Gold Ring Of Betrayal. Michelle Reid

dusky lashes quiver before her eyes began the slow, sluggish journey upwards, skimming his long, silk-clad legs, powerful thighs, his lean, tight torso made of solid muscle and covered by a white shirt that did not quite manage to hide the abundance of crisp black hair shadowing satinsmooth, stretched-leather skin beneath.

      She reached the throat, taut and tanned. Then the chin, rigidly chiselled. Then the shadow of a line that was his grimly held, perfectly sculptured mouth. His nose thin, straight and uncompromisingly masculine. Cheeks, lean and sheened with the silken lustre of well cared for skin. Then at last the eyes. Her blank blue gaze lifted to clash with the hunter’s gold eyes belonging to the one man in this world whom she had most wished never to see again.

      What was it? she found herself thinking dully. Two years since she’d seen him—coming closer to three? He had changed little.

      Yet why should he have changed? He was Nicolas Santino. Big man. Powerful man. A wealthy man who could afford houses with big addresses in every important capital of the world. He was a slick, smooth, beautifully cared for human being. Born to power, raised to power and used to power. When he frowned people cowered.

      The man with everything. Good looks, great body. Why should three small years change any of that? He possessed the godlike features of a man of fable. The hair, so black it gleamed navy blue in the light. The nose, that arrogant appendage he made no apologies for. The mouth, firm, set, a perfectly drawn shadow on a golden bone structure hewn from the same privileged rock those fabled men had come from. And finally the eyes. The eyes of a lion, a tiger, a sleek black panther.

      The eyes of a hard, cold, ruthless predator. Cruel and unforgiving.

      Unforgiving.

      If her mouth had been up to it, it would have smiled, albeit bitterly.

      He the unforgiving one. She the sinner.

      It was a shame she viewed the whole situation the other way around. It meant that neither was prepared to give an inch. Or hate the other less.

      Three years, she was thinking. Three years of cold, silent festering. And it was all still there—lying hidden beneath the surface right now, but there all the same. Three years since he had last allowed himself to share the same space as her. And now he had the gall to appear before her and say her name as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do.

      But it wasn’t. And they both knew it wasn’t. And Sara was in no fit state to play stupid, pride-saving games to the opposite. Not with him. Not with this man, whom she had once loved and now hated with the same intensity.

      She looked away, eyes lowering back down his length, dismissing his handsome face, dismissing his superb body, dismissing his long legs encased in expensive silk. Dismissing the man in his entirety.

      The message was loud and clear. The room gasped.

      ‘Get out.’

      It was quietly spoken, almost conversationally so, yet there was not a person in the room who did not understand the command or whom it was aimed directly at. Indifferent to them all, unmoving, he remained directly in front of Sara’s bowed head while he waited in silence for his instruction to be carried out.

      And they jolted into action, responding like mechanical toys, heads, bodies, limbs jerking with a complete lack of coordination that shifted them en masse towards the door. Two policemen, both in plain clothes. One uniformed chauffeur, hat gone, hair mussed, face white. One weepy young nanny with her face buried in a handkerchief. A harried-looking housekeeper and her grim-faced man-of-all-trades husband. And the doctor who had been called out to treat the young nanny and had ended up staying because he had been seriously concerned that Sara was ready to collapse.

      Or maybe because he had been ordered to stay by this man.

      Who knew—who cared? Sara didn’t. He might be able to make other people quail in their shoes. He might be able to command mute obedience from anyone who came within his despotic reach. But not her. Never her! And she found it amazing if not pathetic that one man could walk in somewhere and command that kind of sheeplike obedience without even having to give his name.

      But then, this one man was not just any man. This was a man who wielded such power that he could walk into any room anywhere in the world and command immediate attention. The same man who had had this house and its beautiful grounds locked up like a fortress within an hour of the incident happening.

      It was a shame he had not had the foresight to do it before it had happened. Then this unwelcome meeting between them would not have needed to take place.

      The last one out drew the door shut behind them. Sara heard it close with a gentle click, and felt the new silence settle around her like a shroud.

      He moved away, coming back moments later to sit down beside her. The next thing, a glass was being pressed to her bloodless mouth.

      ‘Drink,’ he commanded.

      The distinctive smell of brandy invading her nostrils almost made her gag and she shook her head, her waist-length, fine-spun, straight golden hair shimmering against her black-clad shoulders and arms.

      He ignored the gesture. ‘Drink,’ he repeated. ‘You look like death,’ he added bluntly. ‘Drink or I shall make you.’

      No idle threat. That became clear when his hand came up, his long, strong, blunt-ended fingers taking a grip on her chin so he could force her mouth open.

      She drank—then gasped as the liquid slid like fire down her paper-dry throat, the air sucking frantically into her lungs as though it had been trying to do that for hours now without any success.

      ‘That’s better,’ he murmured, believing it was the brandy that had made her gasp like that when in actual fact it had been his touch—his touch acting like an electric charge to her system, shooting stinging shocks of recognition into every corner of her frozen flesh. ‘Now drink some more.’

      She drank, if only to hide the new horror that was attacking her. Him. This man. The bitter fact that she could still respond so violently to physical contact with this—person who had caused her so much pain and disillusionment and grief.

      He made her take several sips at the brandy before deciding she’d had enough. His fingers let go. The glass was removed. By then the brandy had put some colour back into her cheeks—and his touch a glint of bitter condemnation into the blue eyes she managed to lift to his.

      ‘Is this your doing?’ she demanded, the words barely distinguishable as they scraped across her tense throat.

      But he heard—and understood. The hardening of the eyes told her so. Eyes that continued to view her with a cold but steady scrutiny which quite efficiently gave her a reply.

      He was denying it, using his eyes to demand how she dared suspect him of such a terrible thing.

      But she did suspect him. ‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘I despise the very ground you occupy. If anything happens to my baby then watch your back, Nicolas,’ she warned him. ‘Because I’ll be there with a knife long enough to slice right through that piece of cold rock you may call a heart.’

      He didn’t respond, didn’t react, which came as a surprise because his overgrown sense of self did not take kindly to threats. And she’d meant it—every single huskily spoken, virulent word.

      ‘Tell me what happened,’ he instructed quietly instead.

      Her mind went hot at the bright, burning flashback to the young nanny stumbling through the door. ‘Lia has been kidnapped!’ she had screamed in outright hysteria. ‘They just ran up and snatched her while we were playing in the park!’

      The memory launched her with a bone-crunching jerk to her feet, turning her from a wax-like dummy into a shivering, shaking mass of anguish. ‘You know what happened, you evil monster!’ she seared at him. Blue eyes sparked down on him with hatred, with fear, with a bitter, filthy contempt. ‘She was your one humiliation so you’ve had her removed, haven’t you—haven’t you?’

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