Gold Ring Of Betrayal. Michelle Reid

severely cut off.

      ‘Don’t touch her!’

      The command was barked from a raspingly threatening throat.

      She didn’t know who had tried to touch her, who had reached her first as she began to sink, as if in slow motion, to the thick carpet beneath her feet. But she recognised Nicolas’s arms as they came around her, breaking her fall, catching her to his chest and holding her there as something solid hit the back of her knees, impelling her to sit down.

      He didn’t leave go, lowering his body with hers as he guided her into the chair, so that she could still lean weakly against him. Her heart had accelerated out of all control, her breathing fast and shallow, her mind—her mind blanked out by a horror that was more than she could bear.

      And he was cursing softly, roundly, cursing in Italian, in English, cursing over her head at someone, cursing at her. Her fingers came up, ice-cold and numb, scrambling over his shirtfront and up his taut throat until they found his mouth, tight-lipped with fury.

      She could have slapped him full in the face for the reaction she got. He froze, right there in front of all those watching faces; he froze into a statue of stunned silence with her trembling fingers pressed against his mouth.

      ‘Nic,’ she whispered frailly, not even knowing that she had shortened his name to that more intimate version she’d rarely used to call him, and only then when she’d been totally, utterly lost in him. ‘My baby. That was my baby...’

      Nicolas Santino, squatting there with her wonderful hair splayed across his big shoulders so that the sweet rose scent of it completely surrounded him, closed his hard eyes on a moment of stark, muscle-locking pain.

      Then, ‘Shush,’ he murmured, and reached up to grasp the fingers covering his mouth, touching them briefly to his lips before clasping them gently in his hand. ‘Sara, she is fine. She is asking for you but she is not distressed. You understand me, cara? She is—’

      She passed out. At last—and perhaps it seemed fortunate to all those who had worriedly observed her all day—she finally caved in beneath the pressure of it all and went limp against the man holding her.

      She came around to find herself in her own room, lying on her own bed, with the doctor leaning over her. He smiled warmly but briefly. ‘I want you to take these, Mrs Santino,’ he murmured, holding two small white pills and a glass of water out to her.

      But she shook her head, closing her eyes again while she tried to remember what had happened. She remembered running across the hall, remembered opening the door to the study and racing inside, but what she couldn’t remember was why she’d felt the dire need to go there. She remembered seeing Nicolas in the room, and Toni and the two policemen. She remembered them all jerking to attention at her rude entry and her taking several steps towards Nicolas. Then—

      Oh, God. Full recall shuddered through her on a nauseous wave. ‘Where’s Nicolas?’ she gasped.

      ‘Here,’ his grim voice replied.

      Her eyes flickered open to find him looking down at her from the other side of the bed. He looked different somehow, as if some of his usual arrogance had been stripped away. ‘You heard from them, didn’t you?’ she whispered faintly. ‘They called before the deadline.’ Tears pushed into her eyes. ‘They let my baby talk to you.’

      The comer of his tensely held mouth ticked. ‘Take the two pills the doctor is offering you, Sara,’ was all he said by way of a reply.

      She shook her head in refusal again. ‘I want to know what they said,’ she insisted.

      ‘When you take the two pills, I will tell you what they said.’

      But still she refused. ‘You just want to put me to sleep. And I won’t be put to sleep!’

      ‘They are not sleeping tablets, Mrs Santino,’ the doctor asserted. ‘You won’t sleep if you don’t want to, but they will help to relax you a little. I’m telling you the truth,’ he tagged on gravely as her sceptical gaze drifted his way. ‘I can understand your need to remain alert throughout this ordeal, but I doubt your ability to do so if you don’t accept some help. Shock and stress should not be treated lightly. You’re near a complete collapse,’ he diagnosed. ‘Another shock like the one you received downstairs may just have the effect you’ve been fighting so hard against and shut you down completely. Take the pills.’ He offered them to her again. ‘Trust me.’

      Trust him. She looked into his gravely sympathetic eyes and wondered if she could trust him. She had not allowed herself to trust any man in almost three years. Not any man.

      ‘Take the pills, Sara.’ Nicolas placed his own weight behind the advice, voice grim, utterly unmoving. ‘Or watch me hold you down while the doctor sticks a hypodermic syringe in your arm.’

      She took the pills. Nicolas had not and never would make idle threats. And she wasn’t a fool. She knew that if they did resort to a needle it would not be injecting a relaxing aid into her system.

      Nobody spoke for several minutes after that, Sara lying there with her eyes closed, the doctor standing by the bed with her wrist gently clasped between his finger and thumb, and the silence was so profound that she fancied she could actually hear the light tick of someone’s watch as it counted out the seconds.

      She knew even before the doctor dropped her wrist and gave the back of her hand a pat that her pulse had lost that hectic flurry it had had for the last several hours and returned to a more normal rate. She sensed the two men exchanging glances then heard the soft tread of feet moving across the room. The bedroom door opened and closed, then once again she was alone with Nicolas.

      ‘You can tell me what happened now,’ she murmured, not bothering to open her eyes. ‘I won’t have hysterics.’

      ‘You did not have hysterics before,’ he pointed out. ‘You just dropped like a stone to the floor.’

      ‘Déjà vu, Nicolas?’ she taunted wanly.

      To her surprise, he admitted it. ‘Yes,’ he said.

      It made her open her eyes. ‘Only last time you left me there, as I remember it.’

      He turned away, ostensibly simply to hunt out a chair, which he drew up beside the bed, then sat down. But really she knew that he was turning away from the memory she had just evoked—of him looking murderous, fit to actually reach out and hit her, and her responding to the threat of it by passing out.

      Only that particular incident had taken place in another house, another country, in another world altogether. And that time he had walked out and left her lying there.

      She had not set eyes on him again until today.

      ‘When did they call?’ she asked.

      ‘Just after I left you.’

      ‘What did they say?’

      That well-defined shadow called a mouth flexed slightly. ‘You really don’t need to know what they said,’ he advised her. ‘Let us just leave it that they wished me to be aware that they mean business.’

      ‘What kind of business?’ It was amazing, Sara noted as an absent aside, how two small pills could take all the emotion out of her. ‘Money business?’

      His mouth took on a cynical tilt. ‘I would have thought it obvious that they want money, since it is the one commodity I have in abundance.’

      She nodded in agreement, then totally threw him by saying flatly, ‘It’s a lie. They don’t want your money.’

      He frowned. ‘And how do you come to that conclusion?’

      ‘Because they are Sicilian,’ she said, as if that made everything clear. But just in case it didn’t she spelled it out for him. ‘If you’d said they’d taken her as part of a vendetta because you’d spoiled some big business deal of theirs or something I might have believed you. But not simply for money.’

      ‘Are