‘W-what are you going to do?’ she asked breathlessly.
At first he didn’t answer, his lean face closed up as tight as a drum, eyes as hard as iron, mouth like steel, so deeply sunk into his chosen persona that her heart began to quail in her trembling breast.
‘Pay your debt for you,’ he clipped out.
Pay the debt or kill the lender? she found herself extending nervously, and almost laughed—not with amusement, but in sheer nervous response to the strange kind of sensual arousal that was suddenly tugging at the lining in her abdomen. The whole thing—Sandro, how he looked and what she was experiencing because of that look—was disturbing her in ways she could barely cope with.
‘You—you’re not going there to start trouble are you, Sandro?’ she questioned cautiously. ‘He—he has bouncers with him all the time. Big guys who don’t mind h-hitting instead of listening.’
‘And you are concerned that I cannot take care of myself?’ It was mockery, hard and spiked.
Her tongue ran an unsteady track around her paperdry lips as she sent her gaze skittering over that lean tight body locked inside those beautiful clothes.
‘Th-they’ll eat you for breakfast,’ she told him flatly.
He laughed, not in the least disturbed by her opinion. ‘They will not lay a single finger on me, cara, be sure of it.’
Because he was taking this man Luca with him, and two of his security guards? He must be mad or just plain arrogant if he truly believed that.
‘I’m coming with you.’ At least she knew these people, was even on friendly terms with some of them. They would listen to her before using their fists. But with Sandro in this mood, in this fighteningly provoking guise... She shuddered, glancing distractedly around the room for her bag, only to remember annoyingly that she had left it with her coat downstairs in Sandro’s office. ‘I left my bag and coat in your...’
‘You will remain right here.’
Voice soft, dripping ice; that was all he needed to say to bring her scrambling mind into full focus. Spinning back to face him, Joanna found those iron-hard eyes fixed on her for the first time since he’d entered the room, and suddenly the tension sizzling between them was enough to fill her with a spine-tingling sense of dread.
‘Sandro—please don’t do this!’ she pleaded, wringing her hands in front of her. ‘I know these people! I can deal with them. I don’t want you to be hurt!’ she concluded shrilly.
He didn’t bother to deign to give all of that a reply, but simply strode to the lift, tapped the call button with a leather-coated finger, watched the doors slide obediently open, then stepped firmly inside.
The doors closed. Joanna stood there staring at them, feeling angry and frustrated and useless and wretched—so damned wretched that her eyes filled with hot aching tears.
He was gone for over two hours, and in that time she worried herself into a nervous frazzle. She paced the floor. She tried out each chair, only to find she couldn’t sit still in any of them. She even found the will to face the horrors of a lift journey, after a sudden decision to go and collect her bag from downstairs and then go after him.
But when she pressed the lift call button nothing happened. The ruthless swine must have disabled it so it could not leave here!
By the time he reappeared she was locked into a state of brittle high anxiety, sitting in a chair, shoes off, knees tucked up beneath her chin, arms hugging them tightly.
But her knees dropped and her spine straightened as her anxious eyes quickly checked him over from the top of his slick-styled head to the tips of his shining shoes. The overcoat had gone, the gloves and scarf, but there was no sign of any physical damage, she noted with a sinking sense of relief. No cuts or bruises, except the ones on his fist he had caused to himself earlier.
‘Your receipt,’ he drawled, dropping a flimsy scrap of paper down on her lap.
He moved away immediately, going over to the drinks cabinet where he helped himself to what looked like a neat whisky.
Helplessly her eyes lingered on him, then slowly dropped to the piece of paper. ‘Joanna Preston,’ it said. ‘£5,000 paid in full.’ And Arthur Bates’ signature was scrawled beneath.
‘You don’t even use my surname,’ Sandro remarked, his back to her.
She didn’t use his name because she had never felt she’d earned the right to use it, but to say that out loud was the surest way to bring other, much more unpalatable subjects lurking out into the open. So she kept her eyes lowered, bit down into her tremulous bottom lip and said nothing.
He turned, glass in hand, then simply stood there looking at her for what seemed like an age, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and glanced up warily. ‘Thank you for this,’ she said, fingers fluttering across the receipt.
He made no comment; there was no expression in those lean dark smoothly sculptured features. She knew he was angry, knew he felt like spitting nails at someone—preferably her, she ruefully accepted. But for some reason he was keeping it all firmly dampened down inside him.
‘That place was the pits,’ he said.
Not that dampened down, she noted, and she flushed, looking quickly away from him again.
‘At least when you waited in a restaurant there was some dignity to it,’ he went on grimly. ‘But that place was an insult to yourself, Joanna. Why did you go there?’