She shook her bright head, eyes squeezed tight shut, face white, trembling lips pinned back against her clenched teeth.
‘I can feel your heart fluttering like a trapped butterfly... ’
And you’re too close and I can’t breathe, and I feel like I’m about to explode with stress! she thought hectically.
He kissed each of her pulsing temples, brushed his mouth over each quivering eyelid before doing the same thing to either corner of her quivering mouth.
‘Don’t...’ she breathed, turning her head to one side in rejection, then, contrarily, her hands were jerking up from her sides and clutching tightly at his jacket lapels in case she drove him away.
It was awful, this dizzying tumble of confused emotions that wanted their own safe space—yet they wanted him to fill it. She wasn’t even sure if she was reacting like this because of the lift or because of Sandro any more!
‘You are so very beautiful—do you know that?’ he murmured with an excruciating low-voiced intimacy. ‘Even after all of these years, you can still take my breath away.’
‘I’m poison for you,’ she gritted, hating him—loving him.
‘You don’t taste like poison,’ he said, and ran the moist tip of his tongue along her extended jawline. ‘You taste of vanilla. I adore vanilla...’
Oh, dear God! ‘Sandro!’ she pleaded. ‘I can’t bear this!’
‘Me or the lift?’ he questioned huskily.
‘Both!’ she cried. ‘Damn it—both!’
‘Well, the lift has stopped moving,’ he informed her lazily. ‘Which only leaves me to wonder why you are still clinging to me as though your very life depends on my being this close to you...’
Stopped? Her eyes flicked open, struck directly into his—his smiling, mocking, teasing eyes, eyes that were challenging her even as they darkened with yet another message that had her fingers flexing on his jacket lapels.
‘No,’ she protested.
‘Most definitely,’ he insisted. Then he kissed her again, long and deep and achingly gently.
‘This is it, Joanna,’ he warned as he drew away again to watch her lashes flutter upwards to reveal eyes dazed by a hopeless passion. ‘So keep looking at me,’ he urged. ‘For this is what I am now. Not the guy who crept stealthily around your problems the way I did the last time we were together—but this man. The one who means to invade your defensive space at every opportunity he gets. And do you know why?’ he enquired of those dazed and shimmering pure blue eyes. ‘Because each time I do it, you shudder with horror less, and quiver with pleasure more. An interesting point, don’t you think?’
Was it? She didn’t think so; she thought it was utterly terrifying. What was happening to her? Had the two years of never letting herself go near him made her so hungry, so desperate, that she couldn’t even fight herself any more?
‘I can never be a proper wife to you,’ she warned him, and she meant it—knew it as a fact so solid that even this dreadful, aching clutch of need would never change that for her.
‘You think so?’ he pondered. Then, ‘Well, we shall see.’
At last he moved away from her, gave her space to wilt, then pull herself together, gave her the chance to take in her strange new surroundings.
They seemed to have arrived in a basement car park, judging by the rows of cars she could see beyond the lift’s open doors. One, in particular, stood like a shiny black statement of wealth right in front of them: a long and shining luxury limousine.
Sandro took a grip on her arm again and led the way towards it. A man dressed in a black chauffeur’s uniform jumped to open the car’s rear door. Sandro saw Joanna inside, then followed her, and it was only as she shuffled quickly along the soft leather seat in an effort to place as much distance between them as she possibly could that her fingers made contact with something soft and bulky. She glanced down to find Sandro’s black over-coat, scarf and gloves lying tossed on the seat like yet another statement.
The war guise of a man on a mission, she recalled, and shivered. Because it was becoming very clear that Sandro was still on that mission. Arthur Bates had only been one part he had already dealt with; the rest of Sandro’s mission involved herself.
‘Where are we going?’ she dared to ask, once the car was in motion and sweeping smoothly out into thin March daylight.
He didn’t answer immediately, so she sat there tense, waiting with her senses already prepared for him to say, The house in Belgravia.
But he didn’t. Instead his hand went into his jacket pocket and came out with something else to drop casually onto her lap. ‘You forgot to put these on when you came out this morning,’ he drawled. ‘Put them on now.’
It was her ring box. Her fingers fluttered down to touch it. Her ring box which had been safely stashed away inside her drawer of memories when she’d left her flat this morning.
Her drawer of memories, which Sandro must have sifted through. He must have seen what was hidden there. Her wedding photograph, in which she stood in her gown of flowing white silk beside this man, dressed not unlike the way in which he was dressed right now. A photograph that wasn’t framed like Molly’s picture because it was just too painful to be placed out on show, so it had gone in the drawer with her other painful mementos.
Wild colour ran up her throat and into her cheeks in a mottled flush of mortification. She stared at the box, just kept staring fixedly at it while Sandro stared at her bent head, knowing.