Oh, please, she prayed. Don’t let him do this to me! ‘This is crazy,’ she jerked out in rising panic. ‘I don’t know why you think it will be any different now than it was before!’
‘Tell me then, why you gambled away all of that money?’ he countered.
The money? What did the money have to do with this?
‘I told you why,’ she murmured distractedly, trying to prise away his imprisoning hands with her own. She couldn’t budge him, not one bit. ‘Sandro—please!’ she cried out in stark desperation.
He ignored it. ‘Your Mr Bates was of the opinion that you went about losing that money with a vengeance,’ he informed her. ‘With your eyes wide open to the eventual consequences.’
‘And you believed him?’ she charged, feeling sick to her stomach at the very sound of Bates’ name. ‘You of all people should know that had to be a damned lie!’
‘You would assume so,’ he agreed. ‘But then—I have never met a man more likely to send any woman screaming for the nearest place of safety...’
She realised then just what he was implying, and her eyes began to flash with stunned incredulity. ‘You think I got myself into that mess deliberately so I had an excuse to come begging from you?’ She gasped at his absolute arrogance.
‘Did you?’ he challenged outright. ‘Or was it more complex than that?’ he then suggested, eyes narrowed, like two hot lasers trying to probe into the very darkest part of her brain. ‘Did Arthur Bates or do I bear a close resemblance to the man who attacked you, cara?’
Joanna went white, her whole stance stone-still for the few stunning seconds it took her to thoroughly absorb what he was actually suggesting here.
Then the words came, hot and hard and crucifyingly pungent, bursting forth from the very depths of her vilified psyche. ‘Two,’ she corrected. ‘It was two men who raped me, caro!’ she sliced at him with a stinging black mockery. ‘In a lift, if you want the full truth about it!’
And while he leaned there, seemingly locked into total immobility by what she had just thrown at him, Joanna knocked his imprisoning arms aside, pushed herself right away from him and made for the door back into the building, with nausea rising in her throat, the dire need to get away from everything giving her shaken limbs the impetus to carry her quickly.
She actually made it as far as the front entrance before Sandro’s hand snaked out to grab her arm and pull her to a jarring stop.
‘Don’t touch me!’ she bit out, angrily knocking the hand away again.
Sandro said nothing, his face white and drawn. But he took hold of her arm again and led her back to the lift. The doors stood open; he drew her inside. Joanna whirled away from him to stand glaring at the panelled wall while he grimly hit the ‘up’ button.
The doors closed. A thick silence throbbed in the very fabric of the walls surrounding them. Joanna closed her eyes and held her breath, and this time it had nothing to do with her aversion to travelling in lifts!
They stopped and she swung around, hair flying, eyes burning with a rage beyond anything she’d ever experienced before. She completely ignored Sandro’s existence as she stalked out of the lift and back into the apartment.
‘Forgive me,’ he murmured huskily from somewhere behind her.
‘May you burn in hell,’ she replied, and found herself walking as if by instinct into what her subconscious mind must have remembered was the drawing room of this super-elegant place. With the same unerring accuracy she found the drinks cabinet, snapped it open, poured herself a neat gin, then swallowed it.
‘I only knew you had been attacked on your way home from work,’ Sandro persisted. ‘I knew none of the details. Molly refused to discuss them with me. I jumped in with both feet, and I apologise. It was both cruel and thoughtless.’
Molly, she repeated angrily to herself. It had to be Molly who had broken a confidence and told him, because no one else had ever known! And even Molly had never known any of what she had just spat at Sandro.
‘She was worried about you, Joanna,’ he explained, seeming to need to defend her own sister. ‘She was worried that if you did not talk about it to someone you were going to make yourself ill.’
‘So, because I wouldn’t discuss it with her, she decided to discuss it with you.’ Joanna pushed the gin to her lips, but her hand was shaking so badly that the glass chattered against her teeth so she pulled it away again.
‘What did you expect her to do?’ Sandro sighed, her attitude sparking his anger. ‘You shut her out! You shut me out! The two people who loved you!’
‘I shut myself in!’ she responded angrily, swinging around to glare at him through eyes so hard and bright they actually looked dangerous. ‘It was my problem—my choice how I dealt with it!’
‘It was our problem!’ he retaliated harshly. ‘I had a right to know why the woman I’d believed loved me suddenly developed that sickening aversion to me!’
‘And what was I supposed to say to you, Sandro?’ she challenged him. ‘Oh, by the way, I was raped on my way home from work last week, so don’t worry if I can’t let you touch me. It isn’t personal! Would that have done?’
‘You should have trusted me enough to expect love and support from me! I could at least have given you that!’
‘Are you joking?’ she gasped, slamming the gin glass down with enough force to shatter it with the power of her anger. ‘Sandro—you had me up on some kind of damn pedestal! You went on and on about how wonderful it was that I was still a virgin! How you wanted our wedding night to be perfect—pristine white—no shadows!’
Her voice cracked. He spun his back to her, his shoulders bunched, his body stiff. It made it easier; she could shout out all the ugliness to his back much better than she could do to his face.