He ignored that too, preferring instead to switch on the in-car stereo. Orchestral music blared out from the radio: Verdi’s ‘Requiem’. It seemed so utterly fitting that she was surprised, therefore, when he quickly flicked it into CD mode so the much less provocative sound of a Mozart concerto filled the car.
He parked in a side-street beside his elegant apartment block, in one of those parking spaces that always seemed to magically open up for people like Sandro. Then he was shutting down the engine and climbing out of the car. By the time he had opened Joanna’s door she was in a state of near collapse. His hand came out, dealing first with her seat belt for her, then firmly anchoring itself around her wrist to pull her out of the car.
She refused to look at him but she could feel his grimness, his dark sense of resolution, as he held onto her wrist while he shut the door and locked up the car.
Then—there it was: the aged ochre walls of a seventeenth-century building that had once been a beautiful palazzo and was now converted into three luxury apartments, one to each floor. Sandro had the top one; his bank owned the whole building, but of course its chairman lived at the top—which meant a lift was needed to get there.
His hand moved from her wrist to curve around her waist and, even as her spine tensed in tingling response, he set them moving, touching her, as he had promised, at every opportunity now, and she felt so brittle she wondered if her bones would actually snap if he squeezed her too tightly.
‘Where’s the luggage?’ she asked tensely. Until that moment she had been too lost within her own growing nightmare to have noticed that they had traversed the whole airport and driven away in his car without collecting bags of any kind.
‘There is none,’ he answered coolly, still keeping her moving with that hand at her waist, so the full weight of his arm was angled across her rigid spine. ‘We won’t be needing it.’
They’d reached the apartment building entrance by now, stepping inside the luxurious foyer with its original wall frescos so beautifully renovated, like the priceless furniture surrounding them and the cleverly disguised lift hidden away behind its carved solid oak doors.
Joanna pushed a hand up to her trembling mouth as her stomach began to chum with an increasing frenzy. ‘I feel sick,’ she breathed.
Sandro ignored that too, grimly calling down the lift, then walking her inside it. It was palatial, red and golds mingling with oak, a gilded mirror fixed to its back wall.
She turned quickly away from her own haunted reflection, found her face pressed against Sandro’s broad chest and left it there, trembling and shaking like a baby while he grimly started the lift, then closed both arms around her.
‘I can’t do this!’ she choked into his chest, where she could feel the persistent throb of his beating heart.
‘Shush,’ he soothed, brushing his mouth across the top of her head. ‘You can do it,’ he insisted. ‘And you will.’
The man with the mission had spoken, so no argument. She had never known him like this before, so rock-solidly determined that nothing seemed to get through to him.
The lift stopped. He helped her out, almost carried her across the deep red carpet to double doors set in two foot-deep reveals that marked the true beginning of her nightmare.
One of Sandro’s hands snaked out, briskly unlocking then pushing those big doors inwards. He stepped inside, attempting to take her with him, but she could not step over that wretched threshold as the bad memories began circling all around her.
This place, she was thinking tragically, this beautiful place so tastefully refurbished, in keeping with the building’s great age and history. This large-roomed, high-ceilinged, exceptionally refined place where Sandro had brought her three years ago, with his ideals riding high on a buffeting cloud of anticipation—only to have them all brought crashing down at his disbelieving feet
‘I don’t think I can bear it,’ she whispered threadily.
She was clutching at him, one set of anguished fingers clawing at his shirt front while the other did the same to the back of his jacket.
‘Shush, cara,’ he soothed her yet again, his arm still curved around her, holding her securely anchored to his side. ‘You must learn to trust me...’
Trust him? It wasn’t a matter of trust! It was a matter of sheer self-preservation!
‘Let me go to a hotel,’ she pleaded. ‘Just for tonight! Please, Sandro! I can’t go in there!’
‘You must know that the only way forward is to face the ghosts, Joanna,’ he determined grimly. ‘We will face them together. Now, come,’ he urged, trying to draw her over that threshold while she dug her heels in like some recalcitrant donkey and refused point-blank to budge.
‘Joanna, stop this,’ he sighed in exasperation. ‘You have no need to be afraid of this apartment!’
I do! she thought. I need to be quite this afraid of it.
‘Let go of me or I shall s-start screaming,’ she warned.
‘But this is foolish!’ he snapped, losing all patience with her. ‘You are becoming hysterical!’
Hysterical? Yes, she was becoming hysterical. She didn’t want to be here; she didn’t want this—laying of ghosts he was threatening her with. She just wanted to—!
‘I know, Joanna!’ Sandro rasped out suddenly. ‘You are hiding nothing by acting like this! For I know why you treated me the way you did the last time we were here together!’
He knew? Fo