The Marriage Surrender

His dark head was turned her way, his brown eyes fixed on her with absolutely no expression whatsoever. Gone was the electrifying power-dressing suit she had last seen him wearing, and in its place were casual linen trousers and a plain black polo shirt.

Power-dressing, she repeated to herself, and suddenly it all came back in a horrified rush. The memories, where she was, why she was lying here like this, and why Sandro was sitting there like that, looking as though he had been there for hours—hours just watching her—knowing...

‘What happened?’ she asked, desperately playing for time while she tried to come to terms with what had taken place earlier.

‘You don’t remember?’

She remembered almost everything in razor-sharp detail, but to admit to that meant facing it, and at the moment she couldn’t bear to face it ‘Not much,’ she lied. ‘Only a vague recollection of you and I arguing. Did we have a row?’

‘You could say that.’ He smiled an odd twist of a smile. ‘Then you—became ill.’

Became ill, she mused balefully. She had not merely become ill, she had jumped into the screaming pits of Hell rather than face up to what Sandro had claimed he knew about her.

‘Where am I?’

‘In Rome. In my apartment,’ he said, eyeing her narrowly. ‘Where you collapsed. When you showed no sign of recovering, I called in a doctor.’

A doctor? Oh, good grief! How long had she been lying here like this? ‘And he said—what?’ she enquired, very warily.

His eyes made a critical sweep of her too-slender shape beneath the thin layer of bedding, and for the first time she realised that she was wearing nothing more than what felt like a tee shirt.

Her eyelashes lowered, quickly covering a burst of flurried heat because she was suddenly acutely aware that someone had undressed her and put her to bed like this—and that person could only have been Sandro.

‘He called it a combination of too much stress,’ he answered, ‘and not eating enough food to keep a mouse alive.’

Sandro—had Sandro undressed her?

‘I’ve had the ‘flu recently,’ she said, pushing a decidedly shaky hand to her brow so she could hide behind it. ‘Maybe it was that.’

He didn’t answer, made absolutely no comment, and she didn’t dare look at him to see if she could discover what he was thinking.

‘I’m thirsty,’ she announced, trying to moisten paper-dry lips with an equally dry tongue.

He was instantly on his feet and stepping over to a bedside table where a crystal jug full of iced water and a glass tumbler stood glinting in the rich sunlight. While he poured the water she pulled herself into a sitting position, only to stop, pushing her hand back to her brow, when her head began swimming dizzily.

Sandro stopped what he was doing to reach out a hand towards her. She saw it coming and instinctively stiffened in readiness for its electrifying touch. It hovered there in mid-air for a long second while her teeth gritted and the silence in the room became thick with tension.

Then the hand diverted, going to pick up the pillows from behind her and resettling them so she could lean back against them. She did so out of sheer necessity, face pale, eyes closed, feeling so weak inside it was almost pathetic.

Silently Sandro waited. When she could stand it no longer she opened her eyes, and honed them onto the glass full of iced water he was holding; she simply stared at it, wondering how she was going to take it from him without letting her fingers brush against his.

‘I am not a monster,’ he said grimly, knowing exactly what she was thinking.

‘Thank you,’ she mumbled, feeling cruel and heartless, and forced herself to take the glass.

She wanted to apologise, but when she did tha

t it tended to make him angry, so instead she said nothing and sipped at the refreshing water, wishing he would sit down again, because when he stood over her like this she felt so intimidated. Wishing he would go away because she needed some time to herself to come to terms with yesterday’s catastrophic developments.

Then a frown touched her brow. Was it only yesterday she had walked herself right into Sandro’s power again? She had no real idea what day it was, or of the time, except the sunlight was suggesting to her that this was at least one new day. Maybe there had been others. Maybe she had been lying here for days and days, fighting to climb out of that awful dark pit.

Then, no, she told herself, as the nerve-ends throughout her whole system began to tighten. She must not let herself think about those dreadful dreams or she might start to fall apart all over again.

‘How long have I been here?’ she asked Sandro

He sat down again, which was marginally better than having him stand over her. Then he really brought the whole lot bursting back out in the open by informing her with super-silk sardonism, ‘Today is the second day of your new life. cara. You spent what was left of your first day half-comatose, you see...’

See? Oh, she saw everything! And nearly dropped the glass. She hadn’t fooled him in the slightest. He knew she remembered and he wasn’t going to let her get away with lying about it!