‘Joanna, don’t do this!’ Sandro muttered, trying to once more draw her closer, but still she wasn’t letting him. ‘Damn it!’ he cursed. Mamma—why could you not just leave well alone!’
‘Sh-she’s right, though, isn’t she?’ Joanna said, pushing her head up to gaze into those grim brown eyes that always seemed so angry now. ‘I should not be doing this to you again. I keep trying to tell you that!’
‘The only thing you are doing to me is hurting me because you hurt.’
‘I am no good to you any more!’
‘You will stop saying things like that!’ he snapped. ‘Because some animals took you against your will, that does not make you untouchable, Joanna!’
‘But it does—don’t you see?’ she cried, her eyes bright, hot and painfully haunted. ‘I had only one thing I could give to you, Sandro! One small thing that made everything perfect. Because you could give me the world where I had so little to offer you, except for that one s-small thing that you thought was so s-special. And they took it!’ she sobbed, her voice lifting to a heart-wrenching shrillness. ‘They stole the only thing I had that I could give to you! N-now I can’t give myself at all!’ she finished achingly. ‘I can’t do it, Sandro. I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it!’
‘Santa Maria?’ Sandro’s mother breathed in pained understanding from somewhere beyond the heavy mists of Joanna’s own helpless anguish.
Sandro said nothing. He just stood there in front of her with his lean dark features turned white. His mouth was clamped shut, his lips drawn inwards so there was barely an outline left on show. His jaw had locked and his eyes had gone so black they were like twin tunnels leading directly to his darkened soul. He tried to swallow but didn’t quite manage it.
Above all, he was trembling—whether he was trembling with appalled comprehension at last, or trembling with sheer bloody anger was difficult to tell.
But Joanna knew she could not stay around to find out. She had to get out of there, away from the apartment, away from the hell it had all become. But, most of all, she had to get away from him.
Breaking free from his grip, she was suddenly off and running. Running before Sandro had a chance to react. Running into the hall and out of the apartment, Running into the waiting lift, where she stabbed an urgent finger at the console, then turned on shaking legs in time to glimpse Sandro angrily striding towards her as the doors closed firmly between them.
She heard his fist hit the solid door, heard him swearing and cursing until she was out of earshot. Then the doors were sliding open again and she was running again, out into the street as dusk was just beginning to turn everywhere a rich silken red, and still she kept going, on feet that seemed to have been given wings.
CHAPTER TEN
HOW far she got away from the building before Sandro eventually managed to catch up with her, Joanna didn’t know. She had no idea where she was even running to! But she pulled to a panting halt when a familiar black car sped by and skidded to a screeching halt several yards in front of her.
Its door flew open even before the car engine had shuddered its last jolting breath, then Sandro was climbing angrily out.
Tall, lean, heart-rendingly handsome and excruciatingly special, he began striding towards her with that same look of whitened anger etched into his face.
He said not a word, his mouth nothing more than a thin, tight line, as he reached out and took a firm grip on her wrist, turned on his heel and began pulling her behind him back to the car.
His free hand tugged the passenger door open. He urged her inside, shut the door with a muted slam that made her wince, then was striding around the car’s shining bonnet to climb in beside her.
His door slammed them in. Reaching out with a long finger, he touched a switch that sent all the locks shooting into their housing, then he just sat there, one hand clenched into a fist on his thigh, the other pressed into the line of his tightly held mouth, while Joanna sat beside him, gasping for breath after her wild bid for escape and sweating so badly that her skin glistened with it.
‘I...’
‘Don’t!’ he gritted. ‘Don’t say a bloody word.’
She blinked and was thoroughly silenced by the power of emotion he’d infused into that command. In the midst of that emotion, he started the car engine, threw it into gear, then jettisoned them off down the road.
The journey back to his apartment was achieved so quickly that Joanna wondered deliriously why she had bothered to run at all! They jerked to a stop and he got out, came round and opened her door to pull her out. He didn’t look at her, hadn’t looked at her since the car skewed to a halt in the road. He hauled her into the building, then into the waiting lift.
They shot upwards. She didn’t even notice, she was so busy worrying what was coming next. He opened the apartment door, hauled her inside there also, slammed the door shut, then made a grim point of firmly locking them in. Then and only then did he seem to pause to take stock of the whole crazed, wretched experience.
But Joanna didn’t feel like hanging around to wait for whatever conclusions he eventually came to. She made a second bolt for it, flying down the hall and into the bedroom, hurriedly shutting the door behind her before going to sink down weakly on the side of the bed, wishing the door had a lock on it so she could make sure she kept him out.
But there was no lock, and she was trembling with reaction now, shaken to the very core by her own wild, naked confession and the tearing run that had followed it.
‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed, and dropped her face into her hands—only to fly jerkily to her feet again because she could hear him just outside her door and she couldn’t face him yet; she just couldn’t!
The bathroom door had a lock on it! she remembered, and moved off on shaky legs towards it—
‘Try it,’ a super-grim voice behind her invited, ‘and watch me break it down if I have to.’
‘I n-need a shower,’ she improvised, tossing the supposedly casual words over her shoulder so she did not have to turn and face him. ‘I’m sweating and the air-conditioning is on. It’s ch-chilly in here.’