She shrugged and refused to answer. What was the use? He wouldn’t understand it if she tried to explain it to him. After all, what did a man like Alessandro Bonetti know about having nothing, or being nothing, either to yourself or to others.
He could stand there in his smart suit of clothes, that most probably had cost twice as much as the five-thousand-pound debt he had just discharged for her, looking down his classical Roman nose at her, as if the insult she’d given herself had also rubbed off on him. If that was the case, then he should be grateful that she had not used the Bonetti name!
‘Well, that side of your life is now over,’ he suddenly decreed. ‘So we will not speak of it again.’
Subject closed. Joanna lifted her head to stare at him, refusing to believe what she was really hearing—what she had a horrible feeling she was hearing threaded between the actual spoken words.
‘I’m not going to live with you again, Sandro,’ she said, coming stiffly to her feet.
‘No?’ he challenged, and folded his elegant arms across his equally elegant chest. ‘Then where are you going to live?’ he enquired, so smoothly that she sensed the trap even as she walked herself right into it.
‘I still have my flat,’ she declared. ‘I will find myself another job easily enough!’
He didn’t say a damned single word, but Joanna knew, even as he then unfolded his arms and began walking towards her, that her world was about to come tumbling down right into Sandro’s waiting clutches.
Dipping a hand into his jacket pocket, he slid it out again so smoothly that she almost missed the fact that he had collected something as he moved. Then she saw it, and sure enough, everything came clattering down on top of her.
She fell back into the chair, her eyes fixed and staring. ‘W-where did you get that?’ she gasped.
‘Where do you think?’ he drawled, and dropped the tiny photo frame onto her lap before moving away again, leaving her to stare down at her sister’s sweetly smiling face and come to terms in her own time with what it meant for him to be in possession of it.
‘I have stored most of your things at the house in Belgravia,’ he continued quite casually. ‘But I did bring a few essentials back here with me...’
Lifting her shock-darkened eyes, she watched him stroll into the lift, only to come out again almost instant
ly. He was carrying a suitcase—one of her own suitcases, she recognised—which he stood against the wall. Then he smoothly straightened.
‘Y-you’ve been in my flat!’ She gasped out the obvious.
He nodded. ‘Been in it, been appalled by it. Been so damned angry as I stood there in the middle of it, seeing how my wife—my wife!’ he repeated angrily, ‘was living! Here...’ Striding back to her, he calmly added her bag to the growing stack of possessions he seemed hell-bent on piling on her.
And each one sent its own message, she realised mutely. The receipt for the money, which told her she was now in his debt. Molly’s picture frame taken from her bedside table, which told her he had been to her flat. Now her bag, which was telling her exactly how he had found and gained access to the flat in the first place.
And don’t forget the suitcase, she told herself grimly. Your own suitcase, personally packed by this man, which is telling you clearly that he has gone through all your personal things like a robber!
‘I can’t believe you’ve actually done this!’ she choked out shakily.
‘Done it,’ he confirmed, ‘and finished it,’ he added. ‘There is not a loose end left to be tied as far as I can tell. Your flat has been emptied, your lease has been closed, your job terminated and your debts paid. Did I miss anything?’ he enquired with an acid innocence that did not hide the burning antagonism beneath the surface of his calm demeanour. ‘Ah, yes,’ he drawled, bringing those elegantly clad legs in her direction while all she could do was sit there and look at him, too totally, mind numbingly stunned to do much more than blankly watch his approach.
Coming to lean right over her, he braced his hands on the arms of her chair so she was quite effectively pinned where she sat.
‘There is you,’ he said, eyes hard, expression tight. In fact, he was so locked into his role of macho intimidator that he didn’t even seem to care that he was seriously frightening her. ‘You, Signora Bonetti,’ he murmured, using the name like a dire threat, ‘are about to begin the first day of your new life.’
‘I don’t know w-what you think you are talking about,’ she stammered, shifting nervously back in the chair as his face came ever closer.
‘No?’ he quizzed. ‘Then let me explain it to you. Because this is the deal, cara. No bartering, no haggling. I have paid your five-thousand-pound debt for you. I have sorted out your life for you. And in return you, my dear wife, are going to start being a wife to me!’
‘I can’t believe you’re even saying this!’ she spat into his determined face. ‘It makes you no better than Arthur Bates—can’t you see that?’
She shouldn’t have said that, she accepted warily, when she saw the kind of sneer that tugged an ugly line into his beautifully moulded mouth. ‘Oh, surely I am the much better option, cara,’ he contended softly. ‘Even you, with your distorted view of the whole male race in general, must be able to appreciate that!’
Appreciate it? Of course she could appreciate it! Did he think she was blind as well as stupid? But appreciating what Sandro undoubtedly was by comparison to every other man she’d known—never mind the awful Arthur Bates!—did not alter the fact that she could not let him do this to her. Could not let him do it to himself.
Not again. She shuddered. Never again.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered, her voice shaking on the wicked lie. ‘You can’t possibly want to live with a woman who can’t so much as stand you touching her!’
That should have sent him into recoil—she had said it to make him do exactly that. But Sandro seemed to have some hidden agenda of his own here, because instead of recoiling, to her consternation he laughed.