until she’d met him. She would not have learned about her own simmering passions or how they could overpower any shyness when coaxed to do so by a man whose own passions ran hot and dynamic through his blood.
And she would not have known the greatest loves of all. The love of a child for its mother. And the love a mother could feel for her child.
So no, no matter what had happened to them since, she was not sorry now that her first encounter with Nicolas had not been the last encounter. But coming into contact with a man of Nicolas Santino’s dynamic personality had been a bit like being a dove devoured by an eagle.
He’d dropped his wallet. Right at her feet and in the pouring rain. He had stalked off without knowing he had dropped it, having absently tried to shove the wallet back into his jacket pocket.
Standing there with the rain pouring down on her head and still feeling a bit winded by the way he had bumped into her, she had taken a moment to realise what it was that had fallen onto her feet. She’d bent, picked it up, glanced a bit dazedly around her for a sign of what to do next. He had already disappeared into the building by then, and logic had told her that she really had no choice but to follow him.
The rest, she supposed, was history—her following him into the building, luckily seeing him standing by the reception desk with a bevy of dark-suited men around him all shaking hands, her approaching shyly.
‘Excuse me...’ Tentatively she touched his arm.
He turned, looked down at her, and she could still remember the way his golden eyes made her quiver oddly inside as they lanced into her.
The soft green sweatshirt she was wearing, with the logo of the garden centre she worked for emblazoned on the front, was wet through. Her hair, braided in a single thick plait, dripped water down her back. Her face was wet, not to mention her jean-clad legs and trainers. He took it all in seemingly without needing to remove his gaze from her blushing face.
‘Yes?’ he prompted.
‘I th-think you dropped th-this when you bumped into me just n-now...’ Nervously she held out the wallet towards him. ‘Could y-you please check if it’s y-yours?’
It was sheer reaction that sent his hands up to pat his pockets. But he did not take his eyes off her face. A small silence developed while she held out the wallet and he ignored it. A couple of the entourage gathered around him shuffled their feet when they picked up on the sudden tension flowing through the air.
He was tall and she wasn’t, the top of her head barely reaching his chin, so she had to tilt her head to look into his face. The rain had caught him too, but only briefly, so the drops sat on the expensive silk of his jacket in small crystal globules that could easily be brushed away. His hair was so black that it reminded her of midnight, gleaming damply but not dripping wet like hers.
She didn’t know then that the great Nicolas Santino stood there like that in silence because he was completely and utterly love-struck. He admitted that to her later—weeks later when his single-minded campaign to break through her shy reserve was successful—on a night when she lay in his arms on a bed of fine linen, their bodies damp, limbs tangled, his hand gently stroking her long hair across the pillow. And she was shy—still shy even though he had just guided her through the most intimate journey a man and woman could share with each other.
A week after that, they married in a registry office in London. That was the first time she met Toni—when he stood witness for Nicolas. She remembered how strangely he looked at her—as if he couldn’t believe the kind of woman his employer had decided to marry. And the hushed conversation they’d shared before they’d gone in to the ceremony had confirmed his disbelief.
‘What the hell are you playing at, Nic?’ he’d muttered urgently. ‘She doesn’t look strong enough to manage you, never mind a hostile father-in-law!’
Hostile? She had begun to get very nervous at that point, frightened even. But then Nicolas had smiled. She could still conjure up that smile now and feel the warmth of it fill her.
‘She manages me fine,’ he had murmured softly. ‘She is my opposite in every way that matters and with her I am complete. She will manage my father as well; you will see,’ he’d ordained.
He had been wrong. She had not managed his father. In fact, she had been terrified of him from their first meeting. He was a sly, selfish, power-hungry and nasty old man who’d seen her as the single obstacle spoiling the glorious plans he had made for his only child. But he was also clever—clever enough never to let Nicolas see how much he hated Sara for getting in the way of those plans.
Oh, he voiced his initial disappointment in his son’s choice of bride, showed anger, a bitter scepticism of the English in general and of Sara’s ability to cope with the kind of lifestyle they led. Then when he met the brick wall of his son’s own determination to run his life his own way he stepped back to the sidelines and watched and plotted and waited for his moment to pounce.
He picked up on her shyness and timidity straight away and used it ruthlessly against her, forcing her into situations where she would feel totally out of her depth. He knew the great Santino wealth and power intimidated her. He knew she only felt comfortable when Nicolas was at her side, so he arranged it so that Nicolas was hardly ever there.
And Alfredo put himself up as her escort, cloaking his hostility towards her in the presence of his son, displaying a willingness to be Sara’s mentor while she got used to the kind of socialising expected of a Santino woman—while Nicolas got on with more important things, like running the Santino empire.
Consequently, she spent the first year of her marriage in a bewildering world of fine clothes and expensive cars and brittle, bright, sophisticated people who were quite happy to follow the great Alfredo Santino’s lead and mock his very unsophisticated daughter-in-law whenever the chance arose. The fact that on the few occasions she tried to tell Nicolas this he got angry and actually took offence on his father’s behalf only made her feel more helplessly out of her depth, more isolated, more miserable.
It began to put a strain on their marriage. When Nicholas was home, his father would be all charm, which made Sara tense up with a wariness her husband could not understand. When they went out together, the same people who followed Alfredo’s lead would now follow Nicolas’s lead and treat his wife with a warmth she was, quite naturally, suspicious of and Nicolas saw as her being standoffish and cold.
Then a man—an Englishman, Jason Castell—began showing her a lot of attention. Whenever she was out with Alfredo, he would appear at her side, sit with her, dance with her, forever trying to monopolise her attention. If she was out with Nicolas, Jason would be conspicuous in his absence.
Yet Nicolas still heard about him. ‘Who is this Englishman I hear you’ve befriended?’ he asked her one evening as they were getting ready for bed.
‘Who, Jason?’ she asked. ‘He’s a friend of your father’s, not mine.’
‘That is not how I hear it,’ he said coolly. ‘I would prefer it if my wife did not have her name connected with another man. Break the friendship, Sara,’ he warned. ‘Or watch me break it for you.’
For some time her desire to fight back, if only with Nicolas, had been growing stronger the more pressure Alfredo applied to her nerves. And this once she retaliated, hard and tight. ‘If you can rarely be bothered to be here with me yourself, then I don’t see what right you have to tell me who I can and cannot spend my time with.’
‘I have the right of a husband,’ he arrogantly replied.
‘Is that what you call yourself? I call you the man who occasionally visits my bed! How long have you been away this time, Nicolas?’ she demanded as his eyes flashed a warning. ‘Two, nearly three weeks? What am I supposed to do with myself when you’re not here—hide away in purdah?’ In her mind this was not an argument about Jason Castell, but about their lifestyle in general. ‘If you want to know what I’m doing every single minute of the day then stay around and find out!’
‘I have a business