LITMIR.BIZ

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must have cost him a small fortune.

      He’d given it to her with love and she’d accepted it with love, she recalled, as the tears blurred out her vision and a dark cloud of aching emptiness began to descend all around her. For now their love was gone, and really, so should the rings have gone with it.

      She could sell them, she knew that, and easily pay off her debt to Arthur Bates with the proceeds: just another of the ways-out she had spent her sleepless night struggling with.

      But she knew she couldn’t do it. For selling these rings would be tantamount to stealing from the one person in this world she had taken more than enough from already.

      She’d stolen his pride, his self-respect. and, perhaps worst of all, his belief in himself as an acceptable member of the human race.

      ‘You are tearing me apart—can you not see that? We must resolve this, Joanna, for I cannot take much more!’

      Those hard, tight words came lashing back at her after two long miserable years and she winced, feeling his pain whip at her as harshly now as it had done then.

      And it had been because of that pain that she had eventually done the only thing she could think to do. She had left him, walked out on their marriage to move in with her sister Molly, and had refused contact with Sandro on any level, in the hope that he would manage to put behind him the failure of their marriage and learn to be happy again.

      Maybe he had found happiness, because after those first few months, when he had tried very hard to get her to change her mind and come back to him, there had been no more contact—not even when she’d phoned him up to tell him about Molly.

      Molly...

      A sigh broke from her, and, lifting her gaze from the box of rings, she glanced across the room to where a small framed photograph stood beneath the lamp on her bedside table and her sister Molly’s pretty face smiled out at her.

      Her heart gave a tug of aching grief as she went to drop down on the edge of her narrow bed. Gently laying the ring box aside, she picked up Molly’s photograph instead.

      ‘Oh, Molly,’ she whispered. ‘Am I doing the right thing by going to Sandro for help?’

      There was no answer—how could there be? Molly was no longer here.

      But Sandro was very much alive. Sandro, the man she had loved so spectacularly that she had been prepared to do anything to hang on to that love.

      Anything.

      But then, what woman wouldn’t? Alessandro Bonetti had to be the most beautiful man Joanna had ever set eyes upon. The evening he had walked into the small Italian restaurant where she had been working waiting on tables had quite literally changed her whole life.

      ‘Alessandro!’ her boss Vito had called out in elated surprise.

      She had glanced up from what she had been doing. Joanna could still remember smiling at the sight of the short and rotund Vito being engulfed in a typically Latin back-slapping embrace by a man of almost twice his own height

      Over the top of Vito’s balding head, Sandro had caught her smile and had returned it as if he knew exactly what she was finding so amusing—which in turn had taken her laughing blue eyes flicking upwards to clash with the liquid brown richness of his.

      And that had been it. Just like that. Their eyes had locked and an instant and very mutual magic had begun to spark in the current of air between them. His beautiful eyes had darkened, his smile had died, the full length of his long, lean fabulously clothed body had tensed up and his expression had changed to one of complete shock, as if he’d just been hit full in the face by something totally spellbinding. As she’d stood there, caught—trapped by the same heart-stopping sensations herself—she’d watched his hand move in a oddly sensual gesture across the back of Vito’s shoulders, and, to her shock, had felt the flesh across her own shoulders tingle as if he had stroked her, not Vito.

      ‘Who is this?’ he’d demanded of the little restaurant owner.

      Vito had turned towards Joanna and grinned, instantly aware of what was captivating his visitor. ‘Ah,’ he’d said, ‘I see you have already spotted the speciality of the house. This is Joanna,’ he’d announced, ‘the fire outside my kitchen!’ And both men’s eyes had wandered over her bright hair, sparkling blue eyes and softly blushing face in pure Latin communion. ‘Joanna—this is Alessandro Bonetti,’ Vito had completed the introductions. ‘My cousin’s nephew and a man to beware of,’ he’d warned. ‘For he will be a dangerous match to your flame!’

      A match to her flame... All three of them had laughed at the joke. But in reality it had been the truth. The absolute truth. Sandro lit her up like no other man had ever done. Inside, outside, she caught fire like dry tinder for him. And what was wonderful was the way that Sandro had caught fire with her.

      It had been like a dream come true.

      So what had happened to the dream? she asked herself as she sat there staring into space.

      Life had happened, she answered her own grim question. Life had jumped out when she was least expecting it to steal the dream right away from her.

      And overnight she had gone from being the lively, loving creature who had so thoroughly captivated the man she loved, into this—this—hollow wreck of a person who was sitting here right now.

      A hollow wreck who was seriously about to place herself in Sandro’s dynamic vicinity again?

      Could she do it to herself?

      Could she do it to him? That was the far more appropriate question.

      Cash or kind.

      Suddenly and without warning she began to shake—shake all over, shake badly. It had happened like this quite often since she’d had the ’flu.

      But really she knew she was shaking like this because she had come full circle and back to making choices.

      To making the choice that was no choice.

      So she got up, put Molly’s photograph back on the bedside table, walked over to the sideboard to replace the ring box in the drawer, then went grimly about the business of getting herself ready to meet with Sandro...

      CHAPTER TWO

      PRESENTING herself at Sandro’s office premises at the appointed hour took every last ounce of courage Joanna had left in her—though at least she knew she looked OK. She had, in fact, taken great pains to make sure she looked her best—for his sake more than her own.

      For Sandro was Italian; a sense of good taste, flair and style came as naturally to him as breathing. Joanna had witnessed him stroll around his home in nothing more than a pair of unironed white boxer shorts and a shrunken white tee shirt that showed more taut brown midriff than was actually decent—and still he’d managed to look breathtakingly stylish.

      Then she grimaced, acknowledging that she had only seen him dressed like that once in their short but disastrous attempt at living together. Where most women would have found it a pleasurable experience to watch their men parade in front of them like that, she, on the other hand, had metamorphosed into a stone-cold pillar of paralysed horror.

      Sexy? Oh, yes, he had looked sexy, with all of that dark, hair-sprinkled dusky brown skin on show, from long bare feet to strong muscular thighs, and his short, straight black hair looking slightly mussed, eyes sleepy because he had been dozing on the sofa, trying to combat the effects of jet lag because he had just flown back from a whistle-stop visit to his American interests. Even the signs that he needed a shave had not deflected from the fact that the man was, and always would be, sexy—to any woman.

      Even this woman, whose only response had been to completely close down or go totally crazy.

      Not that he had ever understood why she’d responded like that.

      Not that she’d ever wanted him to understand why she’d reacted to his sexuality like that.

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