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And that was all it took for everything to come crashing down around her—the agitation, the panic—all crowding in and congealing into one seething ball of chest-tightening anguish.
He sounded gruff, he sounded terse, but oh, so familiar that her own voice locked itself into her throat. The man outside banged again; she closed her eyes and set her teeth and felt Sandro’s tension sizzle down the telephone line towards her, felt his impatience, his reluctance to accept this call.
‘Joanna?’ he repeated tersely. Then, ‘Damn it!’ she heard him curse. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ she answered breathlessly, and knew she had just taken one of the biggest, bravest steps of her life with that one tiny word of confirmation. ‘S-sorry.’ She apologised for the tense delay in taking it, and tried to relax her jaw in an effort to find some semblance of calm. ‘I dropped my m-money on the call box f-floor and couldn’t find it,’ she explained. ‘And there’s a m-man standing outside w-waiting to use the telephone. He keeps banging on the glass and I—’
The rest was cut off—by herself, because she realised on a wave of despair that she was babbling like an idiot.
Sandro must have been thinking the exact same thing because his tone was tight when he muttered, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Sorry,’ she whispered again, which seemed to infuriate him.
‘I am in the middle of an important meeting here,’ he snapped. ‘So do you think you could get to the point of this—unexpected—honour?’
Sarcasm, hard and tight. Her eyes closed again, her chest so cramped she could barely drag air into her lungs as each angry word hit her exactly where it was aimed to hit.
‘I n-need...’
What did she need? she then stopped to wonder. She had become so addled by now that her reason for calling him at all had suddenly got lost in the ferment of her panic.
‘I n-need...’ Moistening her dry lips, she tried again. ‘Your—advice about something,’ she hedged, knowing she couldn’t just tell him outright that the only reason she was phoning him after all this time was to ask for money! ‘Do you think you could possibly m-meet me somewhere, s-so we can talk?’
No reply. Her nerve-ends reached snapping point A tight, prickling feeling began to scramble its way up from her tingling toes to her hairline. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t swallow, and, worse than all of that, she felt like weeping.
And if Sandro knew that he would fall off his chair in shock, she mocked herself.
‘I am flying to Rome this evening,’ he informed her brusquely. ‘And my day is fully taken up with meetings until I leave for the airport. It will have to wait until I get back next week.’
‘No!’ That wouldn’t do! ‘I can’t wait that long. I...’ Her voice trailed away, her mind flying off in another direction as she bit into her bottom lip on a fresh wave of desperation. Then, defeatedly, she whispered, ‘It doesn’t m-matter. I’m s-sorry to have—’
‘Don’t you damn well dare put that phone down on me!’ Sandro warned on an angry growl that told her that, even after all this time, he could still read her intentions like an open book.
And she could hear him muttering something to himself—cursing most likely—in Italian, because Sandro always did revert to his native tongue when he was really angry. She could even see him in full detail while he did it. Tall and lean, an unbearably handsome Latin dark figure, with brown velvet eyes that turned black when angry and a beautifully shaped intensely sensual mouth that could kiss like no mouth she had ever experienced, but could also spit all sorts at her without her knowing what the words were—but, hell, did she get their drift!
Then, emerging from the middle of all that Latin temperament, came a warning beep that the phone needed feeding yet again.
‘I haven’t any more money!’ she gasped into the mouthpiece while her eyes flickered anxiously across the dirty floor at her feet. ‘I’ll have to—’
‘Give me your number!’ Sandro s
napped.
‘But there’s a man waiting to use the telephone. I have to—’
‘Maledizione!’ he cursed. ‘The number, Joanna!’
She gave it. Her time ran out and the line went dead. She dropped the receiver back onto its rest, then just stood there staring at it, unsure if Sandro had managed to get down every digit before they were cut off, scared that he had done, and terrified that he had not!
Almost faint with stress and wretched confusion, she bent again to search the grubby ground for her other lost coins, found them, then stepped out of the call box to let the man waiting outside take his turn on the telephone.
He sidled past her as though she was some kind of freak. She didn’t blame him; if he had been watching her enact her nervous breakdown inside that telephone box, then she knew she must have looked like a freak!
Sandro’s fault; it was always Sandro’s fault when she went to pieces like this. No one else could make her lose all her usually ice-cold self-possession as completely he could. And he had been doing it since the first time she ever set eyes on him. A few short minutes of his undivided company, and he had always been able to turn her into a shivering, quivering wreck of a useless creature.
Sex.
That single telling word hit her with a hard, cruel honesty. The difference between Sandro and every other man she had ever met was the fact that he was the only one who could stir her up sexually.
