“I hate it when you touch me,” Samantha choked out.

“Hate? Well, let’s just try a little exercise to test the strength of this so-called hatred….”

The next thing she knew, André’s mouth was against hers. Her senses went into a tailspin as the feeling of familiarity completely overwhelmed her. She knew this mouth. She knew its feel, its shape and its sensual mobility as it coaxed her own mouth to respond. She whimpered as sensation after familiar sensation went clamoring through her system.

He stepped back. She just stood there staring up at him.

“Yes…” he hissed down at her in soft-voiced triumph. “You might think you hate my touch, cara mia, but you cannot get enough of my kisses.”

And just like that, the familiarity disappeared and she found herself looking at a complete stranger.

What the memory has lost,

the body never forgets

An electric chemistry with

a disturbingly familiar stranger…

A reawakening of passions long forgotten…

And a compulsive desire to get to know that

stranger all over again!

A compelling miniseries from Harlequin Presents® featuring top-selling authors.

Michelle Reid
The Unforgettable Husband

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

BLACK bow-tie hanging loose around his neck and the top two buttons on his snowy white dress shirt tugged open at his darkly tanned throat, André Visconte sat sprawled in the chair behind his desk, with his feet propped up on the top and the blunt-ended fingers of one beautifully shaped hand lightly clasping a squat crystal glass half full of his favourite whisky.

It was late and he was tired so his eyes were shut, the grooves around his thirty-four-year-old, life-toughened mouth seeming more harshly etched than usual. He should have gone straight home from the gala opening of a friend’s new downtown restaurant but instead he had come back here to his office. He was expecting a call from Paris and it seemed more sensible to wait for it here than at his home since the office was closer.

And anyway, home held no welcome for him any more.

Some bright spark somewhere had once made the classic remark that home was where the heart was. Well, André no longer believed he had a heart, so home, these days, tended to be any place he could lay his head. And, depending on where he was, that usually meant one of the plush city residences he possessed in most capitals of the world.

Not that he had used many of them recently, if you didn’t count his apartment right here in New York, of course. Though all of his homes were maintained to his expected high standards—just in case he decided to drop in.

Or in case Samantha did.

Samantha… The fingers around the whisky glass tightened fractionally. His tough mouth straightened into a line of such grim cynicism that if anyone had been there to see it happen, they would have been backing right off in alarm by now.

Because André Visconte wasn’t known for his good temper these days—hadn’t been known for it for twelve long months now.

Not since Samantha had walked out of his life never to be seen or heard from again. Nowadays, only a fool would dare to say her name out loud in his presence and, since fools were not suffered gladly in the Visconte empire, none ever said it.

But he couldn’t stop the cursed name from creeping into his own head now and then. And when it did, it was difficult to it to unravel the gamut of different emotions that came buzzing along with it. Pain was one of them, plus a dark, bloody anger aimed entirely at himself for letting her get away from him.

Then there were the moments of real guilt-ridden anguish to contend with, or the bouts of gut-wrenching concern as to what had become of her. And, to top it all off, there was a hard-to-take sense of personal bitterness in knowing that she could leave him that made him wish he had never met her in the first place!

But most of all there was an ache. An ache of such muscle-clenching proportions that sometimes he had to fight not to groan at the power of it.

Why—? Because he missed her. No matter what, no matter when, no matter why—sometimes he missed her so badly that he could barely cope with what missing her did to him.

Tonight had been like that. One of those all-too-rare moments when he had caught himself laughing quite easily—actually managing to enjoy himself! Then a beautiful woman with flame-red hair had walked past him. She had reminded him of Samantha and his mood had flipped over. Light to dark. Warm to cold. Laughter to lousy misery…

After that, it had been better to escape here and brood where no one could see him doing it. But, God, he hated her for making him feel like this.

Empty. The word was empty.

The glass went to his mouth, hard lips parting so he could attack the whisky as if it was his enemy. Then, with a sigh that came from somewhere deep down inside of him, he leaned further back into the soft leather chair and waited for the whisky to attack him back by burning Samantha’s name right out of his system.

It didn’t happen for, being the beautiful red-haired witch that she was, she held her ground and simply paid him back for trying to get rid of her by imprinting her image on the back of his eyelids, then smiling at him provocatively.

His gut wrenched. His loins stung. His heart began to pound. ‘Witch,’ he breathed.

Twelve months—twelve long, miserable months—with no word from her, no sign that she was even alive. She had, in effect, simply dropped off the face of the earth as if she had never lived on it.

Cruel, heartless—ruthless witch.

The phone on his desk suddenly burst into life. With a reluctance that suggested he might actually be enjoying sitting here wallowing in his own misery, André let go of the glass and, without even bothering to open his eyes, reached out to hook up the receiver with a couple of long fingers, then tucked it lazily beneath his chin.

‘Visconte,’ he announced, voice tinged with a seductive hint of a husky drawl even though it had meant to rasp.

Expecting to hear a barrage of French come back down the line at him, he was shocked to hear the crisp clean tones of his UK-based manager assailing his ears, instead of his man in Paris.

‘Nathan?’ He frowned. ‘What the hell—?’

Whatever Nathan Payne said to him then brought André alive as nothing else could. His eyes flicked open, revealing dark brown irises with a flash of fire. His hand snaked up to grab at the phone and his feet hit the floor with a resounding thud as he launched his lean body out of the chair.

‘What—?’ he raked out. ‘Where—?’ he barked. ‘When—?’

From the other side of the Atlantic, Nathan Payne began talking in quick, precise sentences, each one of which sent André paler until his satin gold tan had almost disappeared.

‘You’re sure it’s her?’ he asked, when his manager eventually fell into silence.

Confirmation had him sitting down again slowly—carefully, as though he needed to gauge each move he made precisely, in case he used up what was left of his suddenly depleted strength.

‘No, I’m sure you couldn’t,’ he responded to something Nathan said to him. The hand he’d lifted up to cover his eyes was trembling slightly. ‘How did it happen?’

Explanation had him raking up the whisky glass and swallowing its contents in one tense gulp. ‘And you saw this in a newspaper?’ He couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe any of it.

Samantha… His dark head wrenched to one side as a very familiar pain went slicing through him.

‘No!’ he ground out at whatever the other man had suggested. ‘Just watch her, but don’t, for God’s sake, do anything else!’ And suddenly he was on his feet again. ‘I’m on my way,’ he announced. ‘Just don’t so much as let her out of your sight until I get there!’

The phone hit its cradle with a resounding crash. The hard sound was still echoing around the room when he thrust his body into movement. Then he was grimly striding towards the door with his face still showing the kind of reeling shock that would have rendered most people immobile…

He was there again, Samantha noticed. Sitting at the same table he had been sitting at last night, and watching her in a kind of half surreptitious way that said he didn’t want her to know he was doing it.

Why, she had no idea.

She didn’t recognise him. His clean-shaven fair-skinned face sounded no chords in her memory to offer a hint that she might have known him once, in a different setting or another life maybe.

Another life.

Having to smother the desire to heave out a sigh, she turned away to begin making up the order for drinks Carla had just given her. With a deftness of hand she fed two glasses under the gin optic while the other hand hooked up two small bottles of tonic and neatly knocked off the clamp tops.

‘You do that like a professional,’ Carla remarked dryly, watching all of this from the other side of the bar.

Do I? Samantha mused as she placed the items down on Carla’s tray. Well, there’s something else that could belong to that other life I can’t remember. ‘Do you want draught beer or the bottled stuff?’

‘The bottled—are you feeling all right?’ Carla asked, frowning, because it wasn’t like Samantha not to rise to a bit of pleasant banter when she was given the chance to.

‘Just tired,’ she said, and limped off down the bar to get the two bottled beers from the chiller, reassured that her answer had some justification since neither she nor Carla should be working in the hotel lounge bar tonight. Officially, their job was looking after Reception. But the hotel was teetering on its very last legs. Business was poor, and the hotel was being run with the minimum of staff, which therefore meant that people had to chip in wherever they happened to be needed.

Like this week, for instance, when the two of them were doubling up shifts by running the bar in the evening and the reception during the day.

But that didn’t mean she was feeling so tired that she was imagining a pair of eyes burning into her every time she turned her back. Limping back down the bar with the two requested beers, she took a glance sideways and just caught the stranger’s eyes on her before he looked away.

‘The man sitting on his own,’ she murmured to Carla. ‘Any idea who he is?’

‘You mean the well-scrubbed, good-looking one in the Savile Row suit?’ she quizzed, adding at Samantha’s nod, ‘Nathan Payne. Room two-one-two, if his charge slips are to be believed. He booked in last night when Freddie was on duty. And here on business—which doesn’t surprise me, because I can’t believe a man like him would actually choose this place for a holiday.’

Her derision was clear, and Samantha didn’t dispute it. Though the Tremount Hotel’s setting was outstandingly good, sitting right on the edge of its own headland in a beautiful part of Devon, it had been let go so badly that Carla hadn’t been joking when she’d suggested the stranger would not choose it for a holiday. Few people did.

‘Rumour has it that he works for one of the huge hotel conglomerates,’ Carla went on. ‘The ones which buy up run-down monstrosities like this place and turn them into super-modern, ultra-select holiday complexes like the ones you see further down the coast.’

Was that what he was doing—just checking out the whole hotel in general, and not just watching her? Relief quivered through her. Her face relaxed. ‘Well, not before time, I suppose,’ she opined, feeling much better now she had a solid reason for the man’s presence here. ‘The old place could certainly do with a major face-lift.’

‘But at the expense of all our jobs?’ Carla quizzed. ‘The hotel will have to close to renovate, and where will that leave us?’

On that decidedly now sombre note, she picked up her tray and walked away, leaving Samantha alone with her words to chew upon. For what was she going to do if the hotel closed? The Tremount might be suffering from age and neglect, but it had thrown her a lifeline when she’d desperately needed one. She didn’t just work here, she also lived here. The Tremount was her home.

The stranger left quite early. Around nine o’clock he glanced at his watch, stood up and threw some money down on the table for Carla, then moved quickly out of the room. There was something very purposeful in the way he did it. As though he was going somewhere special and was running late.

A suspicion Freddie confirmed when he strolled into the lounge a few minutes later. ‘That guy from the Visconte Group left in a hurry,’ he remarked. ‘He strode out the hotel, gunned up his Porsche, then shot off up the driveway like a bat out of hell.’

‘Maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of spending another night sharing a bathroom with eight other guest rooms,’ Carla suggested. ‘No ensuites at the Tremount,’ she mocked. ‘Here, you learn to tough it out or run!’

‘If he was running, he went without paying his bill,’ Freddie said. ‘More like he was meeting someone,’ he decided. ‘The London train was due in Exeter around— Sam?’ he cut in suddenly. ‘Are you feeling all right? You’ve gone a bit pale.’

Had she? Funnily enough she felt quite pale—which was a very strange sensation in itself. It was the name, Visconte. For a brief moment there, she’d thought she knew it.

Which was a novelty in itself, because names never usually meant anything to her.

Names, faces, places, dates…

‘I’m fine,’ she said, and tossed out a smile for the benefit of the other two. ‘Are you here for your usual, Freddie?’ she asked, lightly passing off the moment.

But the name remained with her for the rest of the evening. And every so often she would think, Visconte, and find herself going off into a strange blank trance. A memory? she wondered. A brief flash from her past that had disappeared as quickly as it had come?

If it was, she couldn’t afford to let it go by without checking it out, she decided. And, since the Visconte name was linked with the stranger, she resolved to ask him about it at the first opportunity, because what other hope did she have of ever knowing who she was, unless she attempted to do it herself? With twelve long months behind her of waiting for someone else to do it for her, she had to start accepting that it just wasn’t going to happen.

Only last week the local paper had run yet another full-page spread on her plight, then pleaded for anyone who might recognise her to come forward. No one had. The police had finally come to the conclusion that she must have been alone in the world and on holiday here in Devon when the accident had happened. The car she had been driving was completely burned out—to the extent that they could only tell it had once been a red Alfa Romeo. They’d had no reports of a missing red Alfa Romeo. No reports of a woman gone missing driving a red Alfa Romeo.

Sometimes it felt as if she had died out there on that lonely road the night the petrol tanker had hit her, only to come back to life again many weeks later as a completely different human being.

But she wasn’t a different human being, she told herself firmly. She was simply a lost one who needed to find herself. If she hung onto nothing else then she had to hang on tight to that belief.

Eleven o’clock saw the lounge bar empty. Samantha rubbed her aching knee and finished tidying behind the bar. An hour later she was safely tucked up in bed, and by eight-thirty the next morning, after a restless night dreaming about dark demons and roaring dragons, both she and Carla were back on duty behind Reception, doing the job they were officially paid to do.

It was changeover day so the foyer was busy, but Samantha kept an eye out for Mr Payne, determined to speak to him if she was given the opportunity.

That opportunity arrived around lunch-time. The reception area had just cleared for the first time that morning, and only a few stragglers now hung around the foyer waiting for taxis to take them to the station. She and Carla were busy working out room allocations for the new guests that would be arriving throughout the afternoon when Samantha happened to glance up as the old-fashioned entrance doors begin to rotate and none other than Mr Payne strode in.

He paused just inside the foyer, and Samantha made the quick decision to take her chance while she had it. Murmuring, ‘Excuse me for a minute,’ to Carla, she opened the lift-top section in their workstation and stepped quickly through it—only to go still when she saw another man walk in and pause at Mr Payne’s side.

Both men were tall, both lean, both dressed in the kind of needle-sharp suits you wouldn’t find anywhere but at a top-notch tailors. But the newcomer was taller and a lot darker, and just that bit more…forbidding because of it, she observed with a cold little quiver that stopped her from approaching them.

As she watched, she saw his dark brown eyes make an impatient scan of their surroundings. There was a tension about him, a restlessness so severely contained that it flicked along his chiselled jawline as if he was clenching and unclenching his teeth behind his rather cold-looking mouth. Then the mouth suddenly twisted, and Samantha didn’t need to be clairvoyant to know what he was thinking right then.

The decor in here was a horrendous mix of pre-First World War splendour and 1960s grot. Originally built to grand Victorian specifications, the Tremount had been revamped in the 1960s, and everything tasteful had been pulled out or hidden behind sheets of flat plasterboard. Even the carpet on the floor was a gruesome spread of royal purple with large splashes of sunshine-gold to complete the horror. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the place that said grace and style; instead it said teak and vinyl rubbish, and even the rubbish had seen better days.

Much like herself, she likened wryly, absently rubbing her knee while watching his gaze go slashing right past her. Then it stopped, sharpened, and came swinging swiftly back again.

Their eyes locked. The hard line of his mouth slackened on a short, sharp intake of air. He looked horrified. And suddenly she didn’t like what was happening here. She didn’t like him, she realised, as a tight constriction completely closed her throat. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow. Even her heart stopped beating with a violent thump, then set going like a hammer drill against her right temple.

As if he could see it happen, his eyes flicked up to her temple. She saw him flinch—remembered the fine pink pucker of scar tissue there, and instinctively put up a hand to cover it.

The fact that she’d managed to move seemed to prompt him to do the same. He began walking straight towards her in a strange, slow, measured way that made her want to start backing. Sweat began to break out all over her. The room began to fade, tunnelling inwards in ever-decreasing circles until the only the two people left in the foyer seemed to be herself and him. And the closer he came, the more tight and airless the tunnel began to feel, until she was almost suffocating by the time he came to a halt two short feet away.

And he was big—too big. Too dark, too handsome, too—everything, she finished on a fine, tight shudder. Overpowering her with his presence, with that compelling look burning in his eyes.

No, she protested, though she had no idea what it was she was protesting against.

Maybe she’d said the word out loud, because he suddenly went quite pale, and his eyes were so dark she actually felt as if she was being drawn right into them.

Crazy, she told herself. Don’t be crazy.

‘Samantha,’ he breathed very thickly. ‘Oh, dear God…’

She fainted. With her name still sounding in her head, she simply closed her eyes and sank like a stone to the purple and gold carpet.

CHAPTER TWO

IN ALL of the long days and weeks she had spent in pain in hospital, she hadn’t fainted. In all of the long, dreadfully frightening weeks and months which had accompanied her slow recovery, she had never fainted. Of all the things she had ever wished and hoped and prayed for during the last twelve empty months, it had been for someone to come in through those revolving doors and say her name to her.

Yet, when someone had done exactly that, she’d fainted.

Samantha came round thinking all of that, in a mad and bewildering jumble of confusion, to find herself lying on one of the reception sofas with Carla squatting beside her, urgently chafing one of her hands, and the sounds of other people talking in hushed voices just beyond her vision.

‘Are you all right?’ Carla said anxiously the moment she saw Samantha open her eyes.

‘He knows me,’ she whispered. ‘He knows who I am.’

‘I know,’ Carla murmured gently.

The stranger suddenly appeared over Carla’s shoulder. Still too big, still too dark, too—

‘I’m sorry,’ he rasped out. ‘Seeing you was such a shock that I just didn’t think before I acted.’ He stopped, swallowed tensely, then added. ‘Are you okay, cara?’

She didn’t answer. Her mind was too busy trying to grapple with the frightening fact that this man actually seemed to know her, while she looked at him and saw a total stranger! It wasn’t fair—it wasn’t! The doctors had suggested that a shock like this might be all that was needed to bring her memory back.

But it hadn’t. Sheer disappointment had her eyes fluttering shut again.

‘No.’ His thick voice pleaded roughly. ‘Samantha—don’t pass out again. I’m not here to—’

His hand touched her shoulder. Her senses went haywire, crawling through her body like scattering spiders and flinging her into a whirling mad panic that jolted her into a sitting position to violently thrust his hand away.

‘Don’t touch me…’ she gasped out in shuddering reaction. ‘I don’t know you. I don’t!’

There was a muttered expletive, then Mr Payne appeared. His fair-skinned face was lined with concern as he murmured something soothing in Italian to the other man. He answered in the same language then, quite suddenly, spun on his heel and sat down abruptly on a nearby chair, as if the strength had just been wrenched out of him. And only then did it occur to Samantha that if he did really know her then he too must be suffering from shock.

‘Here…’ Carla pushed a glass of water at her. ‘Drink some of this,’ she urged. ‘You look dreadful.’

The stranger’s head came up, shock-darkened eyes honing directly onto her own, and for a moment Samantha felt herself sinking into those blackened depths again, as if drawn there by something more powerful than logic.

Oh, God. Confused, she wrenched her gaze away, pushing the glass aside so she could cover her face with a hand while she at least attempted to get a hold of herself.

‘Is she all right?’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘Has that man upset her?’

Hearing the jumble of questions coming from all directions reminded her that there were other people present. ‘Get me away from this,’ she whispered to Carla.

‘Of course,’ Carla murmured understandingly, and straightened up before taking hold of Samantha’s arm to help her to stand. It was a well-timed offer of help, because the moment she tried to put any weight on her right leg the knee reacted with a crack of pain that made her gasp out loud.

‘I wondered when I saw you fall if that would happen.’ Carla frowned. ‘You hit your bad knee against the corner of the desk as you fainted,’ she explained, looking down at the place where Samantha’s uniform-straight navy blue skirt finished, just above the injury. ‘I hope you’ve not done it any further damage.’

Gritting her teeth and clinging to Carla, she began to limp across the reception area towards a door marked ‘Staff Only’.

The stranger came towering to his feet. ‘Where are you going?’ he said sharply, staring at her as though he was expecting her to make a sudden run for it.

Samantha smiled wanly at the prospect. She couldn’t run if she tried. ‘Staffroom,’ she said, then added very reluctantly, ‘You can come if you want.’

‘I have every intention of doing so,’ he replied, and moved to follow them—only to pause and turn to make a flashing inventory of the crowded foyer. ‘Are you the only two people running this place?’ he questioned.

American. His accent contained the deep velvet drawl of a cultured American, Samantha noticed, then began frowning in confusion, because he and Nathan Payne had been speaking in Italian to each other only a minute ago.

‘The manager is away on business today.’ Carla did the explaining. ‘I’ll just help Samantha in here, then I’ll come back and—’

‘No!’ Samantha protested, her hand closing convulsively over Carla’s. ‘Don’t leave me alone with him!’ she whispered shrilly, not caring if the stranger had heard what she’d said and was offended by it.

‘Okay,’ Carla said soothingly, but her expression was looking a little hunted. It was the busiest time of the week on Reception and both of them couldn’t just walk off duty.

‘Nathan.’ Even Samantha, in her state of shock, heard the voice of authority when it spoke like that. ‘Take over here,’ the stranger instructed—then, at Carla’s uncertain look, ‘Don’t worry. He knows what he’s doing. It’s his job to know. We are going in here, I presume?’ he then prompted smoothly, indicating the door next to the reception desk.

Samantha nodded, having to bite down on her bottom lip now because her knee was hurting so badly. So, leaning more heavily on Carla while trying hard not to show it, she limped slowly through the staffroom door with him following so close behind her that she could actually feel his breath on her neck.

She shuddered, wishing he would just back off a little and give her time to recover and think. She didn’t want him here. She didn’t like him. She didn’t want to like him. Which was just stupid when she remembered that this man would be the link to her past she had been praying for.

It was relief to sit down in one of the chairs. At Samantha’s mumbled request Carla hurried off to collect her painkillers from her room, and the stranger pulled up another chair right beside her own, then sank down heavily on it. It brought him too close. She could feel his body heat and smell his subtle, masculine scent. Fighting hard not to edge right away from him, she leaned forward slightly to rub at her throbbing knee.

‘How bad is it?’ he rasped.

‘Not too bad,’ she lied. In fact it was very painful. ‘I just need to rest it for a few minutes.’

‘I meant, how badly did you injure your knee in the accident?’ he grimly corrected her mistake.

‘You know about that?’ she responded in surprise.

‘How the hell else do you think I found you?’ he bit out angrily.

She flinched at his tone; he let out a sigh and suddenly sat forward to lean his elbows on his spread knees, bringing their heads disturbingly close.

‘Sorry.’ He sighed. ‘I didn’t mean to bite your head off.’

Samantha didn’t say anything, and after a moment he said more levelly, ‘Nathan was surveying a couple of properties around here. He saw the article about you in the local newspaper and recognised your photograph. He couldn’t believe it!’ he ground out. ‘Neither could I when he rang me in New York to—’ The words dried up, seeming to block in his throat so he had to swallow, and his hands clenched very tightly together between his spread thighs.

‘Who is Nathan?’ she asked huskily.

His head swivelled round to look at her, dark brown eyes lancing her a bitter hard look. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you asked me who I am?’ he suggested.

But oddly, even to herself, Samantha shook her head. She didn’t know why, but she just wasn’t ready to hear who he was yet.

‘This man…Nathan,’ she persisted instead. ‘He’s been staying here over the last few days to keep an eye on me, hasn’t he?’

He took her refusal to take him up on his challenge with a tensing of his jaw. He answered her question though. ‘Yes. After he rang me and told me about your accident and the—the—God—’ He choked, had to stop to swallow thickly, lifting a decidedly shaky hand to press at his mouth. ‘I don’t want to think about that,’ he muttered after a moment. ‘I can’t cope with thinking about that right now…’

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, accepting that if he had read the article the newspaper had run on her accident, then he had a right to feel this bad about it. It made horrendous reading.

But she didn’t accept the cruel way he lashed back at her. ‘For surviving when six other people didn’t?’

The harsh words sent her jerking back in her seat in reaction, her green eyes spitting ice as a cold anger suddenly took her over. ‘I feel no sense of pleasure in being the lucky one,’ she informed him frigidly. ‘Six people died. I survived. But if you think I’ve spent the last year counting my blessings at their expense then you couldn’t be more wrong!’

‘And I’ve spent the last year wishing you in hell,’ he sliced back at her. ‘Only to discover that you were already living there and I didn’t know a damned thing about it!’

True, so true, she grimly acknowledged, for living hell was exactly where she had been. But it made her wonder why he had wished her in hell. What had she done to him to make him wish something as cruel as that upon her?

Whatever the reason, his harsh words hurt, and did nothing to make her feel more comfortable with him. In fact she was scared.

Maybe he realised it, because he launched himself back to his feet, then just stood there literally pulsing with a sizzling tension. He was tall—over six feet—and the room suddenly grew smaller. He seemed to dwarf everything—and not just with his physical presence. The man possessed a raw kind of energy that seemed to be sucking up all the oxygen.

Then he let out a harsh sigh and muttered something that sounded like a curse beneath his breath. As he did so, some of the tension eased out of the atmosphere.

‘I’m not managing this very well,’ he admitted finally.

No, he wasn’t, Samantha agreed. But then, neither was she.

It was perhaps a good point for Carla to reappear. Glancing warily from one tense face to the other, she came to squat down in front of Samantha, then silently handed her the foil slide containing her prescription painkillers, followed by a second glass of water.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured, and flipped two of the tablets out into her palm, swallowed them down with the help of the water then, on a sigh, sat back in the chair and closed her eyes to wait for the tablets to take effect. The knee was throbbing quite badly, and hot to the touch, which told her she must have knocked it pretty hard.

But that was not the real reason why she was sitting with her eyes closed like this, she had to admit. It was really a means of escape from what was beginning to develop here—not that closing her eyes was going to make it all go away again, she acknowledged heavily.

He was here, and she was too acutely aware of him standing across the room like a dark shadow threatening to completely envelop her.

And on top of that it was just too quiet. Quiet enough for her to sense that he and Carla were swapping silent messages, which had to involve her, though she didn’t bother to open her eyes to see exactly what it was they were plotting.

As it was, she soon found out.

‘Sam…’ Carla’s voice sounded anxious to say the least ‘…do you think you will be all right now? Only I really must go and see if everything is okay out there…’

A clammy sense of dismay went trickling through her when she realised they had been silently plotting her isolation. She didn’t want to be left alone with him. But she also saw that there was no sense in putting off the inevitable. And besides, she understood Carla’s predicament. They were paid to do a job here, and this hotel had a poor enough reputation without the staff walking off duty.

So she gave a short nod of understanding, then forced herself to open her eyes and smile. ‘Thanks. I’ll be fine now.’

With another concerned scan of her pale face, then an even more concerned one of the man who was standing on the other side of the room, Carla stood up and, with a final glance at their two pale faces, left the two of them to it.

And the new silence was cloying.

Samantha didn’t move a single muscle and neither did he. His attention was fixed on the view outside the staffroom window which, since it looked directly onto the hotel kitchens, was not a pretty sight. She kept her eyes fixed on the empty water glass she was so very carefully turning in her hands.

‘What now?’ she asked when she could stand the tension no longer.

‘It’s truth time, I suppose,’ he said, sounding as reluctant about it as she felt.

Turning slowly to face her, he stood watching her for a few more tense seconds. Then he seemed to come to some kind of decision and strode over to sit himself down again—and gently reached for the glass.

His fingers brushed lightly across hers and a fine frisson set her pulse racing. Sliding the glass away, he further disturbed her by taking hold of one of her hands as he set the glass aside then turned back to her.

‘Look at me,’ he urged.

Her eyes lowered and fixed fiercely on their clasped hands; the command locked her teeth together. And for the life of her she couldn’t move a muscle. The frisson became a deep inner tremor that vibrated so strongly she knew he could feel it.

‘I know I’ve come as a shock, but you have to start facing this, Samantha…’ he told her quietly.

He was right, and she did. But she still didn’t want to.

‘So begin by at least looking at me while we talk…’

Oh, dear God, she thought and tried to swallow. It took every bit of courage she had in her to lift her eyes and look directly at him.

He’s so beautiful, was the first unbidden thought to filter through her like a lonely sigh. His neatly styled hair was straight and black; his skin was warmed by a tan that she’d seemed to know from the moment she’d set eyes on him was natural to him. Sleek black eyebrows, long black eyelashes, eyes the colour of dark bitter chocolate. A regular-shaped nose, she saw as her gaze drifted downward to pause at his firm but inherently sensual mouth. It was a strong face, a deeply attractive well-balanced face.

But it was still the face of a total stranger, she concluded.

A stranger who was about to insist he was no stranger and, indeed, she added frowningly to that, already he did not feel like a stranger, because his touch felt familiar. There was an intimacy in the way he was looking at her that told her that this man knew her only too well. Probably knew her better than she knew herself.

‘Samantha,’ he prompted. ‘You know your name is Samantha.’

Glad of the excuse to claim her hand back, she lifted her fingers to part the collar of her blouse, revealing the necklace she wore around her throat.

A necklace spelling out her name in gold lettering. Sweet but childish though it was. ‘It’s all I had left,’ she explained. ‘Everything else was lost in the fire.’

The eyes flashed again. ‘Were you burned?’ he asked harshly.

Her body became shrouded in a clammy coat of perspiration. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Someone dragged me out before the car blew.’ Then the trembling fingers left the necklace to quiver up to the small pink scar at her temple. ‘I injured my head,’ she said huskily, ‘my arm…’ she gave her right arm a tense little jerk ‘…and m-my right leg…’

His eyes dropped to her knee, where even the sensible, high-denier thickness of her stockings could not hide the scarring beneath. Then with a slow raising of his oh-too-sensual long black lashes, he looked at the scar at her temple. ‘Your lovely face…’ he breathed, lifting a hand up to touch the scar.

She flinched back in rejection. And for the first time in months of just being too glad to be alive to want to feel any kind of revulsion for the physically obvious damage she had survived with, Samantha experienced a terrible, terrible urge to hide herself away.

This man’s fault! She blamed him wretchedly. He was so obviously one of those very rare people who was blessed with physical perfection himself and no doubt surrounded himself with the same that she suddenly knew, knew that whoever he was and whatever he once had been to her, she no longer fitted into his selective criteria!

It was her turn to get up, move away, though she didn’t do it with the same grace he did! ‘Who are you?’ She turned to launch at him wretchedly.

He stood up. ‘My name is Visconte,’ he told her huskily. ‘André Visconte.’

There it was, ‘Visconte.’ She breathed the name softly. ‘Of the Visconte Hotel Group?’

He nodded slowly, watching her intently for a sign that the name might begin to mean something else to her. But other than the same odd sensation she’d experienced the night before, when Freddie had said the name, it still meant nothing.

‘And me?’ She then forced herself to whisper. ‘Who am I?’

His eyes went black again, nerve ends began to sing. ‘Your name is also Visconte,’ he informed her carefully, then extended very gently, ‘You are my wife…’

CHAPTER THREE

FACE white, body stiff, eyes pressed tightly shut, Samantha simply stood there waiting—waiting to discover if this latest shock, coming hard upon all the other shocks she had suffered today, would manage to crash through the thick wall closing off her memory.

I am Samantha Visconte, she silently chanted. His wife. This man’s wife. A man I must have loved enough to marry. A man who must have loved me enough to do the same. It should mean something. She stood there willing it to mean something!

But it didn’t. ‘No,’ she said on a release of pent-up air, and opened her eyes to look at him with the same perfectly blank expression. ‘The name means nothing to me.’

She might as well have slapped him. He looked away, then sat down, his lean body hunching over again as he dipped his dark head and pressed his elbows into his spread knees—but not before Samantha had seen the flash of pain in his eyes and realised that her ill-chosen words had managed to hurt him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t mean it to come out sounding so…’

‘Flat?’ he incised when she hesitated.

She ran her dry tongue around her even drier lips. ‘Y-you don’t understand.’ She pushed out an unsteady explanation. ‘The doctors have been suggesting to me for months that a shock meeting like this might be all that was needed to jolt me into…’

‘I need a drink,’ he cut in, then stood up and began striding quickly for the door.

Samantha watched him go—relieved he was going because she needed time alone to try to come to terms with all of this. But it didn’t stop her gaze from following him, eyes feeding on his tall, lean framework as if she still couldn’t quite believe that he was real.

Maybe he wasn’t, she then told herself with a rueful little smile that mocked the turmoil her mind was in. Maybe this was going to turn out to be just another nightmare in a long line of nightmares where tall dark strangers visited her and claimed to know who she was.

‘Have we been married long?’

Why she stopped him at the door when she’d been glad he was going, she didn’t know. But the question blurted out anyway, bringing him to a halt with his hand on the door handle, and stopping her breath as she waited for him to turn.

‘Two years,’ he replied and there was a strangeness about his voice that bothered her slightly. ‘It will be our second wedding anniversary in two days’ time,’ he tagged on—then left the room.

Staring at the closed door through which he had disappeared, Samantha found herself incapable of feeling anything at all now, as a different kind of numbness overcame her.

Two days, she was thinking. Which made it the twelfth. They hadn’t even celebrated their first wedding anniversary together.

Her accident had occurred on the twelfth. Where had she been going on her first wedding anniversary? Had she been rushing back to be with him when the accident had happened? Had that been why she’d—?

No. She mustn’t allow herself to think like that. The police had assured her it had not been her fault. A petrol tanker had jackknifed on the wet road and ploughed into three other cars besides her own before it had burst into a ball of fire. She had been lucky because the tanker had hit her car first then left it behind, a twisted wreck as it careered on. The people in the cars behind her hadn’t stood a chance because they’d caught the brunt of the explosion when everything had gone up. Other drivers had had time to pull Samantha free before her car had joined in the inferno. But her body had had to pay the price for the urgency with which they had got her out. Her head, already split and bleeding from the impact, had luckily rendered her unconscious, but they had told her the man who had pulled her free had had no choice but to wrench her crushed knee through splintered metal if he was to get her clear in time. And her arm, already fractured in three places, had been made worse because it had been the only limb the man had been able to use to tug her out.

The arm had healed now, thankfully. And the knee was getting stronger every day with the help of a lot of physiotherapy. But the scar on her face was a reminder she saw every time she looked into a mirror.

And why was she hashing over all of this right now, when she had far more important things to think about? It was crazy!

So what’s new? She mocked herself, then with a sigh sat back down again.

She hadn’t even considered yet whether André Visconte was lying or not, she realised. Though why someone like him would want to claim someone in her physical and psychological state unless he felt duty-bound to answer the question for her.

Because no one in their right mind would.

No one had for twelve long months. So why hadn’t he found her before now?

He said he’d wished her in hell, she remembered. Did that mean that their marriage had already been over before their first wedding anniversary? Was that why he hadn’t bothered to look for her? And had he only done so now because someone had recognised her in that newspaper as the woman who was his wife?

Agitation began to rise. Her head began to throb, bringing her fingers up to rub at her temple. I want to remember. Please let me remember! she pleaded silently. He’d said something about being in New York. Was that where he lived? Was that where they’d met? Yet her accent was so obviously English that even she—who had learned to question everything about herself over the last twelve, empty months—had not once questioned her nationality.

Had they met here in England? Did they have a home in this area? Was he wealthy enough to own homes in two places? Of course he was wealthy enough, she told herself crossly. He owned a string of prestigious hotels. He looked wealthy. His clothes positively shrieked of wealth.

So what did that make her? A wealthy woman in her own right for her to have moved in the same social circles as he?

She didn’t feel wealthy. She felt poor—impoverished, in fact.

Impoverished from the inside, never mind the outer evidence, with her sensible flat-heeled black leather shoes that had been bought for comfort and practicality rather than because she could really afford them. For months her clothes had been charitable handouts, ill-fitting, drab-looking garments other people no longer wanted to wear but which had been good enough for an impoverished woman who had lost everything including her mind! It had only been since she’d landed this job here that she had been able to afford to replace them with something more respectable—cheap, chain store stuff, but at least they were new and belonged to her—only to her.

What did Visconte see when he looked at this woman he claimed was his wife?

Getting up, she went to stand by the tarnished old mirror that hung on the staffroom wall. If she ignored the scar at her temple, the reflection told her that she was quite passably attractive. The combination of long red wavy hair teamed with creamy white skin must have once looked quite startling—especially before too many long months of constant strain had hollowed out her cheeks and put dark bruises under her eyes. But some inner sense that hadn’t quite been blanked off with the rest of her memory told her she had always been slender, and the physiotherapists had been impressed with what they’d called her ‘athletic muscle structure’.

‘Could have been a dancer,’ one of them had said in a wry, teasing way meant to offset the agony he’d been putting her through as he’d manipulated her injured knee. ‘Your muscles are strong, but supple with it.’

Supple, slender dancer worthy of a second look once upon a time. Not any more, though, she accepted. She thought of the stranger and how physically perfect he was, and wanted to sit down and cry.

I don’t want this, she thought on a sudden surge of panic. I don’t want any of it!

He can’t want me. How can he want me? If I am his wife why has it taken him twelve months to find me? If he’d loved me wouldn’t a man like him have been scouring the whole countryside looking for me?

I would have done for him, she acknowledged with an odd pain that said her feelings for him were not entirely indifferent, no matter what her brain was refusing to uncover.

‘Oh, God.’ She dropped back into the chair to bury her face in her hands as the throbbing in her head became unbearable.

Pull yourself together! she tried to tell herself. You have to pull yourself together and start thinking about what happens next, before—

The door came open. He stepped inside and closed it again, his eyes narrowing on the way she quickly lifted her face from her hands.

His jacket had gone; that was the first totally incomprehensible thing her eyes focused on. The dark silk tie with the slender knot had been tugged down a little and the top button of his shirt was undone, as if he’d found the constriction of his clothes annoying and needed to feel fresh air around that taut tanned throat.

Her mind did a dizzy whirl on a hot, slick spurt of sudden sensual awareness. ‘Here…’ He was walking towards her with a glass of something golden in his hand. ‘I think you need one of these as much as I do.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t, not on top of the painkillers—thank you all the same.’

If nothing else, the remark stopped him, mere inches away from touching her. She didn’t want him to touch her—why, again she didn’t know. Except—

Stranger. The word kept on playing itself over and over like some dreadful, dreadful warning. This man who said he was her husband was a total stranger to her. And the worst of it was she kept on getting this weird idea that him being a stranger to her was not a new feeling.

He discarded the glass, then stood in front of her with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. He seemed to be waiting for something, but Samantha didn’t know what, so she looked at the garish carpet between their feet and waited for whatever was supposed to come next.

What could come next? she then thought tensely. There were questions to ask. Things to know. This was the beginning of her problems, not the end of them.

‘How’s the knee?’

‘What—?’ She blinked up at him, then away again. ‘Oh.’ A hand automatically went down to touch the knee. ‘Better now, thank you.’

Silence. Her nerves began to fray. Teeth gritted together behind clenched lips. God, she wished he would just do something! Say something cruel and trite like, Well, nice to have seen you again, sorry you don’t remember me, but I have to go now!

She wished he would pull her up into his big arms and hold her, hold her tightly, until all these terrible feelings of confusion and fear went away!

He released a sigh. It sounded raw. She glanced at him warily. He bit out harshly, ‘This place is the pits!’

He was right and it was. Small and shabby and way, way beneath his dignity. ‘I l-love this place.’ She heard herself whisper. ‘It gave me a home and a life when I no longer had either.’

Her words sent his face white again—maybe he thought she was taking a shot at him. He threw himself back into the chair beside her—close to her again, his shoulder only a hair’s breadth away from rubbing against her shoulder again.

Move away from me, she wanted to say.

‘Listen,’ he said. And she could feel him fighting something, fighting it so fiercely that his tension straightened her spine and held it so stiff it tingled like a live wire. ‘We need to get away from here,’ he gritted. ‘Find more—private surroundings where we can—relax—’

Even he made the word sound dubious. For who could relax in a situation like this? She certainly couldn’t.

‘Talk,’ he went on. ‘Have time for you to ask the kind of questions I know you must be burning to ask, and for me to do the same.’

He looked at her for a reaction. Samantha stared straight ahead.

‘We can do that better at my own hotel in Exeter than we can here,’ he suggested.

‘Your hotel,’ she repeated, remembering the big, new hotel that had opened its doors only last year.

‘Will you come?’

‘I…’ She wasn’t at all sure about that. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go anywhere with him, or leave what had become over the last year the only place where she felt safe and secure in her bewildered little world.

‘It’s either you come with me or I move in here,’ he declared, and so flatly that she didn’t for one moment think he was bluffing. ‘I would prefer it to be the other way round simply because my place is about a hundred times more comfortable than this. But—’ The pause brought her eyes up to look warily into his. It was what he had been aiming for. The chocolate-brown turned to cold black marble slabs of grim determination. ‘I am not letting you out of my sight again—ever—do you understand that?’

Understand? She almost choked on it. ‘I want proof,’ she whispered.

‘Proof of what?’ He frowned.

‘That you are who you say you are and I am who you say I am before I’ll make any decisions about anything.’

She expected him to be affronted but oddly he wasn’t—which in itself was proof enough that he was indeed telling her the truth about them.

Without a word he stood up, left the room again, coming back mere seconds later carrying the jacket to his suit. His hand was already fishing in the inside pocket when he came to stand over her.

‘My passport,’ he said, dropping the thick, bulky document onto her lap. ‘Your passport—an old one, I admit, but it can still give you your proof.’ That too landed on her knee. ‘Our marriage certificate.’ It landed on top of the two passports. ‘And…’ this came less arrogantly ‘…a photo…’ it fluttered down onto her lap, landing face down. ‘Of you and me on our wedding day.’

He’d come prepared for this, she realised, staring down at the small heap of items now sitting on her lap without attempting to touch them.

Because she was afraid to.

But why was she afraid? He had already told her who he was and who she was and what they were to each other. She was even already convinced that every word he’d said was the truth, or why else would he be standing here in this scruffy back room of a scruffy hotel in a scruffy corner of Devon saying all of these things?

So why, why was she feeling so afraid to actually look at the physical proof of all of that?

The answer came at her hard and cold, and frightened her more than everything else put together. She didn’t want to look for the same reason she’d lost her memory in the first place. The doctors had told her it had had little to do with the car crash. The accident might have helped to cause the amnesia, but the real reason for it lay deeply rooted in some other trauma she’d found she could not face on top of all the pain she had been suffering at that time. So her mind had done the kindest thing and had locked up the personal trauma so all she had to do was to deal with the physical trauma.

Looking at these documents was going to be like squeezing open the door on that trauma, whatever it was.

‘You never were a coward, Samantha,’ he told her quietly, at the same time letting her know that he knew exactly what was going on inside her head.

Well, I am now,’ she whispered, and her body began to tremble.

Instantly he was dropping down into the chair again, his hands coming out, covering hers where they lay pleated tightly together on her stomach, safely away from his proof. And this time she did not flinch away from his touch. This time she actually needed it.

‘Then we’ll do it together,’ he decided gently.

With one hand still covering her two hands, he used the other to slide his passport out from the bottom of the pile and flicked it open at the small photograph that showed his beautiful features set in a sternly arrogant pose.

‘Visconte’, it said. ‘André Fabrizio’. ‘American citizen’.

‘I look like a gangster,’ he said, trying to lighten the moment. Closing the book, he then selected the other one.

You weren’t supposed to smile on passport photographs. But the face looking back up her from her own lap told her that this person did not know how to turn that provocative little smile off. And her face wore no evidence of strain. She simply looked lively and lovely and—

‘Visconte’, it said. ‘Samantha Jane’. ‘British citizen’.

‘You lost this particular passport about six months after we were married and had to apply for a new one,’ he explained. ‘But I happened to turn this up when I was—’ He stopped, then went on. ‘When I was searching through some old papers.’ He finally concluded. But they both knew he had been about to say something else.

When his hand moved to pick up the marriage certificate, she stopped him. ‘No.’ She breathed out thickly. ‘Not that. Th-the other…’

Slowly, reluctantly almost, his fingers moved to pick up the photograph, hesitated a moment, then flipped it over.

Samantha’s heart flipped over with it. Because staring back at her in full Technicolor was herself, dressed up in frothy bridal-white.

Laughing. She was laughing up into the face of her handsome groom. Laughing up at him—this man dressed in a dark suit with a white rose in his lapel and confetti lying on his broad shoulders. He was laughing too, but there was more—so much more to his laughter than just mere amusement. There was—

Abruptly she closed her eyes, shutting it out, shutting everything out as her body began to shake violently, a clammy sweat breaking out across her chilled flesh. She couldn’t breathe again, couldn’t move. And a dark mist was closing round her.

Someone hissed out a muffled curse. It wasn’t her so she had to presume it must be him, though she was way too distressed to be absolutely sure of that. The next moment two hands were grasping her shoulders and lifting her to her feet. The stack of documents slid to the floor forgotten as he wrapped her tightly in his arms.

And suddenly she felt as if she was under attack from a completely different source. Attack—why attack? she asked herself as her head became filled with the warm solid strength of him.

‘Oh, my God.’ She groaned.

‘What’s happening?’ he muttered thickly.

‘I d-don’t know,’ she said tremulously, and tried sucking in a deep breath of air in an effort to compose herself. That deep breath of air went permeating through her system, taking the spicy scent of him along with it, and in the next moment her brain cells went utterly haywire.

Familiar. That scent was familiar. And so wretchedly familiar that—

Once again she fainted. No more warning than that. She just went limp in his arms and knew nothing for long seconds.

This time when she came round she wasn’t lying but sitting, with him standing over her pressing her head down between her knees with a very determined hand.

‘Stay there,’ he gritted when she tried to sit up. ‘Just wait a moment until the blood has had a chance to make it back to your head.’

She stayed, limp and utterly exhausted, taking in some carefully controlled breaths of air while she waited, waited for…

Nothing, she realised. No bright blinding flood of beautiful memories. Not even ugly ones. Nothing.

Carefully she tried to move, and this time he allowed her to, his dark face decidedly guarded as she sat back and looked at him.

‘What?’ he demanded jerkily when she didn’t say a word.

Empty-eyed, she shook her head. She knew what he was thinking, knew what he was expecting. She had been expecting the same thing herself.

His dark eyes glinted, a white line of tension imprinting itself around his mouth. Then he sucked in a deep lungful of air and held onto it for a long time before he let it out again.

‘Well, we aren’t going to try that again,’ he decided. ‘Not until we’ve consulted an expert to find out why you faint every time you’re confronted with yourself.’

Not myself, she wanted to correct him. You.

But she didn’t, didn’t want to get into that one. Not now, when it felt as if her whole world was balancing precariously on the edge of a great, yawning precipice.

‘So that settles it,’ he declared in the same determined tone. ‘You’re coming with me.’ He bent down to pick up the scattered papers, his lean body lithe and graceful even while it was clearly tense. ‘I’m going to need to make a few phone calls,’ he said as he straightened, then really surprised her by dropping the photograph back onto her lap. ‘While I do that, you can go and pack your things. By then I should be finished and we can get on our way—’

‘Do I have any say in this at all?’ she asked cuttingly.

‘No.’ He swung round to show her a look of grim resolve. ‘Not a damned thing. I’ve spent the last twelve months alternately thinking you were dead and wishing you were dead. But you aren’t either, are you, Samantha?’ he challenged bluntly. ‘You’re existing in some kind of limbo land to which I know for a fact that only I have the key to set you free. And until you are set free, I won’t know which of my alternatives I really prefer, and you won’t know why you prefer to stay in limbo. The newspaper report on you said they took you to a hospital in Exeter after the accident, which I presume means you received all your treatment there?’

She nodded.

So did he. ‘Then, since Exeter is where we are going, we don’t mention the past or anything to do with the past until we’ve received some advice from someone who knows what they’re talking about.’ He settled the matter decisively. ‘All you have to do is accept that I am your husband and you are my wife. The rest will have to wait.’

CHAPTER FOUR

WAIT…

Carla certainly did think she should wait for answers before trotting meekly off with him. ‘But you don’t know him from Adam!’ she protested as Samantha moved around her room gathering her few possessions together. ‘How do you know if he’s telling the truth?’

‘Why should he lie?’ Samantha countered, turning the question round on itself.

‘I don’t know.’ Carla sighed in frustration. ‘It just doesn’t feel right to me that you are willing to go off with him without knowing what it is you’re going to!’

Samantha’s only answer was to silently hand Carla the wedding photograph.

She stared at it, then at Samantha, then back at the photo again. And suddenly her mood changed. ‘What can have happened to you to make you forget something as beautiful as this?’ she murmured painfully.

Samantha wished she had the answer to that one. The story that photo was telling might be bringing tears to Carla’s eyes, but she couldn’t even begin to describe how it made her feel.

Nothing, she named it. But it was a strange, pained nothing, which was, in itself, something terribly saddening. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked quietly.

‘Nathan Payne told me.’ Carla nodded. ‘But just because he’s the great Visconte himself doesn’t absolve him from having to explain why it’s taken him twelve months to come and get you!’

True, Samantha conceded, and sat down on the bed as the heavy weight of all her own uncertainties came thundering down on her again.

‘I mean…’ Carla went on, determined to push her point home now that she had Samantha wavering ‘…you were famous for a week or two in these parts when the accident happened. Your predicament was reported in all the local papers. If you were missing and he was worried about you, wouldn’t you expect a man like him to pull out all the stops in an effort to find you? At the very least he could have checked out the police stations and hospitals. Your looks are pretty damned distinctive, Sam,’ she pointed out. ‘Even without you knowing who you are, for someone to be searching for a tall, slender redhead going by the name Samantha would surely be enough to make the necessary link?’

‘Maybe he was away—out of the country or something,’ she suggested, thinking of New York.

‘You mean, you haven’t bothered to ask him?’ Carla sounded dismayed.

Samantha was a little dismayed herself at how little she had asked him to explain. But the truth of it was, she didn’t want to ask. In some incomprehensible way, it felt safer not to ask.

‘The trouble is,’ she admitted with a rueful grimace, ‘every time we discuss anything even vaguely personal, I faint.’

‘Even more reason, surely, for you to think carefully before putting yourself in his care. Don’t you see that?’

See it? Of course she did. But…

Easing herself back to her feet, she gently took back the photograph, then looked at Carla with disturbingly bleak yet resolute green eyes. ‘If I am ever to discover why I’ve ended up like this,’ she said quietly, ‘then I have to go with him.’

To her, it was as simple and as final as that.

Where was she? André flicked a hard glance at his watch then stuffed his hand back into his pocket. She was taking an age!

‘Damn,’ he muttered, feeling the hellish anger he had been keeping banked down take another step closer to exploding. ‘Look at this place,’ he growled out contemptuously. ‘If it fell down right now, no one would miss it.’

Nathan Payne looked up, and André suddenly saw himself as his manager was seeing him—like a prowling panther pacing up and down on the awful carpet in front of the reception desk, as if in need of a good fight.

Hell, he thought. Ten rounds with the best boxer in the world wouldn’t knock out the ugly stuff churning up his system right now.

Samantha, residing in these miserable surroundings. It was enough to snuff the living light out of anyone! And the sooner he got her away from here the better as far as he was concerned.

Where was she? ‘Ring her room,’ he instructed Nathan.

‘No,’ the other man refused. ‘She will come when she’s ready.’

‘She’s already been an hour.’

And that other girl was with her. She didn’t like him. He’d seen it in her face when she’d heard what Samantha was going to do. She thought he was being too pushy and that Samantha was in too deep a state of shock to be going anywhere with anyone. Damn it, she was right, he grimly conceded.

‘Don’t you think you are being a bit hasty, taking her away from the only secure environment she knows?’ Nathan posed levelly.

Don’t you start, André thought. ‘I can give her a secure environment,’ he insisted.

‘She’s in shock, André.’

‘So am I,’ he tossed back.

‘And she’s frightened.’

Did Nathan think he didn’t know that? ‘I’m not into S&M, Nathan,’ he rounded angrily on the other man. ‘I’m not going to chain her up in a cage and put a whip to her rear end every hour on the hour!’

‘I’m so very relieved to hear that,’ another voice inserted.

Spinning round, he saw her standing in the mouth of the corridor which led to the staff quarters. She was wearing a simple blue shift dress and her hair was still fixed in a dreadful, priggish bun, which was in itself a defiance of what the real Samantha was. Deliberate, or a subconscious act? he mused grimly, and felt his senses grind together. Deliberate or not, it was there. Her chin was up, her mouth small, and her eyes were tossing out the kind of cold green sparks that had always declared war—old Samantha style.

He had never been able to resist it, and didn’t even try. Relaxing the tension out of his body, he let his eyes send back a counter-declaration, and he taunted lazily, ‘Submission is not your forte, mia dolce amante. You demand equality in all aspects of your life.’

He threw in the ‘my sweet lover’ in Italian just to see if she would remember it; he saw her face grow pink and was very, very pleased that she did indeed understand what he’d said. Standing beside her, he also saw her friend shift uncomfortably. Behind him he felt his manager do the same. He didn’t actually blame either of them, because sexual tension was suddenly rife in the dull and dingy foyer.

But it was Samantha’s response that mattered to him, and as the first truly healthy one he’d managed to rouse in her it did his bad temper the world of good.

‘Are you ready to come with me?’ he tagged on silkily, deciding to build on his sensual success—a building that crumbled the moment she moved forward and he saw that she was using a walking stick.

Anger roared back to life, making him turn on Nathan like a rattlesnake with poison dripping from its fangs. He snapped out orders which Nathan took in his stride with a kind of silent sympathy that only helped to make him feel worse. But he couldn’t even begin to describe what it did to him seeing his beautiful, vibrant Samantha in so much pain that she needed help just to walk!

Samantha left him to it and went outside, hurt by the flare of dismay she had seen on his face when he’d caught sight of her walking stick. Nor did she like the autocratic way he’d spoken to Nathan Payne, whom it seemed was going to remain here and cover for Samantha until the hotel manager returned.

‘He’s a bully,’ Carla said.

Samantha couldn’t deny it so she remained silent instead.

‘And he fancies the hell out of you,’ Carla added.

Static electricity suddenly shivered through her, setting almost every hair she possessed on end. ‘Not this girl,’ she denied, giving the walking stick a deriding kick.

‘What was the Italian seduction scene about, then?’

‘You said it.’ Samantha shrugged. ‘The words “Italian” and “seduction” always go together. In fact I don’t think they can function without each other.’

‘So he’s an Italian-American.’ Carla assumed.

Samantha shrugged again, because she didn’t actually know. Certainly the Visconte name was Italian. The accent was most definitely American, but the first name was surely French? she mused frowningly.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ From being argumentative, Carla had seen the frown and was now sounding anxious again.

No, I don’t think I am going to be all right, she thought, staring bleakly out across the potholed car park to where two cars in particular stood out like the symbols of success they obviously were. One was a natty black Porsche, the other a racing-green Jaguar.

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