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 person
al 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…’
The Unforgettable Husband Page 3