His sigh seemed to rake over ever inch of him. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Point taken. I’ll eat later. But for goodness’ sake,’ he added angrily, ‘eat something, Samantha… Eat!’
With that he strode out of the kitchen, making her feel miserable and guilty for driving him away. So she ate—force-fed herself, in fact. She drank some coffee, then got up and made fresh of both coffee and toast, placed them on a tray and, on a deep breath for courage, went looking for him.
He was easier to find than she’d expected. She simply followed the muffled sound of his angry voice and found him sitting behind a desk in a beautiful study, lined wall-to-wall with brass-grilled bookcases which looked as old as the house.
He was talking on the phone, but the moment he saw her come through the door he broke the conversation and returned the receiver to its rest.
‘Peace offering.’ She smiled nervously, carrying the loaded tray over to the desk and setting it down. ‘I’m sorry I caused all of that…strife, in the kitchen.’
‘My fault,’ he said instantly.
‘No it wasn’t.’ She refused to let him be that gracious. ‘It was mine. I was nervous—still am as a matter of fact,’ she admitted
‘Pour the coffee,’ he instructed.
Grimacing at the way he had coolly passed over her carefully planned apology, she did as he bade and poured the coffee, then silently handed it to him. She received no thanks, only a glinting look in those wretched eyes that could have held amusement as he took the coffee mug from her.
‘You’re a hard man, Signor Visconte,’ she informed him dryly, and turned to leave.
‘And you, Signora Visconte,’ he returned, ‘are the most amazingly unpredictable woman I know.’
‘Compliment or censure?’ She mused out loud.
He laughed. ‘Oh, most definitely a compliment,’ he assured. ‘No—don’t go,’ he added when she made to do just that, and the husky warmth of his voice vibrated on her senses, bringing her to a very wary standstill.
What now? she wondered, already beginning to pull up her defences again—just in case.
‘Give me two minutes to consume your…peace offering and I’ll reacquaint you with the house, if you like…’
Her defences fell again, that tentative ‘if you like’ helping to tumble them. She nodded her agreement. The telephone rang. It helped ease them through the next, few, awkward seconds. He answered it; she wandered off to peer inside the brass grilles at the selection of priceless first-edition books she could see locked safely out of reach.
‘Has anyone bothered reading them?’ she asked when the phone went down again.
‘Not in my lifetime,’ he drawled. ‘They belonged to my grandfather on my Italian side. This house belonged to his English mother. The melting pot of culture swimming in my blood is astonishing when you think about it,’ he mocked.
The true mongrel, Samantha thought, and smiled to herself because that blood had to be a rare mix of very old money when you put all the evidence together.
‘They should be in a museum,’ Samantha remarked.
‘The books or my family?’
‘The books.’ She laughed, swinging round to toss that laugh at him.
His eyes dilated; she saw it happen as his attention riveted on this first laughing response she had offered him. Her heart-rate quickened, sending a rush of awareness surging to her head. Then, with a blink of his long lashes, he recovered, her heart-rate slowed and the awareness faded.
‘The books belong to the house.’ He continued with the conversation as if the stinging moment in between had never been there. ‘I am only their guardian. Even my very French mother, who respected nothing if it wasn’t French, didn’t dare lay a finger them.’
‘You say that very cynically. But she married an Italian who lived in America. Surely that says she must have loved your father very much.’
‘That was her first marriage. She married her second husband the year after my father died. He was as French as she was.’
Samantha frowned. ‘But I thought you said you were brought up in Philadelphia?’
‘Not by her choice but my father’s choice. He was the one with the money and therefore the power—even from the grave.’ Suddenly the cynicism was really pronounced. ‘If my mother wanted to keep her hands on the money then she had to agree to keep me, as his sole beneficiary, where that money was generated.’
‘You didn’t get on with her,’ Samantha murmured softly.
‘You are mistaken,’ he said coldly. ‘I adored her. She and Ra—’
He stopped quite suddenly, snapping his lips together on whatever he had been about to say. Yet another of those strained silences fell round them, making Samantha frown and André look angry.
The ring of the telephone actually startled the pair of them as it pealed out its demand. He snatched it up. ‘What?’ he rapped out, then sat there frowning and listening while Samantha hunted through the conversation, looking for a logical reason for the sudden silence. The books? The mother? The stepfather whose name he didn’t quite finish?
‘Right now, you mean?’ he questioned sharply. ‘Okay, that’s great.’ He stood up. ‘No, now is fine. I’ll have to change into a suit, but set it up and I’ll be there.’
The phone went down.
‘I have to go out,’ he said to Samantha. ‘I’m sorry. Would you mind showing yourself around the house?’
‘Of course not,’ she assured him.
‘Thanks,’ he murmured. ‘I shouldn’t be long.’ He was already striding for the door. ‘Feel free to make yourself at home while I’m gone.’
‘I thought it was my home,’ she whispered into the empty space he had left behind him, and felt slightly offended by the speed with which he had made his escape—almost as if he’d been relieved by the excuse to get away from her for a while.
No, she scolded herself. The man is important. He runs a multinational business. Of course he has to keep his priorities in perspective.
And that was the second lot of toast and coffee he had walked away from this morning, she thought with a rueful smile. Sighing to herself, she picked the tray up again and carried it back to the kitchen, thinking, Now I am even beginning to feel like a wife. Unappreciated and put to one side.
‘I’ve just thought…’ His voice came at her from behind. ‘You will wait here, won’t you? You won’t be tempted to go out, without me to—’
‘Keep an eye on me?’ she finished for him, turning to throw him a fiery glare.
A glare that fizzled out when she saw him standing there in a grey suit, white shirt and blue silk tie. In the space of what felt like only five minutes he had transformed himself from casual man about the house into hard-edged man of the City.
Handsome, sharp. Powerful—sexy…
‘I just don’t think I should be leaving you alone right now,’ he explained.
Samantha frowned. ‘Go to your meeting,’ she told him. ‘I’m not stupid. And I have no intention of doing anything stupid.’
‘And that,’ he drawled sardonically, ‘is most definitely my cue to get out of here before we start yet another row.’
He went to leave; her eyes began to hurt. ‘Was it always like this between us?’ she asked thickly.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘We fight as we make love: with no holds barred.’
His beautiful mouth moved on a grimace and Samantha grimaced herself. ‘No wonder our marriage barely lasted a year, then,’ she said. And, seeing his hesitation, his desire to say something in answer to her last comment, Samantha turned her back on him again, with a, ‘See you later,’ gauged to finish the discussion before, as he’d predicted, it developed into something else.
He clearly thought the very same thing, because he left with only a flat, ‘Sure.’
It was a relief to have him gone. A relief to have time to walk through the house without feeling under the constant surveillance of a pair of dark eyes that seemingly expected everything she saw to be the magic k
ey that opened the floodgates to her memory.
The house didn’t do it. Walking from room to room, the only thing she did learn was that his mother had possessed a truly unimpeachable eye for what was the best in good taste and classical styling. One room blended smoothly with another in a flow of pastel shades and exquisite furniture pieces that must have cost the earth.
By the time she arrived back where she’d started from, Samantha had to ask herself why she had been so afraid of coming into this house yesterday. Because, on the whole, she’d found the house an absolute pleasure.
Nothing had hit her as scary, nothing vaguely sinister—if she didn’t count the room upstairs, which had given her a couple of uneasy moments when she’d tried the door only to find it was locked. Or the beautiful walnut roll-top bureau in the sitting room she had caught herself gently stroking as if it was a long-lost friend.
But other than for those things she simply loved every inch of the place. A point that added to the puzzle as to why she would want to turn her back on it all as if it had never existed.
Or turn her back on the man who came with it, she then added with a faint quiver she knew was more sexual than threatening.
With a small sigh, she suddenly decided to pick up the phone and call Carla at the Tremount. She’d promised she would keep in touch, and right now she felt she needed to hear a friendly voice… A truly familiar friendly voice, she extended.
But the conversation wasn’t quite as comforting as that…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LETTING himself back into the house, André paused in the hallway to listen for signs of life. Hearing none, he began searching rooms, giving himself a few uneasy moments when he couldn’t find Samantha anywhere—until he had the sense to look where he would have expected to find the old Samantha.
Sure enough, even as he strode through the door connecting the sitting room with the elegant glass-domed swimming pool, he saw her cutting through the water with the smooth, clean glide of a natural-born swimmer. She was a mermaid; she always had been. Give her time to herself and she would usually find a pool somewhere to dive into, and it filled him with a real burst of pleasure to see her truly back where she belonged like this.
His first instinct was to strip to his micro-briefs then dive in there and join her—only he was wryly aware that she probably wouldn’t appreciate the gesture right now, when natural responses had to be contained to their minimum.
Presuming, of course, that the Samantha swimming in the pool was the new Samantha, he then thought frowningly. He didn’t think even she knew how often she’d slipped back and forth through time. He hadn’t begun to realise himself until this morning, when he’d watched her pour his coffee without needing to be prompted on how he liked it. As she’d pushed the drink towards him it had finally begun to dawn on him just what was happening to her—and had been happening from the moment he’d walked back into her life.
The journey to Exeter from the Tremount, for instance, when she’d spent the whole time talking to him as if they’d never been apart. André this, André that. It had driven him crazy at the time, hearing her say his name so comfortably while still believing he was a complete stranger. Then there were the times when they’d touched or kissed or made love, he recounted with a fine, tight, sense-twisting shudder. She’d known him then, all right, and had slipped into the old Samantha mould just as naturally as she was cutting through the water right now.
So—which one was swimming in the pool—the old or the new Samantha? he asked himself.
Hell, he didn’t know. But he was not going to risk finding out the hard way, by shocking her into another blackout in the middle of a pool of deep water.
So, instead of making her aware of his presence, he turned away with the intention of leaving as silently as he had arrived… Or would have done if a rather sarcastic voice hadn’t stopped him.
‘Well, well.’ He heard her drawl. ‘If it isn’t the very busy, hotshot tycoon taking time out of his busy tycoon schedule to say hello…’
His skin began to prickle, the tone alone telling him that whichever Samantha it was she was angry about something. Turning round, he saw her treading water dead centre of the pool. ‘Was there something specific you meant to convey in that remark?’ he enquired narrowly.
‘Yes,’ she replied, then slid gracefully onto her back to stroke smoothly away.
Still not certain who it was he was talking to, André stepped to the edge of the pool. ‘Then, explain,’ he suggested.
‘I was commenting on your very busy life,’ she informed him as those long slender arms lazily propelled her through the water. ‘Picking up a hotel here, picking another up there… Tell me,’ she begged, the sarcasm echoing high into the glass-domed roof, ‘because I’ll be really interested to know, is there an actual point where you can ever envisage saying to yourself that enough is enough, I don’t need another hotel, no matter what its money-pulling potential is?’
She was talking hotels. His flesh went cold. ‘Get out of the water!’ he commanded harshly.
‘I beg your pardon?’ She gasped, and stopped swimming to stare at him.
‘You heard me.’ He began striding down the length of the pool with his senses on alert and his mind gone haywire. ‘I want you to swim to the side of the pool and get out! I mean it, Samantha!’ he warned when she made no move to comply. ‘If you don’t get out of there I’m coming in to drag you out!’
And to suit threat with action he pulled off his jacket and tossed it aside.
Puzzled, more than anything, he suspected, because she could see he was so deadly serious, she swam to the other side of the pool and pulled herself out. Water streamed from her body, leaving behind it a long, slender nymph with skin like a pearl and a lilac one-piece swimsuit that revealed more that it concealed… And he still didn’t know which Samantha it was that turned to glare at him across the width of the pool.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she demanded crossly. ‘I can swim like a fish! I don’t need—’
‘And if you’d had another blackout while you were in there?’ he raked back. ‘What good would your swimming proficiency be to you then?’
Slender hands went on slender hips. Old or new? Both would challenge him with that pose. ‘You’re just trying to divert my attention away from what I was talking about,’ she accused him. ‘Do you think I haven’t noticed how you like to do that? Well, forget it this time, André, because it isn’t going to work—’
André. She’d just called him André.
‘So let’s talk about hotels,’ she went on in a voice still dripping sarcasm. ‘And let’s talk about sneaky tycoons who move in on people as well as hotels and take them over without—’
Hell, she knew who she was all right. ‘I did not move in on the Bressingham!’ He angrily denied the charge. ‘And I did not move in on your father! In fact it was the other way round, if you’d only…’
Something changed inside her. Samantha felt it happen. A sudden icy confusion that made her feel very peculiar as she tried to make sense of a misunderstanding which oddly didn’t feel like a misunderstanding but more like a horrible—horrible case of déjàvu.
‘I was talking about the Tremount and Carla,’ she murmured very slowly. ‘I rang her while you were out. Sh-she told me you…’
Her voice trailed away. Her eyes went blank. Her father—the Bressingham, she found herself repeating. Goose-bumps began to break out all over her wet skin. Then, no, Carla and the Tremount, she corrected herself.
‘Y-you bought it,’ she continued with a perplexed frown. ‘Carla s-suddenly thinks you’re the bees-knees w-when only hours before she…’
She stopped again, frowning that perplexed look across the pool at André, who was standing taut and still and looking very pale. ‘I n-need to sit down,’ she said, and did so, stumbling over to the nearest pool chair and dropping into it.
Cold, she felt icy cold, and nothing seemed to be functioning. Heart, lungs, the blo
od in her veins—they’d gone very silent and still, as if they were gathering themselves ready for some kind of major eruption.
‘Samantha…’ That was André’s voice, she recognised as if from a great distance. There were his footsteps she could hear echoing like thunder on the hard tiled floor. ‘Cara mia, listen to me…’ And he sounded odd, rough and thick and…
‘Why is there a door locked upstairs?’ she asked him.
The footsteps stopped. She looked up, saw him standing stock-still about four feet away. ‘It’s a storeroom,’ he said. ‘I keep my personal files locked away in there…’
‘Liar,’ she said, and looked away again. He kept the door locked because it was Raoul’s room.
Raoul—!
Oh, dear God! She jerked to her feet, jarring her knee in the process so she couldn’t help but wince. André took a giant step towards her but she held him off with a trembling hand. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. I’m not going to black out. Just don’t come near me for a minute while I…’
Once again the words dried up, flailing in a muddy pool of confusion she couldn’t quite seem to clear.
‘You’re not all right,’ he refuted hoarsely. ‘You’re beginning to—’
‘Remember—’ she finished for him. And just like that it finally happened, roaring up with the abruptness of a flickering flame sizzling in the short grasses of her memory, suddenly erupting into a column of fire.
‘Oh, my God.’ She gasped, and began shake. André, her father, Raoul, the Bressingham. ‘André,’ she murmured painfully.
And he was there, coming from behind to drop her robe about her shoulders then holding it there with hands like vices that began firmly pulling her back from the edge of the pool as if he was afraid she was going to topple right back into it.
Maybe she was about to topple. She didn’t even care. The flame of truth was a roaring column inside her head. It began leaping, flicking out long lethal fingers across huge empty gaps to ignite other memories.
‘You lied to me,’ she whispered.
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