by Lynne Graham
‘There is nothing wrong with me, only a temporary phase of slight disorientation—’
‘During which you forgot about a great fat chunk of your past life!’ Hilary slotted in heatedly. ‘I think that’s very relevant and a lot more dangerous than you’re prepared to admit. There’ll be employees and clients you won’t even recognise, situations you don’t understand and which you may screw up. You’re also five flipping years out of date with your precious work. Who are you planning to take into your confidence in an effort to avoid making embarrassing mistakes? Because one thing I do know about you, Roel…just about the only person alive whom you trust is yourself!’
Out of breath and trembling with the force of her feelings, for she was aghast at the very idea of him attempting an immediate return to work, Hilary glared at Roel in challenge. Just as quickly her expression changed to one of anxiety as she saw him frown as though with pain. Only then did she register the ashen cast of his complexion and the slight tremor in his hand as he raised it to his head.
‘Sit down…’ Closing both hands over his, Hilary urged him back towards the armchair behind him.
Roel was swaying but he still fought her attempt to help him. ‘But I don’t need—’
‘Shut up and sit down!’ Hilary launched at him fiercely and she used his uneven balance to topple him down into the chair like a felled tree.
‘Per meraviglia…’ Roel groaned in frustration. ‘It’s only a headache.’
But Hilary had already hit the call button to bring a nurse and the presence of that third party, soon followed by the entry of Dr Lerther, prevented Roel from expressing his fury at her interfering and taking charge in such a way.
In any case, Roel had recognised that his wife had panic written all over her. He decided that there was something to be said for a woman with a face that seemed to wear her every passing thought. Her eyes were dark with stress and worry and she stood humbly at the back of the room, demonstrating what he considered to be exaggerated respect for the medical personnel while nibbling anxiously at a nail.
He couldn’t take his attention off his nail-biting wife. She looked so scared on his behalf and she was trembling. Concern for his health must have made her shout at him. She seemed to be fond of him. She might well be fonder still of his immense wealth and all that it could buy her, Roel conceded cynically but, indisputably, she seemed to cherish some degree of genuine fondness for him. He knew all women were terrific actresses but any single one of the previous lovers he could recall would have withstood torture sooner than succumb to cannibalising a nail.
In addition his wife was neither as uncomplicated nor as predictable as he had initially assumed. A startling amount of fire and defiance lurked behind that cute and curvaceous feminine exterior. He was accustomed to women who said yes to his every request and worked hard at meeting his expectations before he could even be put to the trouble of voicing a request. He had never met a woman who had the nerve to shout at him or one who would go toe to toe with him in a fight. In actuality, he did not argue with people ever. He had never had to argue. Arguments just didn’t happen to him.
Hilary was feeling hugely, horribly guilty and shaken up. Roel was still suffering from the physical after-effects of a serious accident and she had lost her temper with him. How could she have done that? As a rule she had an even temper and a sunny easygoing nature. What had come over her? Instead of being calm and coaxing and patient, she had been strident and emotional and accusing. He had looked taken aback. She didn’t think he was used to being shouted at and she could not believe that she had done so.
Sucking in a deep steadying breath, she studied him. Her heart jumped as though it were on a trampoline. His luxuriant black hair was tousled, bold profile taut, his dense black lashes cut crescent-shaped shadows over his proud olive cheekbones. Extravagantly handsome, he had a raw masculine appeal that turned female heads wherever he went. He still took her breath away. Just as he had the very first time she’d seen him and the recollection of that particular day nearly four years ago swept her back in time…
Talking on a mobile phone, Roel had walked through the door of the busy salon where she’d worked as a junior stylist. There he had stilled, ebony brows elevating with a faint air of well-bred surprise as he’d taken in his surroundings. She had immediately understood that, like others before him, he had mistaken the salon for the much more exclusive place a few doors further along the street. In that split second when he had been on the brink of wheeling round to leave again something had propelled her forward. Something? The fact that he was so outrageously good-looking she would have gone without food for a week just to own a photo of him? How could she explain her own unbelievably powerful need to prevent him walking back out of her life again as casually as he had wandered into it?
‘Just you stay on the phone and I’ll take care of your hair,’ Hilary suggested, planting herself between him and the door, relying on his essential male instinct to avoid acknowledging that he had made a mistake to guide him.
He flicked her a perplexed glance, the sort that told her he did not really see her and was much more interested in his phone conversation. She expected that to change when she wielded the styling scissors around him. In her admittedly slender experience handsome men were well aware of being handsome and as keen as any woman to ensure that their hair was cut only to their own exact specification.
‘Do what needs to be done,’ Roel told her impatiently.
Asked for guidance a second time, he gave her an unbelieving appraisal. ‘But it’s only a haircut, nothing important.’
So she just copied the existing conservative style. Even the feel of his luxuriant black hair thrilled her fingertips. As he paid she urged him to make sure that he came back. He had just walked out when she noticed the large denomination banknote that she assumed he had accidentally dropped on the desk. Ever eager, she rushed out into the street after him.
‘It’s a tip,’ Roel said in a pained tone when she attempted to return the money. He stared down at her from his great height while a limousine the length of a train drew up behind him and a uniformed chauffeur leapt out to throw open the passenger door for his entry.
‘But it’s too much…’ she mumbled, staggered by the sight of that limo and the concept of a tip that size.
With a shrug of imperious dismissal, Roel swung away into his opulent car.
Hilary drifted back to the present to discover that while she had been lost in her thoughts Roel had contrived to regain his natural colour and was upright again.
‘Should you be standing?’ Hilary queried, watching him set down the phone he had been using.
‘We’re going home,’ Roel imparted, ignoring the question.
In search of support, Hilary looked in dismay at the consultant. ‘Dr Lerther?’
The older man aimed a stiff smile at her. ‘There is no physical reason why your husband should remain at the clinic.’
‘Naturalmente…the other problem will vanish,’ Roel pronounced with supreme confidence.
We’re going home. Home? For goodness’ sake, where was home? Caught totally unprepared for the development, Hilary followed Roel out to the lift, which swept them down to the ground floor. There she learned that the case she had left at reception had already been stowed in the transport awaiting them.
‘So where were you when I crashed my car yesterday?’ Roel enquired a tinge drily.
‘In London…er…I have a business there,’ Hilary answered in an undertone while she frantically wondered what she was supposed to do or say next for she had no script on which to act. Nothing was as she had assumed it would be. He was walking wounded, conscious, but by no stretch of the imagination was he himself.
A limousine with tinted windows sat outside the clinic. A chauffeur doffed his cap. She climbed in and sank into a seat upholstered in rich hide leather. She struggled not to gawp at the astonishing luxury of the car interior.
‘How long have we been marr
ied?’ Roel drawled softly.
Without looking at him, Hilary breathed in deep. ‘I think it’ll be more relaxing if I don’t force-feed you facts—’
Roel reached out a lean brown hand and closed long, sure fingers over hers. ‘I want to know everything—’
Startled by the ease with which he had touched her, Hilary could not prevent her fingers from trembling within the hold of his. ‘Dr Lerther said that telling you things that you didn’t really need to know would just complicate matters—’
‘Let me decide what I need to know,’ Roel incised without hesitation.
‘I think Dr Lerther has your best interests at heart and I don’t want to risk your recovery by going against his advice,’ Hilary confided unevenly, for that physically close to him for the first time ever she was a bundle of nerves.
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘In a few days you’ll have remembered it all for yourself,’ Hilary pointed out in urgent consolation, appreciating how much more that scenario was likely to appeal to him. ‘It would be better that way…much better.’
In her eagerness to convince him that patience was his best option, Hilary finally dared to glance up. She met his dark golden gaze in a head-on collision. Her mouth dried and her heart pounded like crazy.
‘And in the short term?’ Roel prompted in his dark, deep drawl.
His delicious growling accent seemed to shimmy down her sensitive spine and set up a chain reaction through her tense body. She was welded to the spot by the electrifying gold of his appraisal; her mind was a blank. ‘The short term…?’ she parroted like someone who had never heard the expression before.
‘You and I,’ Roel specified with a low-pitched laugh that sent the colour flying up into her cheeks while she stared up at him with eyes the same shade as winter skies. ‘What do I do with a wife I’ve forgotten?’
‘You don’t need to do anything. You just trust her to l-look out for you,’ Hilary stammered, fighting with every fibre of her being to suppress her embarrassing lack of self-control around him. Why was she hanging on his every word like a lovelorn schoolgirl and gaping at him like a star struck fan? She was infuriated by her own weakness. Her role was to be a supportive friend, nothing more, nothing less. But the sheer thrill level of just being alone with Roel seemed to have stolen her wits.
‘Look out for me?’ Roel studied her from below black spiky lashes. She was planning to look out for him? In all his life he did not think that he had ever heard anything more naive or ridiculous. Yet he said nothing because she shone with sincerity and good intentions.
‘That’s what I’m here for…’ Hilary extended, but she could hardly find her voice to make that added assurance for her vocal cords were threatening to let her down. His proximity and the casual confidence with which he touched her were sending her brain into freefall.
Even as she spoke Roel raised a hand to let his forefinger trace the luscious fullness of her soft pink lower lip and that did nothing to cool her temperature. Indeed, where he touched her skin seemed to tighten with an awareness so acute it almost hurt to experience it. Leaning closer without even being aware of it, Hilary gave an almost imperceptible gasp as her nipples hardened into stiff straining points below her tee shirt.
‘You’re trembling…’ Roel murmured huskily. ‘But then why not? This is a stimulating situation.’
‘I beg your pardon…?’ Hilary whispered, convinced she had misheard him.
‘A wife I’ve forgotten,’ Roel quipped, watching her with eyes as bright and tough as metallic bronze. ‘A woman with whom I must have shared many intimacies but who appears to me at this moment in the guise of a complete stranger. It’s a sexually intriguing concept, cara mia. How could it be anything else?’
CHAPTER THREE
A RIVER of bright guilty colour washed up Hilary’s throat and surged as high as her hairline.
Sexually intriguing? Hilary shifted on her seat. A woman with whom he had shared many intimacies? Naturally Roel would make that assumption. It would not occur to him that she could be anything other than a normal wife. After all their arrangement nearly four years back had been highly unusual in its terms.
‘You have a novel way of viewing things,’ she muttered awkwardly, fighting not to betray how uncomfortable she was.
‘You blush like an adolescent,’ Roel noted with husky amusement.
‘Absolutely only with you!’ Hilary shot back at him, infuriated by the suspicion that her face was hot enough to fry eggs on. As a teenager her habit of flushing to the roots of her hair when she got embarrassed had made her the butt of many jokes at school. Mercifully she had grown out of the affliction but not, it seemed, around Roel.
‘We can’t have been married long,’ Roel commented, his rich dark drawl roughening and slowing as he reached out and tugged her into his arms.
‘Don’t!’ Hilary yelped as though he had pushed a panic button.
An involuntary grin crossed Roel’s lean, darkly handsome face because, although she wasn’t much bigger than a doll, she had an extremely bossy streak. ‘Don’t worry…kissing my wife is unlikely to put me back into hospital—’
‘How do you know that?’ Hilary demanded jerkily, angling her blonde head back a little more out of reach. Yet her every physical prompting urged her just to throw herself at him and make hay while the sun, as it were, shone. ‘I just don’t think there should be any kissing…yet—’
‘Non c’e problema,’ Roel teased, in his element, reading the look of concern that his wife wore and more amused than ever by her fear that sexual activity might somehow be detrimental to his health. ‘Think of it as a useful experiment. It might even awaken lost memories, bella mia.’
‘Roel…’
But anticipation was rising at wicked speed inside Hilary: she didn’t want to stop him; she didn’t have the will-power to stop him; she couldn’t wait to experience what she had once been denied. And when his wide, sensual mouth tasted hers the pathways between every erogenous zone she possessed turned to liquid fire and blazed. Her heart thumped with mad, crazy excitement.
Long fingers sliding into her hair, he tilted her head back the better to gain access to her mouth. She leant back into the strong arm, bending her spine in the most encouraging way imaginable. He dipped his tongue between her readily parted lips and plundered the inner sweetness with a driving male hunger that took her by storm. Her body leapt into almost agonising life, pulses racing and nerve-endings quivering. Forbidden heat surged at the very heart of her. Defenceless against her own desire, she moaned low in her throat in response.
Dragging in a ragged breath of restraint, Roel released her. Ebony lashes veiling his gaze to a reserved flash of gold, he murmured without expression, ‘We’re home.’
Breathless and dazed by that unfamiliar explosion of passion, Hilary lowered her head and tried to get a grip on herself. Deep down inside her body in a private place that she wasn’t even used to thinking about, she was conscious of a wicked ache of disappointment. She had got carried away: he could have made love to her on the back seat of his limo and he probably knew it. Hilary was so ashamed of herself for encouraging him that she wondered how she would ever look him in the face again. She had behaved like a sex-starved groupie let loose on her idol. What on earth was she playing at? He had accepted her on trust and, to be worthy of that trust, she needed to keep a proper distance between them! When the chauffeur opened the door beside her, she scrambled out of the limo in haste and only then took a good look at her surroundings.
Home? Roel appeared to live in a vast stone mansion set within the seclusion of high screening walls. A middle-aged manservant was stationed beside the imposing entrance. The huge hall was adorned with classical statues, gilded furniture and a marble floor. She was intimidated by such grandeur, and her steps faltered.
‘Santo cielo…’
Roel’s roughened exclamation made Hilary spin round. Wearing a stark frown of disconcertion, he seemed to be staring at the ha
ndsome marble fireplace. Swift understanding gripped her. Something had surprised Roel. Something was different or at least not as he had expected. As he evidently had no memory of the change taking place, he would naturally feel disorientated, and when that happened within his own home it had to be that much more disturbing.
Aware of the manservant’s covert scrutiny, Hilary hurried over to Roel, tucked a confiding hand into his arm and stretched up to whisper, ‘Let’s go upstairs…’
In the very act of wondering why one of his grandfather’s favourite paintings should be hanging in his grandson’s town house, Roel reacted to that breathy little feminine invitation as red-blooded males had done for centuries. The conundrum of the painting momentarily forgotten, he was startled by a desire to scoop his diminutive wife up and kiss her breathless for reading his mind with such accuracy. Was that how he usually acted around her? It shook him to acknowledge that he had no idea.
‘I just remembered something…you go on ahead,’ Hilary said when they reached the marble landing above. Pulling free, she then hurried back downstairs to speak to the manservant before he could disappear from view.
‘I’m sure you’re wondering who I am,’ Hilary began uncomfortably. ‘You are…?’
‘Umberto, signorina. I run the household and you are Mr Sabatino’s guest,’ the older man responded smoothly.
‘I’m not…actually, I’m Roel’s…er…wife, Hilary,’ she explained in an apologetic undertone.
Well-trained though Umberto was, he could not conceal his surprise.
‘Please ensure that no personal or business phone calls are put through to my husband.’
Umberto stiffened, his lips parting in an anxious way.
‘Don’t ignore my instructions,’ Hilary added, tilting her chin.
When she drew level with Roel again, he dealt her a keen appraisal and then, strong mouth quirking, he bent down and swept her up into his arms.