by Lynne Graham
‘It was a long time before she was able to speak for herself, but she was apparently wearing a rather unusual bracelet. Her face had been pretty badly knocked about and she needed surgery.’ For the first time in his life Dawson saw his employer wince, and was sincerely shaken by the evidence of this previously unsuspected vein of sensitivity. ‘So as a first move the police gave a picture of the bracelet to the press. She was swiftly identified as a teenager who had run away from home when she was sixteen. Her parents came forward and identified her—’
‘But Milly doesn’t have parents alive!’ Gianni cut in abrasively.
‘This woman never recovered her memory after the hit and run, Gianni. She’s a total amnesiac—’
‘A total amnesiac?’ Gianni broke in, with raised brows of dubious enquiry.
‘It’s rare, but it does happen,’ Dawson assured him ruefully. ‘I spoke to a nurse at the hospital where she was treated. They still remember her. When she finally recovered consciousness her mind was a blank, and when her parents took her home she still knew nothing but what they had told her about her past. I gather they also discouraged her from seeking further treatment. The medics were infuriated by their interference but powerless to act.’
‘Normal people do not take complete strangers home and keep them as their daughters for three years,’ Gianni informed him with excessive dryness.
‘I should add that the parents hadn’t seen or heard from their missing daughter in seven years, but were still unshakeable in their conviction that the young woman with the bracelet was their child—’
‘Seven years?’ Gianni broke in.
‘The police did try to run a check on dental records, but the surgery which the daughter attended before she disappeared had burnt down, and the most her retired dentist could recall was that she had had excellent teeth, just like the lady in the hospital bed. This is a very well-known story in the town where Faith Jennings lives—her miraculous return home in spite of all the odds.’
‘There was no return, miraculous or otherwise…that was Milly at the airport! Seven years…’ Gianni mused with incredulous bite. ‘And Milly was in a coma, at the mercy of people no better than kidnappers!’
Dawson cleared his throat. ‘The parents are respectable, comfortably off—the father owns a small engineering plant. If there’s been a mistake, it can only have been a genuine one, and most probably due to wishful thinking.’
Gianni was unimpressed. ‘While Milly was still ill, that’s possible, but when she began to recover they must’ve have started to suspect the truth, so why didn’t they do anything?’ he demanded in a seething undertone. ‘What about the fiancé?’
‘Edward Benson. A thirty-eight-year-old company accountant.’
Gianni lounged back against the edge of his desk like a panther about to spring. ‘An accountant,’ he derided between clenched teeth.
‘He’s her father’s second-in-command,’ Dawson filled in. ‘Local gossip suggests that the engagement is part of a business package.’
‘Check me into a hotel down there.’ Gianni straightened, all emotion wiped from his lean, strong face, eyes ice-cool shards of threat. ‘I think it’s time I got to meet my son. And isn’t that going to put the cat among the pigeons?’
Dawson tried not to picture the onslaught of Gianni, his powerful personality, his fleet of limos and his working entourage without whom he went nowhere on a small, peaceful English town…and the woman who against all reason and self-preservation had contrived to forget her intimate involvement with one of the world’s richest and most influential tycoons. A lot of people had a lot of shock coming their way…
‘So you just tell Edward you refuse to live with his mother!’ Louise Barclay met Faith’s aghast look and simply laughed. A redhead with green eyes and loads of freckles, Louise looked as if she was in her twenties but she was actually well into her thirties, and the divorced mother of two rumbustious teenage boys.
‘Sometimes you’re such a wimp, Faith,’ Louise teased.
‘I’m not—’
‘You are when it comes to your own needs. All your energy goes into keeping other people happy, living the life they think you should live! Your parents act like they own you body and soul, and Edward’s not much better!’ Louise informed her in exasperation.
Faith stiffened. Louise was her best friend and her business partner, but she had little understanding of the burden of guilt that Faith carried where her parents were concerned. ‘It’s not like that—’
‘Oh, yes, it is.’ Louise watched Faith carefully package a beautiful bouquet for delivery and leant back against the shop counter. ‘I’m always watching you struggle to be all things to all people. Once you wanted to be a gardener. Your parents didn’t fancy that, so here you are in a prissy flower shop.’
Faith laughed. ‘Alongside you.’
‘But this was my dream. And if you don’t watch out, you’re going to end up living with old Ma Benson. She will cunningly contrive, without Edward ever noticing, to make your home life the equivalent of a daily dance on a bed of sharpened nails!’ the lively redhead forecast with conviction. ‘You think I haven’t noticed how stressed-out and quiet you’ve been since Edward dropped this on you the day before yesterday?’
Faith turned her head away. For once, Louise was barking up the wrong tree. Faith hadn’t told anybody about that incident at the airport, but she still couldn’t get it out of her mind. Her mother didn’t like to be reminded that her daughter was an amnesiac, and got upset whenever Faith referred to that particular part of the past. Her attitude was understandable: after running away, Faith hadn’t once got in touch to ease her parents’ distress.
How could she ever have been so selfish and uncaring that she had failed to make even a single phone call to reassure them that she was at least still alive? Conscience had given Faith a strong need to do whatever she could to please her parents in an effort to make up for her past mistakes.
She was also painfully aware that both her parents viewed those missing years as a Pandora’s box best left sealed. As far as they were concerned, seven years on she had turned up again, pregnant, unmarried and seemingly destitute. Nobody she might have known during that period had listed her as missing. Those bald realities suggested that prior to the accident she had been homeless, unemployed, not in a stable relationship and bereft of any true friends. Frankly, she’d been desperately lucky to have forgiving parents willing to take her home and help her back to normality again, she acknowledged humbly.
Only what was normality? Faith wondered, with the lonely regret of someone who had learnt not to discuss her secret fears and insecurities with anyone. It could never be normal to possess not one single memory of what she’d been told she’d lost—the first twenty-three years of her life. But if she wanted people to feel comfortable with her, if she wanted people to forget that strange past and treat her like everybody else, she always had to pretend that that vast gaping hole inside her memory banks was no longer any big deal…
‘A fresh start.’ In the early days of her convalescence that had been a much-used parental phrase, the implication being that an inability to recall those years might well prove an unexpected blessing. So Faith had concentrated instead on trying to retrieve childhood memories. She had dutifully studied the photo albums of the much-loved and indulged daughter who had grown into a plump teenager with a sullen face, defiant blue eyes and make-up like war paint. Self-conscious about her weight, the teenage Faith hadn’t liked photos, so there had only been a handful after the age of twelve.
Faith had walked through the schools she had once attended, met the teachers, wandered round the town where she had grown up and paid several awkward visits to former schoolfriends, always willing her blank brain to remember, recognise, sense even token familiarity…
Repetition had created a kind of familiarity, and she had exercised her imagination until sometimes she suspected that she did almost remember and that real memory was hovering cr
uelly just out of reach on the very edge of her mind. She had rebuilt a quiet, conventional life round her family, but Connor was the true centre of her world. She loved her parents for their unquestioning support, loved Edward for his calm acceptance of her, but she adored her son with a fierce maternal joy and protectiveness that occasionally shook even her.
‘There’s something more up with you than Edward’s sudden penny-pinching desire to regress and stay home with Mother,’ Louise remarked with sudden insight.
The silence thickened. Faith reached a sudden decision and took a deep breath.
‘A man spoke to me at the airport. He was very persistent. He insisted that he knew me by another name…Milly, he called me.’ Trying to downplay the incident even now, Faith loosed an uneven laugh, but the pent-up words of strain continued to tumble from her. ‘Maybe I have a doppelgänger somewhere. It was daft, but it was a little scary…’
‘Why scary?’
Faith linked her hands tightly together in an effort to conceal their unsteadiness. ‘You see, I noticed this man first…to be honest, I really couldn’t take my eyes off him…’ Her voice trailed away as embarrassment gripped her.
‘So he was trying to make a move on you—but do tell me more,’ Louise invited with amusement. ‘Just why couldn’t you take your eyes off this guy?’
‘I don’t know. He was very, very good-looking,’ Faith conceded, colour flaming into her cheeks. ‘And at first I thought that my staring at him had encouraged him to approach me. But when I thought about it afterwards… I don’t think it was like that.’
‘Why not? You might wear fuddy-duddy clothes and scrape your hair back like a novice nun, but your kind of beauty would shine through a potato sack,’ her friend advised her drily.
‘This man was angry with me…I mean…with this woman, Milly,’ Faith adjusted hurriedly. ‘He accused her of having run away. And he was really astonished when I said I didn’t know him and when I threatened him with the police.’
‘That’s persistent.’ Louise looked more serious now.
‘He said his name was Gianni D’Angelo…it means nothing to—’
Louise had straightened, an incredulous light in her eyes. ‘Say that name again.’
‘Gianni D’Angelo.’
‘Did this guy ooze money?’
‘He was very well dressed.’
‘Gianni D’Angelo owns Macro Industries. He’s a hugely important electronics mogul. My ex-hubby once worked on a major advertising campaign for one of his companies,’ Louise informed her with dancing eyes. ‘And if I thought a gorgeous single guy worth billions was wandering round Heathrow trying to pick up stray women, I’d take my sleeping bag and move in until he tripped over me!’
‘It can’t have been the same man,’ Faith decided. ‘I must’ve misheard the name.’
‘Or perhaps you once enjoyed a champagne and caviar lifestyle, rubbing shoulders with the rich and the famous!’ Louise teased with an appreciative giggle. ‘I think you met a complete nutter stringing you a weird line, Faith.’
‘Probably,’ she agreed, with a noticeable diminution of tension.
With a sense of relief, Faith decided to put the entire silly episode out of her mind. And, just as she had arranged a couple of days earlier, she called in at the estate agent to collect the keys of the house which was her dream house for a second viewing.
True, Edward had not seen the sadly neglected Victorian villa in quite the same light. But Faith knew she had to tell her fiancé why there was no question of her agreeing to move in with his widowed mother after their marriage. Perhaps then he would be more amenable to a property which needed a fair amount of work, she reasoned hopefully.
Set on the edge of town, in what had once been open countryside, the house rejoiced in a large garden screened from the road by tall hedges. Faith unlocked the front door and walked into the hall. The stale air made her wrinkle her nose, and she left the door wide on the weak morning sunlight. She wandered contentedly through the shabby rooms and finally into the old wooden conservatory which still possessed considerable charm. Edward had said it would have to be demolished.
A faint sound tugged Faith only partially from her cosy reverie. She half turned, without the slightest expectation of seeing anybody. So the shock of seeing Gianni D’Angelo ten feet away in the doorway was colossal. A strangled gasp escaped her convulsing throat, all colour draining from her face to highlight sapphire-blue eyes huge with fear.
‘All I want to do is talk to you. I didn’t want to walk into the shop. I didn’t want to go to your home. At least here we’re alone, on neutral territory.’ He spread fluid brown hands in a soothing motion that utterly failed in its intent. ‘I won’t come any closer. I don’t want to frighten you. I just want you to listen.’
But, in a state of petrified paralysis, Faith wasn’t capable of listening. She started to shake, back away, her entire attention magnetically pinned to him, absorbing every aspect of his appearance in terrifyingly minute detail. His smoothly cropped but luxuriant black hair. His fabulous cheekbones. His classic nose. His perfectly modelled mouth. And the devastating strength of purpose dauntingly etched into every feature.
His charcoal-grey suit just screamed designer style and expense, moulding broad shoulders as straight as axe-handles, accentuating the lithe flow of his lean, tightly muscled all-male body. ‘P-please…’ she stammered sickly.
‘Per meraviglia!’ Gianni D’Angelo countered rawly. ‘Since when were you a bag of nerves on the constant brink of hysteria? All right, I’ll just give you the proof that we have had what you might call a prior acquaintance.’
‘I don’t want to have had a prior acquaintance with you!’ Faith exclaimed with stricken honesty. ‘I want you to go away and leave me alone!’
He withdrew something from the inside pocket of his beautifully tailored jacket and extended it to her.
Faith stared, but wouldn’t move forward to reach for the item, which appeared to be a photograph.
‘This is you just over three years ago,’ he breathed in a gritty undertone. ‘And if you had your memory right now, we’d be having a major fight.’
‘A m-major fight…’ Faith parroted weakly.
‘I crept up on you with the camera. You were furious. You made me promise to destroy the photo. I said I would. I lied. I’m afraid it’s the only photo of you I have left.’ Stooping with athletic ease, he tossed the glossy snap down on the pitted tiled floor like a statement.
It skimmed to a halt about two feet from her. Faith stared down at the snap where it lay. Her eyes opened impossibly wide. She saw a slim, bare-breasted blonde semi-submerged in bubbles in a giant bath. She saw a slim, bare-breasted blonde with her face, her eyes, her mouth…her breasts. She didn’t want that brazen hussy to be her! Shock rolled over her like a tidal wave.
‘Keeping it was kind of a guy thing,’ Gianni admitted, almost roughly.
A strangled moan of denial slowly hissed from Faith’s rigidly compressed lips. Her head swam, the photo spinning out of focus, her legs turning hollow. And then the great well of darkness behind her eyelids sucked her down frighteningly fast into a faint.
Gianni caught her before she hit the floor in a crumpled heap and swore vehemently.
CHAPTER TWO
FAITH drifted back to awareness in a complete daze. Her lashes fluttered and then lifted. A dark male face swam into stark focus, but it was those eyes, those stunning lion-gold eyes fringed by black spiky lashes, that entrapped her attention and held her still. Her breath feathered in her throat.
The oddest little tugging sensation pulled deep down inside her, heralding a slow burst of heat that spread from the pit of her stomach up, and then down to more intimate places. Faith quivered in extreme disconcertion, extraordinarily conscious of the strange sensitivity of her full breasts, the sudden straining tightness of her nipples. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t think. Her body had taken on a frightening life of its own, yet she co
uldn’t muster the power to either question or control it.
‘Gianni…Gianni,’ a breathless voice she barely recognised as her own pleaded achingly inside her mind. Seemingly of its own volition, her hand lifted and began to rise towards that strong, aggressive jawline…
Gianni’s eyes shimmered chillingly. He broke the spell by tilting his proud dark head back out of her reach. Then he flashed her a look of raw derision. ‘When I want sex, I’ll tell you, Milly. In the meantime, keep your hands to yourself.’
That assurance was so shattering it sprang Faith back to full awareness. As he slid back upright from his crouching position by the sagging basketwork chair on which she sat, all that had happened in the minutes before she had fainted flooded back to fill her with frantic, frightening confusion.
She had been viewing the house. He had arrived. He had shown her the photo, that awful photo of herself flaunting her bare breasts like a tart. He did know her. He had known her. Dear heaven, she conceded in drowning mortification, he had to have known her in the biblical sense. This man had actually slept with her.
Disorientation engulfed her. She heard afresh that pleading voice whispering his name inside her head, and wondered in stunned disbelief if after three long empty years she had finally remembered something from the past. Something she didn’t want to remember, something that made her squirm with discomfiture. Perhaps it had been her imagination playing a trick on her. Why now and never before? She lifted her head and then suddenly dropped it down again, shutting her eyes tight, unable to meet Gianni D’Angelo’s cool, measured gaze. A dulled throb of tension now pulsed behind her temples.
She recalled his derision, the blunt immediacy of what had been a rejection couched in the most humiliating terms. And then she relived what had prompted that crushing response from him. Oh, dear God, she thought with stunned shame, in those first moments of recovering consciousness she had focused on him and experienced the most unbelievably powerful surge of physical hunger. She was shattered by that realisation. It rewrote everything she had believed she knew about that side of her nature.