by Lynne Graham
Pale as milk, Faith got up and bent down to lift her son back into her arms. ‘There’s not much point continuing this conversation,’ she replied tightly. ‘You’re shocked, and I understand that, but it’s my past, not my present, Edward.’
‘Shocked barely covers it…a sleazy association of that nature!’ Edward fired back in furious disgust. ‘If this gets out locally, I’ll be a laughing stock!’
‘Gianni’s not likely to go around telling people. I only told you because it’s not something I felt I could keep to myself.’ Only now, she acknowledged, she very much wished she had.
Edward vented a humourless laugh. ‘My mother once said I didn’t know what I might be taking on with you. Clearly I should have listened!’
‘Do you want your ring back?’ Faith heard herself ask, without any expression at all.
Edward went rigid, bitter resentment showing in his eyes. ‘Of course I don’t! My God, can’t I let off a little steam without you asking me that?’
‘Calling me a slut is more than “a little steam”,’ Faith countered jaggedly, already wondering if, after their marriage, Edward would throw her past in her teeth every time she annoyed or disappointed him. ‘You might as well know the lot. I was Gianni’s mistress for two years…and I loved him.’
Edward surveyed her in near disbelief. Whether Faith realised it or not there had been a decided edge of defiance in that final announcement.
‘Faith—’ he began brusquely.
‘I just want to go home, Edward. Could you open the door, please?’ she asked woodenly.
Connor restored to his car seat, Faith drove off. Edward was never likely to see her in the same light again. Could she blame him for that? Edward was always very conscious of what others might think. A lot of people had seemed surprised that he should ask a single mother to be his wife. Now Edward was questioning that decision. Were his feelings for her strong enough to withstand such damaging revelations?
Arriving home to find all lights blazing, Faith carried her son straight upstairs and quickly put him to bed. Only when she went downstairs again did it occur to her that the house had the strangest air of being like the Marie Celeste. The kitchen even showed every sign of her mother’s initial preparations for an evening meal. Faith began to tidy up, amazed that the older woman had gone out leaving potatoes half-unpeeled and the radio still playing.
Where had her parents gone in such a hurry? Her father had cancelled a business dinner and her mother should have been attending the choral evening in the church hall. It wasn’t their anniversary or either of their birthdays. Their behaviour didn’t make sense, but Faith was already so tired that she fell into bed, determined to suppress every anxiety and every thought.
Once she had caught up on her sleep nothing would look so bad, she assured herself. Edward would have had time to come to terms with her bombshell. He had hurt her, but possibly she had expected too much from him. After all, she too had been upset by what she had learnt about her own past today. Let the dust settle, she urged herself wearily. Tomorrow would be a whole new day.
Accustomed to being rudely awakened by Connor bouncing on her bed, Faith woke the next morning to a curious silence. Glancing drowsily at her alarm clock, she stiffened and then leapt out of bed in dismay. It was just after ten! For goodness’ sake, why hadn’t her mother roused her?
On her way into the bathroom Faith registered that her son’s bed was already neatly made. After washing at speed, she pulled on a brown skirt and a burgundy sweater. This morning it had been her turn to open the shop early for the deliveries. A perplexed frown on her face, she hurried downstairs.
She stilled at the sight of her parents sitting together in silence in the lounge. They looked odd: stiff and strained, and somehow aged.
Robin Jennings rose heavily upright, a stocky well-built man with grey hair. ‘We thought we should let you sleep in, so I called Louise first thing and said that you weren’t well,’ he explained. ‘Then I took Connor to the nursery as usual. We need to have a serious talk with you and we felt—well, Mr D’Angelo felt it would be wiser to keep the child away from all this.’
‘Mr…? Gianni…?’ Faith echoed in growing confusion. ‘How…I mean…oh, so you know about Gianni?’ she suddenly gasped.
‘Please sit down,’ her father urged.
A hectic flush on her cheeks, Faith was instantly convinced that she knew what was happening. At that moment she absolutely loathed Gianni D’Angelo. Obviously he had gone over her head and contacted her parents. That was probably where they had been last night. With him. And her poor parents looked very much as if they had been completely crushed by what they had learnt about her.
‘Gianni had no right to interfere!’ she exclaimed furiously.
Her father grimaced. ‘Faith, Mr D’Angelo—’
A slight movement at the edge of her vision made Faith spin round. She stared, dumbstruck. Gianni now stood in the archway between the lounge and the dining room. She shook her head in urgent negative. Bewildered anger and resentment burned in her questioning gaze. ‘What are you doing here? How dare you interfere like this? How dare you go behind my back and talk to my parents?’
‘That’s enough, Faith,’ Robin Jennings said stiffly.
‘Why did you let him into this house?’ Faith demanded fiercely.
Gianni strolled forward with measured steps. ‘Keep quiet and sit down,’ he told her, his stunning dark features stamped with gravity, his eyes impenetrable. ‘I asked to be present. Robin and Davina have a rather disturbing confession to make and they need you to listen to them.’
A confession? A confession about what? Complete confusion made Faith sink slowly down into an armchair. Her accusing stare stayed on Gianni. He dominated the low-ceilinged room, with his height and presence, as alien against the backdrop of the cosy décor as a tiger prowling a busy city street. He didn’t belong here, she thought bitterly, and she couldn’t credit that her parents could have been influenced by any request of his.
He wore a silver-grey suit, fabulously well cut to his lithe, lean and powerful frame. The fabric had the smooth gleam of wildly expensive cloth, his shirt the sheen of silk. She clashed with dark, deep-set eyes, and suddenly it was an effort to summon up a single connected thought.
‘Faith…’ her father breathed curtly.
Faith looked back to her parents with some embarrassment. ‘What’s going on?’
‘When we identified you at the hospital three years ago, we didn’t have the smallest doubt that you were our child,’ the older man told her flatly. ‘You were wearing the bracelet we gave our daughter on her sixteenth birthday. You were blonde, blue-eyed, about an inch taller than you had been when you left. You were a lot thinner, but then why not? Seven years is a long time.’
‘Why are you talking about this?’ Faith frowned.
Her mother crammed a tissue to her lips and twisted her head away with a stifled gasp. ‘I can’t bear this—’
‘What Robin is trying to tell you is that he and his wife made a very unfortunate mistake.’ Gianni advanced, sounding every word with precision.
‘We were so overjoyed at getting you back,’ Davina Jennings confided jerkily. ‘It was over a year before I even admitted to myself that there might be room for doubt about your identity…’
Faith was now as still as a statue, her shaken eyes the only life in her taut face. ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say…’
‘At the start you were very ill. Then you came round and you had no memories,’ Robin Jennings reminded her tensely. ‘Our daughter had no distinguishing marks that we could go on. Nothing jarred at that stage. You had grown up. Naturally you had to have matured and changed.’
Gianni shot Faith’s perplexed expression a perceptive glance and murmured levelly, ‘They’re trying to tell you that they are not your parents.’
‘Not my parents,’ Faith repeated like an obedient child. She couldn’t believe that, she just couldn’t believe it, couldn’t even take s
uch a gigantic concept on board long enough to consider it. ‘This is crazy…why are you telling me this stuff?’
‘We came to love you very much,’ her father—who, according to Gianni, was not her father—explained almost eagerly. ‘In fact as we got to know the person we believed you had become we couldn’t have been happier.’
‘But eventually we began making discoveries about you that we couldn’t just ignore or explain away,’ Davina continued reluctantly. ‘You have a lovely singing voice. Our daughter couldn’t even sing in tune. You speak French like a native…our daughter failed French at GCSE. She was hopeless at languages.’
Locked suddenly into a world of her own, Faith remembered the evening her father had brought a French client home for dinner. The instant the man had uttered a French phrase she had turned without hesitation to address him in the same language. Dimly she recalled how astonished her parents had been. But at the time she hadn’t thought anything of that. In fact she’d been delighted when the Frenchman had told her that she had a remarkable idiomatic grasp of his language. In those days it had seemed to her that she had no useful talents, and it had felt good to discover she had at least one.
‘All the little discrepancies we’d so easily explained away at the beginning came back to haunt us. Your handwriting is so different.’ Robin Jennings sighed. ‘You like cats. Faith was allergic to cats. It wasn’t really very likely that you’d grown out of that. We began to look rather desperately for you to remind us in some way of the daughter we remembered, but there was nothing.’
Faith sat there in the kind of shock that felt like a great weight squeezing the life force from her. ‘But the bracelet…I was wearing Granny’s bracelet—’
‘Our daughter must’ve sold it. Although she took it with her when she went, she wasn’t that fond of it. Perhaps you bought the bracelet, or somebody else gave it to you. We were foolish to rely so much on a piece of jewellery,’ Davina conceded curtly.
‘This isn’t possible,’ Faith said very carefully, but as the bracelet that she had long regarded as a kind of talisman was dismissed her voice sank to a mere thread of its usual volume.
Gianni released his breath in a charged hiss.
‘If she doesn’t want to believe it, I’m quite content,’ Davina Jennings announced, shooting a glance of bitter dislike at Gianni. ‘In every way that matters she is our daughter and we love her and we don’t want to lose her. Neither Robin nor I want anything to change. We told you that last night—’
‘And I asked you what you intended to do if the real Faith showed up,’ Gianni reminded the older woman without hesitation.
Davina stiffened defensively. ‘Not very likely after ten years.’
‘This is really happening,’ Faith registered finally. ‘You’re telling me that I’m not really your child, that I was never your child…that this life I’m living actually belongs to another woman.’
‘Your name is Milly Henner and you’re twenty-four years old,’ Gianni delivered. ‘And while I’m here there is nothing to be afraid of.’
Milly, she thought numbly. My name is Milly. She fought to concentrate on thoughts that were whirling like tangled spaghetti inside her blitzed brain. She studied the people whom she had believed were her parents with a deep sense of pain and dislocation. ‘How long have you known that I wasn’t your daughter?’
The silence thundered. Seemingly neither wished to discuss that point.
Gianni had no such inhibition. ‘They’ve known for about eighteen months. They only admitted their suspicions to each other then—’
‘We sat up all night talking,’ Robin Jennings cut in heavily. ‘We just didn’t know what to do. You’d accepted us. We loved you and Connor. We’d introduced you everywhere as our daughter—’
‘You kept quiet sooner than face the embarrassment of admitting that you could make such an appalling mistake,’ Milly, who still so desperately wanted to be Faith, condemned, at that instant hating everybody in the room. They all knew who they were and where they belonged. But she was an outsider.
‘We were happy with the way things were,’ Davina argued vehemently. ‘Nor do we see why anything should change!’
Milly surveyed her dully.
‘I will make every possible effort to trace your real daughter,’ Gianni promised the older couple. ‘But Milly can’t stay here any longer.’
‘She can if she wants to,’ Robin Jennings asserted curtly.
‘She can stay in touch with you. She can even visit. But as who she really is, not as who you’d like her to be!’ Gianni’s attention was on Milly’s stark white face and the blank horror growing in her eyes. ‘She had another life, and she needs to see that life before she makes any decisions.’
‘For heaven’s sake, she’s engaged…she’s getting married!’ Davina exclaimed.
‘And how do you think Edward is likely to react to this fiasco?’ her husband groaned. ‘I’ll deal with that. I’ll see him this morning and explain everything.’
With a sense of numb disbelief, Milly studied them all. Gianni stood apart, his self-discipline absolute. His dark, deep flashing eyes held hers, and she saw the pity he couldn’t hide and just wanted to die. She stood up, and walked out of the room.
As Davina leapt up to follow her Gianni planted a staying hand on her arm. ‘You can’t help Milly with this, Mrs Jennings. Not right now, you can’t,’ he asserted. ‘She feels betrayed by the two people she relied on most. She needs time to come to terms with this.’
‘And what exactly are your plans for her, Mr D’Angelo?’ the older woman demanded bitterly.
Gianni viewed his companions with concealed hostility. They might love Milly, but they had damaged her. Three years ago they had denied her the further professional help she’d needed. They had done nothing to help her regain her memory. And, unforgivably, when they had realized their mistake they had selfishly refused to put it right. They had ignored the reality that the unknown woman they had erroneously identified as their daughter must have had a life elsewhere.
They also acted as if they owned Milly, and as if she couldn’t speak or think for herself. It was an attitude which filled Gianni with violent antipathy. After all, if Milly belonged to anybody, she belonged to him!
She was the mother of his son. He knew her better than anybody alive. He could put her back into the world she had left behind. Leaving Milly anywhere within reach of the Jennings would hamper her recovery. They didn’t want to let go even briefly. They wanted her to go on living a fake life while he could not wait to free her from an existence that struck him as suffocating. Milly was very much a free spirit…
The free spirit stared at herself in the bedroom mirror.
Who am I? Who is Milly Henner?
This was not her home. This was not where she had grown up. Those people downstairs were not her parents. Nothing that she had believed was hers was really hers. Not the share of the shop her supposed father had insisted on buying for her, not her car, which had been a birthday present—presented on a day that probably wasn’t really her birthday. Only Connor was really hers…
As the world she had innocently believed and trusted in caved in around her, Milly experienced an instant of pure terror that threatened to wipe her out entirely.
‘Milly…come back to the hotel with me.’
She spun round and focused on Gianni. Naked loathing rippled through her. He had done this to her. He had ripped her life apart. ‘I hate you…’ she framed, trembling with the force of her emotions.
‘You’ll get over that,’ Gianni informed her, without an ounce of uncertainty.
‘I want Edward,’ she admitted shakily, and turned away again.
‘You’ll get over that too,’ Gianni asserted harshly.
‘You can’t take him away from me!” Milly suddenly slung wildly. ‘You can take everything else but not Edward!’
‘You can’t love him.’ Gianni’s gaze was black as a stormy night, his tone pure derision. ‘You can
’t. He’s nobody; he’s nothing!’
Milly’s teeth gritted. ‘He’s the man I love!’
Gianni breathed in deep, his eyes flashing gold with raw menace. ‘You couldn’t possibly love a calculating little creep like that!’
‘Edward is none of your business! Haven’t you done enough damage?’
Gianni studied her with shimmering eyes, and then he reached for her without any warning at all. He pulled her into his powerful arms and brought his mouth down on hers. Suddenly she was on fire, her breath rasping in her throat, her slim body burning at every point of contact with his. The heated onslaught of that wide, sensual mouth was a revelation. Nothing had ever felt so necessary. Hunger clawed up through her with such greedy force that her head spun, her senses reeled. Riven with wild excitement, she pressed herself into his hard male frame with a shaken moan of surrender.
‘Faith!’ Davina intervened, shrill with condemnation.
As Gianni held Milly back from him she trembled in a daze of shock. She focused in startled embarrassment on the older woman lodged in the bedroom doorway.
‘I’m not Faith,’ she heard herself say unevenly, for she could hardly get air back into her lungs. ‘I’m Milly.’
‘You’re still an engaged woman!’ Davina turned to address Gianni. ‘She’s upset and confused. Why can’t you leave her alone?’
Momentarily, Milly was in a world of her own. She could not credit the terrifying intensity of what Gianni had made her feel. She had behaved like a wanton, pushing closer to him and clinging. If she was mortified now, she deserved to be. But then, as the older woman had pointed out, she was upset and in no state to know what she was really feeling…
‘I think it’s time you told Milly the truth about her engagement,’ Gianni murmured silkily.
‘I haven’t a clue what you’re trying to imply,’ Davina said thinly.
Gianni gazed down at Milly. His expressive mouth twisted. ‘On your wedding day, Edward becomes a fully-fledged partner in the family firm.’
Stunned by that statement, Milly stared back at him. ‘That’s not true-’