by Lynne Graham
‘I wouldn’t ever!’ Milly protested.
‘Well, you haven’t so far,’ Brooke conceded grudgingly. ‘And you’ve been very useful to me, I’ll agree. But we have nothing in common, Milly. You’re poor and uneducated and you wouldn’t even be able to talk properly if I hadn’t sent you to elocution classes. You knit and you go to libraries. What would we talk about? I’d be bored stiff with you in five minutes.’
Milly paled and stiffened and called herself all kinds of a fool for running blindly into such abuse. She had closed her eyes too long to Brooke’s essential coldness towards her, hoping that Brooke would eventually accept her as her sister and leave the sins of their mutual parents behind her in the past where they belonged. But for the first time, she was recognising that Brooke was as angry and resentful now about their father’s affair as she had been when she’d first met her. Brooke tucked away her make-up kit and told the driver yet again to speed up, the instruction sharp and irritable in tone.
The rain had got so heavy that it was streaming down the windows and visibility was poor. It was a horrible day weather-wise, Milly conceded wryly, suppressing her hurt at being labelled boring. It was true that she and her sister had little in common apart from their paternity and their physical likeness to one another. Evidently, however, Brooke didn’t feel an atom of a deeper connection to her because of their blood bond. When Brooke had confided in her about her problems, had it meant anything to her at all? Possibly, Brooke had grasped that Milly was trustworthy in that line and unlikely to reveal all to some murky tabloid newspaper. Or maybe Milly had just been there at the right moment when Brooke had needed to unburden herself.
‘This will be the last time I stand in for you, Brooke,’ Milly said quietly but firmly. ‘If I’m honest, I kind of wish I’d never started it.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, why do you have to start getting difficult right now?’ Brooke demanded wrathfully.
‘I’m not being difficult and I’m not about to let you down,’ Milly responded tautly. ‘But once this is over, I won’t be acting as your stand-in again.’
Brooke flashed one of her charming smiles and stretched out her hand to squeeze Milly’s. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been short with you but this has been such a frantic rush and I’m living on my nerves. We’re almost at your hotel. Make sure you don’t get into any conversations with staff. I never chat to menial people. Stay in your room and eat there too and don’t eat any rubbish. I am known for my healthy eating regime and I have an exercise video in the pipeline. You can’t be seen after you’ve checked in. People will understand. They know my marriage is over and I wouldn’t look human if I wasn’t seen to be grieving and in need of some private downtime...’
Milly was not fooled by that fake smile or the apology. She could see that she was only receiving it because Brooke was scared she would pull out on her at the last minute and it saddened her to see that lack of real feeling in the sister she had come to care deeply for.
Their driver was travelling fast when he suddenly jammed on the brakes to a jolting halt to make a turn. Milly peered out at the traffic. There was a large truck coming through red stop lights towards them and she gasped in fear.
Beside her Brooke was shouting at the driver and as Milly braced herself and offered up a silent prayer she tried to reach out for Brooke’s hand, but her sister was screaming and she couldn’t reach her. There was a terrible crunch on impact that jarred every bone in her body and then she blacked out in response to the wave of unimaginable pain that engulfed every part of her. Brooke... Brooke, she wanted to shriek in horror, because her sister had released her seat belt while she was changing...
* * *
Lorenzo Tassini, the most exceptional private banker of his generation and a renowned genius in the field of finance, was in an unusually good mood that morning because his soon-to-be ex-wife had finally signed the divorce papers earlier that day.
It was done. Within a few weeks, Lorenzo would be free, finally free, from a wife who’d lied, cheated, slept around and created endless embarrassing headlines in the newspapers. Brooke hoped to build an acting career on the back of her notoriety. Lorenzo might despise her, but he blamed himself more for his poor judgement in marrying her than he blamed her for letting him down. In retrospect, he could barely comprehend the madness that had taken hold of him when he had first met Brooke Jackson, a woman totally outside his wide and varied experience of the opposite sex. Lust had proved to be his downfall, he reflected grimly.
Brooke’s white-blonde beauty had mesmerised him but the two years he had been with her had been filled with rage, regret and bitterness, for the honeymoon period in their marriage had been of very short duration. The ink had barely been dry on their marriage licence before he’d realised that his dream of having a wife who would give him a happy home life was unlikely to come true with a woman who had absolutely no interest in making a home or in having a child or indeed spending time with him any place other than a noisy nightclub.
But then what did he know about having a happy home life? Or even about having a family? Indeed, Lorenzo would’ve been the first to admit his ignorance in those fields. He, after all, had been raised in a regimented Italian palazzo by a father who cared more about his academic triumphs than his happiness or comfort. Strict nannies and home tutors had raised him to follow in the footsteps of his forebears and put profit first, and his dream of leading a more normal life in a comfortable home had died on the back of Brooke’s first betrayal. All that foolish nonsense was behind him now though, he assured himself staunchly. From now on, he would simply revel in being very, very rich and free of all ties. He would not remarry and he would not have a child because ten to one, with his ancestry, he would be a lousy parent.
The police called Lorenzo when he was on the way out to lunch. He froze as the grim facts of the crash were recited. The driver was dead, one of his staff. The other passenger was dead. What other passenger? he wondered dimly, reeling in shock from what he was hearing. His wife was seriously injured, and he was being advised to get to the hospital as soon as possible. He would visit the driver’s family too to offer his condolences, he registered numbly.
His wife? Seriously hurt? The designation shook him inside out because he had already stopped thinking of himself as a husband. But in an emergency, he was Brooke’s only relative and if she was hurt, she was entirely his responsibility, and no decent human being would think otherwise, he told himself fiercely. Without hesitation, he headed straight to the hospital. He had stopped liking or respecting his wife a long time ago, but he would never have wished any kind of harm on her.
The police greeted him at the hospital, keen to ask what he might know about the other woman, who had died. According to the passport they had found, her name was Milly Taylor, but he had never heard of her before. The police seemed to think that, with it being a wet day, Brooke might have stopped the car to give some random woman a lift, but Lorenzo couldn’t imagine Brooke doing anything of that nature and suggested that the unknown woman might be one of Brooke’s social media gurus or possibly a make-up artist or stylist because she frequently hired such people.
He wondered if the accident had been his driver’s fault. Consequently, was it his fault for continuing to allow Brooke the luxury of a limo with driver? Although the pre-nup Brooke had signed had proved ironclad in protecting his assets and his fortune, Lorenzo had been generous. He had already bought and given Brooke a penthouse apartment in which to live and had hesitated to withdraw the use of the car and driver as well until she had officially moved out of Madrigal Court, his country home. And Brooke had stalled about actually moving out because it suited her to have staff she didn’t have to pay making her meals for her and doing the hundred and one things she didn’t want to have to do for herself. Madre di Dio...what total nonsense was he thinking about at such a grave moment?
The police reassured him that the accident
had not been his driver’s fault. A foreign truck driver had taken a wrong turn, got into a panic in the heavy traffic and run a set of stop lights, making an accident unavoidable.
Brooke, he learned, had a serious head injury and he was warned by the consultant neurosurgeon about to operate on her that she might not survive. Lorenzo spent the night pacing a bland waiting room, brooding over everything that he had been told. Brooke had facial injuries. The tiny glimpse he’d had of her before she went into surgery, he had found her unrecognisable and he was appalled on her behalf because he had never known a woman whose looks meant more to her. He would engage the very best plastic surgeons to treat her, he promised himself, shame and discomfiture assailing him. As long as she was alive, he would look after her in every way possible, just as if she were still a much-loved and cherished wife. That was his bounden duty and he would not be tried and found wanting in a crisis.
When he learned that she had come through the surgery he breathed more freely again. She was in a coma. Only time would tell when she would come out of it or what she would be like when she came round, because such head traumas generally caused further complications and even if she recovered she might be different in some ways, the exhausted surgeon warned him. Furthermore, Brooke was facing a very long and slow recovery process.
He was given her personal effects by a nurse. He recognised her engagement ring, the big solitaire he had slipped on her finger with such love and hope, the matching wedding band he had given her with equal trust and optimism. He swallowed hard, recognising that he was at a crossroads and not at the crossroads of freedom he had expected to become his within weeks. Brooke was his wife and he would look after her and support her in whatever ways were necessary. In the short term, he reflected tautly, he would put the divorce on hold until she was on the road to recovery and capable of expressing her own wishes again.
CHAPTER TWO
THE WOMAN IN the bed was drifting weightless in a cocoon, her awareness coming to her in weird broken flashes.
She heard voices but she didn’t recognise them. She heard sounds like bells, buzzes, and bleeps but she didn’t recognise them either. And she couldn’t move, no matter how hard she strained her will to shift a finger, wriggle a toe or even open her eyes. Her body felt as heavy as lead. And then she heard one voice and, although she didn’t recognise it either, she clung to it in her disorientation as though it were a lifeline.
It was a man’s voice, deep and dark and measured. It made her listen but at first she couldn’t distinguish the words, and even when she began picking up stray words she couldn’t string them together into a coherent sentence or think about what the words meant. Maybe it was a television, she thought, wondering why it was constantly tuned to a foreign channel because early on she identified a faint but very definite foreign accent that stroked along his vowel sounds like silk, sometimes softening them, sometimes harshening them. Time had no meaning for her while she listened to the voice.
And then there was the music that came and went in the background. It was the sort of music she had never listened to before, mainly classical. But occasionally she heard birdsong or the surge of waves on the shore or even noises she imagined might be heard in a jungle, as if someone had compiled a diverse sound collection just for her. She loved the birdsong because it made her feel that if she could only try a little harder to wake up, she would waken to a fresh new day.
* * *
Lorenzo studied his wife while he stood at the window of her room. Superficially, if one discounted all the machinery and the tubes, Brooke looked as though she were simply asleep, her cascade of white-blonde curls tumbling off the side of the bed in a glorious curtain. They called her, ‘the sleeping beauty’ in the high-tech care home he had moved her to when the hospital could do no more. She had moved from the coma into a vegetative state and there was no sign of recovery after fifteen months.
Fifteen months, Lorenzo conceded, driving a long-fingered hand through his luxuriant black hair, for fifteen crisis-ridden months, his life had revolved around her treatment. Fifteen months during which she had been in and out of Intensive Care, in and out of surgery, both major and minor, and now she was repaired, broken limbs mended, cuts and bruises healed, her face restored by the very best surgeons and daily physiotherapy keeping her muscles from wasting...but still, she wasn’t fixed.
Fixing her every problem, banishing the physical damage caused by the accident and readying her for a return to the living had kept Lorenzo going, even when the hopes of the medical staff had begun to fade. He could not let her go, he could not allow those machines to be switched off, not while there was hope, and he was fortunate that he was wealthy enough to fly in specialists from round the world, only unfortunately all of them had different opinions on Brooke’s prospects of recovery. He had never been humble but it was finally beginning to dawn on Lorenzo that he was not omnipotent and that she might never be fixed and might never open her eyes again.
He sat down by the bed and scored a forefinger over the back of her still hand. Her nails were polished, just as her hair was regularly washed and styled. They had wanted to cut her hair short but he had simply brought in a hairdresser to take care of it instead, just as he had brought in nail technicians. It was what Brooke would’ve wanted, although he had told the hairdresser to stop straightening her hair and leave the natural curls. He knew she would never have agreed to that change and if he accidentally brushed a hand through those glorious tumbling white-blonde ringlets he felt guilt pierce him.
‘I did love you once,’ Lorenzo said almost defiantly in the silent room.
And a finger twitched. Lorenzo froze and studied her hand, which remained in the same position, and he told himself he had imagined that movement. It wouldn’t be the first time that he had imagined such a thing and he was being fanciful.
It bothered him that Brooke was so alone and that he was her sole visitor aside of the occasional specialists. He had never realised how isolated she was until after the accident when paparazzi had tried to sneak in and catch pictures of her but not one single friend had shown up. There had only been cursory phone calls from her agent and various other people engaged in building her career and those enquiries had soon fallen off once the news that she was in a coma spread. The fame she had gloried in had, sadly, proved fleeting. There had been a burst of headlines and speculation in the wake of the crash but now she seemed to be forgotten by everyone but him.
* * *
Early the following morning, alarm bells rang and lights flashed from the machinery by the bed. The woman came awake and went into panic, eyes focusing on an unfamiliar room and then on the arrival of two nurses, their faces both concerned and excited at the same time. She clawed at the breathing tube in her throat because she couldn’t speak and the women tried to both restrain and soothe her, telling her over and over again that the doctor was coming, everything would be all right and that there was nothing to worry about. She thought they were crazy. Her body wouldn’t move. She could only move one hand and her arm felt as if it didn’t belong to her. How could she possibly have nothing to worry about? Why were they talking nonsense? Did they think she was stupid?
The panic kept on clawing at her, even after the doctor arrived and the breathing tube was removed. He kept on asking her questions, questions she couldn’t answer until she couldn’t hide from the truth any longer. She didn’t know who she was. What was her name? She didn’t know why she was lying in a hospital bed. She didn’t have a last memory to offer because her mind was a blank, a complete blank. It was a ridiculous relief to receive an approving nod when she evidently got the name of the Prime Minister right and contrived to name colours correctly.
‘What happened to me?’ she whispered brokenly, her breath rasping. ‘Have I been ill?’
‘You were in an accident.’ The doctor paused there, exchanging a glance with the staff surrounding the bed.
‘What
’s my name?’ she asked shakily.
‘Your name is Brooke... Brooke Tassini.’
The name meant absolutely nothing to her, didn’t even sound slightly familiar.
‘Your husband will be here very soon.’
Brooke’s eyes widened to their fullest extent in shock. ‘I have a husband?’
For some reason, the nurses smiled. ‘Oh, yes, you have a husband.’
‘A very handsome husband,’ one of the women added.
Brooke stared down at her bare wedding finger. She was married. Oh, my goodness, she was married. Did she have children? she asked. No...no children as far as they knew, they said, and a tinge of relief threaded through the panic she was only just holding at bay. Then she felt guilty about that sense of relief. She liked children, didn’t she? But it was scary enough to have a husband she didn’t remember—it would be simply appalling if she had contrived to forget her children as well.
* * *
Lorenzo stood outside in the corridor studying the middle-aged doctor babbling at him. And it was babble because the care-home staff were not accustomed to their comatose patients waking up and excitement laced with frank worry had taken over.
‘It’s post-traumatic amnesia, perfectly understandable after a serious head injury. You need someone more qualified than me in the psychiatric field to advise you on her condition, but I would warn you not to tell her anything that might upset her more at the moment. I wouldn’t mention yet that other people died in the accident or that you were...er...splitting up at the time of the crash,’ the doctor muttered hurriedly, visibly uncomfortable with getting that personal. ‘She’s in a very high state of stress as it is. Try to calm her, try to keep it upbeat without divulging too much information.’