by Lynne Graham
‘Where are you planning to go?’ Lorenzo lifted an ebony brow. ‘Straight to the press to sell the story of the century for a fat price?’
Milly was aghast that he could even harbour such a suspicion and she turned white as milk, her violet eyes standing out stark against her porcelain skin. ‘Of course not! I wouldn’t do that to you or me.’
‘Not even for the money?’ Lorenzo prompted doubtingly.
Lorenzo’s brain was awash with disconnected confused thoughts. He could not yet process what he had just learned. He struggled looking back through the long months with the woman he had believed to be his wife and accepting that she was an entirely different woman. And a stranger, his logic chipped in. A complete and total stranger. He grasped that he needed time and peace to come to terms with what he had just learned.
Milly went rigid, struggling to credit that only the night before Lorenzo had been making passionate love to her and holding her close in the aftermath as if she meant something to him. ‘No, not even for the money,’ she said sickly.
Lorenzo swung away from her as he could no longer stand to look at her. ‘Pack,’ he instructed grimly, recognising that he had to immediately get her out of the house if he was to avoid a sordid scandal. ‘I have somewhere for you to live sitting ready for occupation and you might as well live there. Once I’ve checked out the information you’ve given me and consulted my lawyers, we’ll sort this mess out.’
Pack?
Pure shock resonated through Milly and momentarily her head swam, and she felt dizzy. Evidently, he couldn’t wait to get rid of her and the immediacy of his demand that she pack and move out disconcerted her. She might have told herself that he would want her to leave as soon as possible but her mind had yet to accept that idea. She hadn’t been prepared for that change to take place so quickly and she blinked rapidly, her eyes dazed.
‘I have nothing to pack. I don’t own anything here,’ she said flatly, because it was true when she didn’t even own the clothes she wore because he had paid for everything.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Lorenzo growled. ‘Anything you have worn, anything that you have been using, is yours to take with you. Brooke is gone and she’s not coming back.’
Milly nodded jerkily and quickly stood up, the dizziness she was still enduring dampening her face with perspiration. She felt ill, nauseous, but that was a weakness she had to hide. Lorenzo might be throwing her out but she was not about to play the poor little victim who couldn’t cope. She had had enough of being weak and vulnerable while she was still in medical care.
As she opened the door to leave, Topsy hurled herself at her knees in greeting.
‘You can take the dog with you too,’ Lorenzo murmured. ‘She’s got used to you now. It would be cruel to separate you.’
But, seemingly, it wasn’t cruel to kick out a bogus wife at such short notice, Milly reflected, heading upstairs with a straight spine, still battling to hold the dizziness at bay. Some sort of stupid virus she couldn’t shake off, she thought wearily. As soon as she got settled, she would go and see a doctor, she promised herself. The clothes she had worn in Italy were still in the cases they had returned in and not yet unpacked, but even as she started to assemble the few items that she hadn’t taken abroad with her, a maid arrived with empty cases for her to use. Lorenzo had already told the staff that she was leaving and her still-sensitive stomach rebelled to send her racing into the en suite to be sick.
Afterwards, she cleaned her teeth and with all the animation of a robot she went back to doggedly packing. She didn’t have very much to show for her months in Lorenzo’s life. She stripped off the rings, the diamond-studded watch and the sapphire pendant and laid them on the dressing table because they weren’t hers, or at least had been gifts that weren’t intended for her.
She might feel as though her life were over but, really, it was only beginning another phase, she tried to tell herself. Being hurt that Lorenzo wanted her out of his house was foolish. He had to mourn Brooke and adjust to the knowledge that the wife he had watched over for months while she was in a coma had not survived as he had believed. He had to draw a line under the past months and obviously he didn’t want her around while he was trying to do that.
The cases were stowed in the limo and Milly climbed into the passenger seat, clutching Topsy to her like a tiny hairy comfort blanket. Lorenzo emerged last from the house, his lean, darkly handsome face wiped clean of emotion or any form of warmth, and barely a word was exchanged during the drive into London.
It was a fabulous apartment with its own private lift. Milly stood looking around her at the sea of crisp white furnishings and swallowed apprehensively.
‘I had it decorated for Brooke,’ Lorenzo breathed in a roughened undertone. ‘She loved it.’
‘It’s spectacular,’ she said woodenly, wanting him to leave so that she could ditch her game face. But at the same time, she was dreading the moment when he would actually leave and already wondering how long it would be before she saw him again.
‘It’s yours now. You can make any changes you want...at my expense,’ he added impatiently when she glanced at him in astonishment. ‘Legally, this will ultimately be your apartment.’
Milly frowned in bewilderment. ‘How on earth could it ever be mine?’ she queried.
‘I signed it over to Brooke before the accident and, according to my lawyers, everything that once belonged to Brooke is likely to go to you in the end because I refused to take it. I don’t want anything that belonged to her,’ he confessed quietly. ‘Of course, it will take weeks, if not months, to disentangle the legal threads concerning the misidentification that has been made and free up her funds. In the meantime I will ensure that you are financially secure. The apartment is serviced. The fridge should be packed with food.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ she whispered and flinched inside herself because standing in an apartment he had bought, wearing clothing he had purchased and making such a statement struck her as absurd. But the knowledge that he had evidently consulted his lawyers about their situation before she had even left his home chilled her to the marrow.
‘Nonetheless, I will not leave you destitute. That would be unpardonable,’ Lorenzo bit out in a fierce undertone. ‘You have done nothing wrong. In your role as Brooke’s lookalike you may have innocently contributed to the mistaken identification that was made but your life has been disrupted as much as mine by what happened. It’s my responsibility to ensure that you don’t suffer for that.’
Milly was already suffering, and she didn’t want to hear that he still viewed her as his responsibility, not when he was in the act of casting her off like an old shoe. Her stomach lurched again and she crossed her arms defensively. She said nothing while she watched him from below her lashes, committing every beloved feature to memory. Those beautiful lustrous dark eyes of his were hard and dark without even a redeeming hint of gold. Yet he still looked amazing, sleek and dark and devastatingly handsome. And even the thought made her feel guilty because she was lusting after her sister’s husband, wasn’t she?
Instead she opted to wonder what his precious lawyers had told him to do. Handle her with kid gloves? Give her no cause for complaint or any excuse to run to the press and tell all? Even after all they had shared, did he still think so little of her that he could believe that she would betray him like that? And what did it matter what he thought of her now when everything was over?
Topsy on her lap, she sat still long after he had departed. She had a new life to plan now, she told herself urgently. She didn’t want to return to being a waitress. Living Brooke’s life had made her more ambitious, just as the long struggle to recover from the accident and handle living with amnesia had made her stronger. She would look into other jobs and work out if she could qualify for a training course and take it from there. She might feel as if losing her sister for ever and then losing Lorenzo as we
ll had left her with a giant black hole inside her chest, but she couldn’t afford to give way to such feelings or they would eat her alive.
Right now, she was at rock bottom but, from here on in, her life could only improve...
CHAPTER NINE
THE NEXT MONTH passed painfully slowly for Milly.
She had no contact whatsoever from Lorenzo, but she received more than one visit from his lawyers, seeking affidavits and signatures to documents while also persuading her to consent to a DNA test. They kept her informed of her legal position and of what would happen next. And it being the law, it moved at a leisurely pace but, finally, the day of Brooke’s funeral arrived.
The media storm that had erupted at the news of Brooke’s death, and the half-sister who had mistakenly been identified as her, had died surprisingly swiftly, firstly because Brooke had become old news, and secondly because they could neither find Milly to ask her to tell her story nor identify the woman who was Brooke’s half-sister.
Milly had lived very quietly, walking miles through the streets with Topsy to keep herself busy while struggling to suppress her memories of the time she had spent with Lorenzo. There was no point looking back to a relationship that should never have happened in the first place, she told herself sternly. He wasn’t hers, never had been hers, and never would be hers again.
All the same, even in the midst of her grief there came a day when she could no longer close her eyes to the complication that had developed: she was pregnant with Lorenzo’s baby. And a joy that laced her with guilt filled her almost to overflowing at a development that only she was likely to welcome. For too long, she had ignored her symptoms, and by the time she went to a doctor to have her pregnancy confirmed, she had already done a home test and had fully come to terms with the reality of her condition.
And that she had fallen pregnant really wasn’t that surprising, she reasoned ruefully. She had had sex with Lorenzo countless times and no precautions had been taken. Lorenzo had believed she had an IUD fitted because at the time he had believed that she was Brooke and she hadn’t had the knowledge to contradict him.
He would be upset when she told him, and Milly knew that eventually she would have to tell him. How could she not? He had a right to know his child—even if the woman carrying his child wasn’t the one he would have chosen for the role.
Even when he had believed she was Brooke he had said, ‘The last complication we need now is a child.’
But she wasn’t the same person she had been on the day of the crash, she recognised wryly. Her recuperation and dealing with life as an amnesiac in a rocky marriage had taught her that she was far more mentally and physically robust than she had ever dreamt. Neither of them were to blame for her pregnancy. She was happy about her child, even excited about her future. Lorenzo could hurt her, she conceded ruefully, but he wouldn’t break her.
Those were the thoughts on her mind as she dressed for her sister’s funeral, bundling her hair below a hat, doing her utmost to ensure that nobody would notice her and catch on to the powerful resemblance between her and Brooke. The lawyers had assured her that nobody expected her to attend. For nobody, she had read Lorenzo, and she had grimaced and had said that of course she would attend her sister’s reburial.
A car picked her up at ten. The church was almost empty, there being few mourners this long after Brooke’s demise but the paparazzi were out in force outside the church, peering suspiciously at everyone, in search of the half-sister they had heard about but had not yet contrived to identify. Her head bent, her slender body shrouded in a deliberately unfashionable black coat, Milly dropped into a pew at the back of the church, listening to the service while striving not to stare at the back of Lorenzo’s arrogant dark head.
How could she think of him as the father of her baby when it wasn’t even acceptable to approach him at the funeral, lest someone snatch a photo of them together? At the graveside, tears burning at the backs of her eyes for the sister who was gone and for the sibling affection she had never managed to ignite, she stole a fleeting glance at Lorenzo. He dealt her a faint nod of acknowledgement. His lean, strong face had a tougher, harder edge. He had lost weight. But then Milly had lost weight as well. She felt nauseous much of the day and it was an effort to remember to eat as one day drifted into another. Usually she tried to eat when she was feeding Topsy.
* * *
Lorenzo studied Milly from the other side of the cemetery. He hadn’t wanted her to attend. He had needed her to stay in the background and out of sight, had assured himself over and over again that that was the only sensible solution. But there she stood, lost in the folds of a voluminous coat, her incredible hair hidden below a trilby hat, her delicate face shadowed by the brim and barely recognisable. She looked thinner, younger, but naturally she looked younger because she was years younger than Brooke had been. Milly would only be twenty-three on her next birthday he reminded himself doggedly. It was all over, finally over, the whole distasteful business of his marriage to Brooke, done and dusted, he reflected, fighting to block memories of his time in Italy with Milly: long golden days lazily drifting past, the scent and the taste of her, the sound of her laughter and the readiness of her smile.
It would do him no good to dwell on the past. He had married Brooke and it had been a disaster from start to finish. And Milly was Brooke’s half-sister and by acting as her unofficial stand-in had knowingly engaged with Brooke in an unsavoury deception to fool innocent people. Evidently, she had seen nothing wrong with that kind of behaviour. In other words, the same thread of dishonesty that had run through his late wife like poison had an echo in Milly as well. But she could learn to do better with his guidance, he reasoned squarely. After all, nobody was perfect. And after the ordeal of living with Brooke, he wasn’t perfect either because he found it very hard to trust a woman again. He had needed time away from Milly to recover from the fallout of his failed marriage and the drama of discovering that he had been living with another woman.
He remembered Milly cooking for him, remembered her giving him pleasure as he had never known, and his teeth gritted. It was done: the connection had to remain broken for the moment, lest the paparazzi go into a feeding frenzy over Milly’s very existence. Hopefully, their interest in identifying her wouldn’t last much longer. But were they to discover her and place her within his life, they would tear her apart, implying this, implying that, hurting her as she did not deserve to be hurt.
When the vicar had finished, Milly watched Lorenzo swing on his heel and walk away, wide strong shoulders straight as girders beneath his black cashmere overcoat, his back even straighter, and suddenly she couldn’t bear it. In fact, her temper soared. So much remained unsaid between them and she didn’t even have his phone number! What had she done that was so bad that he was treating her as though she didn’t exist? And she had to tell him about the baby. She had no choice on that score. There was no way she was prepared to ring his lawyers and tell them! He owed her a hearing, didn’t he?
‘Lorenzo!’ she exclaimed, darting frantically in his wake, her face heating with embarrassment at being forced to abandon her hard-won dignity.
Lorenzo wheeled to a sudden halt and turned back to face her.
‘I need to see you to talk about something,’ she told him in an angry rush. ‘Do you think you could call round this evening?’
‘Tomorrow evening. If I must,’ Lorenzo gritted, his glorious dark golden eyes locked to her with an intensity that brought her out in goose bumps.
‘You must,’ Milly declared with bold emphasis. ‘I wouldn’t ask to see you if I didn’t have a good reason for it.’
‘Around eight, then,’ Lorenzo confirmed coolly. ‘Are you sure it isn’t something my lawyers could handle?’
‘No, it’s too personal for that,’ Milly retorted in a tight tone of annoyance, her colour higher than ever at being required to make that distinction.
�
�We’ll talk over dinner. I’ll pick you up at eight.’
Lorenzo strode towards his limousine, enraged at the shot of adrenalin now coursing through his veins and the undeniable sense of anticipation that powered it. He had been trying to stay away from her for weeks and she had just made that impossible, looking up at him with those haunting violet eyes. Of course, he could get through one dinner with her and behave! And go home alone? What was too personal? What the hell could she be referring to? Lorenzo did not like to meet anyone without knowing beforehand exactly what he would be dealing with. His strong jawline clenched hard.
He couldn’t fault her behaviour, though, since she had moved out. She had asked for nothing from him and she hadn’t gone to the press. She hadn’t contacted him, hadn’t clung, had, in short, done exactly as he had supposedly wanted. To all intents and purposes, they were finished. Only, it hadn’t taken more than a day for Lorenzo to register that while he had acted in the shocked conviction that he didn’t have a choice, absence wasn’t what he wanted or needed from Milly.
He had told himself that he was free again, had wondered why he was so angry and why the knowledge that he was free wasn’t the relief that he had expected it to be. And now he knew. Milly was looking skinny and that tore him up. Her fine-boned face was downright thin now and her ankles seemed too delicate to support her. In terms of weight there hadn’t been much of her to begin with, he reasoned...but was she looking after herself properly? The idea that she might not be now that he was no longer around to watch over her welfare nagged at him and made him decide that a dinner was a very good idea because he could check her out without making a production out of it. And to hell with the paparazzi!
CHAPTER TEN
THE NEXT DAY Milly rushed round the apartment, feeding Topsy and tidying up. She hadn’t slept well the night before, haunted as she had been by memories of her sister and the guilty strain of finally laying those memories to rest. Perhaps had she had more time with Brooke or more in common with her, they would have become closer.