The Sicilian's Mistress

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‘Thanks, Mum.’

Faith laid down the mobile. As she did so she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror. Outraged virgin? Her cheeks burned afresh. Was that really how she came across?

During her convalescence her mother had warned her that she had a reputation to rebuild, that folk would be quick to pass final judgement on an unmarried mother. Already the target of considerable local curiosity, Faith had been painfully aware of her parents’ concern about how she might behave. Her parents were very private people, but they were pillars of both church and community. So Faith had followed her mother’s guidance when it came to her wardrobe and had worked hard at cultivating an acceptably low profile.

Distractedly, Faith lifted one of the silver brushes on the dresser to try and tidy her hair as she couldn’t find her clasp anywhere. There had been nothing prudish about that blonde in the bath…and, whether she liked it or not, that blonde had been her! Yet she still found that so hugely hard to accept. It was like the sudden discovery of an identical twin, who was her exact opposite in personality and behaviour.

After all, in three long years Faith had never had the slightest urge to go to bed with anybody! Quite a few men had asked her out. Unfortunately most had had definite expectations of how the evening should end. Repulsed by those pushy advances, Faith had come to believe that she had a pretty low sex drive, and had occasionally marvelled at Connor’s very existence.

Edward had been a family friend long before they had started seeing each other, and she had been grateful that he seemed so ideally suited to her. Her fiancé was neither physically demonstrative nor sexually demanding. He had informed her that he preferred to save intimacy for marriage. He had even told her that he would respect her more on those terms, particularly when she had made what he called ‘a youthful mistake’. When it had dawned on her that the ‘mistake’ Edward was referring to was Connor, she had been mortified and hurt.

When Faith walked back into the beautifully furnished reception room next door, she saw a waiter standing by a trolley in the elegant dining area. Gianni was poised by the window. He watched her approach with unfathomable eyes. Her tummy flipped and her breathing quickened.

‘Let’s eat,’ he suggested smoothly.

She was surprised to discover how hungry she was, and was grateful for the restraining presence of the waiter. Gianni embarked on an impersonal conversation. He questioned her about local businesses and the recent bankruptcies on the industrial estate. His razor-sharp intellect swiftly outran the depths of her economic knowledge. Where another man might have centred his interest on local history, or the sights to be seen, Gianni functioned on an entirely different level.

Involuntarily, Faith was fascinated. In the midst of her nightmare, Gianni D’Angelo could behave as if nothing remotely abnormal was happening. It was intimidating proof of a very resourceful and clever male in absolute control of a difficult situation.

When the waiter departed after serving them, Faith tensed up again. Gianni surveyed her with slumbrous dark golden eyes and her throat tightened, her heartbeat speeding up.

‘Now it’s time to talk about Connor,’ he told her with immovable cool.

‘Connor? How can we?’ Faith protested without hesitation. ‘As it is, I can hardly get my mind around the idea that you could be his father!’

‘Not could be, am,’ Gianni countered with level emphasis. ‘You had a test shortly before your disappearance for the child’s DNA. I am, without a single shadow of a doubt, Connor’s father.’

Faith’s knife and fork fell from her loosening hold to rattle jarringly down on her plate. She stared back at him, appalled by that revealing admission. ‘You weren’t sure that…well, that… You mean you didn’t trust me…you suspected there might’ve been room for doubt?’ She struggled valiantly to frame that horribly humiliating question, and her strained voice shook.

Gianni’s lean, dark devastating face was now as still as a woodland pool. He cursed his error in referring to the DNA tests to convince her that Connor was his son and murmured evenly, ‘I’m a very rich man. The DNA testing was a necessary precaution.’

‘A n-necessary precaution…?’ Faith stammered.

‘A legal safeguard,’ Gianni extended with a slight shift of one broad shoulder. ‘Once Connor was proven to be my child I could be sure that if anything happened to me his inheritance rights would not be easily contested.’

Faith nodded uncertainly, thoroughly taken aback by the obvious fact that Gianni D’Angelo had already thought to make provision for her son in his will. She also registered that she herself had already moved on in terms of acceptance and expectation. Only three hours ago she had wanted Gianni to vanish, had denied any need to know what ties they might once have had. But now she badly needed to be reassured that they had had a stable relationship which would not have entailed DNA testing simply to confirm the paternity of her child.

‘You said I was trying to run away from all this,’ she reminded him tautly, her clear blue eyes pinned anxiously to his hard bronzed features. ‘At first, yes, I was. I was so shocked. But now I have a whole lot of questions I need to ask.’

‘About us,’ Gianni slotted in softly. ‘Unfortunately it would be a bad idea for me to unload too many facts on you right now.’

Faith frowned in complete confusion. ‘Why?’

His stunning eyes veiling, Gianni pushed away his plate and lounged back fluidly in his chair to study her. ‘I talked to a psychologist before I came down here.’

‘A psychologist?’ Disconcerted pink surged up beneath her skin at that admission. The embarrassed distaste with which her parents had regarded all such personnel had left its mark on her.

‘It was his view that wherever possible you should only be expected to deal with one thing at a time. That’s why we’re concentrating on Connor,’ Gianni explained, with the slow quiet diction of someone dealing with a child on the brink of a tantrum. ‘At this moment, that’s enough for you to handle.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Faith muttered unevenly. ‘You are telling me that you are not prepared to—’

‘Muddy the water and confuse you with what is currently extraneous information,’ Gianni confirmed, watching her eyes darken and flare with incredulous anger.

Abruptly thrusting back her chair, Faith rose to her feet. ‘Who the heck do you think you are to tell me that?’

‘Sit down and finish your meal,’ Gianni drawled.

Faith trembled. ‘I have the right to know what role I played in your life. That is not extraneous information!’

‘I think it is. I want to talk about my son because I’ve waited three years to find him and now I would very much like to meet him.’ Gianni’s measured gaze challenged her.

‘You’re not meeting Connor until you tell me what I need to know!’ Faith’s head was starting to pound, not least because a temper she had never known she had was tightening its grip on her, no matter how hard she strove to contain it. ‘What was I to you? A one-night stand? A hooker?’ she slung furiously. ‘Or a girlfriend?’

With pronounced cool, Gianni came upright to face her. Even in the overwrought state she was in, his striking grace of movement caught her eye as he stepped out from behind the table. ‘No to all of the above. Leave this for another day, cara,’ he advised very quietly, incisive dark-as-night eyes resting on the revealing clenching and unclenching of her hands. ‘When the time’s right, I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’

‘Stop treating me like I’m mentally unfit to deal with my own life!’ Faith launched back at him in furious condemnation. ‘I’ll ask you one more time before I walk out of here…what was I to you?’

Gianni expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘You were my mistress.’

Faith stared back at him, eyes widening and widening, soft mouth rounding but no sound emerging. The angry tension evaporated from her. Sheer shock stilled her, leaving her looking vulnerable and lost. Then she sealed her lips, forced her feet to turn her around and walked to the door. There she hesitated, wheeled back, and hurried across the room again to retrieve her handbag. Not once did she allow her attention to roam back in Gianni’s direction.

‘Are my car keys in here?’ she asked woodenly.

‘Yes. This is ridiculous,’ Gianni murmured drily.

‘How long was I…your mistress?’ Faith squeezed out that designation as if her mouth was a clothes-wringer.

‘Two years…’

Faith flinched as though he had struck her a second body blow. Then, pushing up her chin and straightening her slight shoulders, she moved back to the door and paused there. ‘I hope you paid me well to prostitute myself,’ she breathed through painfully compressed lips.

In the thunderous silence that greeted that stinging retaliation Faith turned her head. Gianni gazed back at her, not a muscle moving on his darkly handsome features. But for once she could read him like an open book. His golden eyes blazed his fury. Oddly soothed by that reaction, Faith stalked rigid-backed out of the suite and headed for the lift.

CHAPTER THREE

FAITH’S tenuous control crumpled and fell apart the instant she reached the sanctuary of her car.

Snatching in a gasping breath in an effort to calm herself, Faith stared blindly through the windscreen. His mistress! It made a horrible kind of sense. He was filthy rich. She wasn’t from the same world. So of course she hadn’t been his girlfriend, his equal, she reflected bitterly. Now she knew why he had been challenged to quantify their relationship. The commercial element had figured. For two years. Two years, an agonised inner voice screeched in condemnation. It had taken her an inexcusably long time to wake up and see the error of her ways.

For two years, two of her missing years, she had been a kept woman. In exchange for sex he had probably paid for the roof over her head, her clothing, all her bills. Faith shuddered, mortified by the self she had clearly been before she’d lost her memory. What kind of woman could she have been? This woman who had called herself Milly? What further humiliating discoveries still awaited her?

Striving hard to get a grip on her wildly seesawing emotions, Faith started the car and drove away from the hotel. Gianni had said she had disappeared. OK, she told herself, it might have taken her a long time but at least she had finally decided to leave him. She must have planned to make a fresh start. And a fresh start was exactly what she had made, she reminded herself doggedly.

Then, just as she came off the roundabout on the outskirts of town, her searing headache became suddenly so much worse that her vision began to blur. Immediately she pulled off the road and parked. Perspiration beaded her short upper lip.

And then it happened. As if somebody was staging a sudden slideshow inside her head. A picture slotted into her mind. She saw herself clutching a phone like a lifeline, and then her awareness shifted and she was suddenly inside that self.

‘Gianni…I haven’t seen you in three weeks,’ she was saying, and tears were stinging her eyes, but she was working really hard at keeping her voice light and teasing because like any workaholic Gianni hated it when she nagged.

‘Book yourself a seat on Concorde.’

‘OK…’ she agreed with studied casualness, furiously blinking back the tears.

‘I didn’t realise it had been three weeks.’ Gianni paused, and then continued with innate superiority and instinctive attention to detail. ‘No, it hasn’t been three weeks, cara. Don’t you remember I stopped over one night before I went to Rio?’

‘Gianni, much as I love you,’ she groaned, ‘there are times when I just want to reach down this phone line and hit you! You were here for less than five hours!’

And then, just as quickly as it had come, the picture vanished and Faith was left sitting behind the steering wheel of her car in complete shock. But every emotion she had experienced during that slide back into the past had stayed with her, and the revelation of those powerful emotions now took her by storm.

Winding down the window with a shaking hand, Faith drank in great gulps of fresh air. It had happened, this time it had really, definitely happened, and she had genuinely remembered something. But that tiny slice of the past she had relived had been incredibly disturbing.

She had loved him. She had loved Gianni D’Angelo! She had had a capacity for emotion then that had virtually eaten her alive. Until now Faith had never dreamt that at any stage of her life she could have experienced such strong feelings. And it was even more devastating to be forced to accept that once she had adored Gianni D’Angelo, lived from one day to the next on that love, needed him as she needed air to breathe, felt she was barely existing when he wasn’t around…

Emerging from that shattering new awareness, Faith tried to block it out again. It had already been a hell of a day. Tomorrow she would take it all out again and deal with it. Not now.

She drove through town and parked at the rear of Petals, the flowershop she ran with Louise.

Gianni D’Angelo’s mistress. If she had once been that crazy about him, she could even begin to see how she might have ended up trapped in such a relationship. Love had made a fool of her. Love, she told herself urgently, was a lot more presentable an excuse than avarice.

But how was she to tell Edward? Edward was such a conventional man. Faith’s heart sank. Edward had chosen to assume that some flash young man had seduced her and then abandoned her when she fell pregnant. That was how Edward had dealt with getting engaged to an unwed mother. He had effectively excused her from all real responsibility and decided to view her as an innocent victim.

But being kept by Gianni D’Angelo as a mistress was a very different kettle of fish. And how could she not tell Edward, when Gianni was here in the flesh demanding to meet his son? It was all going to come out. Nothing she could do could prevent that. Gianni D’Angelo’s mistress. It was sordid. Why had she tried briefly to persuade herself otherwise? Edward and her parents would be extremely shocked. And Gianni wasn’t likely to sink back into the woodwork again. Climbing out of her car, Faith paled at that awareness.

The shop was empty of customers. Louise was dusting shelves and humming to herself. Her partner turned round, and as Faith moved into the light she frowned. ‘Heck, what’s happened to you?’

Faith stiffened defensively like a hedgehog under sudden attack. ‘Nothing…nothing’s happened to me.’

‘What have you done with your hair?’ Louise demanded. ‘My goodness, I never realised you had that much of it!’

‘I had a headache…have a headache,’ Faith corrected awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry. I should’ve called you to tell you that I would be out for so long.’

‘Nonsense. Go back home this minute. You look awful,’ Louise told her bluntly.

Relieved by that advice, Faith went back out to her car and drove slowly home to the rambling old farmhouse her parents had bought and renovated when she was a child. In the cosy front hall, the scent of beeswax polish and the ticking of the old grandfather clock enveloped her like a healing blanket.

Connor ran out of the kitchen, loosed a noisy whoop of welcome and flung himself at her. ‘Mummy!’ he carolled.

Faith reached down and lifted her son. She hugged him so tightly he gave a yelp of protest. Instantly she loosened her grip and pressed an apologetic kiss to his smooth brow. A great gush of love had just engulfed her, but for the first time there was a piercing arrow of fearful insecurity inside that love.

He was a gorgeous little boy. The combination of her blonde hair with his dark brows, sparkling brown eyes and golden skin tone was unusual. But all of a sudden Connor wasn’t exclusively her little boy any more. He was the son of a very rich man, who wanted a share of him. How much of a share?

Her mother emerged from the kitchen. ‘Are you taking the rest of the afternoon off?’ she asked, and then frowned. ‘Oh dear, what’s happened to your hair?’

‘I lost the clasp.’

Davina Jennings, a small, comfortably rounded woman with short greying fair hair and an air of bustling activity, sighed. ‘You should take time off more often. You do look tired, darling.’

‘Do I?” Averting her head, Faith lowered Connor to the floor.