The Unforgettable Husband

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When his hand moved to pick up the marriage certificate, she stopped him. ‘No.’ She breathed out thickly. ‘Not that. Th-the other…’

Slowly, reluctantly almost, his fingers moved to pick up the photograph, hesitated a moment, then flipped it over.

Samantha’s heart flipped over with it. Because staring back at her in full Technicolor was herself, dressed up in frothy bridal-white.

Laughing. She was laughing up into the face of her handsome groom. Laughing up at him—this man dressed in a dark suit with a white rose in his lapel and confetti lying on his broad shoulders. He was laughing too, but there was more—so much more to his laughter than just mere amusement. There was—

Abruptly she closed her eyes, shutting it out, shutting everything out as her body began to shake violently, a clammy sweat breaking out across her chilled flesh. She couldn’t breathe again, couldn’t move. And a dark mist was closing round her.

Someone hissed out a muffled curse. It wasn’t her so she had to presume it must be him, though she was way too distressed to be absolutely sure of that. The next moment two hands were grasping her shoulders and lifting her to her feet. The stack of documents slid to the floor forgotten as he wrapped her tightly in his arms.

And suddenly she felt as if she was under attack from a completely different source. Attack—why attack? she asked herself as her head became filled with the warm solid strength of him.

‘Oh, my God.’ She groaned.

‘What’s happening?’ he muttered thickly.

‘I d-don’t know,’ she said tremulously, and tried sucking in a deep breath of air in an effort to compose herself. That deep breath of air went permeating through her system, taking the spicy scent of him along with it, and in the next moment her brain cells went utterly haywire.

Familiar. That scent was familiar. And so wretchedly familiar that—

Once again she fainted. No more warning than that. She just went limp in his arms and knew nothing for long seconds.

This time when she came round she wasn’t lying but sitting, with him standing over her pressing her head down between her knees with a very determined hand.

‘Stay there,’ he gritted when she tried to sit up. ‘Just wait a moment until the blood has had a chance to make it back to your head.’

She stayed, limp and utterly exhausted, taking in some carefully controlled breaths of air while she waited, waited for…

Nothing, she realised. No bright blinding flood of beautiful memories. Not even ugly ones. Nothing.

Carefully she tried to move, and this time he allowed her to, his dark face decidedly guarded as she sat back and looked at him.

‘What?’ he demanded jerkily when she didn’t say a word.

Empty-eyed, she shook her head. She knew what he was thinking, knew what he was expecting. She had been expecting the same thing herself.

His dark eyes glinted, a white line of tension imprinting itself around his mouth. Then he sucked in a deep lungful of air and held onto it for a long time before he let it out again.

‘Well, we aren’t going to try that again,’ he decided. ‘Not until we’ve consulted an expert to find out why you faint every time you’re confronted with yourself.’

Not myself, she wanted to correct him. You.

But she didn’t, didn’t want to get into that one. Not now, when it felt as if her whole world was balancing precariously on the edge of a great, yawning precipice.

‘So that settles it,’ he declared in the same determined tone. ‘You’re coming with me.’ He bent down to pick up the scattered papers, his lean body lithe and graceful even while it was clearly tense. ‘I’m going to need to make a few phone calls,’ he said as he straightened, then really surprised her by dropping the photograph back onto her lap. ‘While I do that, you can go and pack your things. By then I should be finished and we can get on our way—’

‘Do I have any say in this at all?’ she asked cuttingly.

‘No.’ He swung round to show her a look of grim resolve. ‘Not a damned thing. I’ve spent the last twelve months alternately thinking you were dead and wishing you were dead. But you aren’t either, are you, Samantha?’ he challenged bluntly. ‘You’re existing in some kind of limbo land to which I know for a fact that only I have the key to set you free. And until you are set free, I won’t know which of my alternatives I really prefer, and you won’t know why you prefer to stay in limbo. The newspaper report on you said they took you to a hospital in Exeter after the accident, which I presume means you received all your treatment there?’

She nodded.

So did he. ‘Then, since Exeter is where we are going, we don’t mention the past or anything to do with the past until we’ve received some advice from someone who knows what they’re talking about.’ He settled the matter decisively. ‘All you have to do is accept that I am your husband and you are my wife. The rest will have to wait.’

CHAPTER FOUR

WAIT…

Carla certainly did think she should wait for answers before trotting meekly off with him. ‘But you don’t know him from Adam!’ she protested as Samantha moved around her room gathering her few possessions together. ‘How do you know if he’s telling the truth?’

‘Why should he lie?’ Samantha countered, turning the question round on itself.

‘I don’t know.’ Carla sighed in frustration. ‘It just doesn’t feel right to me that you are willing to go off with him without knowing what it is you’re going to!’

Samantha’s only answer was to silently hand Carla the wedding photograph.

She stared at it, then at Samantha, then back at the photo again. And suddenly her mood changed. ‘What can have happened to you to make you forget something as beautiful as this?’ she murmured painfully.

Samantha wished she had the answer to that one. The story that photo was telling might be bringing tears to Carla’s eyes, but she couldn’t even begin to describe how it made her feel.

Nothing, she named it. But it was a strange, pained nothing, which was, in itself, something terribly saddening. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked quietly.

‘Nathan Payne told me.’ Carla nodded. ‘But just because he’s the great Visconte himself doesn’t absolve him from having to explain why it’s taken him twelve months to come and get you!’

True, Samantha conceded, and sat down on the bed as the heavy weight of all her own uncertainties came thundering down on her again.

‘I mean…’ Carla went on, determined to push her point home now that she had Samantha wavering ‘…you were famous for a week or two in these parts when the accident happened. Your predicament was reported in all the local papers. If you were missing and he was worried about you, wouldn’t you expect a man like him to pull out all the stops in an effort to find you? At the very least he could have checked out the police stations and hospitals. Your looks are pretty damned distinctive, Sam,’ she pointed out. ‘Even without you knowing who you are, for someone to be searching for a tall, slender redhead going by the name Samantha would surely be enough to make the necessary link?’

‘Maybe he was away—out of the country or something,’ she suggested, thinking of New York.

‘You mean, you haven’t bothered to ask him?’ Carla sounded dismayed.

Samantha was a little dismayed herself at how little she had asked him to explain. But the truth of it was, she didn’t want to ask. In some incomprehensible way, it felt safer not to ask.

‘The trouble is,’ she admitted with a rueful grimace, ‘every time we discuss anything even vaguely personal, I faint.’

‘Even more reason, surely, for you to think carefully before putting yourself in his care. Don’t you see that?’

See it? Of course she did. But…

Easing herself back to her feet, she gently took back the photograph, then looked at Carla with disturbingly bleak yet resolute green eyes. ‘If I am ever to discover why I’ve ended up like this,’ she said quietly, ‘then I have to go with him.’

To her, it was as simple and as final as that.

Where was she? André flicked a hard glance at his watch then stuffed his hand back into his pocket. She was taking an age!

‘Damn,’ he muttered, feeling the hellish anger he had been keeping banked down take another step closer to exploding. ‘Look at this place,’ he growled out contemptuously. ‘If it fell down right now, no one would miss it.’

Nathan Payne looked up, and André suddenly saw himself as his manager was seeing him—like a prowling panther pacing up and down on the awful carpet in front of the reception desk, as if in need of a good fight.

Hell, he thought. Ten rounds with the best boxer in the world wouldn’t knock out the ugly stuff churning up his system right now.

Samantha, residing in these miserable surroundings. It was enough to snuff the living light out of anyone! And the sooner he got her away from here the better as far as he was concerned.

Where was she? ‘Ring her room,’ he instructed Nathan.

‘No,’ the other man refused. ‘She will come when she’s ready.’

‘She’s already been an hour.’

And that other girl was with her. She didn’t like him. He’d seen it in her face when she’d heard what Samantha was going to do. She thought he was being too pushy and that Samantha was in too deep a state of shock to be going anywhere with anyone. Damn it, she was right, he grimly conceded.

‘Don’t you think you are being a bit hasty, taking her away from the only secure environment she knows?’ Nathan posed levelly.

Don’t you start, André thought. ‘I can give her a secure environment,’ he insisted.

‘She’s in shock, André.’

‘So am I,’ he tossed back.

‘And she’s frightened.’

Did Nathan think he didn’t know that? ‘I’m not into S&M, Nathan,’ he rounded angrily on the other man. ‘I’m not going to chain her up in a cage and put a whip to her rear end every hour on the hour!’

‘I’m so very relieved to hear that,’ another voice inserted.

Spinning round, he saw her standing in the mouth of the corridor which led to the staff quarters. She was wearing a simple blue shift dress and her hair was still fixed in a dreadful, priggish bun, which was in itself a defiance of what the real Samantha was. Deliberate, or a subconscious act? he mused grimly, and felt his senses grind together. Deliberate or not, it was there. Her chin was up, her mouth small, and her eyes were tossing out the kind of cold green sparks that had always declared war—old Samantha style.

He had never been able to resist it, and didn’t even try. Relaxing the tension out of his body, he let his eyes send back a counter-declaration, and he taunted lazily, ‘Submission is not your forte, mia dolce amante. You demand equality in all aspects of your life.’

He threw in the ‘my sweet lover’ in Italian just to see if she would remember it; he saw her face grow pink and was very, very pleased that she did indeed understand what he’d said. Standing beside her, he also saw her friend shift uncomfortably. Behind him he felt his manager do the same. He didn’t actually blame either of them, because sexual tension was suddenly rife in the dull and dingy foyer.

But it was Samantha’s response that mattered to him, and as the first truly healthy one he’d managed to rouse in her it did his bad temper the world of good.

‘Are you ready to come with me?’ he tagged on silkily, deciding to build on his sensual success—a building that crumbled the moment she moved forward and he saw that she was using a walking stick.

Anger roared back to life, making him turn on Nathan like a rattlesnake with poison dripping from its fangs. He snapped out orders which Nathan took in his stride with a kind of silent sympathy that only helped to make him feel worse. But he couldn’t even begin to describe what it did to him seeing his beautiful, vibrant Samantha in so much pain that she needed help just to walk!

Samantha left him to it and went outside, hurt by the flare of dismay she had seen on his face when he’d caught sight of her walking stick. Nor did she like the autocratic way he’d spoken to Nathan Payne, whom it seemed was going to remain here and cover for Samantha until the hotel manager returned.

‘He’s a bully,’ Carla said.

Samantha couldn’t deny it so she remained silent instead.

‘And he fancies the hell out of you,’ Carla added.

Static electricity suddenly shivered through her, setting almost every hair she possessed on end. ‘Not this girl,’ she denied, giving the walking stick a deriding kick.

‘What was the Italian seduction scene about, then?’

‘You said it.’ Samantha shrugged. ‘The words “Italian” and “seduction” always go together. In fact I don’t think they can function without each other.’

‘So he’s an Italian-American.’ Carla assumed.

Samantha shrugged again, because she didn’t actually know. Certainly the Visconte name was Italian. The accent was most definitely American, but the first name was surely French? she mused frowningly.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ From being argumentative, Carla had seen the frown and was now sounding anxious again.

No, I don’t think I am going to be all right, she thought, staring bleakly out across the potholed car park to where two cars in particular stood out like the symbols of success they obviously were. One was a natty black Porsche, the other a racing-green Jaguar.