Читать книгу The Sicilian's Mistress - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 7

STUDIOUSLY ignoring Faith’s troubled expression, Edward smiled. ‘I never dreamt that Mother would make us such a generous offer—’

Faith sucked in a deep, steadying breath. ‘I know, but—’

‘It makes perfect sense. Why go to the expense of buying another property when there’s ample space for us all at Firfield?’

At that precise moment Edward’s flight was called. Immediately he rose to his feet and lifted his briefcase. ‘We’ll talk it over when I get back.’

Faith stood up. A slim, beautiful blonde of diminutive height, she had sapphire-blue eyes, flawless skin and wore her hair in a restrained French plait. ‘I’ll see you to the gate.’

Her fiancé shook his well-groomed fair head. ‘Not much point. I don’t know why you bothered coming to see me off anyway,’ he remarked rather drily. ‘I’m only going to be away for three days.’

Edward strode off and was soon lost from view in the crowds. Faith left the café at a slower pace, genuinely appalled at the announcement Edward had just made. They were getting married in four months and they had been house-hunting for the past three. Now Faith sensed that as far as Edward was concerned the hunt was over: his mother had offered to share her spacious home with them.

It was a really ghastly idea, Faith acknowledged in guilty dismay. Edward’s mother didn’t like her, but she carefully concealed her hostility. Mrs Benson was no more fond of Faith’s two-year-old son, Connor. But then the fact that Faith was an unmarried mother had first fuelled the older woman’s dislike, Faith conceded ruefully as she walked back through the airport.

Her troubled eyes skimmed through the hurrying crowds. Suddenly she stiffened, her gaze narrowing, her head twisting back of its own volition to retrace that visual sweep. She found herself focusing on a strikingly noticeable man standing on the far side of the concourse in conversation with another. As her heartbeat thumped deafeningly in her ears, she faltered into complete stillness.

The compulsion to stare was as overwhelming as it was inexplicable. The man was very tall and very dark. His hard, bronzed features were grave, but not so grave that one glance was not sufficient to make her aware that he was stunningly handsome. Her tummy somersaulted. A fevered pound of tension began to build up pressure behind her temples.

A smooth dark overcoat hung negligently from his wide shoulders. He looked rich, super-sophisticated, that cool aura of razor-edged elegance cloaking immense power. Perspiration dampened her skin. Sudden fear and confusion tore at her as she questioned what she was doing. A wave of dizziness ran over her.

Simultaneously, the stranger turned his arrogant dark head and looked directly at her, only to freeze. The fierce intensity with which those brilliant dark eyes zeroed in on her stilled figure disconcerted her even more. But at that point the nausea churning in her stomach forced a muffled moan from her parted lips. Dragging her attention from him, Faith rushed off in search of the nearest cloakroom.

She wasn’t actually sick, as she had feared. But as she crept back out of the cubicle she had locked herself in and approached the line of sinks she was still trembling. Most of all, she was bewildered and shaken by her own peculiar behaviour. What on earth had possessed her to behave like that? What on earth had prompted her to stop dead and gape like some infatuated schoolgirl at a complete stranger?

Infatuated? She questioned the selection of that particular word and frowned with unease, the way she always did when a thought that didn’t seem quite her came into her mind. But she wasn’t feeling well. Maybe she was feverish, coming down with one of those viruses that could strike with such rapidity.

There had to be some good reason why a total stranger should inspire her with fear…unless he reminded her of somebody she had once known. She tensed. That was highly unlikely, she decided just as quickly, and began to scold herself for her overreaction to a fleeting incident.

But she knew what was the matter with her. She understood all too well the source of her basic insecurity. But that was something she had learnt to put behind her and never ever dwell on these days. With conscious care, Faith suppressed the scary stirrings at the back of her mind and blanked them out again.

But what if she had once known that man? The worrying apprehension leapt out of Faith’s subconscious before she could block it again. Aghast, she stared blindly into space, suddenly plunged into a world of her own, a blank, nebulous world of terrifying uncertainty which she had believed left far behind her. The lost years…what about them?

A crowd of noisy teenagers jostled her at the sinks, springing her back into awareness again. She blinked rapidly, once, twice, snatched in a shuddering breath to steady herself. Discomfited by her uncomfortably emotional frame of mind, she averted her head and shook it slightly. You saw some really interesting people at airports, she told herself squarely. Her attention had been momentarily distracted and she wasn’t feeling too good. That was all it had been.

But when Faith vacated the cloakroom and turned back into the main concourse, she found her path unexpectedly blocked.

‘Milly…?’ A dark, accented voice breathed with noticeable stress.

Faith glanced up, and it was a very long way up, and met flashing dark eyes so cold and deep her heart leapt straight into her throat. It was the same guy she had been staring at ten minutes earlier! Her feet froze to the floor in shock.

‘Madre di Dio…’ The stranger stared fixedly down at her, his deep, accented drawl like an icy hand dancing down her taut spine. ‘It is you!’

Faith gazed up at him in frank surprise and sudden powerful embarrassment. She took a backward step. ‘Sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong person.’

‘Maybe you wish I had.’ The intimidating stranger gazed down at her from his incredibly imposing height, slumbrous dark eyes roving so intently over her face that colour flooded her drawn cheeks. ‘Dio…you still blush. How do you do that?’ he drawled very, very softly.

‘Look, I don’t know you, and I’m in a hurry,’ Faith responded in an evasive, mortified mutter, because she couldn’t help wondering if her own foolish behaviour earlier had encouraged him to believe that she was willing to be picked up.

Eyes the colour of rich, dark golden honey steadily widened and her heartbeat started to thump at what felt like the base of her throat, making it difficult for her to breathe. ‘You don’t know me?’ he repeated very drily. ‘Milly, this is Gianni D’Angelo you’re dealing with, and running scared with a really stupid story won’t dig you out of the big deep hole you’re in!’

‘You don’t know me. You’ve made a mistake,’ Faith told him sharply.

‘No mistake, Milly. I could pick you out of a thousand women in the dark,’ Gianni D’Angelo murmured even more drily, his wide, sensual mouth curling with growing derision. ‘So, if the nose job was supposed to make you unrecognisable, it’s failed. And what sad soap opera did you pick this crazy pretence out of? You’re in enough trouble without this childish nonsense!’

Her dark blue eyes huge in receipt of such an incomprehensible address, Faith spluttered, ‘A nose job? For goodness’ sake—’

‘You have a lot of explaining to do, and I intend to conduct this long-overdue conversation somewhere considerably more private than the middle of an airport,’ he asserted grittily. ‘So let’s get out of here before some paparazzo recognises me!’

As Faith attempted to sidestep him he spontaneously matched her move and blocked her path again. She studied him in disbelief. ‘P-please get out of my way…’ she stammered, fear and confusion now rising like a surging dark tide inside her.

‘No.’

‘You’re mad…if you don’t get out of my way, I’ll scream!’

He reeled back a full step, a deep frown-line of impressive incredulity hardening his lean, strong features. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ he demanded with savage abruptness.

Faith broke through the gap he had left by the wall and surged past him at frantic speed.

A hand as strong and sure as an iron vice captured her wrist before she got more than two feet away. ‘Accidenti…where do you think you’re going?’ he questioned in angry disbelief, curving his infinitely larger hand right round her clenched fingers.

‘I’ll report you to the police for harassing me!’ Faith gasped. ‘Let go of me!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous…’ He gazed unfathomably down into her frightened and yet strangely blank eyes and suddenly demanded with raw, driven urgency, ‘What’s the matter with you?’

Faith spun a frantic glance around herself. Only her instinctive horror at the idea of creating a seriously embarrassing public scene restrained her from a noisy outburst. ‘Please let go of me!’ she urged fiercely.

The ring on her engagement finger scored his palm as she tried to pull free. Without warning he flipped her hand around in the firm hold of his and studied the small diamond solitaire she wore. A muscle jerked tight at the corner of his bloodlessly compressed lips, shimmering flaring eyes flying up again to her taut face.

‘Now I understand why you’re acting like a madwoman!’ he grated, with barely suppressed savagery.

And Faith’s self-discipline just snapped, right then and there. She flung back her head and tried to call out for assistance, but her vocal cords were knotted so tight with stress only a suffocated little squawk emerged. But surprisingly that was sufficient. Gianni D’Angelo, as he had called himself, dropped her hand as if she had burnt him and surveyed her in almost comical astonishment.

Shaking like a leaf, Faith backed away. ‘I’m not this Milly you’re looking for…never seen you before in my life, never want to see you again…’

And she rushed away her tummy tied up in sick knots again, her head pounding, a kind of nameless terror controlling her. She raced across the endless car park as if she had wings, and then fell, exhausted, to a slower pace, breathless and winded, heartbeat thundering. Crazy, crazy man, frightening her like that all because she resembled some poor woman who had clearly got out while the going was good. Gianni D’Angelo. She didn’t recognise that name. And why should she?

But wasn’t it strange that he should have attracted her attention first? And only then had he approached her. Almost as if he genuinely had recognised her…

As her apprehensions rose to suffocating proportions release from fear came in the guise of an obvious fact. Of course he couldn’t have recognised her! She couldn’t believe that she had ever been the kind of person to run around using a false name! And she was Faith Jennings, the only child of Robin and Davina Jennings. True, she might have been a difficult teenager, but then that wasn’t that uncommon, and her parents had long since forgiven her for the awful anxiety she had once caused them.

Half an hour later, sitting in her little hatchback car in heavy morning rush-hour traffic, Faith took herself to task for the overwrought state she was in. Here she was, supposedly a mature adult of twenty-six, reacting like a frightened teenager desperate to rush home to her parents for support. And yet what had happened? Virtually nothing. A case of mistaken identity with a stubborn foreigner unwilling to accept his error! That was all it had been. A nose job, for heaven’s sake!

And yet as she gazed through the windscreen she no longer saw the traffic lights; she saw Gianni D’Angelo, his lean, bronzed features imposed on a mind that for some reason could focus on nothing else. As furiously honking car horns erupted behind her Faith flinched back to the present and belatedly drove on, strain and bemusement stamping her troubled face.

Gianni D’Angelo stared fixedly out of the giant corner window of his London office. An impressive view of the City’s lights stretched before him but he couldn’t see it.

His sane mind was telling him that even twelve hours on he was still in the grip of shock, and that self-control was everything, but he wanted to violently punch walls with the frustrated anger of disbelief. He had searched for Milly for so long. He had almost given up hope. He certainly hadn’t expected her to do something as dumb and childish as try and pretend she didn’t know him, and then compound her past offences by attempting to run away again. And why hadn’t it occurred to her that he would have her followed before she got ten feet away from him?

Milly, whom he’d always called Angel. And instantly Gianni was beset by a thousand memories that twisted his guts even after three years of rigorous rooting out of such images. He saw Milly jumping out of a birthday cake dressed as an angel, tripping over her celestial robes and dropping her harp. Milly, impossibly beautiful but horrendously clumsy when she was nervous. Milly, who had given him his first and only taste of what he had dimly imagined must be a home life…

And you loved it, you stupid bastard! Gianni’s lean hands suddenly clenched into powerful fists. Punishing himself for recalling only pleasant things, Gianni made himself relive the moment he had found his precious pregnant Angel in bed with his kid brother, Stefano. That had put a whole new slant on the joys of home and family life. Until that moment of savage truth he hadn’t appreciated just how much he had trusted her. And instead of proposing marriage, as he had planned, he had ended up taking off with another woman. What else could he have done in the circumstances?

He had wanted to kill them both. For the first time he had understood the concept of a crime of passion. The only two people he had ever allowed close had deceived and betrayed him. A boy of nineteen and a girl/woman only a couple of years older. The generation gap had been there, even though he had been too blind to acknowledge it, he reflected with smouldering bitterness. And naturally Stefano had adored her. Everybody had adored Milly.

Milly, who had called him on the slightest pretext every day and never once failed to tell him how much she loved him. So she had spent a lot of time alone. But business had always come first, and he had never promised more than he had delivered. He had been straight. He had even been faithful. And how many single men in his position were wholly faithful to a mistress?

As a knock sounded on the door Gianni wheeled round and fixed his attention with charged expectancy on his London security chief, Dawson Carter. His child, he thought with ferocious satisfaction. Milly had to have had his child. And, whatever happened, he would use that child as leverage. Whether she liked it or not, Milly was coming back to him…

‘Well?’ he prodded with unconcealed impatience.

Dawson surveyed his incredibly rich and ruthless employer and started to sweat blood. Gianni D’Angelo ran one of the most powerful electronic empires in the world. He was thirty-two. He had come up from nothing. He was tough, streetwise, and brilliant in business. He didn’t like or expect disappointments. He had even less tolerance for mysteries.

‘If this woman is Milly Henner—’ Dawson began with wary quietness.

Gianni stilled. ‘What do you mean if?’ he countered with raw incredulity.

Dawson grimaced. ‘Gianni…if it is her, she’s living under another name, and she’s been doing it successfully for a very long time.’

‘That’s insane, and utterly impossible!’ Gianni asserted in instant dismissal.

‘Three years ago, Faith Jennings was found by the side of a country road in Cornwall. She had been seriously injured and she had no identification. She was the victim of a hit and run. The police think she was robbed after the accident—’

‘Dio!’ Gianni exclaimed in shaken interruption.

‘But she was pregnant at the time of the accident,’ Dawson confirmed. ‘And she does have a child.’

Gianni drew in a stark breath, incisive dark eyes flaming to bright gold in anticipation. ‘So the child must be two and a half…right? A girl or a boy?’ he prompted with fierce impatience.

‘A little boy. She calls him Connor. He’ll be three in May. He was born before his mother came out of the coma she was in.’

Gianni screened his unusually revealing eyes as he mulled over those bald facts. ‘So…’ he murmured then, without any expression at all. ‘Explain to me how Milly Henner could possibly be living under another woman’s name.’

‘It was a long time before she was able to speak for herself, but she was apparently wearing a rather unusual bracelet. Her face had been pretty badly knocked about and she needed surgery.’ For the first time in his life Dawson saw his employer wince, and was sincerely shaken by the evidence of this previously unsuspected vein of sensitivity. ‘So as a first move the police gave a picture of the bracelet to the press. She was swiftly identified as a teenager who had run away from home when she was sixteen. Her parents came forward and identified her—’

‘But Milly doesn’t have parents alive!’ Gianni cut in abrasively.

‘This woman never recovered her memory after the hit and run, Gianni. She’s a total amnesiac—’

‘A total amnesiac?’ Gianni broke in, with raised brows of dubious enquiry.

‘It’s rare, but it does happen,’ Dawson assured him ruefully. ‘I spoke to a nurse at the hospital where she was treated. They still remember her. When she finally recovered consciousness her mind was a blank, and when her parents took her home she still knew nothing but what they had told her about her past. I gather they also discouraged her from seeking further treatment. The medics were infuriated by their interference but powerless to act.’

‘Normal people do not take complete strangers home and keep them as their daughters for three years,’ Gianni informed him with excessive dryness.

‘I should add that the parents hadn’t seen or heard from their missing daughter in seven years, but were still unshakeable in their conviction that the young woman with the bracelet was their child—’

‘Seven years?’ Gianni broke in.

‘The police did try to run a check on dental records, but the surgery which the daughter attended before she disappeared had burnt down, and the most her retired dentist could recall was that she had had excellent teeth, just like the lady in the hospital bed. This is a very well-known story in the town where Faith Jennings lives—her miraculous return home in spite of all the odds.’

‘There was no return, miraculous or otherwise…that was Milly at the airport! Seven years…’ Gianni mused with incredulous bite. ‘And Milly was in a coma, at the mercy of people no better than kidnappers!’

Dawson cleared his throat. ‘The parents are respectable, comfortably off—the father owns a small engineering plant. If there’s been a mistake, it can only have been a genuine one, and most probably due to wishful thinking.’

Gianni was unimpressed. ‘While Milly was still ill, that’s possible, but when she began to recover they must’ve have started to suspect the truth, so why didn’t they do anything?’ he demanded in a seething undertone. ‘What about the fiancé?’

‘Edward Benson. A thirty-eight-year-old company accountant.’

Gianni lounged back against the edge of his desk like a panther about to spring. ‘An accountant,’ he derided between clenched teeth.

‘He’s her father’s second-in-command,’ Dawson filled in. ‘Local gossip suggests that the engagement is part of a business package.’

‘Check me into a hotel down there.’ Gianni straightened, all emotion wiped from his lean, strong face, eyes ice-cool shards of threat. ‘I think it’s time I got to meet my son. And isn’t that going to put the cat among the pigeons?’

Dawson tried not to picture the onslaught of Gianni, his powerful personality, his fleet of limos and his working entourage without whom he went nowhere on a small, peaceful English town…and the woman who against all reason and self-preservation had contrived to forget her intimate involvement with one of the world’s richest and most influential tycoons. A lot of people had a lot of shock coming their way…

‘So you just tell Edward you refuse to live with his mother!’ Louise Barclay met Faith’s aghast look and simply laughed. A redhead with green eyes and loads of freckles, Louise looked as if she was in her twenties but she was actually well into her thirties, and the divorced mother of two rumbustious teenage boys.

‘Sometimes you’re such a wimp, Faith,’ Louise teased.

‘I’m not—’

‘You are when it comes to your own needs. All your energy goes into keeping other people happy, living the life they think you should live! Your parents act like they own you body and soul, and Edward’s not much better!’ Louise informed her in exasperation.

Faith stiffened. Louise was her best friend and her business partner, but she had little understanding of the burden of guilt that Faith carried where her parents were concerned. ‘It’s not like that—’

‘Oh, yes, it is.’ Louise watched Faith carefully package a beautiful bouquet for delivery and leant back against the shop counter. ‘I’m always watching you struggle to be all things to all people. Once you wanted to be a gardener. Your parents didn’t fancy that, so here you are in a prissy flower shop.’

Faith laughed. ‘Alongside you.’

‘But this was my dream. And if you don’t watch out, you’re going to end up living with old Ma Benson. She will cunningly contrive, without Edward ever noticing, to make your home life the equivalent of a daily dance on a bed of sharpened nails!’ the lively redhead forecast with conviction. ‘You think I haven’t noticed how stressed-out and quiet you’ve been since Edward dropped this on you the day before yesterday?’

Faith turned her head away. For once, Louise was barking up the wrong tree. Faith hadn’t told anybody about that incident at the airport, but she still couldn’t get it out of her mind. Her mother didn’t like to be reminded that her daughter was an amnesiac, and got upset whenever Faith referred to that particular part of the past. Her attitude was understandable: after running away, Faith hadn’t once got in touch to ease her parents’ distress.

How could she ever have been so selfish and uncaring that she had failed to make even a single phone call to reassure them that she was at least still alive? Conscience had given Faith a strong need to do whatever she could to please her parents in an effort to make up for her past mistakes.

She was also painfully aware that both her parents viewed those missing years as a Pandora’s box best left sealed. As far as they were concerned, seven years on she had turned up again, pregnant, unmarried and seemingly destitute. Nobody she might have known during that period had listed her as missing. Those bald realities suggested that prior to the accident she had been homeless, unemployed, not in a stable relationship and bereft of any true friends. Frankly, she’d been desperately lucky to have forgiving parents willing to take her home and help her back to normality again, she acknowledged humbly.

Only what was normality? Faith wondered, with the lonely regret of someone who had learnt not to discuss her secret fears and insecurities with anyone. It could never be normal to possess not one single memory of what she’d been told she’d lost—the first twenty-three years of her life. But if she wanted people to feel comfortable with her, if she wanted people to forget that strange past and treat her like everybody else, she always had to pretend that that vast gaping hole inside her memory banks was no longer any big deal…

‘A fresh start.’ In the early days of her convalescence that had been a much-used parental phrase, the implication being that an inability to recall those years might well prove an unexpected blessing. So Faith had concentrated instead on trying to retrieve childhood memories. She had dutifully studied the photo albums of the much-loved and indulged daughter who had grown into a plump teenager with a sullen face, defiant blue eyes and make-up like war paint. Self-conscious about her weight, the teenage Faith hadn’t liked photos, so there had only been a handful after the age of twelve.

Faith had walked through the schools she had once attended, met the teachers, wandered round the town where she had grown up and paid several awkward visits to former schoolfriends, always willing her blank brain to remember, recognise, sense even token familiarity…

Repetition had created a kind of familiarity, and she had exercised her imagination until sometimes she suspected that she did almost remember and that real memory was hovering cruelly just out of reach on the very edge of her mind. She had rebuilt a quiet, conventional life round her family, but Connor was the true centre of her world. She loved her parents for their unquestioning support, loved Edward for his calm acceptance of her, but she adored her son with a fierce maternal joy and protectiveness that occasionally shook even her.

‘There’s something more up with you than Edward’s sudden penny-pinching desire to regress and stay home with Mother,’ Louise remarked with sudden insight.

The silence thickened. Faith reached a sudden decision and took a deep breath.

‘A man spoke to me at the airport. He was very persistent. He insisted that he knew me by another name…Milly, he called me.’ Trying to downplay the incident even now, Faith loosed an uneven laugh, but the pent-up words of strain continued to tumble from her. ‘Maybe I have a doppelgänger somewhere. It was daft, but it was a little scary…’

‘Why scary?’

Faith linked her hands tightly together in an effort to conceal their unsteadiness. ‘You see, I noticed this man first…to be honest, I really couldn’t take my eyes off him…’ Her voice trailed away as embarrassment gripped her.

‘So he was trying to make a move on you—but do tell me more,’ Louise invited with amusement. ‘Just why couldn’t you take your eyes off this guy?’

‘I don’t know. He was very, very good-looking,’ Faith conceded, colour flaming into her cheeks. ‘And at first I thought that my staring at him had encouraged him to approach me. But when I thought about it afterwards… I don’t think it was like that.’

‘Why not? You might wear fuddy-duddy clothes and scrape your hair back like a novice nun, but your kind of beauty would shine through a potato sack,’ her friend advised her drily.

‘This man was angry with me…I mean…with this woman, Milly,’ Faith adjusted hurriedly. ‘He accused her of having run away. And he was really astonished when I said I didn’t know him and when I threatened him with the police.’

‘That’s persistent.’ Louise looked more serious now.

‘He said his name was Gianni D’Angelo…it means nothing to—’

Louise had straightened, an incredulous light in her eyes. ‘Say that name again.’

‘Gianni D’Angelo.’

‘Did this guy ooze money?’

‘He was very well dressed.’

‘Gianni D’Angelo owns Macro Industries. He’s a hugely important electronics mogul. My ex-hubby once worked on a major advertising campaign for one of his companies,’ Louise informed her with dancing eyes. ‘And if I thought a gorgeous single guy worth billions was wandering round Heathrow trying to pick up stray women, I’d take my sleeping bag and move in until he tripped over me!’

‘It can’t have been the same man,’ Faith decided. ‘I must’ve misheard the name.’

‘Or perhaps you once enjoyed a champagne and caviar lifestyle, rubbing shoulders with the rich and the famous!’ Louise teased with an appreciative giggle. ‘I think you met a complete nutter stringing you a weird line, Faith.’

‘Probably,’ she agreed, with a noticeable diminution of tension.

With a sense of relief, Faith decided to put the entire silly episode out of her mind. And, just as she had arranged a couple of days earlier, she called in at the estate agent to collect the keys of the house which was her dream house for a second viewing.

True, Edward had not seen the sadly neglected Victorian villa in quite the same light. But Faith knew she had to tell her fiancé why there was no question of her agreeing to move in with his widowed mother after their marriage. Perhaps then he would be more amenable to a property which needed a fair amount of work, she reasoned hopefully.

Set on the edge of town, in what had once been open countryside, the house rejoiced in a large garden screened from the road by tall hedges. Faith unlocked the front door and walked into the hall. The stale air made her wrinkle her nose, and she left the door wide on the weak morning sunlight. She wandered contentedly through the shabby rooms and finally into the old wooden conservatory which still possessed considerable charm. Edward had said it would have to be demolished.

A faint sound tugged Faith only partially from her cosy reverie. She half turned, without the slightest expectation of seeing anybody. So the shock of seeing Gianni D’Angelo ten feet away in the doorway was colossal. A strangled gasp escaped her convulsing throat, all colour draining from her face to highlight sapphire-blue eyes huge with fear.

‘All I want to do is talk to you. I didn’t want to walk into the shop. I didn’t want to go to your home. At least here we’re alone, on neutral territory.’ He spread fluid brown hands in a soothing motion that utterly failed in its intent. ‘I won’t come any closer. I don’t want to frighten you. I just want you to listen.’

But, in a state of petrified paralysis, Faith wasn’t capable of listening. She started to shake, back away, her entire attention magnetically pinned to him, absorbing every aspect of his appearance in terrifyingly minute detail. His smoothly cropped but luxuriant black hair. His fabulous cheekbones. His classic nose. His perfectly modelled mouth. And the devastating strength of purpose dauntingly etched into every feature.

His charcoal-grey suit just screamed designer style and expense, moulding broad shoulders as straight as axe-handles, accentuating the lithe flow of his lean, tightly muscled all-male body. ‘P-please…’ she stammered sickly.

‘Per meraviglia!’ Gianni D’Angelo countered rawly. ‘Since when were you a bag of nerves on the constant brink of hysteria? All right, I’ll just give you the proof that we have had what you might call a prior acquaintance.’

‘I don’t want to have had a prior acquaintance with you!’ Faith exclaimed with stricken honesty. ‘I want you to go away and leave me alone!’

He withdrew something from the inside pocket of his beautifully tailored jacket and extended it to her.

Faith stared, but wouldn’t move forward to reach for the item, which appeared to be a photograph.

‘This is you just over three years ago,’ he breathed in a gritty undertone. ‘And if you had your memory right now, we’d be having a major fight.’

‘A m-major fight…’ Faith parroted weakly.

‘I crept up on you with the camera. You were furious. You made me promise to destroy the photo. I said I would. I lied. I’m afraid it’s the only photo of you I have left.’ Stooping with athletic ease, he tossed the glossy snap down on the pitted tiled floor like a statement.

It skimmed to a halt about two feet from her. Faith stared down at the snap where it lay. Her eyes opened impossibly wide. She saw a slim, bare-breasted blonde semi-submerged in bubbles in a giant bath. She saw a slim, bare-breasted blonde with her face, her eyes, her mouth…her breasts. She didn’t want that brazen hussy to be her! Shock rolled over her like a tidal wave.

‘Keeping it was kind of a guy thing,’ Gianni admitted, almost roughly.

A strangled moan of denial slowly hissed from Faith’s rigidly compressed lips. Her head swam, the photo spinning out of focus, her legs turning hollow. And then the great well of darkness behind her eyelids sucked her down frighteningly fast into a faint.

Gianni caught her before she hit the floor in a crumpled heap and swore vehemently.