Читать книгу The Sicilian's Mistress - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 8

FAITH drifted back to awareness in a complete daze. Her lashes fluttered and then lifted. A dark male face swam into stark focus, but it was those eyes, those stunning lion-gold eyes fringed by black spiky lashes, that entrapped her attention and held her still. Her breath feathered in her throat.

The oddest little tugging sensation pulled deep down inside her, heralding a slow burst of heat that spread from the pit of her stomach up, and then down to more intimate places. Faith quivered in extreme disconcertion, extraordinarily conscious of the strange sensitivity of her full breasts, the sudden straining tightness of her nipples. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t think. Her body had taken on a frightening life of its own, yet she couldn’t muster the power to either question or control it.

‘Gianni…Gianni,’ a breathless voice she barely recognised as her own pleaded achingly inside her mind. Seemingly of its own volition, her hand lifted and began to rise towards that strong, aggressive jawline…

Gianni’s eyes shimmered chillingly. He broke the spell by tilting his proud dark head back out of her reach. Then he flashed her a look of raw derision. ‘When I want sex, I’ll tell you, Milly. In the meantime, keep your hands to yourself.’

That assurance was so shattering it sprang Faith back to full awareness. As he slid back upright from his crouching position by the sagging basketwork chair on which she sat, all that had happened in the minutes before she had fainted flooded back to fill her with frantic, frightening confusion.

She had been viewing the house. He had arrived. He had shown her the photo, that awful photo of herself flaunting her bare breasts like a tart. He did know her. He had known her. Dear heaven, she conceded in drowning mortification, he had to have known her in the biblical sense. This man had actually slept with her.

Disorientation engulfed her. She heard afresh that pleading voice whispering his name inside her head, and wondered in stunned disbelief if after three long empty years she had finally remembered something from the past. Something she didn’t want to remember, something that made her squirm with discomfiture. Perhaps it had been her imagination playing a trick on her. Why now and never before? She lifted her head and then suddenly dropped it down again, shutting her eyes tight, unable to meet Gianni D’Angelo’s cool, measured gaze. A dulled throb of tension now pulsed behind her temples.

She recalled his derision, the blunt immediacy of what had been a rejection couched in the most humiliating terms. And then she relived what had prompted that crushing response from him. Oh, dear God, she thought with stunned shame, in those first moments of recovering consciousness she had focused on him and experienced the most unbelievably powerful surge of physical hunger. She was shattered by that realisation. It rewrote everything she had believed she knew about that side of her nature.

The sound of brisk footsteps sent her eyes flying open again. She gaped at the sight of the uniformed older man who appeared in the doorway to extend, of all things, a brandy goblet. Gianni took it from him with a nod and a dismissive move of one authoritative hand. He strode back to Faith and slotted the glass into her nerveless fingers. ‘Drink it. You’re as white as a sheet,’ he instructed grimly.

‘Wh-where did that man and this drink come from?’ she stammered in unwilling wonderment.

Gianni frowned, as if that had been a very stupid question. ‘When you passed out, I called my driver on the car phone and told him to bring it in.’

Faith slowly nodded, studying him with slightly glazed eyes. Did he have a bar in his car? It had to be a big car. He wasn’t giving her a bottle to swig out of. Her sense of dislocation from reality increased. The gulf between them felt immeasurable. According to Louise, Gianni D’Angelo was a very wealthy and powerful tycoon, and certainly he looked the part. What sort of relationship could she possibly have had with such a man? Suddenly she really didn’t want to know.

‘Drink the brandy,’ Gianni pressed with controlled impatience.

‘I hardly ever touch alcohol…’

‘Well, you weren’t on any wagon when I knew you,’ Gianni informed her without hesitation.

Shaken by that come-back, and the daunting knowledge that was his alone, Faith tipped the glass to her lips. The spirit raced down her dry throat like liquid fire and burned away the chill spreading inside her. She swallowed hard and then breathed in deep. ‘It seems you once knew me…I want that photograph back!’ she added the instant she recalled its existence, anxious eyes lowering to see if it still lay on the floor. It didn’t.

‘Forget it; it’s mine. But isn’t that just like a woman?’ Gianni growled with incredulous scorn. ‘I only showed you that photo to make you accept that we once had a certain bond, and now you can only concentrate on a complete irrelevance!’

It didn’t feel irrelevant to Faith. Right at that moment she saw that revealing photo as shocking evidence of a past she wanted to leave buried, and she certainly didn’t want it left in his possession. ‘Look, Mr D’Angelo—’

‘Mister D’Angelo?’ he queried, with a slashing smile that chilled her to the marrow. ‘Make it Gianni.’

That ice-cold smile was like a threat. It shook her. He was poised several feet away, still as a predator about to spring. She recognised his hostility and recoiled from it in sudden fear. ‘You hate me…’

He froze.

The silence thundered.

Suddenly he swung away from her. ‘You don’t remember me…you don’t remember anything, do you?’

‘No…I don’t,’ she conceded tautly.

‘I thought you would’ve been full of questions. This isn’t any easier for me,’ he ground out in a charged undertone, spinning back to her with graceful but restive rapidity. Stormy dark eyes assailed her and she paled even more. ‘At the airport, I admit I wanted to strangle you. I didn’t know you’d lost your memory. I don’t like you looking at me like I’m about to attack you either!’

Intimidated by the powerful personality that he was revealing, Faith did nothing to soothe him when she instinctively cowered back into the chair.

‘Milly…’

‘That’s not my name!’ she protested.

He let that go past.

‘Look…’ He spread the fingers of one lean and eloquent hand. ‘You’re scared because I’m rocking your cosy little world. It’s not me you’re afraid of. You’re scared of the unknown that I represent.’

Faith gave a slight wary nod that might or might not have signified agreement, but her expressive eyes revealed her surprise that he could make that distinction. She wasn’t used to the sensation of someone else trying to get inside her head and work out how she felt.

‘I don’t want to frighten you, but anything I tell you is likely to cause you distress, so I’ll keep it basic.’

‘How did you find out where I was living? How did you know I was an amnesiac?’ Faith suddenly demanded accusingly.

‘Naturally I had you followed from the airport. Then I had some enquiries made,’ Gianni supplied with a fluid shrug.

Rising in one sudden motion from the chair, Faith gave him a stricken look of bemusement. ‘But why would you do something like that? Why would you go to so much trouble? Why are you here now? Just because we had some relationship years ago?’

‘I’m working up to that. I did have this rather naïve hope that you might start remembering things when you saw me again,’ Gianni confided with a sardonic laugh, his smooth, dark features broodingly taut. ‘But it looks like I’m going to have to do this the hard way. I suggest you sit down again.’

‘No.’ Faith braced her slim shoulders, a sudden powerful need to regain control of the situation driving her. ‘I don’t need to put myself through this if I don’t want to. I don’t need to listen to you—’

Gianni murmured, ‘I’m afraid you do…’

‘No, I don’t. I just want you to go away and leave me alone,’ Faith admitted truthfully, suppressing the little inner voice that warned her that that was craven and short-sighted. For here it finally was, the opportunity she had once yearned for: the chance to knock a window, however small, into that terrible wall that closed her out from her own memory. Yet because she didn’t know, indeed strongly feared what she might glimpse through that window, she was rejecting the chance.

Gianni D’Angelo surveyed her with disturbing intensity, brilliant eyes semi-screened by his lush lashes to a glimmer of gold. ‘That’s not possible. You asked me why I was here. So I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple. When you disappeared out of my life, you were pregnant with my child…’

A roaring sounded in Faith’s ears. Her lips parted. She stared back at him in horror as that cosy little world he had referred to with such perceptible scorn lurched and tilted dangerously on its axis.

‘Connor is my son,’ Gianni spelt out levelly.

The very floor under Faith’s feet seemed to shift. Her eyes were blank with shock.

As she swayed, Gianni strode forward. Curving a powerful arm to her spine to steady her, he took her out of the conservatory and back through the hall. ‘No, don’t pass out on me again. Let’s get out of this dump. We both need some fresh air.’

The winter sunlight that engulfed her at the front of the house seemed impossibly bright. She blinked and shifted her aching head. ‘No, not Connor…it’s not possible…not you!’

Ignoring those objections, Gianni guided her over to a worn bench and settled her down on it with surprisingly gentle hands. He hunkered down in front of her and reached for her trembling fingers, enclosing them firmly in his. ‘There is no easy way to tell you these things. I’m working really hard to keep the shocks to the minimum.’

That one shock had temporarily left her bereft of the ability to even respond. And yet he could call that one bombshell keeping the shocks to the “minimum”? Dear God, what worse could he tell her than he had already told her? Her face was pale as parchment. ‘My head hurts,’ she mumbled, like a child seeking sympathy in an effort to ward off punishment for some offence.

Gianni’s hands tightened fiercely on hers. ‘I’m sorry, but I had to tell you. Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think I’ve spent three endless years trying to trace you both?’ he demanded emotively.

Faith focused on him numbly. The father of her child. Why hadn’t that possibility occurred to her sooner? But she knew why, didn’t she? Connor might as well have sprung into being without benefit of any male input whatsoever.

Once she had been frantic to know who had fathered her child, but when she had admitted that need to her parents they had gone all quiet and looked at each other uncomfortably. And when she had questioned their attitude to what seemed to her an absolutely crucial question that had to be answered, she had recognised what they didn’t want to put into words.

They were afraid that she had been promiscuous, that she might not even know for sure who had actually got her pregnant. And she had been very upset to realise that her parents could harbour such sordid suspicions about a life she could no longer remember.

‘The father of my baby might love me…might be looking for me right now!’ she had sobbed in distraught self-defence.

‘If he loved you, why were you on your own?’

‘If you disappeared, why hasn’t he been in touch with the police?’

‘And why hasn’t he come here looking for you? Surely he would at least have known where your parents lived? Even though you hadn’t been in touch with us recently, wouldn’t he have arrived here to check us out as a last resort?’

Faced with those unanswerable questions, Faith had finally let go of the idea that she might have conceived her baby in a caring relationship. And from that moment on she had begun suppressing her own curiosity, shrinking from the idea that Connor might be the result of some casual sexual encounter. Yet those suspicions had only fronted worse fears, she conceded now, a hysterical laugh lodging like a giant stone in her throat. These days you read so many horror stories about the level penniless and homeless teenagers could be reduced to just to survive…

‘Milly…’ Gianni tugged her upright.

‘That’s n-not my name,’ she stated through chattering teeth.

He raised his hands to capture her taut cheekbones and she shivered because he was so very close. ‘That’s the name I knew you by,’ he murmured softly.

‘Please let go of me…’

‘You’re shaking like a jerry-built building in an earthquake,’ Gianni countered drily.

She realised that she was. Involuntarily, she braced her hands on his chest. Instantly the heat of him sprang out at her and she swiftly removed her hands again, almost off-balancing in her eagerness to put some distance between them. But the distinctive scent of him still flared in her nostrils. Clean, warm, intrinsically male and somehow earthy in a way Edward was not. Edward always smelt of soap. Oh, my God, Edward, a voice screamed inside her pounding head.

Another moan was dredged from her. She covered her distraught face with trembling hands in growing desperation. Connor, whom she loved beyond life itself. Connor’s father was here to stake a claim in his son’s life. What else could he be here for? Why else had he searched for them?

‘Let me tell you something…’ Gianni breathed in a charged undertone that reeked of menace but somehow didn’t frighten her. ‘Three years without me has turned you into a basket case! I’m taking you back to my hotel and getting a doctor to look you over!’

By sheer force of will he got her down the path and out onto the pavement. She wasn’t capable of matching the speed of his reactions, but she dimly registered that what he thought he acted on simultaneously, with terrifying decisiveness. She gawped at the sight of the long silver limousine waiting, not to mention the chauffeur surging round the bonnet as if he was running a race to get the passenger door open in time.

‘Your hotel…?’ she repeated belatedly, her brain functioning only in tiny, cripplingly slow bursts of activity. ‘I can’t go to your hotel!’

Gianni ducked her head down as carefully as an officer of the law tucking a suspect into a police car and settled her onto the rich leather-backed seat. He swung in beside her, forcing her to move deeper into the opulent car, and a split second later the door slammed on them both.

‘I’m not going anywhere with you!’ Faith protested frantically. ‘I’ve got to get back to the shop—’

‘I’m sure your partner will manage without you for a couple of hours.’

‘I have to pick up Connor from the nursery…no, I don’t…I forgot,’ she lied jerkily. ‘The kids are out on a trip today and they won’t be back until—’

Gianni subjected her to a derisive appraisal. ‘Wise up,’ he breathed in cool interruption. ‘You can’t hide Connor or keep him from me. When I want to meet my son, I will, but I’m unlikely to stage that meeting when you’re on the edge of hysteria.’

He had seen right through her, and that terrified her. ‘I’m not on the edge of hysteria…my car…the house…it wasn’t locked up—’

Gianni held up the keys. ‘I pulled the door shut behind us. If you give me your car keys, your car will be picked up and driven over to the hotel. You’re in no condition to drive.’

Faith surveyed him with huge haunted eyes. She passed over her car keys. He was like a tank, rolling over her to crush her deeper and deeper into the dust. And so cold, so very, very cold, she sensed with a shiver. He had tried to calm her, gripped her hands, made an effort to show that he understood why she was so distressed. But none of that had worked. Why? There was no human warmth in him. His brilliant, beautiful dark eyes now chilled her to ice.

Connor’s eyes were lighter in shade, but his skin always had that same golden tint even in winter, she reflected numbly. Maybe he was lying about Connor being his child! Even as her head pounded unmercifully into what felt like the onset of a migraine attack she discarded that faint hope. Gianni D’Angelo wouldn’t be wasting his time tracking down a child he didn’t know to be his.

Stray, unconnected thoughts kept on hitting her from all directions. She had shared his bed. She shifted on the seat, totally unable to look at him any more. She had bathed in his bath. It had to have been his bath. Nothing would convince her that she had ever been in the bracket of owning so luxurious a bath. But he had avoided the usual word ‘relationship’ to describe their former intimacy. ‘A certain bond’. That was the phrase he had used. Such an odd choice to describe their…their what?

Not an affair, not a relationship? Oh, dear heaven, had she been a one-night stand? Or worse? And she knew what was worse. No, no. She discarded that melodramatic suspicion. If she’d been a hooker, he would hardly be so sure her son was his. Dear heaven, what was she thinking? It was as if her brain had just been unhinged, torn open to let all her most deep-seated anxieties flood out.

In silence, Gianni reached into the built-in bar and withdrew a glass. He poured another brandy and settled it meaningfully into her trembling fingers.

Had she drunk a lot when he knew her? Been a real boozer with a strong head? She raised the glass to her lips, the rim rattling against her teeth. The nightmare just went on and on. What did he want from her? She was too terrified to ask, was in a state of complete panic, incapable of rational dialogue.

She didn’t even notice where the limo had been going until he helped her out of the car. It was a big country house hotel about three miles out of town. Faith had dined there on her twenty-sixth birthday. Even her father, who liked to make a show of sophistication, had winced at the cost of that meal.

‘I don’t want to go in here…just take me home,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m not feeling very well.’

‘You can lie down for a while,’ Gianni assured her. ‘Get your head together.’

‘You’re not listening to me—’

‘You’re not saying anything I want to hear.’

‘Did I ever?’ she heard herself whisper as he pressed her into the lift and the doors slid shut on them.

His superb bone structure tautened. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said flatly.

Her tummy twisted. Was he making fun of her?

Gianni stared down at her from his imposing height. His mouth curled. ‘I guess you could say I don’t want to remember. It’s irrelevant now.’

Her head felt woozy, her legs weak and wobbly. As the lift disgorged them into a smoothly carpeted reception area containing only one door, he settled a bracing hand on her spine. ‘I don’t want to be here,’ she told him afresh.

‘I know, but I have a habit of getting what I want.’ He made her precede him into an incredibly spacious and luxurious suite. Closing the door, he bent, and without the slightest hesitation scooped her off her feet.

‘What are you doing?’ she gasped.

‘You should’ve said no to that second drink. But possibly I did you a favour. The alcohol has acted on you like a tranquilliser.’ Thrusting open another door, he crossed the room beyond and laid her down on a big bed. ‘The doctor will check you out in a few minutes. I brought him down from London with me.’

‘I don’t need a doctor.’

Gianni studied her without any expression at all and strode back out of the room, leaving the door slightly ajar.

A doctor did come. He was middle-aged and suave. If he gave her his name, she didn’t catch it. She was finding it impossible to concentrate, and she was so tired, so unbelievably tired, it took almost incalculable effort to respond to his questions…

Gianni watched Milly sleep. Grudging pity stirred in him. She looked so fragile, and it wasn’t an illusion. Right now, Milly was like a delicate porcelain cup with a hair-fine crack. If he wasn’t very careful, she would break in half, and he might never get her glued back together again. Connor needed his mother. Connor did not need a mother having a nervous breakdown over the identity crisis that was soon to engulf her.

Porca miseria, Gianni swore inwardly. He wanted to wipe Robin and Davina Jennings from the face of the earth for screwing Milly up. She wasn’t the same person any more. She was a shadow imprint. Anxious, nervous as a cat, apologetic, scared. She didn’t know him from Adam and yet she had just let him bring her back to his hotel suite. In her current condition she was as foolishly trusting as a very young child.

But there was nothing immature about Gianni’s response to her. He wanted to rip her out of that buttoned-up white blouse and gathered floral skirt she wore and free her glorious hair from that ugly plait. And then he wanted to jump her like an animal and keep her in bed for at least twenty-four hours, he acknowledged, with grim acceptance of his own predictability.

He had really hoped she would leave him cold. But she didn’t. Sooner or later she would. She was a woman, like other women, and eventually all women bored him. Only she never had in the past, he conceded reluctantly. And if he hadn’t caught her with Stefano he would have married her. His dirt-poor Sicilian background of traditional values had surfaced when he’d got her pregnant. He had been ready to buy into the whole dream. The wife, the child, the family hearth. And this tiny, fragile woman, who would only reach his heart now if she stood on literal tiptoes, had exploded the dream and destroyed his relationship with his brother.

He had wanted revenge so badly he could still taste it even now. He had come down to Oxfordshire intending to let revenge simply take its natural course. He emitted a humourless laugh. He hated her, but he craved the oblivion of her sweet body like a drug addict craved a fix. He hated her, but he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her. He hated the Jenningses for making him the weapon that had to hurt. He had no choice but to blow Milly’s cosy little fake world away. She had to take her own life back, and she couldn’t do that without him…

A slight, slanting smile eased the ferocious tension stamped on Gianni’s features. She was his. He cursed the rampant stirring in his loins. He had been in a state of near constant arousal ever since the airport. Only rigid self-discipline and cold intellect restrained him. For the foreseeable future, she was untouchable. He had waited three years; he could wait a little longer. The fiancé had to be seen off. How was Mr Square and Upwardly Mobile likely to react to the news that Milly wasn’t really the boss’s daughter?

Milly shifted in her sleep and turned over. The plait lay temptingly exposed on the pillow. Gianni moved forward, and before he even knew what he was doing he was unclasping the stiff black bow, loosening the strands, running his long fingers through her beautiful silky hair. His hands weren’t quite steady. Instantly he withdrew them, studied them broodingly, clenched them into defensive fists.

When she had her memory back and he had enjoyed her for a while, he would dump her again. But he would retain a lot of visiting privileges. Purely for his son’s benefit, of course. The cascade of half-unravelled wavy golden hair hung over the side of the bed like a lethal lure. It might be quite a while until he dumped her. So what? He asked himself. You couldn’t put a price on pleasure.

But how did he tell her the truth about herself in a way that didn’t make her hate him? How did you wrap up the fact that at heart she was a gold-digging, cheating tramp who had fooled him right to the bitter end? And if she got her memory back she was going to remember that she had run rings round him right from the minute she’d jumped out of that birthday cake. She was his one weakness, but he could afford to indulge himself just one more time. As long as he never let himself forget for a second what she was really like…

‘Angel…?’

Somebody was shaking her awake. Faith began to sit up, opening her eyes, only to freeze into immobility.

Gianni D’Angelo stood over her. So very tall, so exotically dark.

‘What did you call me?’ she mumbled, remembering everything, attempting to block it back out again until she felt better equipped to deal with it.

Faint colour scored his hard cheekbones. ‘Milly…I called you Milly.’

‘My name’s Faith,’ she told him flatly, refusing to consider his assurance that he had known her by that other name because such an astonishing claim raised questions about her past she could not yet bring herself to ask. ‘Why on earth did you bring me here?’

‘You needed time out.’

With a sudden start of dismay, Faith checked her watch. It was almost one. She began to scramble off the bed with alacrity. ‘I need to pick up Connor—’

‘Call Mrs Jennings. You should eat before you get back behind a steering wheel.’

Mrs Jennings? What an odd way to refer to her mother! Struggling to regain her equilibrium, Faith was even more disconcerted by the untidy cascade of hair now falling round her face. The clasp must have fallen off while she slept. Thrusting the waving mass back behind one small ear, she frowned in Gianni’s general direction. ‘Eat? I have to pick up Connor—’

He extended a mobile phone to her. ‘Ask Mrs Jennings to do it today. We need to talk.’

‘No, I—’

‘You can’t run away from this.’

You can’t run away from this. That blunt statement unnerved her. Her lower lip trembled, and then firmed. She twisted her golden head away and snatched in a shuddering breath. Once again Gianni D’Angelo had seen right through her. Her parents and Edward had always been content to accept what they saw on the surface.

And how was her fiancé likely to react to the sudden appearance of Connor’s natural father? Badly—probably very badly, Faith acknowledged dully. Edward was a very conservative man. And he had once admitted that the very fact he was the only man involved in Connor’s life had made it easier for him to accept her son.

The mobile phone was pressed into her tense fingers.

‘You think you can just tell me what to do—’ she began accusingly.

‘Right now, you’d seize on any excuse to walk out of here again!’

Reddening at the accuracy of that stab, Faith turned back reluctantly to look at Gianni D’Angelo.

And, like a slap in the face, she saw all the cool control she craved etched into the arrogant angle of his dark head and the steadiness of his burnished dark gaze. He had complete dominion over himself.

‘When you’ve made your call, we’ll have lunch.’

Her teeth ground together. She couldn’t hold back her hostility any longer. ‘I really don’t like you.’

Gianni stilled with one brown hand on the door. ‘I know… The Sleeping Beauty woke up to a kiss—’

‘She also woke up to a prince!’ Faith heard herself interrupt, and then she stiffened, disturbed by the speed of her own retaliation. She never argued with anybody. She was far better known as a peacemaker.

‘If I’d kissed you, you might have screamed assault…although possibly that’s only what you’d prefer me to believe.’ Gianni surveyed her, a sardonic slant to his expressive mouth. ‘I think your body remembers me better than your brain does.’

Faith was aghast at that suggestion. ‘How dare you?’

Gianni gave an exaggerated wince. ‘Tell me, how do you square the outraged prudish virgin act with the reality that you’re a single mother?’

Beneath his coolly enquiring gaze, Faith’s soft mouth opened and closed again. Colour flooded her complexion.

‘When something irritates the hell out of me, I usually mention it,’ Gianni shared, before he turned on his heel and left her alone.

In his wake, a combustible mix of anger and chagrin engulfed Faith. She punched out her home phone number with a stabbing finger. Her mother answered.

‘It’s Faith. I’m sorry, but I won’t be home for lunch…and I hate to ask you at such short notice but could you pick up Connor from nursery for me?’ Faith asked tautly.

‘Of course I can, darling,’ Davina Jennings responded instantly. ‘You sound flustered. Is the shop very busy or is Louise away? Never mind. I’d better get a move on if I’m to collect my grandson and still have lunch ready for your father!’

‘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.