Читать книгу The Unforgettable Husband - Michelle Reid - Страница 6

BLACK bow-tie hanging loose around his neck and the top two buttons on his snowy white dress shirt tugged open at his darkly tanned throat, André Visconte sat sprawled in the chair behind his desk, with his feet propped up on the top and the blunt-ended fingers of one beautifully shaped hand lightly clasping a squat crystal glass half full of his favourite whisky.

It was late and he was tired so his eyes were shut, the grooves around his thirty-four-year-old, life-toughened mouth seeming more harshly etched than usual. He should have gone straight home from the gala opening of a friend’s new downtown restaurant but instead he had come back here to his office. He was expecting a call from Paris and it seemed more sensible to wait for it here than at his home since the office was closer.

And anyway, home held no welcome for him any more.

Some bright spark somewhere had once made the classic remark that home was where the heart was. Well, André no longer believed he had a heart, so home, these days, tended to be any place he could lay his head. And, depending on where he was, that usually meant one of the plush city residences he possessed in most capitals of the world.

Not that he had used many of them recently, if you didn’t count his apartment right here in New York, of course. Though all of his homes were maintained to his expected high standards—just in case he decided to drop in.

Or in case Samantha did.

Samantha… The fingers around the whisky glass tightened fractionally. His tough mouth straightened into a line of such grim cynicism that if anyone had been there to see it happen, they would have been backing right off in alarm by now.

Because André Visconte wasn’t known for his good temper these days—hadn’t been known for it for twelve long months now.

Not since Samantha had walked out of his life never to be seen or heard from again. Nowadays, only a fool would dare to say her name out loud in his presence and, since fools were not suffered gladly in the Visconte empire, none ever said it.

But he couldn’t stop the cursed name from creeping into his own head now and then. And when it did, it was difficult to it to unravel the gamut of different emotions that came buzzing along with it. Pain was one of them, plus a dark, bloody anger aimed entirely at himself for letting her get away from him.

Then there were the moments of real guilt-ridden anguish to contend with, or the bouts of gut-wrenching concern as to what had become of her. And, to top it all off, there was a hard-to-take sense of personal bitterness in knowing that she could leave him that made him wish he had never met her in the first place!

But most of all there was an ache. An ache of such muscle-clenching proportions that sometimes he had to fight not to groan at the power of it.

Why—? Because he missed her. No matter what, no matter when, no matter why—sometimes he missed her so badly that he could barely cope with what missing her did to him.

Tonight had been like that. One of those all-too-rare moments when he had caught himself laughing quite easily—actually managing to enjoy himself! Then a beautiful woman with flame-red hair had walked past him. She had reminded him of Samantha and his mood had flipped over. Light to dark. Warm to cold. Laughter to lousy misery…

After that, it had been better to escape here and brood where no one could see him doing it. But, God, he hated her for making him feel like this.

Empty. The word was empty.

The glass went to his mouth, hard lips parting so he could attack the whisky as if it was his enemy. Then, with a sigh that came from somewhere deep down inside of him, he leaned further back into the soft leather chair and waited for the whisky to attack him back by burning Samantha’s name right out of his system.

It didn’t happen for, being the beautiful red-haired witch that she was, she held her ground and simply paid him back for trying to get rid of her by imprinting her image on the back of his eyelids, then smiling at him provocatively.

His gut wrenched. His loins stung. His heart began to pound. ‘Witch,’ he breathed.

Twelve months—twelve long, miserable months—with no word from her, no sign that she was even alive. She had, in effect, simply dropped off the face of the earth as if she had never lived on it.

Cruel, heartless—ruthless witch.

The phone on his desk suddenly burst into life. With a reluctance that suggested he might actually be enjoying sitting here wallowing in his own misery, André let go of the glass and, without even bothering to open his eyes, reached out to hook up the receiver with a couple of long fingers, then tucked it lazily beneath his chin.

‘Visconte,’ he announced, voice tinged with a seductive hint of a husky drawl even though it had meant to rasp.

Expecting to hear a barrage of French come back down the line at him, he was shocked to hear the crisp clean tones of his UK-based manager assailing his ears, instead of his man in Paris.

‘Nathan?’ He frowned. ‘What the hell—?’

Whatever Nathan Payne said to him then brought André alive as nothing else could. His eyes flicked open, revealing dark brown irises with a flash of fire. His hand snaked up to grab at the phone and his feet hit the floor with a resounding thud as he launched his lean body out of the chair.

‘What—?’ he raked out. ‘Where—?’ he barked. ‘When—?’

From the other side of the Atlantic, Nathan Payne began talking in quick, precise sentences, each one of which sent André paler until his satin gold tan had almost disappeared.

‘You’re sure it’s her?’ he asked, when his manager eventually fell into silence.

Confirmation had him sitting down again slowly—carefully, as though he needed to gauge each move he made precisely, in case he used up what was left of his suddenly depleted strength.

‘No, I’m sure you couldn’t,’ he responded to something Nathan said to him. The hand he’d lifted up to cover his eyes was trembling slightly. ‘How did it happen?’

Explanation had him raking up the whisky glass and swallowing its contents in one tense gulp. ‘And you saw this in a newspaper?’ He couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe any of it.

Samantha… His dark head wrenched to one side as a very familiar pain went slicing through him.

‘No!’ he ground out at whatever the other man had suggested. ‘Just watch her, but don’t, for God’s sake, do anything else!’ And suddenly he was on his feet again. ‘I’m on my way,’ he announced. ‘Just don’t so much as let her out of your sight until I get there!’

The phone hit its cradle with a resounding crash. The hard sound was still echoing around the room when he thrust his body into movement. Then he was grimly striding towards the door with his face still showing the kind of reeling shock that would have rendered most people immobile…

He was there again, Samantha noticed. Sitting at the same table he had been sitting at last night, and watching her in a kind of half surreptitious way that said he didn’t want her to know he was doing it.

Why, she had no idea.

She didn’t recognise him. His clean-shaven fair-skinned face sounded no chords in her memory to offer a hint that she might have known him once, in a different setting or another life maybe.

Another life.

Having to smother the desire to heave out a sigh, she turned away to begin making up the order for drinks Carla had just given her. With a deftness of hand she fed two glasses under the gin optic while the other hand hooked up two small bottles of tonic and neatly knocked off the clamp tops.

‘You do that like a professional,’ Carla remarked dryly, watching all of this from the other side of the bar.

Do I? Samantha mused as she placed the items down on Carla’s tray. Well, there’s something else that could belong to that other life I can’t remember. ‘Do you want draught beer or the bottled stuff?’

‘The bottled—are you feeling all right?’ Carla asked, frowning, because it wasn’t like Samantha not to rise to a bit of pleasant banter when she was given the chance to.

‘Just tired,’ she said, and limped off down the bar to get the two bottled beers from the chiller, reassured that her answer had some justification since neither she nor Carla should be working in the hotel lounge bar tonight. Officially, their job was looking after Reception. But the hotel was teetering on its very last legs. Business was poor, and the hotel was being run with the minimum of staff, which therefore meant that people had to chip in wherever they happened to be needed.

Like this week, for instance, when the two of them were doubling up shifts by running the bar in the evening and the reception during the day.

But that didn’t mean she was feeling so tired that she was imagining a pair of eyes burning into her every time she turned her back. Limping back down the bar with the two requested beers, she took a glance sideways and just caught the stranger’s eyes on her before he looked away.

‘The man sitting on his own,’ she murmured to Carla. ‘Any idea who he is?’

‘You mean the well-scrubbed, good-looking one in the Savile Row suit?’ she quizzed, adding at Samantha’s nod, ‘Nathan Payne. Room two-one-two, if his charge slips are to be believed. He booked in last night when Freddie was on duty. And here on business—which doesn’t surprise me, because I can’t believe a man like him would actually choose this place for a holiday.’

Her derision was clear, and Samantha didn’t dispute it. Though the Tremount Hotel’s setting was outstandingly good, sitting right on the edge of its own headland in a beautiful part of Devon, it had been let go so badly that Carla hadn’t been joking when she’d suggested the stranger would not choose it for a holiday. Few people did.

‘Rumour has it that he works for one of the huge hotel conglomerates,’ Carla went on. ‘The ones which buy up run-down monstrosities like this place and turn them into super-modern, ultra-select holiday complexes like the ones you see further down the coast.’

Was that what he was doing—just checking out the whole hotel in general, and not just watching her? Relief quivered through her. Her face relaxed. ‘Well, not before time, I suppose,’ she opined, feeling much better now she had a solid reason for the man’s presence here. ‘The old place could certainly do with a major face-lift.’

‘But at the expense of all our jobs?’ Carla quizzed. ‘The hotel will have to close to renovate, and where will that leave us?’

On that decidedly now sombre note, she picked up her tray and walked away, leaving Samantha alone with her words to chew upon. For what was she going to do if the hotel closed? The Tremount might be suffering from age and neglect, but it had thrown her a lifeline when she’d desperately needed one. She didn’t just work here, she also lived here. The Tremount was her home.

The stranger left quite early. Around nine o’clock he glanced at his watch, stood up and threw some money down on the table for Carla, then moved quickly out of the room. There was something very purposeful in the way he did it. As though he was going somewhere special and was running late.

A suspicion Freddie confirmed when he strolled into the lounge a few minutes later. ‘That guy from the Visconte Group left in a hurry,’ he remarked. ‘He strode out the hotel, gunned up his Porsche, then shot off up the driveway like a bat out of hell.’

‘Maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of spending another night sharing a bathroom with eight other guest rooms,’ Carla suggested. ‘No ensuites at the Tremount,’ she mocked. ‘Here, you learn to tough it out or run!’

‘If he was running, he went without paying his bill,’ Freddie said. ‘More like he was meeting someone,’ he decided. ‘The London train was due in Exeter around— Sam?’ he cut in suddenly. ‘Are you feeling all right? You’ve gone a bit pale.’

Had she? Funnily enough she felt quite pale—which was a very strange sensation in itself. It was the name, Visconte. For a brief moment there, she’d thought she knew it.

Which was a novelty in itself, because names never usually meant anything to her.

Names, faces, places, dates…

‘I’m fine,’ she said, and tossed out a smile for the benefit of the other two. ‘Are you here for your usual, Freddie?’ she asked, lightly passing off the moment.

But the name remained with her for the rest of the evening. And every so often she would think, Visconte, and find herself going off into a strange blank trance. A memory? she wondered. A brief flash from her past that had disappeared as quickly as it had come?

If it was, she couldn’t afford to let it go by without checking it out, she decided. And, since the Visconte name was linked with the stranger, she resolved to ask him about it at the first opportunity, because what other hope did she have of ever knowing who she was, unless she attempted to do it herself? With twelve long months behind her of waiting for someone else to do it for her, she had to start accepting that it just wasn’t going to happen.

Only last week the local paper had run yet another full-page spread on her plight, then pleaded for anyone who might recognise her to come forward. No one had. The police had finally come to the conclusion that she must have been alone in the world and on holiday here in Devon when the accident had happened. The car she had been driving was completely burned out—to the extent that they could only tell it had once been a red Alfa Romeo. They’d had no reports of a missing red Alfa Romeo. No reports of a woman gone missing driving a red Alfa Romeo.

Sometimes it felt as if she had died out there on that lonely road the night the petrol tanker had hit her, only to come back to life again many weeks later as a completely different human being.

But she wasn’t a different human being, she told herself firmly. She was simply a lost one who needed to find herself. If she hung onto nothing else then she had to hang on tight to that belief.

Eleven o’clock saw the lounge bar empty. Samantha rubbed her aching knee and finished tidying behind the bar. An hour later she was safely tucked up in bed, and by eight-thirty the next morning, after a restless night dreaming about dark demons and roaring dragons, both she and Carla were back on duty behind Reception, doing the job they were officially paid to do.

It was changeover day so the foyer was busy, but Samantha kept an eye out for Mr Payne, determined to speak to him if she was given the opportunity.

That opportunity arrived around lunch-time. The reception area had just cleared for the first time that morning, and only a few stragglers now hung around the foyer waiting for taxis to take them to the station. She and Carla were busy working out room allocations for the new guests that would be arriving throughout the afternoon when Samantha happened to glance up as the old-fashioned entrance doors begin to rotate and none other than Mr Payne strode in.

He paused just inside the foyer, and Samantha made the quick decision to take her chance while she had it. Murmuring, ‘Excuse me for a minute,’ to Carla, she opened the lift-top section in their workstation and stepped quickly through it—only to go still when she saw another man walk in and pause at Mr Payne’s side.

Both men were tall, both lean, both dressed in the kind of needle-sharp suits you wouldn’t find anywhere but at a top-notch tailors. But the newcomer was taller and a lot darker, and just that bit more…forbidding because of it, she observed with a cold little quiver that stopped her from approaching them.

As she watched, she saw his dark brown eyes make an impatient scan of their surroundings. There was a tension about him, a restlessness so severely contained that it flicked along his chiselled jawline as if he was clenching and unclenching his teeth behind his rather cold-looking mouth. Then the mouth suddenly twisted, and Samantha didn’t need to be clairvoyant to know what he was thinking right then.

The decor in here was a horrendous mix of pre-First World War splendour and 1960s grot. Originally built to grand Victorian specifications, the Tremount had been revamped in the 1960s, and everything tasteful had been pulled out or hidden behind sheets of flat plasterboard. Even the carpet on the floor was a gruesome spread of royal purple with large splashes of sunshine-gold to complete the horror. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the place that said grace and style; instead it said teak and vinyl rubbish, and even the rubbish had seen better days.

Much like herself, she likened wryly, absently rubbing her knee while watching his gaze go slashing right past her. Then it stopped, sharpened, and came swinging swiftly back again.

Their eyes locked. The hard line of his mouth slackened on a short, sharp intake of air. He looked horrified. And suddenly she didn’t like what was happening here. She didn’t like him, she realised, as a tight constriction completely closed her throat. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow. Even her heart stopped beating with a violent thump, then set going like a hammer drill against her right temple.

As if he could see it happen, his eyes flicked up to her temple. She saw him flinch—remembered the fine pink pucker of scar tissue there, and instinctively put up a hand to cover it.

The fact that she’d managed to move seemed to prompt him to do the same. He began walking straight towards her in a strange, slow, measured way that made her want to start backing. Sweat began to break out all over her. The room began to fade, tunnelling inwards in ever-decreasing circles until the only the two people left in the foyer seemed to be herself and him. And the closer he came, the more tight and airless the tunnel began to feel, until she was almost suffocating by the time he came to a halt two short feet away.

And he was big—too big. Too dark, too handsome, too—everything, she finished on a fine, tight shudder. Overpowering her with his presence, with that compelling look burning in his eyes.

No, she protested, though she had no idea what it was she was protesting against.

Maybe she’d said the word out loud, because he suddenly went quite pale, and his eyes were so dark she actually felt as if she was being drawn right into them.

Crazy, she told herself. Don’t be crazy.

‘Samantha,’ he breathed very thickly. ‘Oh, dear God…’

She fainted. With her name still sounding in her head, she simply closed her eyes and sank like a stone to the purple and gold carpet.