Читать книгу The Unforgettable Husband - Michelle Reid - Страница 9

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.