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CHAPTER TWO

IN ALL of the long days and weeks she had spent in pain in hospital, she hadn’t fainted. In all of the long, dreadfully frightening weeks and months which had accompanied her slow recovery, she had never fainted. Of all the things she had ever wished and hoped and prayed for during the last twelve empty months, it had been for someone to come in through those revolving doors and say her name to her.

Yet, when someone had done exactly that, she’d fainted.

Samantha came round thinking all of that, in a mad and bewildering jumble of confusion, to find herself lying on one of the reception sofas with Carla squatting beside her, urgently chafing one of her hands, and the sounds of other people talking in hushed voices just beyond her vision.

‘Are you all right?’ Carla said anxiously the moment she saw Samantha open her eyes.

‘He knows me,’ she whispered. ‘He knows who I am.’

‘I know,’ Carla murmured gently.

The stranger suddenly appeared over Carla’s shoulder. Still too big, still too dark, too—

‘I’m sorry,’ he rasped out. ‘Seeing you was such a shock that I just didn’t think before I acted.’ He stopped, swallowed tensely, then added. ‘Are you okay, cara?’

She didn’t answer. Her mind was too busy trying to grapple with the frightening fact that this man actually seemed to know her, while she looked at him and saw a total stranger! It wasn’t fair—it wasn’t! The doctors had suggested that a shock like this might be all that was needed to bring her memory back.

But it hadn’t. Sheer disappointment had her eyes fluttering shut again.

‘No.’ His thick voice pleaded roughly. ‘Samantha—don’t pass out again. I’m not here to—’

His hand touched her shoulder. Her senses went haywire, crawling through her body like scattering spiders and flinging her into a whirling mad panic that jolted her into a sitting position to violently thrust his hand away.

‘Don’t touch me…’ she gasped out in shuddering reaction. ‘I don’t know you. I don’t!’

There was a muttered expletive, then Mr Payne appeared. His fair-skinned face was lined with concern as he murmured something soothing in Italian to the other man. He answered in the same language then, quite suddenly, spun on his heel and sat down abruptly on a nearby chair, as if the strength had just been wrenched out of him. And only then did it occur to Samantha that if he did really know her then he too must be suffering from shock.

‘Here…’ Carla pushed a glass of water at her. ‘Drink some of this,’ she urged. ‘You look dreadful.’

The stranger’s head came up, shock-darkened eyes honing directly onto her own, and for a moment Samantha felt herself sinking into those blackened depths again, as if drawn there by something more powerful than logic.

Oh, God. Confused, she wrenched her gaze away, pushing the glass aside so she could cover her face with a hand while she at least attempted to get a hold of herself.

‘Is she all right?’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘Has that man upset her?’

Hearing the jumble of questions coming from all directions reminded her that there were other people present. ‘Get me away from this,’ she whispered to Carla.

‘Of course,’ Carla murmured understandingly, and straightened up before taking hold of Samantha’s arm to help her to stand. It was a well-timed offer of help, because the moment she tried to put any weight on her right leg the knee reacted with a crack of pain that made her gasp out loud.

‘I wondered when I saw you fall if that would happen.’ Carla frowned. ‘You hit your bad knee against the corner of the desk as you fainted,’ she explained, looking down at the place where Samantha’s uniform-straight navy blue skirt finished, just above the injury. ‘I hope you’ve not done it any further damage.’

Gritting her teeth and clinging to Carla, she began to limp across the reception area towards a door marked ‘Staff Only’.

The stranger came towering to his feet. ‘Where are you going?’ he said sharply, staring at her as though he was expecting her to make a sudden run for it.

Samantha smiled wanly at the prospect. She couldn’t run if she tried. ‘Staffroom,’ she said, then added very reluctantly, ‘You can come if you want.’

‘I have every intention of doing so,’ he replied, and moved to follow them—only to pause and turn to make a flashing inventory of the crowded foyer. ‘Are you the only two people running this place?’ he questioned.

American. His accent contained the deep velvet drawl of a cultured American, Samantha noticed, then began frowning in confusion, because he and Nathan Payne had been speaking in Italian to each other only a minute ago.

‘The manager is away on business today.’ Carla did the explaining. ‘I’ll just help Samantha in here, then I’ll come back and—’

‘No!’ Samantha protested, her hand closing convulsively over Carla’s. ‘Don’t leave me alone with him!’ she whispered shrilly, not caring if the stranger had heard what she’d said and was offended by it.

‘Okay,’ Carla said soothingly, but her expression was looking a little hunted. It was the busiest time of the week on Reception and both of them couldn’t just walk off duty.

‘Nathan.’ Even Samantha, in her state of shock, heard the voice of authority when it spoke like that. ‘Take over here,’ the stranger instructed—then, at Carla’s uncertain look, ‘Don’t worry. He knows what he’s doing. It’s his job to know. We are going in here, I presume?’ he then prompted smoothly, indicating the door next to the reception desk.

Samantha nodded, having to bite down on her bottom lip now because her knee was hurting so badly. So, leaning more heavily on Carla while trying hard not to show it, she limped slowly through the staffroom door with him following so close behind her that she could actually feel his breath on her neck.

She shuddered, wishing he would just back off a little and give her time to recover and think. She didn’t want him here. She didn’t like him. She didn’t want to like him. Which was just stupid when she remembered that this man would be the link to her past she had been praying for.

It was relief to sit down in one of the chairs. At Samantha’s mumbled request Carla hurried off to collect her painkillers from her room, and the stranger pulled up another chair right beside her own, then sank down heavily on it. It brought him too close. She could feel his body heat and smell his subtle, masculine scent. Fighting hard not to edge right away from him, she leaned forward slightly to rub at her throbbing knee.

‘How bad is it?’ he rasped.

‘Not too bad,’ she lied. In fact it was very painful. ‘I just need to rest it for a few minutes.’

‘I meant, how badly did you injure your knee in the accident?’ he grimly corrected her mistake.

‘You know about that?’ she responded in surprise.

‘How the hell else do you think I found you?’ he bit out angrily.

She flinched at his tone; he let out a sigh and suddenly sat forward to lean his elbows on his spread knees, bringing their heads disturbingly close.

‘Sorry.’ He sighed. ‘I didn’t mean to bite your head off.’

Samantha didn’t say anything, and after a moment he said more levelly, ‘Nathan was surveying a couple of properties around here. He saw the article about you in the local newspaper and recognised your photograph. He couldn’t believe it!’ he ground out. ‘Neither could I when he rang me in New York to—’ The words dried up, seeming to block in his throat so he had to swallow, and his hands clenched very tightly together between his spread thighs.

‘Who is Nathan?’ she asked huskily.

His head swivelled round to look at her, dark brown eyes lancing her a bitter hard look. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you asked me who I am?’ he suggested.

But oddly, even to herself, Samantha shook her head. She didn’t know why, but she just wasn’t ready to hear who he was yet.

‘This man…Nathan,’ she persisted instead. ‘He’s been staying here over the last few days to keep an eye on me, hasn’t he?’

He took her refusal to take him up on his challenge with a tensing of his jaw. He answered her question though. ‘Yes. After he rang me and told me about your accident and the—the—God—’ He choked, had to stop to swallow thickly, lifting a decidedly shaky hand to press at his mouth. ‘I don’t want to think about that,’ he muttered after a moment. ‘I can’t cope with thinking about that right now…’

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, accepting that if he had read the article the newspaper had run on her accident, then he had a right to feel this bad about it. It made horrendous reading.

But she didn’t accept the cruel way he lashed back at her. ‘For surviving when six other people didn’t?’

The harsh words sent her jerking back in her seat in reaction, her green eyes spitting ice as a cold anger suddenly took her over. ‘I feel no sense of pleasure in being the lucky one,’ she informed him frigidly. ‘Six people died. I survived. But if you think I’ve spent the last year counting my blessings at their expense then you couldn’t be more wrong!’

‘And I’ve spent the last year wishing you in hell,’ he sliced back at her. ‘Only to discover that you were already living there and I didn’t know a damned thing about it!’

True, so true, she grimly acknowledged, for living hell was exactly where she had been. But it made her wonder why he had wished her in hell. What had she done to him to make him wish something as cruel as that upon her?

Whatever the reason, his harsh words hurt, and did nothing to make her feel more comfortable with him. In fact she was scared.

Maybe he realised it, because he launched himself back to his feet, then just stood there literally pulsing with a sizzling tension. He was tall—over six feet—and the room suddenly grew smaller. He seemed to dwarf everything—and not just with his physical presence. The man possessed a raw kind of energy that seemed to be sucking up all the oxygen.

Then he let out a harsh sigh and muttered something that sounded like a curse beneath his breath. As he did so, some of the tension eased out of the atmosphere.

‘I’m not managing this very well,’ he admitted finally.

No, he wasn’t, Samantha agreed. But then, neither was she.

It was perhaps a good point for Carla to reappear. Glancing warily from one tense face to the other, she came to squat down in front of Samantha, then silently handed her the foil slide containing her prescription painkillers, followed by a second glass of water.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured, and flipped two of the tablets out into her palm, swallowed them down with the help of the water then, on a sigh, sat back in the chair and closed her eyes to wait for the tablets to take effect. The knee was throbbing quite badly, and hot to the touch, which told her she must have knocked it pretty hard.

But that was not the real reason why she was sitting with her eyes closed like this, she had to admit. It was really a means of escape from what was beginning to develop here—not that closing her eyes was going to make it all go away again, she acknowledged heavily.

He was here, and she was too acutely aware of him standing across the room like a dark shadow threatening to completely envelop her.

And on top of that it was just too quiet. Quiet enough for her to sense that he and Carla were swapping silent messages, which had to involve her, though she didn’t bother to open her eyes to see exactly what it was they were plotting.

As it was, she soon found out.

‘Sam…’ Carla’s voice sounded anxious to say the least ‘…do you think you will be all right now? Only I really must go and see if everything is okay out there…’

A clammy sense of dismay went trickling through her when she realised they had been silently plotting her isolation. She didn’t want to be left alone with him. But she also saw that there was no sense in putting off the inevitable. And besides, she understood Carla’s predicament. They were paid to do a job here, and this hotel had a poor enough reputation without the staff walking off duty.

So she gave a short nod of understanding, then forced herself to open her eyes and smile. ‘Thanks. I’ll be fine now.’

With another concerned scan of her pale face, then an even more concerned one of the man who was standing on the other side of the room, Carla stood up and, with a final glance at their two pale faces, left the two of them to it.

And the new silence was cloying.

Samantha didn’t move a single muscle and neither did he. His attention was fixed on the view outside the staffroom window which, since it looked directly onto the hotel kitchens, was not a pretty sight. She kept her eyes fixed on the empty water glass she was so very carefully turning in her hands.

‘What now?’ she asked when she could stand the tension no longer.

‘It’s truth time, I suppose,’ he said, sounding as reluctant about it as she felt.

Turning slowly to face her, he stood watching her for a few more tense seconds. Then he seemed to come to some kind of decision and strode over to sit himself down again—and gently reached for the glass.

His fingers brushed lightly across hers and a fine frisson set her pulse racing. Sliding the glass away, he further disturbed her by taking hold of one of her hands as he set the glass aside then turned back to her.

‘Look at me,’ he urged.

Her eyes lowered and fixed fiercely on their clasped hands; the command locked her teeth together. And for the life of her she couldn’t move a muscle. The frisson became a deep inner tremor that vibrated so strongly she knew he could feel it.

‘I know I’ve come as a shock, but you have to start facing this, Samantha…’ he told her quietly.

He was right, and she did. But she still didn’t want to.

‘So begin by at least looking at me while we talk…’

Oh, dear God, she thought and tried to swallow. It took every bit of courage she had in her to lift her eyes and look directly at him.

He’s so beautiful, was the first unbidden thought to filter through her like a lonely sigh. His neatly styled hair was straight and black; his skin was warmed by a tan that she’d seemed to know from the moment she’d set eyes on him was natural to him. Sleek black eyebrows, long black eyelashes, eyes the colour of dark bitter chocolate. A regular-shaped nose, she saw as her gaze drifted downward to pause at his firm but inherently sensual mouth. It was a strong face, a deeply attractive well-balanced face.

But it was still the face of a total stranger, she concluded.

A stranger who was about to insist he was no stranger and, indeed, she added frowningly to that, already he did not feel like a stranger, because his touch felt familiar. There was an intimacy in the way he was looking at her that told her that this man knew her only too well. Probably knew her better than she knew herself.

‘Samantha,’ he prompted. ‘You know your name is Samantha.’

Glad of the excuse to claim her hand back, she lifted her fingers to part the collar of her blouse, revealing the necklace she wore around her throat.

A necklace spelling out her name in gold lettering. Sweet but childish though it was. ‘It’s all I had left,’ she explained. ‘Everything else was lost in the fire.’

The eyes flashed again. ‘Were you burned?’ he asked harshly.

Her body became shrouded in a clammy coat of perspiration. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Someone dragged me out before the car blew.’ Then the trembling fingers left the necklace to quiver up to the small pink scar at her temple. ‘I injured my head,’ she said huskily, ‘my arm…’ she gave her right arm a tense little jerk ‘…and m-my right leg…’

His eyes dropped to her knee, where even the sensible, high-denier thickness of her stockings could not hide the scarring beneath. Then with a slow raising of his oh-too-sensual long black lashes, he looked at the scar at her temple. ‘Your lovely face…’ he breathed, lifting a hand up to touch the scar.

She flinched back in rejection. And for the first time in months of just being too glad to be alive to want to feel any kind of revulsion for the physically obvious damage she had survived with, Samantha experienced a terrible, terrible urge to hide herself away.

This man’s fault! She blamed him wretchedly. He was so obviously one of those very rare people who was blessed with physical perfection himself and no doubt surrounded himself with the same that she suddenly knew, knew that whoever he was and whatever he once had been to her, she no longer fitted into his selective criteria!

It was her turn to get up, move away, though she didn’t do it with the same grace he did! ‘Who are you?’ She turned to launch at him wretchedly.

He stood up. ‘My name is Visconte,’ he told her huskily. ‘André Visconte.’

There it was, ‘Visconte.’ She breathed the name softly. ‘Of the Visconte Hotel Group?’

He nodded slowly, watching her intently for a sign that the name might begin to mean something else to her. But other than the same odd sensation she’d experienced the night before, when Freddie had said the name, it still meant nothing.

‘And me?’ She then forced herself to whisper. ‘Who am I?’

His eyes went black again, nerve ends began to sing. ‘Your name is also Visconte,’ he informed her carefully, then extended very gently, ‘You are my wife…’

CHAPTER THREE

FACE white, body stiff, eyes pressed tightly shut, Samantha simply stood there waiting—waiting to discover if this latest shock, coming hard upon all the other shocks she had suffered today, would manage to crash through the thick wall closing off her memory.

I am Samantha Visconte, she silently chanted. His wife. This man’s wife. A man I must have loved enough to marry. A man who must have loved me enough to do the same. It should mean something. She stood there willing it to mean something!

But it didn’t. ‘No,’ she said on a release of pent-up air, and opened her eyes to look at him with the same perfectly blank expression. ‘The name means nothing to me.’

She might as well have slapped him. He looked away, then sat down, his lean body hunching over again as he dipped his dark head and pressed his elbows into his spread knees—but not before Samantha had seen the flash of pain in his eyes and realised that her ill-chosen words had managed to hurt him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t mean it to come out sounding so…’

‘Flat?’ he incised when she hesitated.

She ran her dry tongue around her even drier lips. ‘Y-you don’t understand.’ She pushed out an unsteady explanation. ‘The doctors have been suggesting to me for months that a shock meeting like this might be all that was needed to jolt me into…’

‘I need a drink,’ he cut in, then stood up and began striding quickly for the door.

Samantha watched him go—relieved he was going because she needed time alone to try to come to terms with all of this. But it didn’t stop her gaze from following him, eyes feeding on his tall, lean framework as if she still couldn’t quite believe that he was real.

Maybe he wasn’t, she then told herself with a rueful little smile that mocked the turmoil her mind was in. Maybe this was going to turn out to be just another nightmare in a long line of nightmares where tall dark strangers visited her and claimed to know who she was.

‘Have we been married long?’

Why she stopped him at the door when she’d been glad he was going, she didn’t know. But the question blurted out anyway, bringing him to a halt with his hand on the door handle, and stopping her breath as she waited for him to turn.

‘Two years,’ he replied and there was a strangeness about his voice that bothered her slightly. ‘It will be our second wedding anniversary in two days’ time,’ he tagged on—then left the room.

Staring at the closed door through which he had disappeared, Samantha found herself incapable of feeling anything at all now, as a different kind of numbness overcame her.

Two days, she was thinking. Which made it the twelfth. They hadn’t even celebrated their first wedding anniversary together.

Her accident had occurred on the twelfth. Where had she been going on her first wedding anniversary? Had she been rushing back to be with him when the accident had happened? Had that been why she’d—?

No. She mustn’t allow herself to think like that. The police had assured her it had not been her fault. A petrol tanker had jackknifed on the wet road and ploughed into three other cars besides her own before it had burst into a ball of fire. She had been lucky because the tanker had hit her car first then left it behind, a twisted wreck as it careered on. The people in the cars behind her hadn’t stood a chance because they’d caught the brunt of the explosion when everything had gone up. Other drivers had had time to pull Samantha free before her car had joined in the inferno. But her body had had to pay the price for the urgency with which they had got her out. Her head, already split and bleeding from the impact, had luckily rendered her unconscious, but they had told her the man who had pulled her free had had no choice but to wrench her crushed knee through splintered metal if he was to get her clear in time. And her arm, already fractured in three places, had been made worse because it had been the only limb the man had been able to use to tug her out.

The arm had healed now, thankfully. And the knee was getting stronger every day with the help of a lot of physiotherapy. But the scar on her face was a reminder she saw every time she looked into a mirror.

And why was she hashing over all of this right now, when she had far more important things to think about? It was crazy!

So what’s new? She mocked herself, then with a sigh sat back down again.

She hadn’t even considered yet whether André Visconte was lying or not, she realised. Though why someone like him would want to claim someone in her physical and psychological state unless he felt duty-bound to answer the question for her.

Because no one in their right mind would.

No one had for twelve long months. So why hadn’t he found her before now?

He said he’d wished her in hell, she remembered. Did that mean that their marriage had already been over before their first wedding anniversary? Was that why he hadn’t bothered to look for her? And had he only done so now because someone had recognised her in that newspaper as the woman who was his wife?

Agitation began to rise. Her head began to throb, bringing her fingers up to rub at her temple. I want to remember. Please let me remember! she pleaded silently. He’d said something about being in New York. Was that where he lived? Was that where they’d met? Yet her accent was so obviously English that even she—who had learned to question everything about herself over the last twelve, empty months—had not once questioned her nationality.

Had they met here in England? Did they have a home in this area? Was he wealthy enough to own homes in two places? Of course he was wealthy enough, she told herself crossly. He owned a string of prestigious hotels. He looked wealthy. His clothes positively shrieked of wealth.

So what did that make her? A wealthy woman in her own right for her to have moved in the same social circles as he?

She didn’t feel wealthy. She felt poor—impoverished, in fact.

Impoverished from the inside, never mind the outer evidence, with her sensible flat-heeled black leather shoes that had been bought for comfort and practicality rather than because she could really afford them. For months her clothes had been charitable handouts, ill-fitting, drab-looking garments other people no longer wanted to wear but which had been good enough for an impoverished woman who had lost everything including her mind! It had only been since she’d landed this job here that she had been able to afford to replace them with something more respectable—cheap, chain store stuff, but at least they were new and belonged to her—only to her.

What did Visconte see when he looked at this woman he claimed was his wife?

Getting up, she went to stand by the tarnished old mirror that hung on the staffroom wall. If she ignored the scar at her temple, the reflection told her that she was quite passably attractive. The combination of long red wavy hair teamed with creamy white skin must have once looked quite startling—especially before too many long months of constant strain had hollowed out her cheeks and put dark bruises under her eyes. But some inner sense that hadn’t quite been blanked off with the rest of her memory told her she had always been slender, and the physiotherapists had been impressed with what they’d called her ‘athletic muscle structure’.

‘Could have been a dancer,’ one of them had said in a wry, teasing way meant to offset the agony he’d been putting her through as he’d manipulated her injured knee. ‘Your muscles are strong, but supple with it.’

Supple, slender dancer worthy of a second look once upon a time. Not any more, though, she accepted. She thought of the stranger and how physically perfect he was, and wanted to sit down and cry.

I don’t want this, she thought on a sudden surge of panic. I don’t want any of it!

He can’t want me. How can he want me? If I am his wife why has it taken him twelve months to find me? If he’d loved me wouldn’t a man like him have been scouring the whole countryside looking for me?

I would have done for him, she acknowledged with an odd pain that said her feelings for him were not entirely indifferent, no matter what her brain was refusing to uncover.

‘Oh, God.’ She dropped back into the chair to bury her face in her hands as the throbbing in her head became unbearable.

Pull yourself together! she tried to tell herself. You have to pull yourself together and start thinking about what happens next, before—

The door came open. He stepped inside and closed it again, his eyes narrowing on the way she quickly lifted her face from her hands.

His jacket had gone; that was the first totally incomprehensible thing her eyes focused on. The dark silk tie with the slender knot had been tugged down a little and the top button of his shirt was undone, as if he’d found the constriction of his clothes annoying and needed to feel fresh air around that taut tanned throat.

Her mind did a dizzy whirl on a hot, slick spurt of sudden sensual awareness. ‘Here…’ He was walking towards her with a glass of something golden in his hand. ‘I think you need one of these as much as I do.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t, not on top of the painkillers—thank you all the same.’

If nothing else, the remark stopped him, mere inches away from touching her. She didn’t want him to touch her—why, again she didn’t know. Except—

Stranger. The word kept on playing itself over and over like some dreadful, dreadful warning. This man who said he was her husband was a total stranger to her. And the worst of it was she kept on getting this weird idea that him being a stranger to her was not a new feeling.

He discarded the glass, then stood in front of her with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. He seemed to be waiting for something, but Samantha didn’t know what, so she looked at the garish carpet between their feet and waited for whatever was supposed to come next.

What could come next? she then thought tensely. There were questions to ask. Things to know. This was the beginning of her problems, not the end of them.

‘How’s the knee?’

‘What—?’ She blinked up at him, then away again. ‘Oh.’ A hand automatically went down to touch the knee. ‘Better now, thank you.’

Silence. Her nerves began to fray. Teeth gritted together behind clenched lips. God, she wished he would just do something! Say something cruel and trite like, Well, nice to have seen you again, sorry you don’t remember me, but I have to go now!

She wished he would pull her up into his big arms and hold her, hold her tightly, until all these terrible feelings of confusion and fear went away!

He released a sigh. It sounded raw. She glanced at him warily. He bit out harshly, ‘This place is the pits!’

He was right and it was. Small and shabby and way, way beneath his dignity. ‘I l-love this place.’ She heard herself whisper. ‘It gave me a home and a life when I no longer had either.’

Her words sent his face white again—maybe he thought she was taking a shot at him. He threw himself back into the chair beside her—close to her again, his shoulder only a hair’s breadth away from rubbing against her shoulder again.

Move away from me, she wanted to say.

‘Listen,’ he said. And she could feel him fighting something, fighting it so fiercely that his tension straightened her spine and held it so stiff it tingled like a live wire. ‘We need to get away from here,’ he gritted. ‘Find more—private surroundings where we can—relax—’

Even he made the word sound dubious. For who could relax in a situation like this? She certainly couldn’t.

‘Talk,’ he went on. ‘Have time for you to ask the kind of questions I know you must be burning to ask, and for me to do the same.’

He looked at her for a reaction. Samantha stared straight ahead.

‘We can do that better at my own hotel in Exeter than we can here,’ he suggested.

‘Your hotel,’ she repeated, remembering the big, new hotel that had opened its doors only last year.

‘Will you come?’

‘I…’ She wasn’t at all sure about that. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go anywhere with him, or leave what had become over the last year the only place where she felt safe and secure in her bewildered little world.

‘It’s either you come with me or I move in here,’ he declared, and so flatly that she didn’t for one moment think he was bluffing. ‘I would prefer it to be the other way round simply because my place is about a hundred times more comfortable than this. But—’ The pause brought her eyes up to look warily into his. It was what he had been aiming for. The chocolate-brown turned to cold black marble slabs of grim determination. ‘I am not letting you out of my sight again—ever—do you understand that?’