The Sicilian's Mistress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well?’ he prodded with unconcealed impatience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dio!’ Gianni exclaimed in shaken interruption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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