The Sicilian's Mistress

But, in a state of petrified paralysis, Faith wasn’t capable of listening. She started to shake, back away, her entire attention magnetically pinned to him, absorbing every aspect of his appearance in terrifyingly minute detail. His smoothly cropped but luxuriant black hair. His fabulous cheekbones. His classic nose. His perfectly modelled mouth. And the devastating strength of purpose dauntingly etched into every feature.

His charcoal-grey suit just screamed designer style and expense, moulding broad shoulders as straight as axe-handles, accentuating the lithe flow of his lean, tightly muscled all-male body. ‘P-please…’ she stammered sickly.

‘Per meraviglia!’ Gianni D’Angelo countered rawly. ‘Since when were you a bag of nerves on the constant brink of hysteria? All right, I’ll just give you the proof that we have had what you might call a prior acquaintance.’

‘I don’t want to have had a prior acquaintance with you!’ Faith exclaimed with stricken honesty. ‘I want you to go away and leave me alone!’

He withdrew something from the inside pocket of his beautifully tailored jacket and extended it to her.

Faith stared, but wouldn’t move forward to reach for the item, which appeared to be a photograph.

‘This is you just over three years ago,’ he breathed in a gritty undertone. ‘And if you had your memory right now, we’d be having a major fight.’

‘A m-major fight…’ Faith parroted weakly.

‘I crept up on you with the camera. You were furious. You made me promise to destroy the photo. I said I would. I lied. I’m afraid it’s the only photo of you I have left.’ Stooping with athletic ease, he tossed the glossy snap down on the pitted tiled floor like a statement.

It skimmed to a halt about two feet from her. Faith stared down at the snap where it lay. Her eyes opened impossibly wide. She saw a slim, bare-breasted blonde semi-submerged in bubbles in a giant bath. She saw a slim, bare-breasted blonde with her face, her eyes, her mouth…her breasts. She didn’t want that brazen hussy to be her! Shock rolled over her like a tidal wave.

‘Keeping it was kind of a guy thing,’ Gianni admitted, almost roughly.

A strangled moan of denial slowly hissed from Faith’s rigidly compressed lips. Her head swam, the photo spinning out of focus, her legs turning hollow. And then the great well of darkness behind her eyelids sucked her down frighteningly fast into a faint.

Gianni caught her before she hit the floor in a crumpled heap and swore vehemently.

CHAPTER TWO

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.’