The Sicilian's Mistress

‘No.’ Faith braced her slim shoulders, a sudden powerful need to regain control of the situation driving her. ‘I don’t need to put myself through this if I don’t want to. I don’t need to listen to you—’

Gianni murmured, ‘I’m afraid you do…’

‘No, I don’t. I just want you to go away and leave me alone,’ Faith admitted truthfully, suppressing the little inner voice that warned her that that was craven and short-sighted. For here it finally was, the opportunity she had once yearned for: the chance to knock a window, however small, into that terrible wall that closed her out from her own memory. Yet because she didn’t know, indeed strongly feared what she might glimpse through that window, she was rejecting the chance.

Gianni D’Angelo surveyed her with disturbing intensity, brilliant eyes semi-screened by his lush lashes to a glimmer of gold. ‘That’s not possible. You asked me why I was here. So I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple. When you disappeared out of my life, you were pregnant with my child…’

A roaring sounded in Faith’s ears. Her lips parted. She stared back at him in horror as that cosy little world he had referred to with such perceptible scorn lurched and tilted dangerously on its axis.

‘Connor is my son,’ Gianni spelt out levelly.

The very floor under Faith’s feet seemed to shift. Her eyes were blank with shock.

As she swayed, Gianni strode forward. Curving a powerful arm to her spine to steady her, he took her out of the conservatory and back through the hall. ‘No, don’t pass out on me again. Let’s get out of this dump. We both need some fresh air.’

The winter sunlight that engulfed her at the front of the house seemed impossibly bright. She blinked and shifted her aching head. ‘No, not Connor…it’s not possible…not you!’

Ignoring those objections, Gianni guided her over to a worn bench and settled her down on it with surprisingly gentle hands. He hunkered down in front of her and reached for her trembling fingers, enclosing them firmly in his. ‘There is no easy way to tell you these things. I’m working really hard to keep the shocks to the minimum.’

That one shock had temporarily left her bereft of the ability to even respond. And yet he could call that one bombshell keeping the shocks to the “minimum”? Dear God, what worse could he tell her than he had already told her? Her face was pale as parchment. ‘My head hurts,’ she mumbled, like a child seeking sympathy in an effort to ward off punishment for some offence.

Gianni’s hands tightened fiercely on hers. ‘I’m sorry, but I had to tell you. Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think I’ve spent three endless years trying to trace you both?’ he demanded emotively.

Faith focused on him numbly. The father of her child. Why hadn’t that possibility occurred to her sooner? But she knew why, didn’t she? Connor might as well have sprung into being without benefit of any male input whatsoever.

Once she had been frantic to know who had fathered her child, but when she had admitted that need to her parents they had gone all quiet and looked at each other uncomfortably. And when she had questioned their attitude to what seemed to her an absolutely crucial question that had to be answered, she had recognised what they didn’t want to put into words.

They were afraid that she had been promiscuous, that she might not even know for sure who had actually got her pregnant. And she had been very upset to realise that her parents could harbour such sordid suspicions about a life she could no longer remember.

‘The father of my baby might love me…might be looking for me right now!’ she had sobbed in distraught self-defence.

‘If he loved you, why were you on your own?’

‘If you disappeared, why hasn’t he been in touch with the police?’

‘And why hasn’t he come here looking for you? Surely he would at least have known where your parents lived? Even though you hadn’t been in touch with us recently, wouldn’t he have arrived here to check us out as a last resort?’

Faced with those unanswerable questions, Faith had finally let go of the idea that she might have conceived her baby in a caring relationship. And from that moment on she had begun suppressing her own curiosity, shrinking from the idea that Connor might be the result of some casual sexual encounter. Yet those suspicions had only fronted worse fears, she conceded now, a hysterical laugh lodging like a giant stone in her throat. These days you read so many horror stories about the level penniless and homeless teenagers could be reduced to just to survive…

‘Milly…’ Gianni tugged her upright.

‘That’s n-not my name,’ she stated through chattering teeth.

He raised his hands to capture her taut cheekbones and she shivered because he was so very close. ‘That’s the name I knew you by,’ he murmured softly.

‘Please let go of me…’

‘You’re shaking like a jerry-built building in an earthquake,’ Gianni countered drily.

She realised that she was. Involuntarily, she braced her hands on his chest. Instantly the heat of him sprang out at her and she swiftly removed her hands again, almost off-balancing in her eagerness to put some distance between them. But the distinctive scent of him still flared in her nostrils. Clean, warm, intrinsically male and somehow earthy in a way Edward was not. Edward always smelt of soap. Oh, my God, Edward, a voice screamed inside her pounding head.

Another moan was dredged from her. She covered her distraught face with trembling hands in growing desperation. Connor, whom she loved beyond life itself. Connor’s father was here to stake a claim in his son’s life. What else could he be here for? Why else had he searched for them?

‘Let me tell you something…’ Gianni breathed in a charged undertone that reeked of menace but somehow didn’t frighten her. ‘Three years without me has turned you into a basket case! I’m taking you back to my hotel and getting a doctor to look you over!’

By sheer force of will he got her down the path and out onto the pavement. She wasn’t capable of matching the speed of his reactions, but she dimly registered that what he thought he acted on simultaneously, with terrifying decisiveness. She gawped at the sight of the long silver limousine waiting, not to mention the chauffeur surging round the bonnet as if he was running a race to get the passenger door open in time.

‘Your hotel…?’ she repeated belatedly, her brain functioning only in tiny, cripplingly slow bursts of activity. ‘I can’t go to your hotel!’

Gianni ducked her head down as carefully as an officer of the law tucking a suspect into a police car and settled her onto the rich leather-backed seat. He swung in beside her, forcing her to move deeper into the opulent car, and a split second later the door slammed on them both.

‘I’m not going anywhere with you!’ Faith protested frantically. ‘I’ve got to get back to the shop—’

‘I’m sure your partner will manage without you for a couple of hours.’

‘I have to pick up Connor from the nursery…no, I don’t…I forgot,’ she lied jerkily. ‘The kids are out on a trip today and they won’t be back until—’

Gianni subjected her to a derisive appraisal. ‘Wise up,’ he breathed in cool interruption. ‘You can’t hide Connor or keep him from me. When I want to meet my son, I will, but I’m unlikely to stage that meeting when you’re on the edge of hysteria.’

He had seen right through her, and that terrified her. ‘I’m not on the edge of hysteria…my car…the house…it wasn’t locked up—’

Gianni held up the keys. ‘I pulled the door shut behind us. If you give me your car keys, your car will be picked up and driven over to the hotel. You’re in no condition to drive.’

Faith surveyed him with huge haunted eyes. She passed over her car keys. He was like a tank, rolling over her to crush her deeper and deeper into the dust. And so cold, so very, very cold, she sensed with a shiver. He had tried to calm her, gripped her hands, made an effort to show that he understood why she was so distressed. But none of that had worked. Why? There was no human warmth in him. His brilliant, beautiful dark eyes now chilled her to ice.

Connor’s eyes were lighter in shade, but his skin always had that same golden tint even in winter, she reflected numbly. Maybe he was lying about Connor being his child! Even as her head pounded unmercifully into what felt like the onset of a migraine attack she discarded that faint hope. Gianni D’Angelo wouldn’t be wasting his time tracking down a child he didn’t know to be his.

Stray, unconnected thoughts kept on hitting her from all directions. She had shared his bed. She shifted on the seat, totally unable to look at him any more. She had bathed in his bath. It had to have been his bath. Nothing would convince her that she had ever been in the bracket of owning so luxurious a bath. But he had avoided the usual word ‘relationship’ to describe their former intimacy. ‘A certain bond’. That was the phrase he had used. Such an odd choice to describe their…their what?

Not an affair, not a relationship? Oh, dear heaven, had she been a one-night stand? Or worse? And she knew what was worse. No, no. She discarded that melodramatic suspicion. If she’d been a hooker, he would hardly be so sure her son was his. Dear heaven, what was she thinking? It was as if her brain had just been unhinged, torn open to let all her most deep-seated anxieties flood out.

In silence, Gianni reached into the built-in bar and withdrew a glass. He poured another brandy and settled it meaningfully into her trembling fingers.

Had she drunk a lot when he knew her? Been a real boozer with a strong head? She raised the glass to her lips, the rim rattling against her teeth. The nightmare just went on and on. What did he want from her? She was too terrified to ask, was in a state of complete panic, incapable of rational dialogue.

She didn’t even notice where the limo had been going until he helped her out of the car. It was a big country house hotel about three miles out of town. Faith had dined there on her twenty-sixth birthday. Even her father, who liked to make a show of sophistication, had winced at the cost of that meal.

‘I don’t want to go in here…just take me home,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m not feeling very well.’

‘You can lie down for a while,’ Gianni assured her. ‘Get your head together.’

‘You’re not listening to me—’

‘You’re not saying anything I want to hear.’

‘Did I ever?’ she heard herself whisper as he pressed her into the lift and the doors slid shut on them.

His superb bone structure tautened. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said flatly.