The Unforgettable Husband

The glass went to his mouth, hard lips parting so he could attack the whisky as if it was his enemy. Then, with a sigh that came from somewhere deep down inside of him, he leaned further back into the soft leather chair and waited for the whisky to attack him back by burning Samantha’s name right out of his system.

It didn’t happen for, being the beautiful red-haired witch that she was, she held her ground and simply paid him back for trying to get rid of her by imprinting her image on the back of his eyelids, then smiling at him provocatively.

His gut wrenched. His loins stung. His heart began to pound. ‘Witch,’ he breathed.

Twelve months—twelve long, miserable months—with no word from her, no sign that she was even alive. She had, in effect, simply dropped off the face of the earth as if she had never lived on it.

Cruel, heartless—ruthless witch.

The phone on his desk suddenly burst into life. With a reluctance that suggested he might actually be enjoying sitting here wallowing in his own misery, André let go of the glass and, without even bothering to open his eyes, reached out to hook up the receiver with a couple of long fingers, then tucked it lazily beneath his chin.

‘Visconte,’ he announced, voice tinged with a seductive hint of a husky drawl even though it had meant to rasp.

Expecting to hear a barrage of French come back down the line at him, he was shocked to hear the crisp clean tones of his UK-based manager assailing his ears, instead of his man in Paris.

‘Nathan?’ He frowned. ‘What the hell—?’

Whatever Nathan Payne said to him then brought André alive as nothing else could. His eyes flicked open, revealing dark brown irises with a flash of fire. His hand snaked up to grab at the phone and his feet hit the floor with a resounding thud as he launched his lean body out of the chair.

‘What—?’ he raked out. ‘Where—?’ he barked. ‘When—?’

From the other side of the Atlantic, Nathan Payne began talking in quick, precise sentences, each one of which sent André paler until his satin gold tan had almost disappeared.

‘You’re sure it’s her?’ he asked, when his manager eventually fell into silence.

Confirmation had him sitting down again slowly—carefully, as though he needed to gauge each move he made precisely, in case he used up what was left of his suddenly depleted strength.

‘No, I’m sure you couldn’t,’ he responded to something Nathan said to him. The hand he’d lifted up to cover his eyes was trembling slightly. ‘How did it happen?’

Explanation had him raking up the whisky glass and swallowing its contents in one tense gulp. ‘And you saw this in a newspaper?’ He couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe any of it.

Samantha… His dark head wrenched to one side as a very familiar pain went slicing through him.

‘No!’ he ground out at whatever the other man had suggested. ‘Just watch her, but don’t, for God’s sake, do anything else!’ And suddenly he was on his feet again. ‘I’m on my way,’ he announced. ‘Just don’t so much as let her out of your sight until I get there!’

The phone hit its cradle with a resounding crash. The hard sound was still echoing around the room when he thrust his body into movement. Then he was grimly striding towards the door with his face still showing the kind of reeling shock that would have rendered most people immobile…

He was there again, Samantha noticed. Sitting at the same table he had been sitting at last night, and watching her in a kind of half surreptitious way that said he didn’t want her to know he was doing it.

Why, she had no idea.

She didn’t recognise him. His clean-shaven fair-skinned face sounded no chords in her memory to offer a hint that she might have known him once, in a different setting or another life maybe.

Another life.

Having to smother the desire to heave out a sigh, she turned away to begin making up the order for drinks Carla had just given her. With a deftness of hand she fed two glasses under the gin optic while the other hand hooked up two small bottles of tonic and neatly knocked off the clamp tops.

‘You do that like a professional,’ Carla remarked dryly, watching all of this from the other side of the bar.

Do I? Samantha mused as she placed the items down on Carla’s tray. Well, there’s something else that could belong to that other life I can’t remember. ‘Do you want draught beer or the bottled stuff?’

‘The bottled—are you feeling all right?’ Carla asked, frowning, because it wasn’t like Samantha not to rise to a bit of pleasant banter when she was given the chance to.

‘Just tired,’ she said, and limped off down the bar to get the two bottled beers from the chiller, reassured that her answer had some justification since neither she nor Carla should be working in the hotel lounge bar tonight. Officially, their job was looking after Reception. But the hotel was teetering on its very last legs. Business was poor, and the hotel was being run with the minimum of staff, which therefore meant that people had to chip in wherever they happened to be needed.

Like this week, for instance, when the two of them were doubling up shifts by running the bar in the evening and the reception during the day.

But that didn’t mean she was feeling so tired that she was imagining a pair of eyes burning into her every time she turned her back. Limping back down the bar with the two requested beers, she took a glance sideways and just caught the stranger’s eyes on her before he looked away.

‘The man sitting on his own,’ she murmured to Carla. ‘Any idea who he is?’

‘You mean the well-scrubbed, good-looking one in the Savile Row suit?’ she quizzed, adding at Samantha’s nod, ‘Nathan Payne. Room two-one-two, if his charge slips are to be believed. He booked in last night when Freddie was on duty. And here on business—which doesn’t surprise me, because I can’t believe a man like him would actually choose this place for a holiday.’

Her derision was clear, and Samantha didn’t dispute it. Though the Tremount Hotel’s setting was outstandingly good, sitting right on the edge of its own headland in a beautiful part of Devon, it had been let go so badly that Carla hadn’t been joking when she’d suggested the stranger would not choose it for a holiday. Few people did.

‘Rumour has it that he works for one of the huge hotel conglomerates,’ Carla went on. ‘The ones which buy up run-down monstrosities like this place and turn them into super-modern, ultra-select holiday complexes like the ones you see further down the coast.’

Was that what he was doing—just checking out the whole hotel in general, and not just watching her? Relief quivered through her. Her face relaxed. ‘Well, not before time, I suppose,’ she opined, feeling much better now she had a solid reason for the man’s presence here. ‘The old place could certainly do with a major face-lift.’

‘But at the expense of all our jobs?’ Carla quizzed. ‘The hotel will have to close to renovate, and where will that leave us?’

On that decidedly now sombre note, she picked up her tray and walked away, leaving Samantha alone with her words to chew upon. For what was she going to do if the hotel closed? The Tremount might be suffering from age and neglect, but it had thrown her a lifeline when she’d desperately needed one. She didn’t just work here, she also lived here. The Tremount was her home.

The stranger left quite early. Around nine o’clock he glanced at his watch, stood up and threw some money down on the table for Carla, then moved quickly out of the room. There was something very purposeful in the way he did it. As though he was going somewhere special and was running late.

A suspicion Freddie confirmed when he strolled into the lounge a few minutes later. ‘That guy from the Visconte Group left in a hurry,’ he remarked. ‘He strode out the hotel, gunned up his Porsche, then shot off up the driveway like a bat out of hell.’

‘Maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of spending another night sharing a bathroom with eight other guest rooms,’ Carla suggested. ‘No ensuites at the Tremount,’ she mocked. ‘Here, you learn to tough it out or run!’

‘If he was running, he went without paying his bill,’ Freddie said. ‘More like he was meeting someone,’ he decided. ‘The London train was due in Exeter around— Sam?’ he cut in suddenly. ‘Are you feeling all right? You’ve gone a bit pale.’

Had she? Funnily enough she felt quite pale—which was a very strange sensation in itself. It was the name, Visconte. For a brief moment there, she’d thought she knew it.

Which was a novelty in itself, because names never usually meant anything to her.

Names, faces, places, dates…

‘I’m fine,’ she said, and tossed out a smile for the benefit of the other two. ‘Are you here for your usual, Freddie?’ she asked, lightly passing off the moment.

But the name remained with her for the rest of the evening. And every so often she would think, Visconte, and find herself going off into a strange blank trance. A memory? she wondered. A brief flash from her past that had disappeared as quickly as it had come?

If it was, she couldn’t afford to let it go by without checking it out, she decided. And, since the Visconte name was linked with the stranger, she resolved to ask him about it at the first opportunity, because what other hope did she have of ever knowing who she was, unless she attempted to do it herself? With twelve long months behind her of waiting for someone else to do it for her, she had to start accepting that it just wasn’t going to happen.

Only last week the local paper had run yet another full-page spread on her plight, then pleaded for anyone who might recognise her to come forward. No one had. The police had finally come to the conclusion that she must have been alone in the world and on holiday here in Devon when the accident had happened. The car she had been driving was completely burned out—to the extent that they could only tell it had once been a red Alfa Romeo. They’d had no reports of a missing red Alfa Romeo. No reports of a woman gone missing driving a red Alfa Romeo.

Sometimes it felt as if she had died out there on that lonely road the night the petrol tanker had hit her, only to come back to life again many weeks later as a completely different human being.

But she wasn’t a different human being, she told herself firmly. She was simply a lost one who needed to find herself. If she hung onto nothing else then she had to hang on tight to that belief.