The Unforgettable Husband

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?