Faith frowned in complete confusion. ‘Why?’
His stunning eyes veiling, Gianni pushed away his plate and lounged back fluidly in his chair to study her. ‘I talked to a psychologist before I came down here.’
‘A psychologist?’ Disconcerted pink surged up beneath her skin at that admission. The embarrassed distaste with which her parents had regarded all such personnel had left its mark on her.
‘It was his view that wherever possible you should only be expected to deal with one thing at a time. That’s why we’re concentrating on Connor,’ Gianni explained, with the slow quiet diction of someone dealing with a child on the brink of a tantrum. ‘At this moment, that’s enough for you to handle.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Faith muttered unevenly. ‘You are telling me that you are not prepared to—’
‘Muddy the water and confuse you with what is currently extraneous information,’ Gianni confirmed, watching her eyes darken and flare with incredulous anger.
Abruptly thrusting back her chair, Faith rose to her feet. ‘Who the heck do you think you are to tell me that?’
‘Sit down and finish your meal,’ Gianni drawled.
Faith trembled. ‘I have the right to know what role I played in your life. That is not extraneous information!’
‘I think it is. I want to talk about my son because I’ve waited three years to find him and now I would very much like to meet him.’ Gianni’s measured gaze challenged her.
‘You’re not meeting Connor until you tell me what I need to know!’ Faith’s head was starting to pound, not least because a temper she had never known she had was tightening its grip on her, no matter how hard she strove to contain it. ‘What was I to you? A one-night stand? A hooker?’ she slung furiously. ‘Or a girlfriend?’
With pronounced cool, Gianni came upright to face her. Even in the overwrought state she was in, his striking grace of movement caught her eye as he stepped out from behind the table. ‘No to all of the above. Leave this for another day, cara,’ he advised very quietly, incisive dark-as-night eyes resting on the revealing clenching and unclenching of her hands. ‘When the time’s right, I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’
‘Stop treating me like I’m mentally unfit to deal with my own life!’ Faith launched back at him in furious condemnation. ‘I’ll ask you one more time before I walk out of here…what was I to you?’
Gianni expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘You were my mistress.’
Faith stared back at him, eyes widening and widening, soft mouth rounding but no sound emerging. The angry tension evaporated from her. Sheer shock stilled her, leaving her looking vulnerable and lost. Then she sealed her lips, forced her feet to turn her around and walked to the door. There she hesitated, wheeled back, and hurried across the room again to retrieve her handbag. Not once did she allow her attention to roam back in Gianni’s direction.
‘Are my car keys in here?’ she asked woodenly.
‘Yes. This is ridiculous,’ Gianni murmured drily.
‘How long was I…your mistress?’ Faith squeezed out that designation as if her mouth was a clothes-wringer.
‘Two years…’
Faith flinched as though he had struck her a second body blow. Then, pushing up her chin and straightening her slight shoulders, she moved back to the door and paused there. ‘I hope you paid me well to prostitute myself,’ she breathed through painfully compressed lips.
In the thunderous silence that greeted that stinging retaliation Faith turned her head. Gianni gazed back at her, not a muscle moving on his darkly handsome features. But for once she could read him like an open book. His golden eyes blazed his fury. Oddly soothed by that reaction, Faith stalked rigid-backed out of the suite and headed for the lift.
CHAPTER THREE
FAITH’S tenuous control crumpled and fell apart the instant she reached the sanctuary of her car.
Snatching in a gasping breath in an effort to calm herself, Faith stared blindly through the windscreen. His mistress! It made a ho
rrible kind of sense. He was filthy rich. She wasn’t from the same world. So of course she hadn’t been his girlfriend, his equal, she reflected bitterly. Now she knew why he had been challenged to quantify their relationship. The commercial element had figured. For two years. Two years, an agonised inner voice screeched in condemnation. It had taken her an inexcusably long time to wake up and see the error of her ways.
For two years, two of her missing years, she had been a kept woman. In exchange for sex he had probably paid for the roof over her head, her clothing, all her bills. Faith shuddered, mortified by the self she had clearly been before she’d lost her memory. What kind of woman could she have been? This woman who had called herself Milly? What further humiliating discoveries still awaited her?
Striving hard to get a grip on her wildly seesawing emotions, Faith started the car and drove away from the hotel. Gianni had said she had disappeared. OK, she told herself, it might have taken her a long time but at least she had finally decided to leave him. She must have planned to make a fresh start. And a fresh start was exactly what she had made, she reminded herself doggedly.
Then, just as she came off the roundabout on the outskirts of town, her searing headache became suddenly so much worse that her vision began to blur. Immediately she pulled off the road and parked. Perspiration beaded her short upper lip.
And then it happened. As if somebody was staging a sudden slideshow inside her head. A picture slotted into her mind. She saw herself clutching a phone like a lifeline, and then her awareness shifted and she was suddenly inside that self.
‘Gianni…I haven’t seen you in three weeks,’ she was saying, and tears were stinging her eyes, but she was working really hard at keeping her voice light and teasing because like any workaholic Gianni hated it when she nagged.