‘You can sit on my lap any time you like. Just not when I’m taking a conference call.’ He pushed her playfully. ‘Now go.’
‘Okay, okay, I know when I’m not wanted.’
He gave her a stern look that only made her laugh harder.
She sashayed deliberately to the door, a thought striking her as she made to leave. ‘How do I get on with Christina?’
His brow furrowed.
‘I ask because...well, I’m ashamed to say this but when I saw her getting out of your car last week...it felt like a knife in my heart.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I assumed she was your latest girlfriend.’ She must have seen the darkening in his eyes he wasn’t quick enough to hide for she hastened to add, ‘Don’t forget, I had no idea we were married. I was used to your rolling conveyor belt of girlfriends, it was an easy mistake for me to make. I couldn’t understand why it hurt to see you with what I thought was another lover.’
Stefano made sure not to show any reaction. Lying to Anna had been easy when she’d first had the amnesia diagnosed. Now, every untruth felt rancid in his guts. She didn’t yet have the memories to know that she’d only met his sister the one time, when she’d walked into their London flat early that morning and found Christina wearing her robe. Anna not being able to speak Italian and Christina not speaking English had given them a language barrier that had allowed Anna to assume the worst.
It came to him how Christina had later described the scene.
‘She went white,’ his sister had said. ‘I thought she was going to be sick. I tried to speak to her but she couldn’t understand me; she kept shaking her head as if she’d seen something horrifying, and then she walked out.’
Did that really sound like the actions of a woman calculating how to turn a situation to her advantage?
Now he allowed himself to think about it with some distance from the aftermath, did it not sound like the actions of a woman who’d received a terrible shock?
‘You and Christina have a language barrier,’ he said steadily. That wasn’t a lie.
She eyed him with the look of someone who knew something was being held back. Then she shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe that’s my cue to start learning Italian.’
He was saved from further talk of his sister by the tone on his laptop ringing out to notify him his conference call was about to start.
Anna shrugged again, a wry smile playing on her lips. ‘And that’s my cue to leave. Have fun.’
After she’d closed the door behind her, Stefano took the seat at his desk and accepted the call. While waiting for the others joining to connect, he rubbed his forehead.
The game he’d been playing, the revenge he’d been savouring...it sat like a bad taste on his tongue.
He’d learned more about his wife in the last week than he had in their entire marriage. Before she’d stormed into his boardroom and humiliated him that day he would never have dreamt she could be a gold-digger or that his trust in her could be unfounded. Every instinct in his guts and in his head were shouting at him that somehow, in some way, everything was wrong.
This was Anna. The woman he’d desired and admired from their very first meeting. The woman he’d trusted enough to pledge his life to...
His head began to burn and his guts twisted with something worse than nausea. With his revenge only hours away, he came to the realisation that he couldn’t go through with it.
When his conference call was over he would call Miranda, the journalist he’d entrusted into his confidence, and tell her the embargoed press statement he’d given to her a week ago was to be scrapped and buried.
He’d get tonight’s awards over with and then he would sit down with Anna and tell her the truth about everything.
* * *
The moment Anna walked into Stefano’s apartment in San Francisco, more memories returned. Throughout their days in Santa Cruz, more and more had appeared. Her memory was like a giant jigsaw puzzle and what had started as a mammoth hunt for the pieces was now coming together rapidly.
‘When did we get a new sofa?’ she asked, surprised to find the plump white one replaced with chocolate-brown leather.
‘You remember it?’
‘It was my favourite thing here.’ This apartment was furnished along the same lines as the London one, with everything designed to show off wealth and great taste. She already missed their Santa Cruz beach house. For all its opulence, it had felt like a home.
He strode to the kitchen. ‘It got damaged a f