CHAPTER ONE
BLACK bow-tie hanging loose around his neck and the top two buttons on his snowy white dress shirt tugged open at his darkly tanned throat, André Visconte sat sprawled in the chair behind his desk, with his feet propped up on the top and the blunt-ended fingers of one beautifully shaped hand lightly clasping a squat crystal glass half full of his favourite whisky.
It was late and he was tired so his eyes were shut, the grooves around his thirty-four-year-old, life-toughened mouth seeming more harshly etched than usual. He should have gone straight home from the gala opening of a friend’s new downtown restaurant but instead he had come back here to his office. He was expecting a call from Paris and it seemed more sensible to wait for it here than at his home since the office was closer.
And anyway, home held no welcome for him any more.
Some bright spark somewhere had once made the classic remark that home was where the heart was. Well, André no longer believed he had a heart, so home, these days, tended to be any place he could lay his head. And, depending on where he was, that usually meant one of the plush city residences he possessed in most capitals of the world.
Not that he had used many of them recently, if you didn’t count his apartment right here in New York, of course. Though all of his homes were maintained to his expected high standards—just in case he decided to drop in.
Or in case Samantha did.
Samantha… The fingers around the whisky glass tightened fractionally. His tough mouth straightened into a line of such grim cynicism that if anyone had been there to see it happen, they would have been backing right off in alarm by now.
Because André Visconte wasn’t known for his good temper these days—hadn’t been known for it for twelve long months now.
Not since Samantha had walked out of his life never to be seen or heard from again. Nowadays, only a fool would dare to say her name out loud in his presence and, since fools were not suffered gladly in the Visconte empire, none ever said it.
But he couldn’t stop the cursed name from creeping into his own head now and then. And when it did, it was difficult to it to unravel the gamut of different emotions that came buzzing along with it. Pain was one of them, plus a dark, bloody anger aimed entirely at himself for letting her get away from him.
Then there were the moments of real guilt-ridden anguish to contend with, or the bouts of gut-wrenching concern as to what had become of her. And, to top it all off, there was a hard-to-take sense of personal bitterness in knowing that she could leave him that made him wish he had never met her in the first place!
But most of all there was an ache. An ache of such muscle-clenching proportions that sometimes he had to fight not to groan at the power of it.
Why—? Because he missed her. No matter what, no matter when, no matter why—sometimes he missed her so badly that he could barely cope with what missing her did to him.
Tonight had been like that. One of those all-too-rare moments when he had caught himself laughing quite easily—actually managing to enjoy himself! Then a beautiful woman with flame-red hair had walked past him. She had reminded him of Samantha and his mood had flipped over. Light to dark. Warm to cold. Laughter to lousy misery…
After that, it had been better to escape here and brood where no one could see him doing it. But, God, he hated her for making him feel like this.
Empty. The word was empty.
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.