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?
I would have done for him, she acknowledged with an odd pain that said her feelings for him were not entirely indifferent, no matter what her brain was refusing to uncover.
‘Oh, God.’ She dropped back into the chair to bury her face in her hands as the throbbing in her head became unbearable.
Pull yourself together! she tried to tell herself. You have to pull yourself together and start thinking about what happens next, before—
The door came open. He stepped inside and closed it again, his eyes narrowing on the way she quickly lifted her face from her hands.
His jacket had gone; that was the first totally incomprehensible thing her eyes focused on. The dark silk tie with the slender knot had been tugged down a little and the top button of his shirt was undone, as if he’d found the constriction of his clothes annoying and needed to feel fresh air around that taut tanned throat.
Her mind did a dizzy whirl on a hot, slick spurt of sudden sensual awareness. ‘Here…’ He was walking towards her with a glass of something golden in his hand. ‘I think you need one of these as much as I do.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t, not on top of the painkillers—thank you all the same.’
If nothing else, the remark stopped him, mere inches away from touching her. She didn’t want him to touch her—why, again she didn’t know. Except—
Stranger. The word kept on playing itself over and over like some dreadful, dreadful warning. This man who said he was her husband was a total stranger to her. And the worst of it was she kept on getting this weird idea that him being a stranger to her was not a new feeling.
He discarded the glass, then stood in front of her with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. He seemed to be waiting for something, but Samantha didn’t know what, so she looked at the garish carpet between their feet and waited for whatever was supposed to come next.
What could come next? she then thought tensely. There were questions to ask. Things to know. This was the beginning of her problems, not the end of them.
‘How’s the knee?’
‘What—?’ She blinked up at him, then away again. ‘Oh.’ A hand automatically went down to touch the knee. ‘Better now, thank you.’
Silence. Her nerves began to fray. Teeth gritted together behind clenched lips. God, she wished he would just do something! Say something cruel and trite like, Well, nice to have seen you again, sorry you don’t remember me, but I have to go now!
She wished he would pull her up into his big arms and hold her, hold her tightly, until all these terrible feelings of confusion and fear went away!
He released a sigh. It sounded raw. She glanced at him warily. He bit out harshly, ‘This place is the pits!’
He was right and it was. Small and shabby and way, way beneath his dignity. ‘I l-love this place.’ She heard herself whisper. ‘It gave me a home and a life when I no longer had either.’
Her words sent his face white again—maybe he thought she was taking a shot at him. He threw himself back into the chair beside her—close to her again, his shoulder only a hair’s breadth away from rubbing against her shoulder again.