LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      Move away from me, she wanted to say.

      ‘Listen,’ he said. And she could feel him fighting something, fighting it so fiercely that his tension straightened her spine and held it so stiff it tingled like a live wire. ‘We need to get away from here,’ he gritted. ‘Find more—private surroundings where we can—relax—’

      Even he made the word sound dubious. For who could relax in a situation like this? She certainly couldn’t.

      ‘Talk,’ he went on. ‘Have time for you to ask the kind of questions I know you must be burning to ask, and for me to do the same.’

      He looked at her for a reaction. Samantha stared straight ahead.

      ‘We can do that better at my own hotel in Exeter than we can here,’ he suggested.

      ‘Your hotel,’ she repeated, remembering the big, new hotel that had opened its doors only last year.

      ‘Will you come?’

      ‘I…’ She wasn’t at all sure about that. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go anywhere with him, or leave what had become over the last year the only place where she felt safe and secure in her bewildered little world.

      ‘It’s either you come with me or I move in here,’ he declared, and so flatly that she didn’t for one moment think he was bluffing. ‘I would prefer it to be the other way round simply because my place is about a hundred times more comfortable than this. But—’ The pause brought her eyes up to look warily into his. It was what he had been aiming for. The chocolate-brown turned to cold black marble slabs of grim determination. ‘I am not letting you out of my sight again—ever—do you understand that?’

      Understand? She almost choked on it. ‘I want proof,’ she whispered.

      ‘Proof of what?’ He frowned.

      ‘That you are who you say you are and I am who you say I am before I’ll make any decisions about anything.’

      She expected him to be affronted but oddly he wasn’t—which in itself was proof enough that he was indeed telling her the truth about them.

      Without a word he stood up, left the room again, coming back mere seconds later carrying the jacket to his suit. His hand was already fishing in the inside pocket when he came to stand over her.

      ‘My passport,’ he said, dropping the thick, bulky document onto her lap. ‘Your passport—an old one, I admit, but it can still give you your proof.’ That too landed on her knee. ‘Our marriage certificate.’ It landed on top of the two passports. ‘And…’ this came less arrogantly ‘…a photo…’ it fluttered down onto her lap, landing face down. ‘Of you and me on our wedding day.’

      He’d come prepared for this, she realised, staring down at the small heap of items now sitting on her lap without attempting to touch them.

      Because she was afraid to.

      But why was she afraid? He had already told her who he was and who she was and what they were to each other. She was even already convinced that every word he’d said was the truth, or why else would he be standing here in this scruffy back room of a scruffy hotel in a scruffy corner of Devon saying all of these things?

      So why, why was she feeling so afraid to actually look at the physical proof of all of that?

      The answer came at her hard and cold, and frightened her more than everything else put together. She didn’t want to look for the same reason she’d lost her memory in the first place. The doctors had told her it had had little to do with the car crash. The accident might have helped to cause the amnesia, but the real reason for it lay deeply rooted in some other trauma she’d found she could not face on top of all the pain she had been suffering at that time. So her mind had done the kindest thing and had locked up the personal trauma so all she had to do was to deal with the physical trauma.

      Looking at these documents was going to be like squeezing open the door on that trauma, whatever it was.

      ‘You never were a coward, Samantha,’ he told her quietly, at the same time letting her know that he knew exactly what was going on inside her head.

      Well, I am now,’ she whispered, and her body began to tremble.

      Instantly he was dropping down into the chair again, his hands coming out, covering hers where they lay pleated tightly together on her stomach, safely away from his proof. And this time she did not flinch away from his touch. This time she actually needed it.

      ‘Then we’ll do it together,’ he decided gently.

      With one hand still covering her two hands, he used the other to slide his passport out from the bottom of the pile and flicked it open at the small photograph that showed his beautiful features set in a sternly arrogant pose.

      ‘Visconte’, it said. ‘André Fabrizio’. ‘American citizen’.

      ‘I look like a gangster,’ he said, trying to lighten the moment. Closing the book, he then selected the other one.

      You weren’t supposed to smile on passport photographs. But the face looking back up her from her own lap told her that this person did not know how to turn that provocative little smile off. And her face wore no evidence of strain. She simply looked lively and lovely and—

      ‘Visconte’, it said. ‘Samantha Jane’. ‘British citizen’.

      ‘You lost this particular passport about six months after we were married and had to apply for a new one,’ he explained. ‘But I happened to turn this up when I was—’ He stopped, then went on. ‘When I was searching through some old papers.’ He finally concluded. But they both knew he had been about to say something else.

      When his hand moved to pick up the marriage certificate, she stopped him. ‘No.’ She breathed out thickly. ‘Not that. Th-the other…’

      Slowly, reluctantly almost, his fingers moved to pick up the photograph, hesitated a moment, then flipped it over.

      Samantha’s heart flipped over with it. Because staring back at her in full Technicolor was herself, dressed up in frothy bridal-white.

      Laughing. She was laughing up into the face of her handsome

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