The Sicilian's Mistress (2 page)

Milly, who had called him on the slightest pretext every day and never once failed to tell him how much she loved him. So she had spent a lot of time alone. But business had always come first, and he had never promised more than he had delivered. He had been straight. He had even been faithful. And how many single men in his position were wholly faithful to a mistress?

As a knock sounded on the door Gianni wheeled round and fixed his attention with charged expectancy on his London security chief, Dawson Carter. His child, he thought with ferocious satisfaction. Milly
had
to have had his child. And, whatever happened, he would use that child as leverage. Whether she liked it or not, Milly was coming back to him…

‘Well?' he prodded with unconcealed impatience.

Dawson surveyed his incredibly rich and ruthless employer and started to sweat blood. Gianni D'Angelo ran one of the most powerful electronic empires in the world. He was thirty-two. He had come up from nothing. He was
tough, streetwise, and brilliant in business. He didn't like or expect disappointments. He had even less tolerance for mysteries.

‘If this woman
is
Milly Henner—' Dawson began with wary quietness.

Gianni stilled. ‘What do you mean
if
?' he countered with raw incredulity.

Dawson grimaced. ‘Gianni…if it is her, she's living under another name, and she's been doing it successfully for a very long time.'

‘That's insane, and utterly impossible!' Gianni asserted in instant dismissal.

‘Three years ago, Faith Jennings was found by the side of a country road in Cornwall. She had been seriously injured and she had no identification. She was the victim of a hit and run. The police think she was robbed after the accident—'

‘Dio!'
Gianni exclaimed in shaken interruption.

‘But she
was
pregnant at the time of the accident,' Dawson confirmed. ‘And she does have a child.'

Gianni drew in a stark breath, incisive dark eyes flaming to bright gold in anticipation. ‘So the child must be two and a half…right? A girl or a boy?' he prompted with fierce impatience.

‘A little boy. She calls him Connor. He'll be three in May. He was born before his mother came out of the coma she was in.'

Gianni screened his unusually revealing eyes as he mulled over those bald facts. ‘So…' he murmured then, without any expression at all. ‘Explain to me how Milly Henner could possibly be living under another woman's name.'

‘It was a long time before she was able to speak for herself, but she was apparently wearing a rather unusual bracelet. Her face had been pretty badly knocked about and she needed surgery.' For the first time in his life Dawson saw his employer wince, and was sincerely shaken by the evidence of this previously unsuspected vein of sensitivity. ‘So
as a first move the police gave a picture of the bracelet to the press. She was swiftly identified as a teenager who had run away from home when she was sixteen. Her parents came forward and identified her—'

‘But Milly doesn't
have
parents alive!' Gianni cut in abrasively.

‘This woman never recovered her memory after the hit and run, Gianni. She's a total amnesiac—'

‘A total amnesiac?' Gianni broke in, with raised brows of dubious enquiry.

‘It's rare, but it does happen,' Dawson assured him ruefully. ‘I spoke to a nurse at the hospital where she was treated. They still remember her. When she finally recovered consciousness her mind was a blank, and when her parents took her home she still knew nothing but what they had told her about her past. I gather they also discouraged her from seeking further treatment. The medics were infuriated by their interference but powerless to act.'

‘Normal people do not take complete strangers home and keep them as their daughters for three years,' Gianni informed him with excessive dryness.

‘I should add that the parents hadn't seen or heard from their missing daughter in seven years, but were still unshakeable in their conviction that the young woman with the bracelet was their child—'

‘Seven years?' Gianni broke in.

‘The police did try to run a check on dental records, but the surgery which the daughter attended before she disappeared had burnt down, and the most her retired dentist could recall was that she had had excellent teeth, just like the lady in the hospital bed. This is a very well-known story in the town where Faith Jennings lives—her miraculous return home in spite of all the odds.'

‘There was no return, miraculous or otherwise…that
was
Milly at the airport! Seven years…' Gianni mused with incredulous bite. ‘And Milly was in a coma, at the mercy of people no better than kidnappers!'

Dawson cleared his throat. ‘The parents are respectable, comfortably off—the father owns a small engineering plant. If there's been a mistake, it can only have been a genuine one, and most probably due to wishful thinking.'

Gianni was unimpressed. ‘While Milly was still ill, that's possible, but when she began to recover they must've have started to suspect the truth, so why didn't they
do
anything?' he demanded in a seething undertone. ‘What about the fiancé?'

‘Edward Benson. A thirty-eight-year-old company accountant.'

Gianni lounged back against the edge of his desk like a panther about to spring. ‘An accountant,' he derided between clenched teeth.

‘He's her father's second-in-command,' Dawson filled in. ‘Local gossip suggests that the engagement is part of a business package.'

‘Check me into a hotel down there.' Gianni straightened, all emotion wiped from his lean, strong face, eyes ice-cool shards of threat. ‘I think it's time I got to meet my son. And isn't that going to put the cat among the pigeons?'

Dawson tried not to picture the onslaught of Gianni, his powerful personality, his fleet of limos and his working entourage without whom he went nowhere on a small, peaceful English town…and the woman who against all reason and self-preservation had contrived to forget her intimate involvement with one of the world's richest and most influential tycoons. A lot of people had a lot of shock coming their way…

 

‘So you just tell Edward you
refuse
to live with his mother!' Louise Barclay met Faith's aghast look and simply laughed. A redhead with green eyes and loads of freckles, Louise looked as if she was in her twenties but she was actually well into her thirties, and the divorced mother of two rumbustious teenage boys.

‘Sometimes you're such a wimp, Faith,' Louise teased.

‘I'm not—'

‘You are when it comes to your own needs. All your energy goes into keeping other people happy, living the life
they
think you should live! Your parents act like they own you body and soul, and Edward's not much better!' Louise informed her in exasperation.

Faith stiffened. Louise was her best friend and her business partner, but she had little understanding of the burden of guilt that Faith carried where her parents were concerned. ‘It's not like that—'

‘Oh, yes, it is.' Louise watched Faith carefully package a beautiful bouquet for delivery and leant back against the shop counter. ‘I'm always watching you struggle to be all things to all people. Once you wanted to be a gardener. Your parents didn't fancy that, so here you are in a prissy flower shop.'

Faith laughed. ‘Alongside you.'

‘But this
was
my dream. And if you don't watch out, you're going to end up living with old Ma Benson. She will cunningly contrive, without Edward ever noticing, to make your home life the equivalent of a daily dance on a bed of sharpened nails!' the lively redhead forecast with conviction. ‘You think I haven't noticed how stressed-out and quiet you've been since Edward dropped this on you the day before yesterday?'

Faith turned her head away. For once, Louise was barking up the wrong tree. Faith hadn't told anybody about that incident at the airport, but she still couldn't get it out of her mind. Her mother didn't like to be reminded that her daughter was an amnesiac, and got upset whenever Faith referred to that particular part of the past. Her attitude was understandable: after running away, Faith hadn't once got in touch to ease her parents' distress.

How could she ever have been so selfish and uncaring that she had failed to make even a single phone call to reassure them that she was at least still alive? Conscience had
given Faith a strong need to do whatever she could to please her parents in an effort to make up for her past mistakes.

She was also painfully aware that both her parents viewed those missing years as a Pandora's box best left sealed. As far as they were concerned, seven years on she had turned up again, pregnant, unmarried and seemingly destitute. Nobody she might have known during that period had listed her as missing. Those bald realities suggested that prior to the accident she had been homeless, unemployed, not in a stable relationship and bereft of any true friends. Frankly, she'd been desperately lucky to have forgiving parents willing to take her home and help her back to normality again, she acknowledged humbly.

Only what was normality? Faith wondered, with the lonely regret of someone who had learnt not to discuss her secret fears and insecurities with anyone. It could never be
normal
to possess not one single memory of what she'd been told she'd lost—the first twenty-three years of her life. But if she wanted people to feel comfortable with her, if she wanted people to forget that strange past and treat her like everybody else, she always had to pretend that that vast gaping hole inside her memory banks was no longer any big deal…

‘A fresh start.' In the early days of her convalescence that had been a much-used parental phrase, the implication being that an inability to recall those years might well prove an unexpected blessing. So Faith had concentrated instead on trying to retrieve childhood memories. She had dutifully studied the photo albums of the much-loved and indulged daughter who had grown into a plump teenager with a sullen face, defiant blue eyes and make-up like war paint. Self-conscious about her weight, the teenage Faith hadn't liked photos, so there had only been a handful after the age of twelve.

Faith had walked through the schools she had once attended, met the teachers, wandered round the town where she had grown up and paid several awkward visits to former
schoolfriends, always willing her blank brain to remember, recognise, sense even token familiarity…

Repetition
had
created a kind of familiarity, and she had exercised her imagination until sometimes she suspected that she did
almost
remember and that real memory was hovering cruelly just out of reach on the very edge of her mind. She had rebuilt a quiet, conventional life round her family, but Connor was the true centre of her world. She loved her parents for their unquestioning support, loved Edward for his calm acceptance of her, but she adored her son with a fierce maternal joy and protectiveness that occasionally shook even her.

‘There's something more up with you than Edward's sudden penny-pinching desire to regress and stay home with Mother,' Louise remarked with sudden insight.

The silence thickened. Faith reached a sudden decision and took a deep breath.

‘A man spoke to me at the airport. He was very persistent. He insisted that he knew me by another name…Milly, he called me.' Trying to downplay the incident even now, Faith loosed an uneven laugh, but the pent-up words of strain continued to tumble from her. ‘Maybe I have a
doppelgänger
somewhere. It was daft, but it was a little scary…'

‘Why scary?'

Faith linked her hands tightly together in an effort to conceal their unsteadiness. ‘You see, I noticed this man first…to be honest, I really couldn't take my eyes off him…' Her voice trailed away as embarrassment gripped her.

‘So he was trying to make a move on you—but do tell me more,' Louise invited with amusement. ‘Just why couldn't you take your eyes off this guy?'

‘I don't know. He was very, very good-looking,' Faith conceded, colour flaming into her cheeks. ‘And at first I thought that my staring at him had encouraged him to approach me. But when I thought about it afterwards… I don't think it was like that.'

‘Why not? You might wear fuddy-duddy clothes and
scrape your hair back like a novice nun, but your kind of beauty would shine through a potato sack,' her friend advised her drily.

‘This man was angry with me…I mean…with this woman, Milly,' Faith adjusted hurriedly. ‘He accused her of having run away. And he was really astonished when I said I didn't know him and when I threatened him with the police.'

‘That's persistent.' Louise looked more serious now.

‘He said his name was Gianni D'Angelo…it means nothing to—'

Louise had straightened, an incredulous light in her eyes. ‘Say that name again.'

‘Gianni D'Angelo.'

‘Did this guy ooze money?'

‘He was very well dressed.'

‘Gianni D'Angelo owns Macro Industries. He's a hugely important electronics mogul. My ex-hubby once worked on a major advertising campaign for one of his companies,' Louise informed her with dancing eyes. ‘And if I thought a gorgeous single guy worth billions was wandering round Heathrow trying to pick up stray women, I'd take my sleeping bag and move in until he tripped over me!'

‘It can't have been the same man,' Faith decided. ‘I must've misheard the name.'

‘Or perhaps you once enjoyed a champagne and caviar lifestyle, rubbing shoulders with the rich and the famous!' Louise teased with an appreciative giggle. ‘I think you met a complete nutter stringing you a weird line, Faith.'

‘Probably,' she agreed, with a noticeable diminution of tension.