Abruptly she closed her eyes, shutting it out, shutting everything out as her body began to shake violently, a clammy sweat breaking out across her chilled flesh. She couldn’t breathe again, couldn’t move. And a dark mist was closing round her.
Someone hissed out a muffled curse. It wasn’t her so she had to presume it must be him, though she was way too distressed to be absolutely sure of that. The next moment two hands were grasping her shoulders and lifting her to her feet. The stack of documents slid to the floor forgotten as he wrapped her tightly in his arms.
And suddenly she felt as if she was under attack from a completely different source. Attack—why attack? she asked herself as her head became filled with the warm solid strength of him.
‘Oh, my God.’ She groaned.
‘What’s happening?’ he muttered thickly.
‘I d-don’t know,’ she said tremulously, and tried sucking in a deep breath of air in an effort to compose herself. That deep breath of air went permeating through her system, taking the spicy scent of him along with it, and in the next moment her brain cells went utterly haywire.
Familiar. That scent was familiar. And so wretchedly familiar that—
Once again she fainted. No more warning than that. She just went limp in his arms and knew nothing for long seconds.
This time when she came round she wasn’t lying but sitting, with him standing over her pressing her head down between her knees with a very determined hand.
‘Stay there,’ he gritted when she tried to sit up. ‘Just wait a moment until the blood has had a chance to make it back to your head.’
She stayed, limp and utterly exhausted, taking in some carefully controlled breaths of air while she waited, waited for…
Nothing, she realised. No bright blinding flood of beautiful memories. Not even ugly ones. Nothing.
Carefully she tried to move, and this time he allowed her to, his dark face decidedly guarded as she sat back and looked at him.
‘What?’ he demanded jerkily when she didn’t say a word.
Empty-eyed, she shook her head. She knew what he was thinking, knew what he was expecting. She had been expecting the same thing herself.
His dark eyes glinted, a white line of tension imprinting itself around his mouth. Then he sucked in a deep lungful of air and held onto it for a long time before he let it out again.
‘Well, we aren’t going to try that again,’ he decided. ‘Not until we’ve consulted an expert to find out why you faint every time you’re confronted with yourself.’
Not myself, she wanted to correct him. You.
But she didn’t, didn’t want to get into that one. Not now, when it felt as if her whole world was balancing precariously on the edge of a great, yawning precipice.
‘So that settles it,’ he declared in the same determined tone. ‘You’re coming with me.’ He bent down to pick up the scattered papers, his lean body lithe and graceful even while it was clearly tense. ‘I’m going to need to make a few phone calls,’ he said as he straightened, then really surprised her by dropping the photograph back onto her lap. ‘While I do that, you can go and pack your things. By then I should be finished and we can get on our way—’
‘Do I have any say in this at all?’ she asked cuttingly.
‘No.’ He swung round to show her a look of grim resolve. ‘Not a damned thing. I’ve spent the last twelve months alternately thinking you were dead and wishing you were dead. But you aren’t either, are you, Samantha?’ he challenged bluntly. ‘You’re existing in some kind of limbo land to which I know for a fact that only I have the key to set you free. And until you are set free, I won’t know which of my alternatives I really prefer, and you won’t know why you prefer to stay in limbo. The newspaper report on you said they took you to a hospital in Exeter after the accident, which I presume means you received all your treatment there?’
She nodded.
So did he. ‘Then, since Exeter is where we are going, we don’t mention the past or anything to do with the past until we’ve received some advice from someone who knows what they’re talking about.’ He settled the matter decisively. ‘All you have to do is accept that I am your husband and you are my wife. The rest will have to wait.’
CHAPTER FOUR
WAIT…
Carla certainly did think she should wait for answers before trotting meekly off with him. ‘But you don’t know him from Adam!’ she protested as Samantha moved around her room gathering her few possessions together. ‘How do you know if he’s telling the truth?’
‘Why should he lie?’ Samantha countered, turning the question round on itself.
‘I don’t know.’ Carla sighed in frustration. ‘It just doesn’t feel right to me that you are willing to go off with him without knowing what it is you’re going to!’
Samantha’s only answer was to silently hand Carla the wedding photograph.
She stared at it, then at Samantha, then back at the photo again. And suddenly her mood changed. ‘What can have happened to you to make you forget something as beautiful as this?’ she murmured painfully.
Samantha wished she had the answer to that one. The story that photo was telling might be bringing tears to Carla’s eyes, but she couldn’t even begin to describe how it made her feel.
Nothing, she named it. But it was a strange, pained nothing, which was, in itself, something terribly saddening. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked quietly.
‘Nathan Payne told me.’ Carla nodded. ‘But just because he’s the great Visconte himself doesn’t absolve him from having to explain why it’s taken him twelve months to come and get you!’
True, Samantha conceded, and sat down on the bed as the heavy weight of all her own uncertainties came thundering down on her again.
‘I mean…’ Carla went on, determined to push her point home now that she had Samantha wavering ‘…you were famous for a week or two in these parts when the accident happened. Your predicament was reported in all the local papers. If you were missing and he was worried about you, wouldn’t you expect a man like him to pull out all the stops in an effort to find you? At the very least he could have checked out the police stations and hospitals. Your looks are pretty damned distinctive, Sam,’ she pointed out. ‘Even without you knowing who you are, for someone to be searching for a tall, slender redhead going by the name Samantha would surely be enough to make the necessary link?’
‘Maybe he was away—out of the country or something,’ she suggested, thinking of New York.
‘You mean, you haven’t bothered to ask him?’ Carla sounded dismayed.
Samantha was a little dismayed herself at how little she had asked him to explain. But the truth of it was, she didn’t want to ask. In some incomprehensible way, it felt safer not to ask.
‘The trouble is,’ she admitted with a rueful grimace, ‘every time we discuss anything even vaguely personal, I faint.’
‘Even more reason, surely, for you to think carefully before putting yourself in his care. Don’t you see that?’
See it? Of course she did. But…
Easing herself back to her feet, she gently took back the photograph, then looked at Carla with disturbingly bleak yet resolute green eyes. ‘If I am ever to discover why I’ve ended up like this,’ she said quietly, ‘then I have to go with him.’
To her, it was as simple and as final as that.
Where was she? André flicked a hard glance at his watch then stuffed his hand back into his pocket. She was taking an age!