yet as she gazed through the windscreen she no longer saw the traffic lights; she saw Gianni D’Angelo, his lean, bronzed features imposed on a mind that for some reason could focus on nothing else. As furiously honking car horns erupted behind her Faith flinched back to the present and belatedly drove on, strain and bemusement stamping her troubled face.
Gianni D’Angelo stared fixedly out of the giant corner window of his London office. An impressive view of the City’s lights stretched before him but he couldn’t see it.
His sane mind was telling him that even twelve hours on he was still in the grip of shock, and that self-control was everything, but he wanted to violently punch walls with the frustrated anger of disbelief. He had searched for Milly for so long. He had almost given up hope. He certainly hadn’t expected her to do something as dumb and childish as try and pretend she didn’t know him, and then compound her past offences by attempting to run away again. And why hadn’t it occurred to her that he would have her followed before she got ten feet away from him?
Milly, whom he’d always called Angel. And instantly Gianni was beset by a thousand memories that twisted his guts even after three years of rigorous rooting out of such images. He saw Milly jumping out of a birthday cake dressed as an angel, tripping over her celestial robes and dropping her harp. Milly, impossibly beautiful but horrendously clumsy when she was nervous. Milly, who had given him his first and only taste of what he had dimly imagined must be a home life…
And you loved it, you stupid bastard! Gianni’s lean hands suddenly clenched into powerful fists. Punishing himself for recalling only pleasant things, Gianni made himself relive the moment he had found his precious pregnant Angel in bed with his kid brother, Stefano. That had put a whole new slant on the joys of home and family life. Until that moment of savage truth he hadn’t appreciated just how much he had trusted her. And instead of proposing marriage, as he had planned, he had ended up taking off with another woman. What else could he have done in the circumstances?
He had wanted to kill them both. For the first time he had understood the concept of a crime of passion. The only two people he had ever allowed close had deceived and betrayed him. A boy of nineteen and a girl/woman only a couple of years older. The generation gap had been there, even though he had been too blind to acknowledge it, he reflected with smouldering bitterness. And naturally Stefano had adored her. Everybody had adored Milly.
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
