When Stefano chose to back a business he didn’t hold back. He gave it everything. He thrived on the gamble but liked the odds to be in his favour. He liked to be certain that he wasn’t going to be throwing away his time, resources and money. It didn’t matter how many reports she produced, he would play it all out in his mind, working through it on his own mental spreadsheet.
And now that gaze was directed at her, as if she were a business venture that needed to be analysed. He was mentally dissecting something and that something had to do with her.
‘We’re really married?’ she asked him.
A slow smile spread across his face as if she’d said something amusing but the focus in his eyes sharpened. ‘Sì.’
None of this made sense. ‘Why would I have married you?’
He shifted his chair forward and leaned over to speak directly into her ear. His warm breath stirred the strands of her hair, making her pulses stir with them. ‘Because you wanted my body.’
His nearness meant she had to concentrate hard to form a response. ‘This is no time for your jokes. I wouldn’t marry you. I have self-respect.’
He sat back and spread out his hands. ‘No joke. We’re married.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ The very idea was preposterous.
‘I can give you proof.’
‘We can’t be.’
There was no way she would have married Stefano. He was gorgeous, funny when he wasn’t being brooding and impatient, and rich, but he also had a revolving door of girlfriends. She had always maintained that she wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot bargepole and had told him so on numerous occasions.
Always he’d responded with a dazzling grin and, ‘You can’t resist me for ever, bambolina.’
To which she’d always replied with her own grin turned up to full wattage, ‘Watch me.’
This time there was no comeback. He pulled out his phone and started tapping away. After a few moments he leaned over to show her the screen. Her pulse made another strange leap at his closeness and the familiar scent of his tangy cologne that had always filled their workspace. She blinked and focused her attention on what he was showing her.
It was a photograph of them standing together on a beach. Stefano was dressed in charcoal trousers and a short-sleeved open-necked white shirt. She wore a long white chiffon dress that had a distinct bridal look to it, and was clutching a posy of flowers. Oh, and they were kissing.
Anna stared at the screen for so long her eyes went dry. Her heart was pounding so hard its beats vibrated through her. When she dared look at him she found him watching her closely.
‘Did you drug me?’ She could hardly believe the evidence before her. It wasn’t possible. It had to be fake.
‘We married on the twentieth of November. Our first anniversary is in ten days.’
‘That’s impossible.’ She did some mental maths. She remembered as far back as her Spinning class, which had been the day after bonfire night, November the fifth.
He expected her to believe she’d married him two weeks later? Did he take her for a complete idiot?
But then she looked again at the photo on his screen.
‘We married in Santa Cruz,’ he supplied. ‘It was a very... I can’t think of the word, but it was quick.’
‘Spontaneous?’
‘That’s the word, sì.’
Despite the mounting evidence she still couldn’t bring herself to believe him.
‘If we’re married, why did I wake up in my own bed in mine and Melissa’s flat?’
There was only the barest flicker of his pupils. ‘We’d had a row.’
‘About what?’
‘Nothing important. You often stay the night there.’
‘Why were you so angry to see me in the office this morning? And why has Chloe taken my desk?’
‘I told you, we’d had an argument.’
‘Cheating on me already?’ she asked, only half jesting.
There was a tiny clenching of his jaw before his handsome features relaxed into the smile that had always melted her stomach. ‘I’ve never cheated on a woman in my life.’
‘You’ve never stayed with a woman long enough to cheat.’ Stefano had the attention span of a goldfish. He thrived on the chase, growing bored quickly and moving straight onto the next woman to catch his eye.
‘We’ve been married for almost a year and I’ve never been unfaithful,’ he stated steadily.
‘Then what were we arguing about?’
‘It was nothing. Teething problems like all newly-weds deal with. You weren’t supposed to be in this week so Chloe’s been working at your desk.’
The image of the blonde woman following him out of his car popped back into her mind. She had no memories of that woman but the way she’d reacted to her, the way her already tender stomach had twisted and coiled, made her think she had met her. ‘Who was that woman in your car this morning?’
Before he could answer, the consultant coughed unsubtly. Anna had almost forgotten she was there.
‘Anna, I appreciate this is hard for you. There are a lot of gaps in your memory to fill.’
She sucked in her lips and nodded. A whole year of memories needed to be filled. A whole year that she’d lost; a big black void during which she had married her boss and Lord knew what else had occurred. ‘Will I get my memories back?’
‘Brain injuries are complex. There are methods that will help retrieve the memories, things we call “joggers”, which are aids to help with recall, but there are no guarantees. The country’s top specialist in retrograde amnesia will be here in the morning to see you—he’ll be able to give you more information.’
Anna closed her eyes. ‘How long do I have to stay here for?’
‘We want to keep you under observation for the night. Providing there’s no further issues, there’s no reason you can’t be discharged tomorrow after you’ve seen the specialist.’
‘And then I can go home?’
But where was her home? Was it the flat she’d shared with her big sister since she was fourteen? Or with Stefano?
The nausea that had eased with the help of medication rolled back into life.
She couldn’t have married him. Not Stefano of all people.
‘You’ll need to take it easy for a few weeks to recover from the concussion but your husband’s already assured me he’ll be on hand to take care of you.’
‘So Stefano knows all this? You’ve already discussed it with him?’
‘I’m your next of kin,’ he said, his thick accent pronouncing ‘kin’ as ‘keen’, something that under ordinary circumstances would make her laugh. Right then, Anna felt she would never find anything funny again.
‘No, you’re not. Melissa is.’ Melissa had been her next of kin since her sister had agreed to take sole guardianship of her when she’d been only eighteen and Anna fourteen.
The uncomfortable look came back to the consultant’s face. ‘Anna, I understand this is