The Sicilian's Mistress. Lynne Graham

You saw some really interesting people at airports, she told herself squarely. Her attention had been momentarily distracted and she wasn’t feeling too good. That was all it had been.

      But when Faith vacated the cloakroom and turned back into the main concourse, she found her path unexpectedly blocked.

      ‘Milly…?’ A dark, accented voice breathed with noticeable stress.

      Faith glanced up, and it was a very long way up, and met flashing dark eyes so cold and deep her heart leapt straight into her throat. It was the same guy she had been staring at ten minutes earlier! Her feet froze to the floor in shock.

      ‘Madre di Dio…’ The stranger stared fixedly down at her, his deep, accented drawl like an icy hand dancing down her taut spine. ‘It is you!’

      Faith gazed up at him in frank surprise and sudden powerful embarrassment. She took a backward step. ‘Sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong person.’

      ‘Maybe you wish I had.’ The intimidating stranger gazed down at her from his incredibly imposing height, slumbrous dark eyes roving so intently over her face that colour flooded her drawn cheeks. ‘Dio…you still blush. How do you do that?’ he drawled very, very softly.

      ‘Look, I don’t know you, and I’m in a hurry,’ Faith responded in an evasive, mortified mutter, because she couldn’t help wondering if her own foolish behaviour earlier had encouraged him to believe that she was willing to be picked up.

      Eyes the colour of rich, dark golden honey steadily widened and her heartbeat started to thump at what felt like the base of her throat, making it difficult for her to breathe. ‘You don’t know me?’ he repeated very drily. ‘Milly, this is Gianni D’Angelo you’re dealing with, and running scared with a really stupid story won’t dig you out of the big deep hole you’re in!’

      ‘You don’t know me. You’ve made a mistake,’ Faith told him sharply.

      ‘No mistake, Milly. I could pick you out of a thousand women in the dark,’ Gianni D’Angelo murmured even more drily, his wide, sensual mouth curling with growing derision. ‘So, if the nose job was supposed to make you unrecognisable, it’s failed. And what sad soap opera did you pick this crazy pretence out of? You’re in enough trouble without this childish nonsense!’

      Her dark blue eyes huge in receipt of such an incomprehensible address, Faith spluttered, ‘A nose job? For goodness’ sake—’

      ‘You have a lot of explaining to do, and I intend to conduct this long-overdue conversation somewhere considerably more private than the middle of an airport,’ he asserted grittily. ‘So let’s get out of here before some paparazzo recognises me!’

      As Faith attempted to sidestep him he spontaneously matched her move and blocked her path again. She studied him in disbelief. ‘P-please get out of my way…’ she stammered, fear and confusion now rising like a surging dark tide inside her.

      ‘No.’

      ‘You’re mad…if you don’t get out of my way, I’ll scream!’

      He reeled back a full step, a deep frown-line of impressive incredulity hardening his lean, strong features. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ he demanded with savage abruptness.

      Faith broke through the gap he had left by the wall and surged past him at frantic speed.

      A hand as strong and sure as an iron vice captured her wrist before she got more than two feet away. ‘Accidenti…where do you think you’re going?’ he questioned in angry disbelief, curving his infinitely larger hand right round her clenched fingers.

      ‘I’ll report you to the police for harassing me!’ Faith gasped. ‘Let go of me!’

      ‘Don’t be ridiculous…’ He gazed unfathomably down into her frightened and yet strangely blank eyes and suddenly demanded with raw, driven urgency, ‘What’s the matter with you?’

      Faith spun a frantic glance around herself. Only her instinctive horror at the idea of creating a seriously embarrassing public scene restrained her from a noisy outburst. ‘Please let go of me!’ she urged fiercely.

      The ring on her engagement finger scored his palm as she tried to pull free. Without warning he flipped her hand around in the firm hold of his and studied the small diamond solitaire she wore. A muscle jerked tight at the corner of his bloodlessly compressed lips, shimmering flaring eyes flying up again to her taut face.

      ‘Now I understand why you’re acting like a madwoman!’ he grated, with barely suppressed savagery.

      And Faith’s self-discipline just snapped, right then and there. She flung back her head and tried to call out for assistance, but her vocal cords were knotted so tight with stress only a suffocated little squawk emerged. But surprisingly that was sufficient. Gianni D’Angelo, as he had called himself, dropped her hand as if she had burnt him and surveyed her in almost comical astonishment.

      Shaking like a leaf, Faith backed away. ‘I’m not this Milly you’re looking for…never seen you before in my life, never want to see you again…’

      And she rushed away her tummy tied up in sick knots again, her head pounding, a kind of nameless terror controlling her. She raced across the endless car park as if she had wings, and then fell, exhausted, to a slower pace, breathless and winded, heartbeat thundering. Crazy, crazy man, frightening her like that all because she resembled some poor woman who had clearly got out while the going was good. Gianni D’Angelo. She didn’t recognise that name. And why should she?

      But wasn’t it strange that he should have attracted her attention first? And only then had he approached her. Almost as if he genuinely had recognised her…

      As her apprehensions rose to suffocating proportions release from fear came in the guise of an obvious fact. Of course he couldn’t have recognised her! She couldn’t believe that she had ever been the kind of person to run around using a false name! And she was Faith Jennings, the only child of Robin and Davina Jennings. True, she might have been a difficult teenager, but then that wasn’t that uncommon, and her parents had long since forgiven her for the awful anxiety she had once caused them.

      Half an hour later, sitting in her little hatchback car in heavy morning rush-hour traffic, Faith took herself to task for the overwrought state she was in. Here she was, supposedly a mature adult of twenty-six, reacting like a frightened teenager desperate to rush home to her parents for support. And yet what had happened? Virtually nothing. A case of mistaken identity with a stubborn foreigner unwilling to accept his error! That was all it had been. A nose job, for heaven’s sake!

      And 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