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‘I’m sorry,’ she briefly sobbed against his shoulder before she got a grip on herself again and glanced up at him with a grimace of apology. ‘It was the shock. I wasexpecting—’
‘Keep it simple, like me,’ Lorenzo urged. ‘I’m practical and calculating and very typical of the male sex. I’m expecting you in my bed at night.’
An indelicate little snort of laughter escaped Brooke then, drying up the tears at source. ‘Is that so?’ she mumbled, a sudden shard of happiness piercing her.
‘You haven’t even asked me yet whatIdid wrong in our marriage,’ he reproved. ‘The mistakes weren’t all onyourside. I worked long hours, left you alone too much and only took you to boring dinner parties where everyone was talking about finance. You weren’t happy with me either.’
‘We’ll see how Italy goes,’ Brooke murmured softly. ‘As you said, we can choose to part at any time, so neither of us need to feel trapped.’
‘You’re feeling trapped?’ Lorenzo demanded without warning, an arctic light gleaming in his beautiful dark eyes.
‘No...’ Brooke toyed with a button on his jacket, striving not to flatter him with too much enthusiasm. ‘I don’t feel trapped at all. Maybe I’ve grown up a bit from the person I was before the crash. Obviously I’ve changed. I don’t seem to want people with cameras chasing me. I seem to have lost what seems to have been an overriding interest in fashion and clothes...gosh, I’m going to be forced out shopping if you’re taking me travelling. A lot of the clothes, and particularly the shoes, don’t fit me now,’ she confided ruefully.
‘I’ll organise someone to come to the house this afternoon and kit you out. I’ll postpone the flight until early tomorrow morning,’ Lorenzo informed her arrogantly. ‘But that means I’ll have to work late tonight... OK?’
‘OK,’ she agreed breathlessly.
Lorenzo stared down at her heart-shaped face while awhat-the-hell-am-I-doing?question raced over and over through his brain. He concentrated instead on that luscious pink mouth and the ever-present throb at his groin and bent his head to taste those succulent lips.
Brooke fell into that kiss like honey melting on a grill. Her insides turned liquid and burned. It happened every time he kissed her, a shooting, thrilling internal heat that washed through her like a dangerous drug, lighting up every part of her body. She wanted to cling, but she wouldn’t let herself, stepping back with a control that she was proud to maintain after her earlier emotionalism.
She reddened as she connected with his brilliant dark eyes, which packed such a passionate punch. Maybe this very hunger was what had first brought them together and kept them together even when their relationship didn’t work in other ways. Sadly, it was a sobering thought to accept that sexual attraction might have been the most they had ever had as a couple and all she had left to build on.
Obviously, naturally, she wanted more, she reflected ruefully. She wanted him tostopfeeling as responsible for her as a man might feel about a helpless child. She wanted him to see and accept that she no longer needed to be handled with kid gloves, that she was an adult and able to cope with her own life, even if it did mean losing him in the process. And possibly that was what itwouldmean, she conceded unhappily, bearing in mind that their marriage had apparently been rocky from the start.
Yet where had the ambition-driven woman she had been gone? Where had all the knowledge she must have accumulated from the fashion world gone? Why didn’t she care now about what style was ‘in’ and what was ‘out’? Why was she most comfortable in a pair of ordinary jeans? Where now was the brash confidence that had fairly blazed out of the magazine cuttings in her press scrapbooks? Those were questions that only time, or the recovery of her memories, would answer. But facing up to more challenging situations alone would probably strengthen her and do her good, she told herself fiercely. She resolved to make that visit to the café to ask about Milly Taylor on the drive home. Perhaps that would help her work out what the connection had been between two ostensibly very different women.
The café was also a bakery and Brooke waited patiently until the queue of customers had gone and the older woman behind the counter looked at her for the first time. The woman’s eyes rounded, and she paled, stepping back as though she had had a fright.
‘Milly?’she exclaimed shakily, her hand flying up to her mouth in a gesture of confusion as she stared at the younger woman. ‘No, no... I canseeyou’re not Milly, but just for a moment there, the resemblance gave me such a shock!’
Brooke’s brow pleated as she asked the woman if they could have a chat. ‘I’m Brooke Tassini. Milly died in the crash that I was injured in. You seem to think I resemble her... I’ve lost my memory,’ she explained with a wince. ‘I’m still trying to work out who Milly was to me.’
‘Brooke? I’m Marge,’ the middle-aged woman said comfortably as she moved out from behind the counter. ‘When I get a better look at you, the resemblance isn’t as striking as I first thought it was. But Milly had the same long curly hair and the same colour of eyes. Look, come and see the photo of her.’
Brooke crossed the café to scrutinise the small staff group photo on the wall, but it wasn’t a very clear picture and she peered at the smiling image with a frown because she could see the extraordinary similarity of their features and colouring. ‘When she was working here, did she ever mention me? I’m wondering now if she could be some distant relation, a cousin or something?’
‘Milly didn’t ever mention you,’ Marge told her apologetically. ‘She was a quiet girl. To be honest, I don’t think shehadmuch of a life outside work and she only worked here for a couple of months. I got the impression that she had moved around quite a bit, but I was still surprised that morning when she chucked her job in, because she had seemed content here. She said she had to quit because she had a family crisis.’ Marge made a face. ‘She seemed to forget that according to what she had once told me, she didn’thavea family.’
‘Oh...’ Brooke breathed, acknowledging that she was no further on in her need to know who her companion had been and why they had been in the limousine together. The resemblance, though, that was a new fact, something that hadn’t come out before, possibly because Marge wasn’t in the right age group even to know who Brooke Tassini was or what she looked like, she reasoned while thanking the woman for her time.
As she walked to the door to leave, a startling image shot through her brain and for a split second it froze her in her tracks. In the flashback a man was standing over her where she sat in the café and shouting drunkenly at her while Marge flung the door wide to persuade him to leave. Brooke tried to hang onto that snapshot back in time, frantic to see more, knowmore. But nothing else came to her and embarrassment at the time she had already taken out of Marge’s working day—Marge, who was already serving a new queue of customers at the counter—pushed her back out onto the street again in a daze.
Why did she never remember anything useful? she asked herself in frustration. Obviously she had visited the café at some point, presumably to see Milly, and Marge hadn’t remembered her, which wasn’t that surprising in a busy enterprise. What did still nag at Brooke, though, was the resemblance that Marge had remarked on and she had seen for herself. That was a rather strange coincidence, wasn’t it? But how could it relate in any way to why that woman had been with her in the car?
CHAPTER SEVEN
BROOKEWASRELAXEDand calm on the drive from the airport in Florence.
Even the crack of dawn flight had failed to irritate her because the change of scene was a relief and an escape from her repetitive and anxious thoughts. Those exact same thoughts had threatened to send her out in search of more gossipy magazines that would enable her to find out additional stuff about her marriage. Aware of that temptation and the futility of such an exercise, when she already knew as much as she needed to know for the present, she had made herself concentrate instead on the selection of a capsule wardrobe with the stylist, who had arrived at Madrigal Court the previous afternoon. It had been a disappointment, though, that Lorenzo had come home so late that he had evidently chosen to sleep in his own room.
The crisp white and blue sundress she wore was comfortable in the heat of an Italian summer. It was neither edgy nor trendy but it was elegant and flattering, skimming nicely over those curvy parts of her that she was beginning to suspect were a littletoocurvy. Was a tendency to gain why she had once watched her diet with such zeal? But she had been too thin when she emerged from the coma and was now content to be a healthy weight, she reasoned. In any case, Lorenzo had been with her when she was flawless in figure and physically perfect and, clearly, it had done nothing to save their marriage. Now she had scars and more curves and neither seemed to bother him, although, to be fair, the scarring was minimal, thanks to the expert cosmetic surgery she had received, she acknowledged gratefully.
‘Have I ever been to this house of yours before?’ she asked Lorenzo.
‘No. I tried to bring you here a couple of times, but it never fitted your schedule. There was always some event, some opening or fashion show that you couldn’t miss.’
‘Did you grow up in this house?’ she prompted with curiosity.
