You weren’t supposed to smile on passport photographs. But the face looking back up her from her own lap told her that this person did not know how to turn that provocative little smile off. And her face wore no evidence of strain. She simply looked lively and lovely and—
‘Visconte’, it said. ‘Samantha Jane’. ‘British citizen’.
‘You lost this particular passport about six months after we were married and had to apply for a new one,’ he explained. ‘But I happened to turn this up when I was—’ He stopped, then went on. ‘When I was searching through some old papers.’ He finally concluded. But they both knew he had been about to say something else.
When his hand moved to pick up the marriage certificate, she stopped him. ‘No.’ She breathed out thickly. ‘Not that. Th-the other…’
Slowly, reluctantly almost, his fingers moved to pick up the photograph, hesitated a moment, then flipped it over.
Samantha’s heart flipped over with it. Because staring back at her in full Technicolor was herself, dressed up in frothy bridal-white.
Laughing. She was laughing up into the face of her handsome groom. Laughing up at him—this man dressed in a dark suit with a white rose in his lapel and confetti lying on his broad shoulders. He was laughing too, but there was more—so much more to his laughter than just mere amusement. There was—
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.