The Unforgettable Husband

But other than for those things she simply loved every inch of the place. A point that added to the puzzle as to why she would want to turn her back on it all as if it had never existed.

Or turn her back on the man who came with it, she then added with a faint quiver she knew was more sexual than threatening.

With a small sigh, she suddenly decided to pick up the phone and call Carla at the Tremount. She’d promised she would keep in touch, and right now she felt she needed to hear a friendly voice… A truly familiar friendly voice, she extended.

But the conversation wasn’t quite as comforting as that…

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LETTING himself back into the house, André paused in the hallway to listen for signs of life. Hearing none, he began searching rooms, giving himself a few uneasy moments when he couldn’t find Samantha anywhere—until he had the sense to look where he would have expected to find the old Samantha.

Sure enough, even as he strode through the door connecting the sitting room with the elegant glass-domed swimming pool, he saw her cutting through the water with the smooth, clean glide of a natural-born swimmer. She was a mermaid; she always had been. Give her time to herself and she would usually find a pool somewhere to dive into, and it filled him with a real burst of pleasure to see her truly back where she belonged like this.

His first instinct was to strip to his micro-briefs then dive in there and join her—only he was wryly aware that she probably wouldn’t appreciate the gesture right now, when natural responses had to be contained to their minimum.

Presuming, of course, that the Samantha swimming in the pool was the new Samantha, he then thought frowningly. He didn’t think even she knew how often she’d slipped back and forth through time. He hadn’t begun to realise himself until this morning, when he’d watched her pour his coffee without needing to be prompted on how he liked it. As she’d pushed the drink towards him it had finally begun to dawn on him just what was happening to her—and had been happening from the moment he’d walked back into her life.

The journey to Exeter from the Tremount, for instance, when she’d spent the whole time talking to him as if they’d never been apart. André this, André that. It had driven him crazy at the time, hearing her say his name so comfortably while still believing he was a complete stranger. Then there were the times when they’d touched or kissed or made love, he recounted with a fine, tight, sense-twisting shudder. She’d known him then, all right, and had slipped into the old Samantha mould just as naturally as she was cutting through the water right now.

So—which one was swimming in the pool—the old or the new Samantha? he asked himself.

Hell, he didn’t know. But he was not going to risk finding out the hard way, by shocking her into another blackout in the middle of a pool of deep water.

So, instead of making her aware of his presence, he turned away with the intention of leaving as silently as he had arrived… Or would have done if a rather sarcastic voice hadn’t stopped him.

‘Well, well.’ He heard her drawl. ‘If it isn’t the very busy, hotshot tycoon taking time out of his busy tycoon schedule to say hello…’

His skin began to prickle, the tone alone telling him that whichever Samantha it was she was angry about something. Turning round, he saw her treading water dead centre of the pool. ‘Was there something specific you meant to convey in that remark?’ he enquired narrowly.

‘Yes,’ she replied, then slid gracefully onto her back to stroke smoothly away.

Still not certain who it was he was talking to, André stepped to the edge of the pool. ‘Then, explain,’ he suggested.

‘I was commenting on your very busy life,’ she informed him as those long slender arms lazily propelled her through the water. ‘Picking up a hotel here, picking another up there… Tell me,’ she begged, the sarcasm echoing high into the glass-domed roof, ‘because I’ll be really interested to know, is there an actual point where you can ever envisage saying to yourself that enough is enough, I don’t need another hotel, no matter what its money-pulling potential is?’

She was talking hotels. His flesh went cold. ‘Get out of the water!’ he commanded harshly.

‘I beg your pardon?’ She gasped, and stopped swimming to stare at him.

‘You heard me.’ He began striding down the length of the pool with his senses on alert and his mind gone haywire. ‘I want you to swim to the side of the pool and get out! I mean it, Samantha!’ he warned when she made no move to comply. ‘If you don’t get out of there I’m coming in to drag you out!’

And to suit threat with action he pulled off his jacket and tossed it aside.

Puzzled, more than anything, he suspected, because she could see he was so deadly serious, she swam to the other side of the pool and pulled herself out. Water streamed from her body, leaving behind it a long, slender nymph with skin like a pearl and a lilac one-piece swimsuit that revealed more that it concealed… And he still didn’t know which Samantha it was that turned to glare at him across the width of the pool.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she demanded crossly. ‘I can swim like a fish! I don’t need—’

‘And if you’d had another blackout while you were in there?’ he raked back. ‘What good would your swimming proficiency be to you then?’

Slender hands went on slender hips. Old or new? Both would challenge him with that pose. ‘You’re just trying to divert my attention away from what I was talking about,’ she accused him. ‘Do you think I haven’t noticed how you like to do that? Well, forget it this time, André, because it isn’t going to work—’

André. She’d just called him André.

‘So let’s talk about hotels,’ she went on in a voice still dripping sarcasm. ‘And let’s talk about sneaky tycoons who move in on people as well as hotels and take them over without—’

Hell, she knew who she was all right. ‘I did not move in on the Bressingham!’ He angrily denied the charge. ‘And I did not move in on your father! In fact it was the other way round, if you’d only…’

Something changed inside her. Samantha felt it happen. A sudden icy confusion that made her feel very peculiar as she tried to make sense of a misunderstanding which oddly didn’t feel like a misunderstanding but more like a horrible—horrible case of déjàvu.