The Vengeful Husband (The Husband Hunters 2)

Still in a world of her own, Darcy moved her muzzy head as if she was afraid it might fall off her neck. Luca Raffacani could not be the man with whom she had spent the night in Venice; he could not possibly be the same man! And yet, he was! It made no sense, it seemed beyond the bounds of even the wildest feat of imagination, but those strong promptings of familiarity which had troubled her apparently had their basis in solid fact.

'Can you stand?' Luca enquired.

'I'm fine...really,' Darcy whispered unconvincingly as she fought to focus her mind. She got up on legs that felt like cotton wool sticks. She shook hands with the vicar, who was anxiously hovering. Then she stared at Luca again with a kind of appalled fascination and knew she would never feel fine again, knew she felt, rather, as if she had lost her mind in that devastating moment of recognition.

"The car's outside, sir.' Benito spoke for the first time as he turned from the window.

Darcy's attention swivelled to the younger man. Sir? She encountered a fleeting look of pity in Benito's gaze. The sort of pity one experienced for someone sick when all hope had gone, Darcy labelled with a bemused shudder.

What on earth was going on? Who was Gianluca Fabrizio Raffacani? And whoever he was, whatever he was, she had just made him her husband!

'Calm yourself,' Luca urged before they walked back out of the church to face the crowd of well-wishers waiting to see them off.

'But I recognised you...' she told him shakily.

'You mean you finally shuffled the memory of one face out of the no doubt countless one-night stands you have enjoyed?' Luca murmured in a silken smooth stab, making her shrink in stricken disbelief at such a charge. 'Am I to feel honoured by that most belated distinction?'

His cool confirmation that he was who she believed he was shook Darcy up even more. In the back of her mind she had still somehow expected and foolishly hoped that Luca would turn with a raised brow to tell her that he hadn't a clue what she was talking about.

'You don't understand,' she began, in an unsteady at¬tempt to defend herself, so confused was she still. 'I could hardly see you that night, not in any detail...your face was a blur and out of focus—you looked different...'

'I guess one bird for the plucking looks much like an¬other,' Luca responded with a sardonic bite that sizzled down her spine like a hurricane warning and made her turn even paler.

A bird for the plucking? She didn't understand that crack any more than she could understand anything else. As they left the churchyard her attention fell on the big silver lim¬ousine waiting by the kerb. Pressed into a vehicle which was the very last word in expensive luxury, she was even more bewildered. Benito swung into the front seat. The tinted glass barrier between the front and the back of the limo was partially open, denying them privacy.

Darcy snatched in a shuddering breath. Her brain ached, all at once throwing up a dozen even more confusing in¬consistencies. In a daze, she struggled hopelessly to super¬impose the image of the Luca she had thought she was getting to know over her memory of the male who had romanced her in Venice, the sleek, seductive rat who had torn her inside out with the pain of loss...

Involuntarily she focused on Luca again. There was a strikingly relaxed quality to the indolent sprawl of his strong, supple body. In the state Darcy was in, that supreme poise and cool was uniquely intimidating.

Within minutes the limo drew up outside the Folly. Darcy scrambled out in haste, her heartbeat banging in her eardrums. With damp, nerveless hands she unlocked and thrust open the heavy front door to walk into the echoing medieval hall with its aged flagstoned floor.

She spun round, then, to face Luca, where he had stilled by the giant smoke-blackened stone fireplace. Her oval face was stiff with strain as she attempted to match his aura of complete self-command.

'I can't believe that coincidence has anything to do with this...' Darcy admitted jaggedly.

'Very wise.' Luca surveyed her with a grim satisfaction that was chilling.

'How could you possibly have found out who I was...or where I lived?'

'With persistence, no problem is insuperable. It took time, but I had you traced.'

'You had me traced...dear heaven, why?' Darcy could not hide her incredulity. 'Why the heck would you even want to do such a thing?'

'Don't play dumb,' Luca advised with derision.

Darcy shook her head dizzily as she braced her hands on the back of a tapestry-covered chair to steady herself. 'You came to that interview in disguise...you have to be certi-fiably nuts to have gone to such outrageous lengths—'

'No...merely guilty of the inexpressibly vain assumption that I might be in some danger of being recognised.'

Darcy winced at that jibe and closed her eyes, but then she had to open them again, possessed as she was by a sick compulsion to keep on watching Luca. But his lean, hard features betrayed nothing. 'Why did you do this? What's in it for you? You can't be unemployed or b-broke.'