The Sicilian's Mistress

‘That’s enough, Faith,’ Robin Jennings said stiffly.

‘Why did you let him into this house?’ Faith demanded fiercely.

Gianni strolled forward with measured steps. ‘Keep quiet and sit down,’ he told her, his stunning dark features stamped with gravity, his eyes impenetrable. ‘I asked to be present. Robin and Davina have a rather disturbing confession to make and they need you to listen to them.’

A confession? A confession about what? Complete confusion made Faith sink slowly down into an armchair. Her accusing stare stayed on Gianni. He dominated the low-ceilinged room, with his height and presence, as alien against the backdrop of the cosy décor as a tiger prowling a busy city street. He didn’t belong here, she thought bitterly, and she couldn’t credit that her parents could have been influenced by any request of his.

He wore a silver-grey suit, fabulously well cut to his lithe, lean and powerful frame. The fabric had the smooth gleam of wildly expensive cloth, his shirt the sheen of silk. She clashed with dark, deep-set eyes, and suddenly it was an effort to summon up a single connected thought.

‘Faith…’ her father breathed curtly.

Faith looked back to her parents with some embarrassment. ‘What’s going on?’

‘When we identified you at the hospital three years ago, we didn’t have the smallest doubt that you were our child,’ the older man told her flatly. ‘You were wearing the bracelet we gave our daughter on her sixteenth birthday. You were blonde, blue-eyed, about an inch taller than you had been when you left. You were a lot thinner, but then why not? Seven years is a long time.’

‘Why are you talking about this?’ Faith frowned.

Her mother crammed a tissue to her lips and twisted her head away with a stifled gasp. ‘I can’t bear this—’

‘What Robin is trying to tell you is that he and his wife made a very unfortunate mistake.’ Gianni advanced, sounding every word with precision.

‘We were so overjoyed at getting you back,’ Davina Jennings confided jerkily. ‘It was over a year before I even admitted to myself that there might be room for doubt about your identity…’

Faith was now as still as a statue, her shaken eyes the only life in her taut face. ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say…’

‘At the start you were very ill. Then you came round and you had no memories,’ Robin Jennings reminded her tensely. ‘Our daughter had no distinguishing marks that we could go on. Nothing jarred at that stage. You had grown up. Naturally you had to have matured and changed.’

Gianni shot Faith’s perplexed expression a perceptive glance and murmured levelly, ‘They’re trying to tell you that they are not your parents.’

‘Not my parents,’ Faith repeated like an obedient child. She couldn’t believe that, she just couldn’t believe it, couldn’t even take s

uch a gigantic concept on board long enough to consider it. ‘This is crazy…why are you telling me this stuff?’

‘We came to love you very much,’ her father—who, according to Gianni, was not her father—explained almost eagerly. ‘In fact as we got to know the person we believed you had become we couldn’t have been happier.’

‘But eventually we began making discoveries about you that we couldn’t just ignore or explain away,’ Davina continued reluctantly. ‘You have a lovely singing voice. Our daughter couldn’t even sing in tune. You speak French like a native…our daughter failed French at GCSE. She was hopeless at languages.’

Locked suddenly into a world of her own, Faith remembered the evening her father had brought a French client home for dinner. The instant the man had uttered a French phrase she had turned without hesitation to address him in the same language. Dimly she recalled how astonished her parents had been. But at the time she hadn’t thought anything of that. In fact she’d been delighted when the Frenchman had told her that she had a remarkable idiomatic grasp of his language. In those days it had seemed to her that she had no useful talents, and it had felt good to discover she had at least one.

‘All the little discrepancies we’d so easily explained away at the beginning came back to haunt us. Your handwriting is so different.’ Robin Jennings sighed. ‘You like cats. Faith was allergic to cats. It wasn’t really very likely that you’d grown out of that. We began to look rather desperately for you to remind us in some way of the daughter we remembered, but there was nothing.’

Faith sat there in the kind of shock that felt like a great weight squeezing the life force from her. ‘But the bracelet…I was wearing Granny’s bracelet—’

‘Our daughter must’ve sold it. Although she took it with her when she went, she wasn’t that fond of it. Perhaps you bought the bracelet, or somebody else gave it to you. We were foolish to rely so much on a piece of jewellery,’ Davina conceded curtly.

‘This isn’t possible,’ Faith said very carefully, but as the bracelet that she had long regarded as a kind of talisman was dismissed her voice sank to a mere thread of its usual volume.

Gianni released his breath in a charged hiss.

‘If she doesn’t want to believe it, I’m quite content,’ Davina Jennings announced, shooting a glance of bitter dislike at Gianni. ‘In every way that matters she is our daughter and we love her and we don’t want to lose her. Neither Robin nor I want anything to change. We told you that last night—’

‘And I asked you what you intended to do if the real Faith showed up,’ Gianni reminded the older woman without hesitation.

Davina stiffened defensively. ‘Not very likely after ten years.’

‘This is really happening,’ Faith registered finally. ‘You’re telling me that I’m not really your child, that I was never your child…that this life I’m living actually belongs to another woman.’

‘Your name is Milly Henner and you’re twenty-four years old,’ Gianni delivered. ‘And while I’m here there is nothing to be afraid of.’