The Unforgettable Husband
Michelle Reid CHAPTER ONE
BLACK bow-tie hanging loose around his neck and the top two buttons on his snowy white dress shirt tugged open at his darkly tanned throat, Andre Visconte sat sprawled in the chair behind his desk, with his feet propped up on the top and the blunt-ended fingers of one beautifully shaped hand lightly clasping a squat crystal glass half full of his favourite whisky.
It was late and he was tired so his eyes were shut, the grooves around his thirty-fouryear-old, life-toughened mouth seeming more harshly etched than usual. He should have gone straight home from the gala opening of a friend's new downtown restaurant but instead he had come back here to his office. He was expecting a call from Paris and it seemed more sensible to wait for it here than at his home since the office was closer.
And anyway, home held no welcome for him any more.
Some bright spark somewhere had once made the classic remark that home was where the heart was. Well, Andre no longer believed he had a heart, so home, these days, tended to be any place he could lay his head. And, depending on where he was, that usually meant one of the plush city residences he possessed in most capitals of the world.
Not that he had used many of them recently, if you didn't count his apartment right here in New York, of course. Though all of his homes were maintained to his expected high standards-just in case he decided to drop in.
Or in case Samantha did.
_ Samantha. .. The fingers around the whisky glass tightened fractionally. His tough mouth straightened into a line of such grim cynicism that if anyone had been there to see it happen, they would have been backing right off in alarm by now.
Because Andre Visconte wasn't known for his good temper these days-hadn't been known for it for twelve long months now.
Not since Samantha had walked out of his life never to be seen or heard from again. Nowadays, only a fool would dare to say her name out loud in his presence and, since fools were not suffered gladly in the Visconte empire, none ever said it.
But he couldn't stop the cursed name from creeping into his own head now and then. And when it did, it was difficult to it to unravel the gamut of different emotions that came buzzing along with it. Pain was one of them, plus a dark, bloody anger aimed entirely at himself for letting her get away from him.
Then there were the moments of real guilt-ridden anguish to contend with, or the bouts of gut-wrenching concern as to what had become of her. And, to top it all off, there was a hard-to-take sense of personal bitterness in knowing that she could leave him that made him wish he had never met her in the first place!
But most of all there was an ache. An ache of such muscle-clenching proportions that sometimes he had to fight not to groan at the power of it.
Why-? Because he missed her. No matter what, no matter when, no matter whysometimes he missed her so badly that he could barely cope with what missing her did to him.
Tonight had been like that. One of those all-too-rare moments when he had caught himself laughing quite easily-actually managing to enjoy himself! Then a beautiful woman with flame-red hair had walked past him. She had reminded him of Samantha and his mood had flipped over. Light to dark. Warm to cold. Laughter to lousy misery ...
After that, it had been better to escape here and brood where no one could see him doing it. But, God, he hated her for making him feel like this.
Empty. The word was empty.
The glass went to his mouth, hard lips parting so he could attack the whisky as if it was his enemy. Then, with a sigh that came from somewhere deep down inside of him, he leaned further back into the soft leather chair and waited for the whisky to attack him back by burning Samantha's name right out of his system.
