Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  The moment he let her up for air she searched his face through the semi-darkness. He looked different, relaxed, the strain and the tough self-control had gone.

  ‘It’s over?’ she asked.

  He nodded, levering himself up on his side so he could look down at her. ‘Your brother is off the hook because the bank has decided not to press charges since the money went missing for only twenty-four hours,’ he said. ‘And your father simply told the truth and maintained he knew nothing about any of it.’

  ‘And you?’ she asked.

  ‘I talked my way out of it,’ he answered, ‘By deciding on my story and sticking to it. So long as I continued to insist I knew nothing about the five and a half million your brother took, they could prove no wrongdoing on my part.’

  Lizzy lifted a hand to touch her fingers to the rueful twist at the corner of his mouth. ‘But what you did was—wrong?’

  He didn’t answer for a moment, his eyes dark on her anxious expression. Then he took hold of her fingers and kissed them.

  ‘Morally, yes,’ he said.

  Tears spread like a film across her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, then, that you felt you had to do something wrong for my benefit, but—thank you,’ she added. Then, because she knew she just had to say it, in fact she’d been burning to say it throughout the long, hard week, ‘I love you, Luc,’ she whispered to him.

  It was the first time she had allowed herself to say it and even hearing it fall from her lips set her heart pounding in her chest because she knew she couldn’t lay herself more open to him.

  Yet he said nothing—nothing for ages, just continued to kiss the tips of her fingers and look down at her through those dark golden, utterly unreadable eyes of his.

  Then he smiled. ‘Loving gratitude from my worst critic,’ he mocked lightly. ‘It was almost worth it.’

  It was like receiving a kick in the teeth. Lizzy tried to get up, but he stopped her.

  ‘No,’ he husked, ‘forget I said that. I’m still stinging from being forced to explain myself and that was unbelievably generous of you.’

  Was he trying to make her feel better? Because he wasn’t succeeding. She felt broken in two.

  ‘And I love you too, bella mia,’ he added huskily. ‘Of course I do. Why else would I put my reputation at such risk if not for the woman I love?’

  Why else indeed? Lizzy thought bleakly. Desire? Anger? Wounded pride? A determination not to look the fool Bianca had turned him into, no matter what it cost him?

  She could have made the list grow and grow, if he’d let her, but, ‘Now all I want is you, so badly I ache,’ he roughed out, and the warm crush of his hungry mouth took away her ability to think.

  For the first time since their wedding night they made love with a grim, silent intensity that pounded her wounded emotions and left her satiated but with tears on her cheeks.

  He gently licked them away and said nothing. He continued to hold her close and said nothing. And when she woke the next morning he had gone from their bed leaving her with an ache that dragged on her insides.

  It was an ache that was not going to go away any time soon, and indeed was about to become a whole lot worse.

  Though Lizzy didn’t know that when she crawled out of the bed that morning. In truth she would have preferred to remain in it, with her face buried in the pillow and the covers pulled up over her head. She did not want to face whatever the new day was bringing, but Abriana was due to arrive and she needed to get herself together by then.

  There was a note waiting for her when she walked into the kitchen. It was propped up against the kettle and her fingers trembled as she picked it up and read Luc’s precise bold scrawl. ‘Dinner at eight’ he had written. ‘I will book a table somewhere special. Wear something fabulous. It will be our first date.’ And he’d signed it, ‘Ti amo, Luc…’ Ti amo, Luc …

  Thick tears crushed the muscles in her throat as she stood there trying to deal with the impact the endearment was having on her.

  Ti amo, Luc …

  She wished he hadn’t written it. She wished with all of her aching heart that he’d just pretended the words hadn’t come up between them so she could try—try to forget how stupid she’d been and maybe manage to move on.

  But Ti amo, Luc’ told her he was feeling bad about his reaction to her when she’d said it. ‘Ti amo, Luc,’ said he was attempting to make amends. ‘Ti amo, Luc,’ reminded her that they had a marriage to continue whatever else had happened and ‘Ti amo’ was, she supposed, a basic part of it, even if it was offered without the sincerity of truth.

  She crushed the note in her fingers and wrapped her slender arms tight around her aching ribs. The phone began ringing out in the hallway. It took six long echoing rings before she could bring herself to answer it.

  ‘Yes?’ she whispered.

  ‘Elizabeth?’ Luc questioned sharply. ‘Why are you answering the telephone? Where is Abriana?’

  Why was he the only person in the world who called her Elizabeth? she found herself thinking. Why did he have to be so painfully different from everyone else?

  ‘Sh-she’s not here yet,’ she answered.

  There was a buzzing silence. She wished she could think of something to say but she couldn’t, and her voice was shaking—she’d heard it for herself when she spoke.

  ‘Are you all right, cara?’ he husked out then.

  So he’d heard it too. Lizzy pressed her lips together. It was mad how one small endearment had the power to turn her into this much of a pained, quivering wreck. Cara, she could deal with. Cara was lightweight and familiar.

  ‘Luc, I think I m-might catch a flight home to England today. Go and see—’ she swallowed ‘—m-my father and—’

  ‘The hell you will,’ he bit out harshly, then followed it up with a blistering curse. ‘What is the matter with you? Why are you choosing this moment in particular to do this to me?’

  To him? She was doing it to herself! ‘I just thought—’

  ‘Well, don’t think!’ he rasped at her. ‘Por Dio, I will never understand women for as long as I live! I am on my way back to the apartment. You will do nothing until I arrive. We should not even be having this conversation! Abriana should be there to answer the damn phone!’

  ‘Why are you on your way here?’ Lizzy asked frowningly.

  There was another sharp buzzing silence and she could almost see him seething inside his chauffeur-driven car. ‘I will tell you when I get there. Our plans have changed. We will be going to the Lake Como villa. Use your time packing a suitcase for a stay there instead of packing one to leave me!’

  The phone went dead. Lizzy stared at it in a state of blank disbelief. He never got angry—not fire-breathing angry, anyway. He preferred the icy kind that could freeze the blood in your veins.

  The doorbell sounded its ring then. Replacing the telephone receiver, she went to let in her PA, with her head still whirling over too many things to make her stop and think before she turned the lock and opened the door.

  The person she saw standing there dressed in unrelieved black sent her gasping in shocked disbelief. ‘Bianca!’ she breathed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BURNING BLACK EYES spitting murder at her, Bianca Moreno took a step forward and threw her hand against the side of Lizzy’s face.

  ‘How could you, Lizzy?’ she sizzled at her. ‘How could you just marry him like that?’

  The whip-crack sting sent Lizzy staggering backwards, her hand jerking up to cover her cheek. ‘But y-you ran away with Matthew,’ she stammered out. ‘You left Luc—’

  ‘I didn’t leave him!’ her best friend spat at her scathingly. ‘Luc sent me away, because he said he’d found someone else and he didn’t want to marry me any more!’

  She was repeating her own press, Lizzy realized. ‘But that isn’t true. You know it isn’t, you—’

  Bianca stalked off, a shimmering mass of hurt tears and anger that Lizzy had to follow with her insides still shaking from the shock angry
slap.

  ‘Matthew rescued me.’ She continued to use the press line from a tragic position in the centre of the living room. ‘I called him up when I saw what was happening between you and Luc—’

  ‘But nothing was happening!’ Lizzy insisted.

  ‘I needed Matthew to come and take you away before you ruined my life!’ Swinging around to face her, Bianca let Lizzy see the pained tears in her eyes. ‘He was going to do it too,’ she said thickly, ‘the very next morning after that—fiasco w-when I caught you and Luc together on the terrace. I saw your face, Lizzy! I knew what you’d been doing!’

  The cringing guilt of that incident coming back to haunt her, Lizzy opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  Bianca burned her a scathing look. ‘I got you away from there as quickly as I could,’ she went on. ‘Your brother wanted to go to your room then and there and drag you home by the scruff of your traitorous neck, but it was already too late.’ Her voice broke down into a choke. ‘Luc arrived only minutes after we got back to the hotel. He told me it was over—right there in front of my cousin Vito and your brother, Lizzy!’ she cried. ‘He finished it between us and I have never been so humiliated in all of my life!’

  None of this was true—not the way that Bianca was telling it anyway, but what Lizzy couldn’t work out was why she was persisting in telling it to her as if it were!

  ‘You know you’re lying,’ she husked out shakily.

  ‘I’m lying?’ Bianca seared out. ‘Did you or did you not have the hots for my fiancé from the moment you set eyes on him?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Lizzy choked in shuddering answer.

  ‘We were friends—best friends! And you betrayed me in the worst possible way that you could! Well, now you’re going to know what it feels like to be hurt beyond bearing and be humiliated, Lizzy, because I’m pregnant with Luc’s baby and I want him back!’

  With those final words ringing in the silence that followed, several things suddenly happened at once. Luc appeared tall and tense in the opening through to the hallway with Abriana standing white-faced at his side. Bianca saw him and on a broken sob she ran towards him and threw herself against his chest.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she kept sobbing over and over while she clung to him, and he just stood there with his handsome face cold like frozen marble and his golden eyes fixed on Lizzy’s face.

  He had to have heard what Bianca had said because she’d been shrieking loud enough to drown out the sound of him coming into the apartment. And he wasn’t denying it could be possible. He wasn’t pushing Bianca away. He was just looking at Lizzy—looking as if waiting for her to say something, but what was there for her to say?

  And, anyway, it was as if someone had just switched on a light to make her see reality for the first time in weeks of self-denial. It was crazy and she knew it, but not once had she so much as considered that Luc and Bianca would be lovers. She’d just blocked the now sinkingly obvious out. Having to face it now, though, having to stand here with Bianca’s finger marks still stinging her cheek and her stark eyes fixed on Luc’s sternly controlled expression—glass case or not—she knew she was going to have to get out of here as fast as she could before she threw up.

  Bianca was still sobbing into his chest as Lizzy managed to get her shaking legs to walk forward. She was vaguely aware that he’d muttered something at Abriana because she disappeared out of sight and the growing horror of it all throbbed like an invisible monster in the air surrounding her. The closer she came to them, the worse the throbbing felt.

  When she finally drew level with them, Luc snaked a hand out and caught her shoulder. She shuddered so violently he bit out a curse.

  ‘Don’t’ he said in a dark husky rasp.

  She paused to look at him, then at Bianca held against him, then back into his eyes, and a strained, pale, helpless smile twisted her quivering lips at the tableau they made—the man, the jilted betrothed, the wife.

  Maybe he was reading her mind again because Luc moved his hand on her shoulder as if he was trying to use it as plea. ‘Don’t,’ he said again. ‘I will deal with it.’

  Deal with it … Thick tears wrapped themselves around her throat. For what was there for him to deal with? A near-hysterical ex-betrothed? A stung and stunned and stupidly naïve wife? Or a baby, which totally, utterly overwhelmed the importance of everything else.

  She shrugged off his hand and walked away from him. Hidden away inside the bedroom, she found herself staring at her own image reflected back at her from the full length mirror hung on one of the wardrobe doors. It was like looking at a stranger, a long and curvy total stranger with grey eyes and chestnut-coloured hair and an errant curl that insisted on flopping over her brow.

  It was over. It had to be. It didn’t matter any more if most of what Bianca had screamed at her was the detailed fabrication put out there to save Luc’s face. What mattered was the child Bianca claimed that she carried.

  The first De Santis heir.

  She was the infiltrator in this little trio, Lizzy told herself, which meant that she was the one who was going to have to leave.

  Maybe Bianca was right and she did deserve what was coming to her. She certainly felt that she did as she carefully turned away from the mirror only to find herself staring at the bed. Then with a race-quick spring of nerve-dragging agony the panic erupted, the desperate need to get out of here now—while she could!

  It took very little to do it, she realised painfully as she turned to yank open the closet door and dragged out the first suitcase she could lay her hands on. What she flung into that suitcase showed no sign of logic. Nor did the way she suddenly diverted halfway through and pulled open the wardrobe door to snatch at the first outdoor garment she saw. It was a black linen jacket she had never worn before. She dragged it on over the white tee shirt she was wearing with a pair of denims, then hunted down her handbag and rummaged through it with tight, trembling fingers to check that her passport was still in it along with her credit cards, then, finding everything in order, she completely forgot about the half-packed suitcase and spun to open the bedroom door.

  All was quiet in the hallway as she walked along it. Even Abriana was nowhere to be seen. And the door to Luc’s study was shut tight into its housing, telling her that he must have taken Bianca in there.

  Outside it was still raining—raining—raining. She waved down a cab and climbed inside. Linate airport was busy. It was always busy but she managed to get a seat on a flight about to leave for London. Three short hours later she was walking through the arrivals gate at Gatwick.

  And the first face she focused on was her father’s. Tears once again started to threaten. ‘H-how did you—?’

  ‘Luc called me,’ he explained, then nodded his head at someone standing behind her.

  Lizzy glanced round, then withered out a smile as she turned back to her father’s sombre face. She had been followed from the moment she’d stepped out of the apartment, tracked every foot of the way here by one of Luc’s security team.

  She didn’t know why her tears picked that moment to break, but she threw herself sobbing into her father’s arms.

  ‘It’s all right, Lizzy, you’re home now.’ Her father patted her back awkwardly. They were not a hugging, sobbing kind of family. ‘Let’s go and find my car.’

  They were halfway home before she asked about Matthew. ‘He’s okay,’ her father said. ‘If nothing else, he learned a few hard lessons in life with his crazy escapade, the main one being that taking something that doesn’t belong to you might be exciting while it’s happening, but there has to be a point where you accept you’re going to have to pay.’

  Was he talking about Matt stealing Hadley’s money, or her stealing Bianca from Luc? Lizzy didn’t ask the question because she didn’t want to know the answer.

  ‘Where is he now?’ she enquired instead.

  ‘In one of those expensive rehab clinics paid for by Luc—didn’t you know?’ he said t
o her gasp of surprise. ‘I thought Luc would have told you.’

  If there was one thing Lizzy had taken away from her very short marriage it was that Luc only told her what he wanted her to know. ‘Why rehab?’ she questioned.

  ‘Your brother had got himself into some messy stuff long before this thing with Bianca came up,’ her father said grimly. ‘I blame myself,’ he added heavily. ‘I should not have been so determined to make the two of you be the people I wanted you to be instead of the people you needed to be… Matthew owed a lot of money to a lot of unsavoury people,’ he continued heavily. ‘The idea of borrowing some of Hadley’s loan to pay these people was where the rest of his problems began. One bad idea exploded into a damn foolish thirst for revenge on me. The rest you know. He took off with Bianca for Australia to learn his real lesson in life, that the greatest love of your life is not always the sanest love of your life—as you have no doubt just found out for yourself.’

  Again Lizzy said nothing. She didn’t want to think about the insanity she had shown around Luc. All she wanted was to walk back into her own home and into her old bedroom and be miserable in there for the rest of her life.

  Only it wasn’t going to happen quite like that. The telephone was ringing even as they stepped into the house through the front door. Her father picked it up.

  ‘It’s Luc,’ he said, holding the receiver out to her.

  But Lizzy just pressed her lips together and walked into the kitchen. She didn’t want to speak to him—probably ever again.

  He rang again the next morning, and again she refused to speak to him.

  ‘We owe him a lot, Lizzy,’ her father chided her cold stubbornness, grimly stretching out his hand and the phone.

  ‘Not me,’ she denied. ‘I’ve paid my debt to him.’

  The fact that she knew Luc must have heard her say that didn’t touch her at all because she had paid her debt to him with kisses and heartache and by believing too many of his lies.

  So where did he lie to you? a little voice in her head challenged.

  Stop it, she told it. Leave me alone with my complicated misery. I like it. And she picked up her coffee-cup and took it with her back to her lonely bed.