Cipriani's Innocent Captive

by Cathy Williams

  ‘We did what we set out to do,’ Lucas said flatly. ‘You only spent a short while with Ken Huang and his family, but let me tell you that he was charmed by our tale of love at first sight.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ He had already turned away and she followed him, hearing herself say all the right things to the businessman while sifting through her conflicting emotions to try and find a path she could follow. In a show of unity, Lucas had his arm around her waist lovingly, and she could see how thrilled Ken Huang and his wife were by the romance.

  Mission accomplished, indeed.

  ‘Time to go, I think.’ Lucas turned to her the second Huang had departed.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where do you think? We’re engaged, Katy. Getting my driver to deliver you back to your flat is a sure-fire way of getting loose tongues wagging.’

  ‘We’re going back to your place?’

  ‘Unless you have a better idea?’ He shot her a wolfish smile but this time her blood didn’t sizzle as it would have normally. This time she didn’t give that soft, yielding sigh as her body took over and her ability to think disappeared like water down a plughole.

  Mission accomplished. It was back to business for Lucas, and for that read ‘sex’. They would go to his apartment, like the madly in love couple they weren’t, and he would take her to his bed and do what he did so very, very well. He would send her pliant body into the stratosphere but would leave her heart untouched.

  ‘We need to talk.’ Nerves poured through her. She couldn’t do this. She’d admitted how she felt about Lucas to herself and now she couldn’t see a way of continuing what they had, pretending that nothing had changed.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Us,’ Katy told him quietly, and Lucas stilled.

  ‘Follow me.’

  ‘Where are we going? I mean, I’d rather not have this conversation in your apartment.’

  ‘I’m on nodding acquaintance with the manager of this hotel. I will ensure we have privacy for whatever it is you feel you need to talk about.’

  The shutters had dropped. Katy could feel it in his body language. Gone was the easy warmth and the sexy teasing. She followed him away from the ball room, leaving behind the remaining guests. He had said his goodbyes to the people who mattered and, where she would have at least tried to circulate and make some polite noises before leaving, Lucas had no such concerns.

  She hung back as he had a word with the manager, who appeared from nowhere, as though his entire evening had been spent waiting to see if there was anything he could do for Lucas. There was and he did it, leading them to a quiet seating area and assuring them that they would have perfect privacy.

  ‘Will I need something stiff for this talk?’ Lucas asked once the door was closed quietly behind them. On the antique desk by the open fireplace, there was an assortment of drinks, along with glasses and an ice bucket. Without waiting for an answer, he helped himself to a whisky and then remained where he was, perched against the desk, his dark eyes resting on her without any expression at all.

  Katy gazed helplessly at him for a few seconds then took a deep, steadying breath.

  ‘I can’t do this.’ She hadn’t thought out what she was going to say but, now the words had left her mouth, she felt very calm.

  ‘You can’t do what?’

  ‘This. Us.’ She spread her arms wide in a gesture of frustration. His lack of expression was like an invisible force field between them and it added strength to the decision she had taken impulsively to tell him how she felt.

  ‘This is as far as I can go,’ she told him quietly. ‘I’ve done the public appearance thing and I’ve had the photos taken and I... I can’t continue this charade for any longer. I can’t pretend that...that...’

  Lucas wasn’t going to help her out. He knew what she was saying, he knew why she was saying it and he also knew that it was something he had recognised over time but had chosen to ignore because it suited him.

  ‘You love me.’

  Those three words dropped like stones into still water, sending out ripples that grew bigger and bigger until they filled the space between them.

  Stressed out, stricken and totally unable to tell an outright lie, Katy stared at him, her face white, her arms folded.

  ‘I wish I could tell you that that wasn’t true, but I can’t. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You knew how I felt about commitment...’

  ‘Yes, I knew! But sometimes the heart doesn’t manage to listen to the head!’

  ‘I told you I wasn’t in the market for love and commitment.’ He recalled what he had felt when he had seen other men looking at her and then later, when his gaze had dropped to that perfect diamond on her finger, and something close to fear gripped him. ‘I will never love you the way you want to be loved and the way you deserve to be loved, cara. I can desire you but I am incapable of anything more.’

  ‘Surely you can’t say that?’ she heard herself plead in a low, driven voice, hating herself, because she should have had a bit more pride.

  Lucas’s mouth twisted. In the midst of heightened emotions, he could still grudgingly appreciate her bravery in having a conversation that was only ever going to go in a pre-ordained direction. But then she was brave, wasn’t she? In the way she always spoke her mind, the way she would dig her heels in and defend what she believed in even if he was giving her a hard time. In the way she acted, as she had at an event which would have stretched her to the limits and taken her far out of her comfort zone.

  ‘I can’t feel the way you do,’ Lucas said, turning away from her wide, green, honest eyes and feeling a cad. But it wasn’t his fault that he just couldn’t give her what she wanted, and it was better for him to be upfront about that right now!

  And maybe this was a positive outcome. What would the alternative have been—that a charade born of necessity dragged on and on until he was forced to prise her away from him? She had taken the bull by the horns and was doing the walking away herself. She was rescuing him from an awkward situation and he wondered why he wasn’t feeling better about that.

  He hated ‘clingy’ and he didn’t do ‘needy’ and a woman who was bold enough to declare her love was both. He should be feeling relieved!

  ‘I’ve seen how destructive love can be,’ he told her harshly. ‘And I’ve sworn to myself that I would never allow it to enter my life, never allow it to destroy me.’ He held up one hand, as though she had interrupted him in mid-flow when in fact she hadn’t said a word. ‘You’re going to tell me that you can change me. I can’t change. This is who I am—a man with far too many limitations for someone as romantic and idealistic as you.’

  ‘I realise that,’ Katy told him simply. ‘I’m not asking you to change.’

  Suddenly restless, Lucas pushed himself away from the desk to pace the room. He felt caged and trapped—two very good indications that this was a situation that should be ended without delay because, for a man who valued the freedom of having complete control over his life, caged and trapped didn’t work.

  ‘You’ll meet someone...who can give you what you want and need,’ he rasped, his normally graceful movements jerky as he continued to pace the room, only stopping now and again to look at her where she had remained standing as still as a statue. ‘And of course, you’ll be compensated,’ he told her gruffly.

  ‘I’m not following you.’

  ‘Compensated. For what you’ve done. I’ll make sure that you have enough money so that you can build your life wherever you see fit. Rest assured that you will never want for anything. You will be able to buy any house you want in any part of London, and naturally I will ensure that you have enough of a comfort blanket financially so that you need not rush to find another job. In fact, you will be able to teach full-time, and you won’t have to worry about finding something alongside the teaching because you won’t have to pay rent.’

  ‘You’re offering me money,’ Katy said numbly, frozen to the spot and stripped bare of all her defences.
Had he any idea how humiliating this was for her—to be told that she would be paid off for services rendered? She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her. She was still wearing the princess dress but she could have been clothed in rags because she certainly didn’t feel like Cinderella at the ball.

  ‘I want to make sure that you’re all right at the end of this,’ Lucas murmured huskily, dimly unsettled by her lack of expression and the fact that she didn’t seem to hear what he was saying. The colour had drained from her face. Her hair, in contrast, was shockingly vibrant, hanging over her shoulders in a torrent of silken copper.

  ‘And of course, you can keep the ring,’ he continued in the lengthening silence. ‘In fact, I insist you do.’

  ‘As a reminder?’ Katy asked quietly. ‘Of the good old days?’

  The muscles in her legs finally remembered how to function and she walked towards him stiffly.

  For one crazy, wild moment, Lucas envisaged her arms around him, but the moment didn’t last long, because she paused to meet his eyes squarely and directly.

  ‘Oh, Lucas. I don’t want your money.’ She felt the engagement ring with her finger, enjoying the forbidden thought of what it would feel like for the ring to be hers for real, and then she gently pulled it off her finger and held it out towards him. ‘And I don’t want your ring either.’

  Then she turned and left the room, noiselessly shutting the door behind her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BEHIND THE WHEEL of his black sports car, Lucas was forced to cut his speed and to slow down to accommodate the network of winding roads that circled the village where Katy’s parents lived like a complex spider’s web.

  Since leaving the motorway, where he had rediscovered the freedom of not being driven by someone else, he had found himself surrounded on all sides by the alien landscape of rural Britain.

  He should be somewhere else. In fact, he should be on the other side of the world. Instead, however, he had sent his next in command to do the honours and finalise work on the deal that had been a game changer.

  Lucas didn’t know when or how the thing he had spent the better part of a year and a half consolidating had faded into insignificance. He just knew that two days ago Katy had walked out of his life and, from that moment on, the deal that had once upon a long time ago commandeered all his attention no longer mattered.

  The only thing that had mattered was the driving need to get her back and, for two days, he had fought that need with every tool at his disposal. For two days, Lucas had told himself that Katy was the very epitome of what he had spent a lifetime avoiding. She lived and breathed a belief in a romantic ideal that he had always scorned. Despite her poor experience, she nurtured a faith in love that should have been buried under the weight of disappointment. She was the sort of woman who terrified men like him.

  And, more than all of that put together, she had come right out and spoken words that she surely must have known would be taboo for him.

  After everything he had told her.

  She had fallen in love with him. She had blatantly ignored all the ‘do not trespass’ signs he had erected around himself and fallen in love with him. He should have been thankful that she had not wept and begged him to return her love. He should have been grateful that, as soon as she had made that announcement, she had removed the engagement ring and handed it back to him.

  He should have thanked his lucky stars that she had then proceeded to exit his life without any fuss or fanfare.

  There would be a little untidiness when it came to the engagement that had lasted five seconds before imploding, and the press would have a field day for a week or so, but that hadn’t bothered him. Ken Huang would doubtless be disappointed, but he would already be moving on to enjoy his family life without the stress of a company he had been keen to sell to the right bidder, and would not lose sleep over it because it was a done deal.

  Life as Lucas knew it could be returned to its state of normality.

  Everything was positive, but Katy had left him and, stubborn, blind idiot that he was, it was only when that door had shut behind her that he had realised how much of his heart she was taking with her.

  He had spent two days trying to convince himself that he shouldn’t follow her, before caving in, because he just hadn’t been able to envisage life without her in it, at which point he had abandoned all hope of being able to control his destiny. Along with his heart, that was something else she had taken with her.

  And now here he was, desperately hoping that he hadn’t left everything too late.

  His satnav was telling him to veer off onto a country lane that promised a dead end, but he obeyed the instructions and, five minutes later, with the sun fading fast, the vicarage she had told him about came into view, as picturesque as something lifted from the lid of a box of chocolates.

  Wisteria clambered over faded yellow stone. The vicarage was a solid, substantial building behind which stretched endless acres of fields, on which grazing sheep were blobs of white, barely moving against the backdrop of a pink-and-orange twilit sky. The drive leading to the vicarage was long, straight and bordered by neat lawns and flower beds that had obviously taken thought in the planting stage.

  For the first time in his life, Lucas was in a position of not knowing what would happen next. He’d never had to beg for anyone before and he felt that he might have to beg now. He wondered whether she had decided that replacing him immediately would be a cure for the pain of confessing her love to a guy who had sent her on her way with the very considerate offer of financial compensation for any inconvenience. When Lucas thought about the way he had responded to her, he shuddered in horror.

  He honestly wouldn’t blame her if she refused to set eyes on him.

  He drove slowly up the drive and curled his car to the side of the vicarage, then killed the engine, quietly opened the door and got out.

  * * *

  ‘Darling, will you get that?’

  Propped in front of the newspaper where she had been scouring ads for local jobs for the past hour and a half, Katy looked up. Sarah Brennan was at the range stirring something. Conversation was thin on the ground because her parents were both so busy tiptoeing around her, making sure they didn’t say the wrong thing.

  Her father was sitting opposite her with a glass of wine in his hand, and every so often Katy would purposefully ignore the look of concern he gave her, because he was worried about her.

  She had shown up, burst into tears and confessed everything. She had wanted lots of tea and sympathy, and she had got it from her parents, who had put on a brave face and said all the right things about time being a great healer, rainbows round corners and silver linings on clouds, but they had been distraught on her behalf. She had seen it in the worried looks they gave one another when they didn’t think she was looking, and it was there in the silences, where before there would have been lots and lots of chat and laughter.

  ‘I should have known better,’ Katy had conceded the evening before when she had finally stopped crying. ‘He was very honest. He wasn’t into marriage, and the engagement was just something that served a purpose.’

  ‘To spare us thinking you were...were...’ Her mother had stumbled as she had tried to find a polite way of saying easy. ‘Do you honestly think we would have thought that, when we know you so very well, my darling?’

  Katy could have told them that sparing them had only been part of the story. The other part had been her concern for Lucas’s reputation. Even then, she must have been madly in love with him, because she had cared more about his reputation than he had.

  She also didn’t mention the money he had offered her. She felt cheapened just thinking about that and her parents would have been horrified. Even with Lucas firmly behind her, she still loved him so much that she couldn’t bear to have her parents drill that final nail in his coffin.

  The doorbell rang again and Katy blinked, focused and realised that her mother was looking at her oddly, waiting for h
er actually to do something about getting the door.

  Her father was already rising to his feet and Katy waved him down with an apologetic smile. She wondered who would be calling at this time but then, for a small place it was remarkably full of people who urgently needed to talk to her parents about something or other. Just as soon as the cat was out of the bag, the hot topic of conversation would actually be her, and she grimaced when she thought about that.

  She was distracted as she opened the door. The biggest bunch of red roses was staring her in the face. Someone would have to have wreaked havoc in a rose garden to have gathered so many. Katy stared down, mind blank, her thoughts only beginning to sift through possibilities and come up with the right answer when she noted the expensive leather shoes.

  Face drained of colour, she raised her eyes slowly, and there he was, the man whose image had not been out of her head for the past two agonising days since they had gone their separate ways.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Unfamiliar nerves turned the question into an aggressive statement of fact. Lucas wasn’t sure whether flowers were the right gesture. Should he have gone for something more substantial? But then, Katy hated ostentatious displays of wealth. Uncertainty gripped him, and he was so unfamiliar with the sensation that he barely recognised it for what it was.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Katy was too shocked to expand on that but she folded her arms, stiffened her spine and recollected what it had felt like when he had offered to pay her off. That was enough to ignite her anger, and she planted herself squarely in front of him, because there was no way she was going to let him into the house.

  ‘I’ve come to see you.’

  ‘What for?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘Please let me in, Katy. I don’t want to have this conversation with you on your doorstep.’

  ‘My parents are inside.’

  ‘Yes, I thought they might be here.’

  ‘Why have you come here, Lucas? We have nothing to say to one another. I don’t want your flowers. I don’t want you coming into this house and I don’t want you meeting my parents. I’ve told them everything, and now I just want to get on with my life and pretend that I never met you.’