by Lynne Graham
Meeting Drew’s puzzled gaze, she gave an exaggerated shiver. ‘Someone walked over my grave,’ she joked, veiling her too-expressive eyes.
‘Now that you’re in London, we’ll be able to see each other more often,’ Drew remarked tensely and reached for her hand. ‘What I’m trying to say, not very well, perhaps, is…I believe I’m in love with you.’
Her hand jerked, bathing them both in sherry. With a muttered apology she fumbled into her bag for a tissue, but a waiter moved forward and deftly mopped up the table. Catherine sat, frozen, wishing that she were anywhere but where she was now, with Drew looking at her expectantly.
He sighed, ‘I wanted you to know how I felt.’
‘I…I didn’t know. I had no idea.’ It was all she could think to say, hopelessly inadequate as it was.
‘I thought you might have worked it out for yourself.’ There was a glimmer of wry humour in his level scrutiny. ‘Apparently I haven’t been as obvious as I thought I was being. Catherine, don’t look so stricken. I don’t expect anything from you. I don’t believe there is an appropriate response for an occasion like this. I’ve been clumsy and impatient and I’m sorry.’
‘I feel that I’ve come between you and Annette,’ she whispered guiltily.
He frowned. ‘That’s nonsense. It’s only since I left her that I began to realise just how much I enjoyed being with you.’
‘But if I hadn’t been around, maybe you would have gone back to her,’ she reasoned tautly. ‘You’re a very good friend, but I’m…’
He covered her hand again with his. ‘I’m not trying to rush you, Catherine. We’ve got all the time in the world,’ he assured her evenly, and deftly flipped the subject, clearly registering that further discussion at that moment would be unproductive.
They were in the River Room Restaurant when she heard the voice. Dark-timbred, slightly accented, like honey drifting down her spine. Instantly her head spun on a chord of response rooted too deep even to require consideration. Her eyes widened in shock, her every sinew jerked tight. The blood pounded dizzily in her eardrums. With a trembling hand she set down her wine glass.
Luc.
Oh, God…Luc. It had been him earlier. It was him. His carved profile, golden and vibrant as a gypsy’s, was etched in bold relief against the light flooding through the window behind him. One brown hand was moving to illustrate some point to his two male companions. That terrible compulsion to stare was uncontrollable. The lean, arrogant nose, the hard slant of his high cheekbones and the piercing intensity of deep-set dark eyes, all welded into one staggeringly handsome whole.
His gleaming dark head turned slightly. He looked straight at her. No expression. No reaction. Eyes golden as the burning heart of a flame. Her ability to breathe seized up. A clock had stopped ticking somewhere. She was sentenced to immobility while every primitive sense she possessed screamed for her to get up and run and keep on running until the threat was far behind. For a moment her poise almost deserted her. For a moment she forgot that he was very unlikely to acknowledge her. For a moment she was paralysed by sheer gut-wrenching fear.
Luc broke the connection first. He signalled with a hand to one of his companions, who immediately rose from his seat with the speed of a trained lackey, inclining his head down for his master’s voice.
‘I’ve upset you,’ Drew murmured. ‘I should have kept quiet.’
Her lashes dropped down like a camera shutter. The clink of cutlery and the buzz of voices swam back to her again. One thing hadn’t changed, she acknowledged numbly; when she looked at Luc there was nothing and nobody else in the world capable of stealing her attention. Perspiration was beading her upper lip. Luc was less than fifteen feet away. They said that when you drowned your whole life flashed before you. Oh, for the deep concealment of a pool.
‘Catherine—’
Belatedly she recalled the man she had been lunching with. ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ she mumbled. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get something for it.’
Up she got, on jellied knees, undyingly grateful that she didn’t have to pass Luc’s table. Even so, leaving the restaurant was like walking the plank above a gathering of sharks. An unreasoning part of her was expecting a hand to fall on her shoulder at any second. Feeling physically sick, she escaped into the nearest cloakroom and ran cold water over her wrists.
Drying her hands, she touched the slender gold band on her wedding finger. Harriet’s gift, Harriet’s invention. Everyone but Peggy thought she was a widow. Harriet had coined and told the lie before Catherine had even left hospital. She could not have publicly branded Harriet a liar. Even so, it had gone against the grain to pose as something she wasn’t, although she was ruefully aware that, without Harriet’s respectable cover-story, she would not have been accepted into the community in the same way.
Her stomach was still heaving. Calm down, breathe in. Why give way to panic? With Luc in the vicinity, panic made sense, she reasoned feverishly. Luc was very unpredictable. He threw wild cards without conscience. But she couldn’t stay in here forever, could she?
‘I think there must be a storm in the air,’ she told Drew on her return, her eyes carefully skimming neither left nor right. ‘I often get a headache when the weather’s about to break.’
She talked incessantly through the main course. If Drew was a little overwhelmed by her loquacity, at least he wasn’t noticing that her appetite had vanished. Luc was watching her. She could feel it. She could feel the hypnotic beat of tawny gold on her profile. And she couldn’t stand it. It was like Chinese water-torture. Incessant, remorseless. Anger began to gain ground on her nerves.
Luc was untouched. It was against nature that he should be untouched after the scars he had inflicted on her. There was no justice in a world where Luc continued to flourish like a particularly invasive tropical plant. Hack it down and it leapt up again, twice as big and threatening.
And yet some day…somehow…some woman had to slice beneath that armour-plating of his. It had to happen. He had to learn what it was to feel pain from somebody. That belief was all that had protected Catherine from burning up with bitterness. She would picture Luc driven to his knees, Luc humanised by suffering, and then she would filter back to reality again, unable to sustain the fantasy.
Religiously she stirred her coffee. Clockwise, anti-clockwise, clockwise again, belatedly adding sugar. Her mind was in turmoil, lost somewhere between the past and the present. She was merely one more statistic on the long Santini casualty list. It galled her to acknowledge that demeaning truth.
‘I’ve been cut dead.’ Drew planted the observation flatly into the flow of her inconsequential chatter.
‘Sorry?’ she said, all at sea.
‘Luc Santini. He looked right through me on the way out.’
She was floored by the casual revelation that Drew actually knew Luc. Yet why was she so surprised? Even if he was in a much smaller category, Drew was in the same field as Luc. Huntingdon’s manufactured computer components. ‘Is th-that important?’ she stammered.
‘It’ll teach me not to get too big for my boots,’ Drew replied wryly. ‘I did do some business with him once, but that was years ago. I’m not in the Santini league these days. Possibly he didn’t remember me.’
Luc had a memory like a steel trap. He never forgot a face. She was guiltily conscious that Luc had cut Drew because of her presence and for no other reason. And she wasn’t foolish enough to pretend that she didn’t know who Luc was. The individual who hadn’t heard of Luc Santini was either illiterate or living in a grass hut on a desert island.
Drew sipped at his coffee, clearly satisfied that he had simply been forgotten. ‘He’s a fascinating character. Think of the risks he must have taken to get where he is today.’
‘Think of the body-count he must have left behind him.’
‘That’s a point,’ Drew mused. ‘To my knowledge, he’s only slipped once. Let me see, it was about four…five years ago now. I don’t know wh
at happened, but he damned near lost the shirt off his back.’
Obviously he had snatched his shirt back again and, knowing Luc, he had snatched someone else’s simultaneously. On that level, Luc was unashamedly basic. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and perhaps interest into the bargain. In remembrance she stilled a shudder.
As they left the hotel, Drew said in a driven undertone, ‘I’ve made a bloody fool of myself, haven’t I?’
‘Of course you haven’t,’ she hastened to assure him.
‘Do you want a taxi?’ he asked stiffly. ‘I’d better get back to the office.’
‘I think I’ll go for a walk.’ She was ashamed that she hadn’t handled the situation with greater tact, but the combination of his confession and Luc, hovering on the horizon like a pirate ship, had bereft her of her wits.
‘Catherine?’ Before she could turn away, Drew bent down in an almost involuntary motion and crushed her parted lips briefly with his own. ‘Some day soon I’m going to ask you to marry me, whether you like it or not,’ he promised with recovering confidence. ‘It’s nearly five years since you lost your husband. You can’t bury yourself with his memory forever. And I’m a persistent man.’
A second later he was gone, walking quickly in the other direction. Tears lashed her eyes fiercely. Waves of delayed reaction were rolling over her, reducing her self-control to rubble. He was such a kind man, the essence of an old-fashioned gentleman, proposing along with the first kiss. And she was a fraud, a complete fraud. She was not the woman he thought she was, still grieving for some youthful husband and a tragically short-lived marriage. Drew had her on a pedestal.
The truth would shatter him. In retrospect, it even shattered her. For two years she had been nothing better than Luc Santini’s whore, in her own mind. Kept and clothed in return for her eagerness to please in his bed. Luc hadn’t once confused sex with love. That mistake had been hers alone. The polite term was ‘mistress’. Only rich men’s mistresses tended to share the limelight. Luc had ensured that she’d remained strictly off stage. He had never succumbed to an urge to take her out and show her off. She hadn’t had the poise or the glitter, never mind the background or the education. Even now, the memories were like acid burns on her flesh, wounding and hurting wherever they touched.
Choices. Life was all about choices. Sometimes the tiniest choice could raise Cain at a later date. At eighteen Catherine had made a series of choices. At least, she had thought she was making them; in reality, they had most of them been made for her. Love was a terrifying leveller of pride and intelligence when a woman was an insecure girl. Before she had met Luc, she wouldn’t have believed that it could be a mistake to love somebody. But it could be, oh, yes, it could be. If that person turned your love into a weapon against you, it could be a mistake you would regret for the rest of your days.
From no age at all, Catherine had been desperate to be loved. With hindsight she could only equate herself with a walking time-bomb, programmed to self-destruct. Within hours of her birth, she had been abandoned by her mother and her reluctant parent had never been traced. Nor had anybody ever come forward with any information.
She had grown up in a children’s home where she had been one of many. She had been a dreamer, weaving fantasies for years about the unknown mother who might eventually come to claim her. When that hope had worn thin in her teens, she had dreamt of a towering passion instead.
Leaving school at sixteen, she had worked as a helper in the home until it had closed down two years later. The Goulds had been related to the matron. A young, sophisticated couple, they had owned a small art gallery in London. Giving her a job as a receptionist, the Goulds had paid her barely enough to live on and had taken gross advantage of her willingness to work long hours. Business had been poor at the gallery and it had been kept open late most nights, Catherine left in charge on the many evenings that her employers went out.
Luc had strolled in one wet winter’s night when she’d been about to lock up. His hotel had been near by. He had walked in off the street on impulse, an off-white trenchcoat carelessly draped round his shoulders, crystalline raindrops glistening in his luxuriant black hair and that aura of immense energy and self-assurance splintering from him in waves. She had made her first choice then, bedazzled and bemused by a fleeting smile…she had stopped locking up.
A silver limousine purred into the kerb several yards ahead of her now, penetrating her reverie. She hadn’t even noticed where she’d been walking. Looking up, she found herself in a quiet side-street. The rear door of the car swung open and Luc stepped out on to the pavement, blocking her path. ‘May I offer you a lift?’
CHAPTER TWO
CATHERINE focused on him in unconcealed horror, eyes wide above her pale cheeks. ‘I’m…I’m not going anywhere—’
‘You’re simply loitering?’ Luc gibed.
‘That I would need a lift,’ she completed jerkily. ‘How did you know where I was?’
A beautifully shaped brown hand moved deprecatingly.
‘How?’ she persisted.
‘I had you followed from the hotel.’
Oxygen locked in her throat. Had she really thought this second meeting a further coincidence? Had she really thought he would let her go without a single question? A car pulled up behind the limousine, two security men speedily emerging. Like efficient watchdogs, one of them took up a stance to Luc’s rear, the other backing across the street for a better vantage point. For Catherine, there was an unreality to the scene. She was reminded of how vastly different a world she had inhabited over the past four years.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ she whispered tautly.
Black spiky lashes lowered over glittering dark eyes. ‘Perhaps I wanted to catch up on old times. I don’t know. You tell me,’ he invited softly. ‘Impulse? Do you think that is a possibility?’
Involuntarily she backed towards the railings behind her. ‘You’re not an impulsive person.’
‘Why are you trembling?’ He moved soundlessly closer, and her shoulders met wrought iron in an effort to keep the space between them intact.
‘You come up out of nowhere? You gave me one heck of a fright!’
‘You used to have the love of a child for surprises.’
‘You might not have noticed, but I’m not a child any more!’ It took courage to hurl the retort, but it was a mistake. Luc ran a raking, insolent appraisal over her, taking in the purple bullclip doing a haphazard task of holding up her silky hair, the lace-collared blouse and the tiered floral skirt cinched at her tiny waist with a belt. Modestly covered as she was, she still felt stripped.
‘I see Laura Ashley is still doing a roaring trade,’ he said drily.
He was so close now that she could have touched him. But she wouldn’t raise her eyes above the level of his blue silk tie. He wore a dove-grey suit with an elegance few men could emulate. Superb tailoring outlined his lean length in the cloth of a civilised society. However, what she sensed in the atmosphere was far from civilised. It was nameless, frightening. A silent intimidation that clawed cruelly at her nerve-endings.
‘We don’t have anything to talk about after all this time.’ The assurance left her bloodless lips in a rush, an answer to an unvoiced but understood demand.
Negligently he raised a hand and a fingertip roamed with taunting slowness from her delicate collarbone where a tiny pulse was flickering wildly up to the taut curve of her full lower lip. Her skin was on fire, her entire body suddenly consumed by a heatwave.
‘Relax,’ he cajoled, carelessly withdrawing his hand a split second before she jerked her head back in violent repudiation of the intimacy. Flames danced momentarily in his dark eyes and then a slow, brilliant smile curved his hard mouth. ‘I didn’t intend to frighten you. Come…are we enemies?’
‘I’m in r…rather a hurry,’ she stammered.
‘And you still don’t want a lift? Fine. I’ll walk along with you,’ he responded smoothly. ‘Or we could get into the
car and just drive around for a while…even sit in a traffic jam. Believe me, I’m in an unusually accommodating mood.’
‘Why?’ Valiantly moving away from the hard embrace of the railings, Catherine straightened her shoulders. ‘What do you want?’
‘Well, I don’t expect you to do what we used to do in traffic jams.’ Slumbrous dark eyes rested unrepentantly on the tide of hot colour spreading beneath her fair skin. ‘What do you think I might want? Surely, it’s understandable that I should wish to satisfy a little natural curiosity?’
‘What about?’
‘About you. What else?’ An ebony brow quirked. ‘Do you think I am standing here in the street for my own pleasure?’
Catherine chewed indecisively at her lower lip. She could feel his temper rising. Time was when Luc would have said ‘get in the car’ and she would have leapt. He was smiling, but you couldn’t trust Luc’s smiles. Luc could smile while he broke you in two with a handful of well-chosen words. Without speaking, she reached her decision and bypassed him. Luc was exceptionally newsworthy and she could not afford to be seen with him, lest her past catch up with the present that Harriet had so carefully reconstructed for her.
A security man materialised at her elbow and opened the door of the limousine. Ducking her head, she slid along the cream leather upholstery to the far corner. The door slammed on them, sealing them into claustrophobic privacy.
‘Really, Catherine…was that so difficult?’ Luc murmured silkily. ‘Would you like a drink?’
Her throat was parched. She fought for her vanished poise. ‘Why not?’
Her palms smoothed nervously down over her skirt, rearranging the folds. Her skin prickled at his proximity as he bent forward to press open the built-in bar. For the longest moment of her existence, the black springy depths of his hair were within reach of her fingers. The mingled aroma of some elusive lotion and that indefinable but oh, so familiar scent that was purely him assailed her defensively flared nostrils. As he straightened again, she was disturbingly conscious of the clean movement of rippling muscles beneath the expensive fabric that sheathed his broad shoulders. And an ache and an agony were reborn treacherously within her.