by Lynne Graham
‘Did you enjoy yourself trailing my security men all over town for three hours this afternoon?’ Luc enquired dulcetly, springing her from her increasingly panic-stricken ruminations.
‘Trailing your…?’ As she registered his meaning, her incredulity spoke for her.
‘Zero for observation, cara. You don’t change. You wander around in a rosy dream-state like an accident waiting to happen.’ He strolled fluidly into the lounge, his wide mouth compressing as he took open stock of his surroundings. ‘No verdant greenery, not a floral drape or a frill or a flounce anywhere in sight. Either you haven’t lived here very long or he has imposed his taste on yours. Dio, he had more success than I…’
The last was an aside, as disorientating as the speech which had preceded it. Unwittingly, she went pink as she recalled scathing comments about her preference for nostalgia as opposed to the abrasively modern d;aaecors he favoured. It was an unfortunate reference, summoning up, as it inexplicably did, stray and rebellious memories of baths by candlelight and an over-the-top lace-strewn four-poster bed…
The vast differences between them even on that level were almost laughable. Two more radically differing personalities would have been hard to find. Her dreams had been the ordinary ones of love and marriage and children.
But Luc hadn’t had dreams. Dreams weren’t realistic enough to engage his attention. He lived his life by a master plan of self-aggrandisement. He achieved one goal and moved on to the next. The possibility of failure never occurred to him. It was, after all, unthinkable that Luc would ever settle for less than what he wanted. As she thought unavoidably of how much less than her dreams she had settled for, bitterness coalesced into a hard, unforgiving stone inside her.
‘Feel free to make yourself at home.’ Her sarcasm was so out of character that Luc whipped round in surprise to stare at her.
‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ he breathed almost tautly.
‘I’ll talk to you whatever way I want!’ she dared.
‘Be my guest,’ Luc invited. ‘You won’t do it more than once.’
‘Want to bet?’ Her ability to defy him was gathering steam on the awareness that neither Daniel nor any trace of him could betray her in this apartment.
‘If I were you, I wouldn’t risk it,’ Luc responded. ‘You have this appalling habit of backing the wrong horse. And the odds definitely aren’t in your favour.’
Courageously, she lifted her chin. ‘I am not afraid of you.’
‘You ought to be.’
Her Joan of Arc backbone suffered a sudden jolt in confidence. ‘Are you trying to threaten me?’ she asked shakily.
‘To my knowledge, I’ve never tried to threaten anyone.’ It was an assertion backed by immovable cool.
She bent her head. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
‘But I have plenty to say to you.’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Jerkily she crossed her arms to conceal the fact that her hands were shaking, and moved over to the window, her back protectively turned on him.
‘When I talk to people, I prefer them to look at me,’ Luc imparted with irony.
‘I don’t want to look at you.’ She was dismayed to realise that she was perilously close to tears. If wishes were horses, she would have been a thousand miles from this confrontation.
‘Since I arrived, I’ve been having a marvellous conversation with myself.’ The sardonic criticism of her monosyllabic responses drove much-needed colour into her cheeks. ‘Perhaps I should approach this from a different angle.’
Taking a deep breath, she spun back to him. ‘I want you to leave.’
An ebony brow elevated. ‘The carpet or me?’
She flung her head back, sharp strain etched into every delicate line of her features, but she said nothing, could not trust her voice to emerge levelly or her gaze to meet directly with his.
‘May we dispense with the imaginary husband, whose name you have such difficulty in recalling?’ Luc murmured very quietly. ‘I don’t believe he exists.’
‘I don’t know where you get that idea.’ Wildly disconcerted by the question thrown at her without warning, she was dismally conscious that her reply lacked sufficient surprise or annoyance to be convincing.
‘I won’t play these games with you.’ The victim of that hooded dark stare holding her by sheer force of will, she felt cornered. ‘I play them everywhere else in my life, but not with you. I saw you with Huntingdon outside the hotel. No doubt you believe that that ring lends a certain spurious respectability to your present position in his life. It doesn’t,’ he concluded flatly.
Desperation was beginning to grip her. ‘You misunderstood what you saw.’
‘Did I? I don’t think so,’ Luc murmured. ‘Relax, he’s still all in one piece…but he’s halfway to Germany in pursuit of a contract he’s not going to get.’
Her lower lip parted company with the upper. ‘I b-beg your pardon?’
‘You are not, I believe, hard of hearing.’
Unbearable tension held her unnaturally still. ‘What have you got to do with that contract?’
‘Influence alone,’ Luc delivered. ‘And influence will be sufficient.’
‘But why? I mean, Drew?’ she whispered strickenly.
‘Unfortunately for him, this is his apartment.’ Luc sent her a glittering glance, redolent of unashamed threat. ‘And when a man trespasses on my territory, it must hurt. If it does not, who will respect the boundaries I set? Surely you do not expect me to reward him for bedding my woman?’
CHAPTER THREE
CATHERINE went white. Luc was hitting her with too much all at once. It was as if she were drowning and unable to breathe. Shock was reverberating with paralysing effect all the way down from her brain to her toes.
Luc surveyed her without a tinge of remorse. And this time she could sense the savage anger he was containing. A dark aura that radiated violent vibrations into the thickening atmosphere. It was an insidiously intimidating force, for Luc had never lost his temper with her before. Luc rarely unleashed his emotions. People who let anger triumph invariably surrendered control of the situation. Luc would not be guilty of such a gross miscalculation. Or so she had once believed…
She tried and failed to swallow. The tip of her tongue nervously crept out to moisten her dry lips. ‘I am not your woman,’ she said unsteadily.
Black spiky lashes partially screened a blaze of gold. ‘For two years you were mine, indisputably mine, as no other woman ever has been. Some things don’t change. In the Savoy, you couldn’t take your eyes off me.’
Catherine was so appalled by the accusation that she momentarily forgot the threat to Drew. ‘That’s nonsense!’
‘Is it?’ She was reminded of a well-fed tiger indulgently watching his next meal at play. His brilliant gaze was riveted to her. ‘I don’t believe it is. And why should we argue about it? You have the same effect on me. I’m not denying it. A certain je ne sais quoi, unsought and, on many occasions since, unwelcome, but still in existence after six and a half years. Doesn’t that tell you something?’
A furrow between her brows, Catherine was struggling to follow what he was telling her, but every time she came close to comprehension she retreated from it in disbelief.
‘Plenty of marriages don’t last that long,’ Luc pointed out smoothly. ‘I want you back, Catherine.’
In the bottomless pit of the silence he allowed to fall, she was sure she could hear her own heartbeat thundering fit to burst behind her breastbone. Her throat worked convulsively but no sound emerged, and that was hardly surprising when he had deprived her of the power of speech. Shock had gone into counter-shock, and her capacity to think straight had gone into cold storage.
‘You have to be the most incredibly modest woman of my acquaintance. Do you really think I would go to these lengths for anything less?’ Strolling over to the table, Luc uncapped one of the decanters, lifted a glass off the tray and poured a single measure of brandy.
‘I can’t believe that you can say that to me,’ she mumbled.
‘Console yourself with the reflection that I have not said one quarter of what I would like to say.’ Luc slotted the glass between her nerveless fingers, cupped them helpfully round to clasp it, the easy intimacy of his touch one more violently disorientating factor to plague her. ‘I feel sure that you are grateful for my restraint.’
Dimly she understood how a rabbit felt, mesmerised by headlights on the motorway. Those golden eyes could be shockingly compelling. The brandy went down in one appreciative gulp and she gasped as fire raced down her throat. It banished her paralysis, however, and retrieved her wits. ‘You…you actually think that Drew is keeping me?’ she demanded with a shudder of distaste. ‘Is that what you’re insinuating?’
‘I rarely insinuate, cara. I state.’
‘How dare you?’ Catherine exclaimed.
Luc dealt her an impassive look. ‘I find it particularly unsavoury that he should be a married man, old enough to be your father.’
Restraint, she acknowledged, was definitely fighting a losing battle. Fierce condemnation accompanied that final statement. ‘There’s nothing unsavoury about Drew!’ she protested furiously. ‘He’s one of the most decent, honourable men I’ve ever met!’
‘Only not above cheating on his wife with a woman half his age,’ Luc drawled in biting conclusion. ‘A little word of warning, cara. After tonight, I don’t ever wish to hear his name on your lips again.’
Catherine was too caught up in an outraged defence of Drew to listen to him. ‘He wouldn’t cheat on his wife. He’s been separated from her for almost a year. He’ll be divorced next month!’
‘I know,’ Luc interposed softly, taking the wind from her sails. ‘He should have stayed home with his wife. It would have been safer for him.’
‘Safer?’ she whispered, recalling what he had said some minutes earlier. ‘You threatened him—’
‘No. I delivered a twenty-two-carat-gold promise of intent.’ The contradiction was precise, chilling.
‘But you didn’t mean it, you couldn’t have meant it!’ she argued in instinctive appeal.
Dark eyes lingered on her reflectively and veiled. ‘If you say so.’ A broad shoulder lifted in a very Latin shrug of dismissal. ‘We have more important things to discuss.’
Her stomach executed a sick somersault. Under that exquisitely tailored suit dwelt a predator of Neanderthal proportions, ungiven to anything as remote as an attack of conscience. ‘It’s absolutely none of your business,’ she conceded tightly, ‘but I’m not having an affair with Drew.’
‘Everything that concerns you is my business.’
It went against the grain to permit that to go past unchallenged, but she was more concerned about Drew. ‘Why should you want to damage Huntingdon Components? What has he ever done to you?’
‘You ask me that?’ It was a positive snarl of incredulity. ‘You live in his apartment and you ask me that?’
‘It’s not what it seems.’
‘It is exactly what it seems. Cheap, nasty.’ His nostrils flared as he passed judgement.
‘Like what I had with you?’ She couldn’t resist the comparison.
‘Cristo!’ He threw up both hands in sudden lancing fury. ‘How can you say that to me? In all my life, I never treated a woman as well as I treated you!’
The most maddening quality of that assurance was its blazing, blatant sincerity. He actually believed what he was saying. Her teeth ground together on a blistering retort.
‘And what did I receive in return? You tell me!’ he slashed at her rawly, rage masking his dark features. ‘A bloody stupid scrawl on a mirror that I couldn’t even read! I trusted you as though you were my family and you betrayed that trust. You stuck a knife in my back.’
She should have been better prepared for that explosion, but she wasn’t. His legendary self-control had evaporated right before her stricken eyes, revealing the primitive depth of the anger she had dared to provoke. ‘Luc, I—’
‘Stay where you are!’ The command cracked like a whiplash across the room, halting her retreat in the direction of the door. ‘You were with me two years, Catherine. Two years,’ he repeated fiercely, anger vibrating from every tensed line of his lean, powerful physique. ‘And then you vanish into thin air. In nearly five years, what do I get? Hmm? Not so much as a postcard! So, I look for you. I wonder if you’re starving somewhere. I worry about how you’re managing to live. I think maybe you’ve had an accident, maybe you’re dead. And where do I find you?’ he grated in soaring crescendo. ‘In the Savoy with another man!’
Her feet were frozen to the carpet under that searing onslaught. She had never seen Luc betray that much emotion. Dazedly, she watched him swing away from her, ferocious tension etched into the set of his broad shoulders and the angle of his hard, taut profile. She could not quite credit the evidence of what she was seeing, never mind what he had said.
He had worried about her? He had actually worried about her? In her mind she fought to come to terms with that revelation. When she had left him, sneaking cravenly out of the service entrance like a thief, she had foreseen his probable response to her departure. Disbelief…outrage…contempt…acceptance. The idea of his worrying about her, looking for her, had never once occurred to her.
In a strange way which she could not understand, she found the idea very disturbing, and it was in reaction to that that she chose to say nothing in her own defence. One fact had penetrated. Luc had no suspicion of Daniel’s existence. That fear assuaged, she could only think of Drew.
‘Leave Drew alone,’ she said. ‘He needs that contract.’
‘Is that all you have to say to me?’ There was a formidable chill in his dark eyes.
She swallowed hard. ‘Losing that contract could ruin him.’
A grim smile curved his lips. ‘I know.’
‘If you’re angry with me, take it out on me. I can’t believe you really want to harm Drew,’ she confided.
‘Believe it,’ Luc urged.
‘I mean…’ she made a helpless movement of her small hands, eloquent of her confusion ‘…you walk in here and you say…you say you want me back, but there’s absolutely no question of that,’ she completed shakily.
‘No?’
‘No! And I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me!’ she cried.
‘Maybe you should try.’
She refused to look at him. He had hurt her too much. In Luc’s presence she was as fearfully wary as a child who had once put her hand in the fire. The memory of the pain was a persistent barrier. ‘I won’t try,’ she said with simple dignity. ‘You’re an episode which I put behind me a long time ago.’
‘An episode?’ he derided incredulously. ‘You lived with me for two years!’
‘Nineteen months, and every month a mistake,’ Catherine corrected, abandoning her caution by degrees.
‘Madre de Dio.’ A line of colour demarcated his high cheekbones. ‘Hardly a one-night stand.’
Visibly she flinched. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I often used to feel like one.’
‘How can you say that to me? I treated you with respect!’ he ground out.
‘That was respect?’ A chokey laugh escaped her. She felt wild in that instant. If she had been a tigress, she would have clawed him to death in revenge. Her very powerlessness taunted her cruelly. ‘When I look at you now, I wonder why it took me so long to come to my senses.’
‘Since I arrived, you have looked everywhere but at me,’ Luc said drily, deflatingly.
‘I hate you, Luc. I hate you so much that if you dropped dead at my feet I’d dance on your corpse!’ she vented in a feverish rush.
‘The near future promises to be intriguing.’
‘There isn’t going to be one for us!’ Catherine had never lost her head with anyone before, but it was happening now. As if it were not bad enough that he should stand there with the air of someone handling an escaped lunatic with enviable coo
l, he was ignoring every word she said. ‘I’m not about to fall into line like one of your employees! Come back to you? You have to be out of your mind! You used me once, and I’d sooner be dead than let you do it again! I loved you, Luc. I loved you much more than you deserved to be loved—’
‘I know,’ he interposed softly.
A hectic flush carmined her cheeks, fury running rampant through her every skin-cell. ‘What do you mean…you know? Where do you get the nerve to admit that?’
Unreadable golden eyes arrowed into her and lingered intently. ‘I thought it might be in my favour.’
‘In your favour? It makes what you did to me all the more unforgivable!’ Catherine ranted in a fresh burst of outrage. ‘You took everything I had to give and tried to pay for it, as though I were some tramp you’d picked up on a street-corner!’
His jawline clenched. ‘I might have made one or two unfortunate errors of judgement,’ he conceded after a very long pause. ‘But, if you were dissatisfied with our relationship, you should have expressed that dissatisfaction.’
‘I beg your pardon? Expressed it?’ Catherine could hardly get the words out, she was so enraged. ‘God forgive you, Luc, because I never will! Let me just make one little point. You can go out there and you can buy anything you want, but you can’t buy me. I’m not available. I’m not up for sale. There’s no price-tag attached, so what are you going to do?’
Trembling violently, she turned away from him, emotion still storming through her in a debilitating wave. She had never dreamt that she could attack Luc like that, but somehow it had simply happened. Yet in the aftermath she experienced no sense of pleasure; she felt only pain. A tearing, desperate pain that seemed to encompass her entire being. Just being in the same room with him hurt. She had sworn once that she would not let him do this to her. She would not let hatred poison the very air she breathed. But that wall inside her head was tumbling down brick by brick, and the vengeful force of all the feelings she had buried behind it was surging out of control. With those feelings came memories she fiercely sought to blank out…