by Lynne Graham
‘You’ve got six weeks left. Enjoy him while you can,’ she had derided the first time Catherine met her. ‘With Luc, it never lasts longer than three months, and, with the clothes-sense you’ve got, honey, another six weeks should be quite a challenge for him.’
Luc was talking very quietly now. Rafaella vented a strangled sob and spat back in staccato Italian. Catherine moved away, ashamed that she hadn’t moved sooner, and uneasily certain of the source of the drama. Yesterday, Luc had publicly announced his marital plans. Rafaella was reeling. Her pain seared Catherine with a strange sister pain. There but for the grace of God go I.
Luc was the sun round which Rafaella revolved. She could not resist that pull even when it scorched her; she could not break free. Though she knew that she was overstepping the boundaries that Luc set, she would still interfere. That was Rafaella. Stubborn, persistent, remorseless in enmity. Sometimes what disturbed Catherine most about Rafaella was her similarity to Luc. By the law of averages, she had thought uneasily more than once, Luc and Rafaella ought to have been a match made in heaven.
A door slammed on its hinges with an almighty crash. Bernardo had made himself scarce. Catherine wasn’t quick enough. Rafaella stalked across the hall and circled her like a killer shark drawn by a lump of raw meat, rage and hatred splintering from her diamond-hard stare.
‘You bitch!’ She launched straight into attack. ‘He wouldn’t believe me when I told him, but I’ll be back when I can prove it. And when I get the evidence you’ll be out with the garbage, because he’ll never forgive you!’
‘Rafaella.’ Luc was poised fifty feet away, lithe and sleek as a panther about to spring, his features savagely set.
She shot him a fierce, embittered glance. ‘I wanted a closer look at the only truly honest woman you’ve ever met! She must be on the endangered species list. And, caro,’ she forecast on her passage to the door, ‘you’re in for a severe dose of indigestion.’
Bernardo reappeared out of nowhere and surged to facilitate her exit. Catherine slowly breathed again. Rafaella, out of control and balked of her prey, was an intimidating experience. And she was astounded by her threats. What wouldn’t Luc believe? What did Rafaella intend to prove? What would Luc never forgive her for?
‘What on earth was she talking about?’ she whispered tautly.
Smouldering tension still vibrated from Luc. She could read nothing in the steady beat of his dark eyes. For an instant it seemed to her that that stare both probed and challenged, but she dismissed the idea when a faintly sardonic smile lighted his expression. ‘Nothing that need concern you.’
But it did concern her, she reasoned frustratedly as he curved a possessive arm to her slim shoulders and guided her into the magnificently proportioned salone. ‘And Rafaella need not concern you either,’ he completed.
‘Why?’ she prompted uncertainly.
‘As of now, she no longer works for me,’ Luc drawled with a chilling lack of sentiment.
Catherine was immediately filled with guilt. Rafaella lived for her career. If she hadn’t been hanging about in the hall, the incident which had so enraged Luc would never have occurred. ‘She was terribly upset, Luc. Shouldn’t you make allowances for that?’ she muttered after a long pause, resenting the ironic twist of fate that had set her up as the brunette’s sole defender.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Luc demanded, abrasive in his incredulity. ‘In the same position, she’d slit your throat without a second’s hesitation. She walks into my home, she insults me, she insults you…and you expect me to take that lying down? I don’t believe this!’
‘She lost her head and it wouldn’t have happened if…if…’ she fumbled awkwardly beneath his piercing scrutiny ‘…she didn’t love you.’
‘Love like that I can do without,’ he responded, unmoved.
‘Sometimes,’ she whispered, ‘you can be very unfeeling, Luc.’
His superb bone-structure clenched, something more than irritation leaping through him now. ‘Which translates to a ruthless, insensitive bastard, does it not?’ he sizzled back at her.
Nobody criticised Luc. Rafaella might argue with him, but she would not have dreamt of criticising him. From being an infant prodigy in a very ordinary, poorly educated family in awe of his intellectual gifts, Luc had stalked into early adulthood, unfettered by any need or demand to consider anyone but himself. But he was in the wrong and she was helplessly tempted to tell him that plainly, had to bite back the words. He could not treat Rafaella as an old friend one moment and a humble employee the next. It had not been a kindness to keep Rafaella so close when he was aware of her feelings for him. It had only encouraged her to hope.
‘I didn’t say that,’ she said tightly. ‘Don’t shout me down.’
‘I am not shouting you down. You fascinate me. You belong up on a cloud with a harp!’ he derided with acid bite. ‘You haven’t the slightest conception of what makes other human beings tick.’
Catherine lifted her chin. ‘I only said that Rafaella deserves a little compassion—’
‘Compassion? If you were bleeding to death by the side of the road, she’d sell tickets!’ he grated. ‘She’s out because I don’t trust her any more. I understand her too well. The first opportunity she gets, she’ll stick a knife in your back, even if it costs her everything she has.’
Her flesh chilled involuntarily at the deadly certainty with which he voiced that belief.
‘The subject is now closed. Are you coming to dinner?’ he concluded drily.
‘Will you give her a reference?’
There was a sharp little silence. Luc spun back, clashed with the hauntingly beautiful blue eyes pinned expectantly to him. ‘Per amor di Dio…all right, if that’s what you want!’ he gritted, out of all patience.
He wasn’t built to recognise compromise. Compromise was a retrograde step towards losing, and losing didn’t come gracefully to Luc. Catherine tucked into her dinner with unblemished appetite. Luc poked at his appetiser, complained about the temperature of the wine, sat tapping his fingers in tyrannical tattoo between courses and cooled down only slowly.
‘What did you think of Dr Scipione?’ he enquired over the coffee.
‘He was very kind. Is he the local doctor?’
An ebony brow quirked. ‘He lives in Rome. He’s also one of the world’s leading authorities on amnesia.’
‘Oh.’ Catherine almost choked on her dismay. ‘I treated him as if he was just anybody!’
‘Catherine, one of your greatest virtues is the ability to treat everyone from the lowliest cleaning-lady up in exactly the same way,’ he murmured, unexpectedly linking his fingers with hers, a smile curving the formerly hard line of his lips. ‘Let us at least agree that your manners are a great deal better than mine. By the way, I have some papers for you to sign before we can get married. We should take care of them now.’
She accompanied him into the library where he had been with Rafaella earlier. It was packed with books from floor to ceiling, and a massive desk sat before the tall windows. Fierce discomfiture gripped her when she saw the sheaf of documents he lifted. Forms to fill in…bureaucracy. With Luc present, her worst nightmare had full substance.
‘This is the…’ Luc handed her a pen but she didn’t absorb his explanation. There was a thunderbeat of tension in her ears. ‘You sign here.’ A brown forefinger indicated the exact spot and stayed there.
The paper was a grey and white blur. Covertly she bent her head. ‘I just s-sign?’ she stammered, terrified that there was something else to do that he wasn’t mentioning because he would naturally assume that she could easily see it and read it for herself.
‘You just sign.’
She inscribed her signature slowly and carefully. Luc whipped the document away and presented her with a second. ‘And here.’
More hurriedly, less carefully, she complied. ‘Is that it?’ Struggling to conceal her relief at his nod of confirmation, she lifted the document. ‘You once told me never
to sign anything I couldn’t read,’ she joked unsteadily.
‘I was more obtuse than I am now.’ He studied her. The strain etched in her delicate profile was beginning to ease but her hand was shaking perceptibly. ‘It’s in Italian, cara,’ he told her very gently.
‘I wasn’t really looking at it.’ Clumsily she put it down again.
Before she could turn away, lean hands came down to rest on her tense shoulders, keeping her in front of him where he lounged on the edge of the polished desk. ‘I believe it’s more than that,’ he countered quietly. ‘Don’t you think it’s time that we stopped playing this game? Whether you realise it or not, it’s caused a lot of misunderstanding between us.’
Her face had gone chalk-white. ‘G-game?’
He sighed. ‘Why do you think I choose your meals for you when we dine out?’
‘I…I dither; it saves time,’ she muttered, making an abrupt move to walk away, but he was impervious to the hint.
‘And I’m just naturally insensitive to what you might choose for yourself?’ he chided. ‘Catherine, I’ve been aware that you have trouble reading since the first week I spent with you in London. I saw through all those painfully elaborate little stratagems and, I have to admit, I was pretty shocked.’
Her stricken gaze veiled as tears lashed her eyelids in a blistering surge. She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her. His deep voice, no matter how calm and quiet it was, stung like a whip on her most vulnerable skin. Her throat was convulsing and she couldn’t speak. All she wanted to do was get away from him, but his arms banded round her slim waist like steel hawsers.
‘We are going to have this all out in the open,’ Luc informed her steadily. ‘Why didn’t you tell me right at the beginning that you were dyslexic? I didn’t realise that. You were ashamed of it and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, so I pretended as well. I ignored it but, in my ignorance of the true situation, I hoped very much that you would do something about it.’
‘I can’t!’ she gasped. ‘They did all they could for me at school but I’ll never be able to read properly!’
‘Do you think I don’t know that now? Will you stop trying to get away from me?’ he demanded, subduing her struggles with determined hands. ‘I know that you’re dyslexic, but I didn’t know it then. I thought—’
‘You thought I was just illiterate!’ she sobbed in agonised interruption. ‘I’ll never forgive you for doing this to me!’
‘You’re going to listen to me.’ He held her fast. ‘I was at fault as well. I took the easy way out. What I didn’t like, I chose not to see. I should have tried to help you myself. Had I done that, I would have realised what was really wrong. But you should have told me,’ he censured.
‘Let go of me!’ she railed at him, shaken by tempestuous sobs of humiliation.
‘Don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you?’ He gave her a fierce little shake that momentarily roused her from her distress. ‘If I had known, if I had understood, I wouldn’t have been angry when you made no effort to improve your situation! I’m not getting through to you, am I?’
‘You’re ashamed of me!’ she accused him despairingly.
Sliding upright, he crushed her into his arms and laced one hand into the golden fall of her hair to tip her head back. ‘No, I’m not,’ he contradicted fiercely. ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of. Einstein was dyslexic, da Vinci was dyslexic. If it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for you!’
‘Oh, Luc!’ A laugh somewhere between a hiccup and a sob escaped her as she looked up at him. ‘Good enough? I probably have it worse than they did.’
‘I don’t know how I could have been so blind for so long,’ he admitted. ‘You have no sense of direction, you can’t tell left from right, the tying of a bow defeats you, and sometimes you’re just a little forgetful.’ There was a teasing, soothing quality to that concluding statement.
She was still shaking. Her distress had been too great to ebb quickly. She buried her face in his jacket, weak and uncertain, but beyond that there was this glorious sense of release from a pretence that had frequently lacerated her nerves and kept her in constant fear of discovery.
‘You don’t mind, you really don’t mind?’ she muttered.
‘All that I mind is that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me yourself, but, now I know, we can speak to an educational specialist—I’m sure you can be helped.’ Tipping her head back, he produced a hanky and automatically mopped her up, smiling down at her, and something about that smile made her heart skip an entire beat. ‘It wasn’t brave to suffer in silence, it was foolish. I would have understood your difficulties. We live in a world in which the capacity to interpret the written word is taken for granted. How did you manage to work in the art gallery? I’ve often wondered that,’ he confided.
‘Elaine taped the catalogue for me.’
He finger-combed her hair back into a semblance of order. ‘Secrets,’ he said, ‘create misunderstandings.’
‘That’s the only one I have,’ she sighed. ‘You’re always tidying me up and putting me back together again.’
‘Maybe I enjoy doing it. Have you thought of that?’ he teased, his husky voice fracturing slightly as she stared up at him.
All the oxygen in the air seemed to be used up without warning. Desire clutched at her stomach in a lancing surge. Her breasts felt constrained within their silken covering as her sensitive flesh swelled and her nipples peaked into tight aching buds. The sensations were blindingly physical, unnervingly powerful, and she trembled.
He withdrew his hand from her hair and stepped back. ‘It’s late. You should go to bed,’ he muttered harshly. ‘If you don’t, I’ll take you here.’
A heady flush lit her cheeks. She backed away obediently on cotton-wool legs. She couldn’t drag her eyes from his dark-golden beauty. The view was spiced by her intrinsic awareness of the savage sexual intensity contained below that surface calm and control. She wanted him. She wanted him so much that it scared her. In her memory there was nothing to equal the force of the hunger she was experiencing now. It confused her, embarrassed her.
‘I’m expecting an important call,’ he added, and, as she looked at him in surprise, said succinctly, ‘Time zones.’
She couldn’t picture Luc sitting up to take a phone call, no matter how important it was. People called at his convenience, not their own. Still watching him, she found the door more by accident than design and fumbled it open. ‘I really am feeling marvellous,’ she assured him in a self-conscious rush before she ducked out into the hall.
Although she had bathed earlier, Catherine decided to have a refreshing shower. Fifteen minutes later, liberally anointed with some of the scented essences she had found on a shelf in the en suite bathroom, she donned the diaphanous peach silk nightdress lying across the bed and slid between the sheets to lie back in a breathless state of anticipation and wait for Luc.
The minutes dragged past. She amused herself by thinking lovingly of how reassuring he had been about her dyslexia. He was right. She should have confided in him a long time ago. He would have understood. She saw that now, regretted her silence and subterfuge, and felt helplessly guilty about misjudging him so badly.
Somewhere in the midst of these ruminations, she dozed off and dreamt. It was the strangest dream. She was writing on a mirror, sound-spelling ‘Ah-ree-va’…and she was crying while she did it, reflections of what she was writing and her own unhappy face making the task all the more difficult. There was so much pain in that image that she wanted to scream with it, and she woke up with a start in the darkness, tears wet on her cheeks.
Somebody had switched the light out. She made that connection, bridging the gap between a piece of the past she had forgotten and the present. She slumped back against the pillows, clinging to the dream, but there was so little of it to hold on to and build on. It was the pain she recalled most, a bewildered, frantic sense of pain and defeat.
Padding into the bathroom, s
he splashed her face and dried it. Who had switched the light off? It must have been Luc. He had come to her and she had been fast asleep. She lifted a weak hand to her forehead where the pounding in her temples was only slowly steadying. It was impossible to stifle a sudden, desperate, tearing need to be with him.
She approached the door in her bedroom which she assumed connected with his. Finding it locked, she frowned and crept out on to the gallery, dimly wondering what time it was. The bedroom itself was in darkness when she entered, but a triangle of light was spilling from the open bathroom door. She could hear a shower running and she smiled. It couldn’t be that late. She scrambled into the turned-back bed as quietly as a mouse.
The shower went off and the light almost simultaneously. A second or two later the bedroom curtains were drawn back. Luc unlatched one of the windows and stood there in the moonlight, magnificently naked, towelling his hair dry.
He was asking to catch his death of cold but the urge to announce her presence dwindled. Whipcord muscles flexed taut beneath the smooth golden skin of his back. Her mouth ran dry. Feeling mortifyingly like a voyeur, she closed her eyes. The mattress gave slightly with his weight and three-quarters of the sheet was wrenched from her.
As he rolled over, punching a pillow and narrowly missing her head, he came into sudden contact with her. ‘Dio!’ Jerking semi-upright, he lunged at the light above the bed before she could prevent him.
One hand braced tautly on the carved headboard, he stared down at her in shock. ‘Catherine?’
She could feel one of those ghastly beetroot blushes crawling in a tide over her exposed skin. Somehow his tone implied that the very last place he expected to find her was in his bed. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
He slid lower on the mattress, surveying her intently, his cheekbones harshly accentuated. ‘No more could I. Come here.’ He reached out with a determined hand and brought her close, not giving her time to respond to what was more of a command than a request. ‘I want you,’ he admitted roughly. ‘Do you have any idea how much I want you?’