by Lynne Graham
Now that she came to think of it—and thinking was exceedingly difficult at that moment—Luc had mentioned something casual about some close friends coming to stay the night before the wedding. The minute she had shown her nerves at the prospect, he had dropped the subject. Right now, he was undoubtedly wishing he hadn’t. Right now, he was remembering that she had a head like a sieve. Right now, as his long lean stride carried him towards her, his eyes were telling her that he wanted to kill her, inch by painful inch, preferably over a lengthy period. And that he intended to enjoy every minute of it when he got the chance.
‘Say, I thought it was fancy dress,’ she muttered and attempted to sidle out again, but Luc snaked out a hand and cut off her escape.
‘She’s so avant-garde,’ a youthful female voice gasped. ‘Mummy, why can’t I wear stuff like that?’
‘Designer punk,’ someone else commented. ‘Very arresting.’
‘And I wouldn’t mind being arrested with her.’ A tall, very good-looking blond man sent her a sizzling smile. ‘Luc, I begin to understand why you kept this charming lady under wraps until the very last moment. I’m Christian…Christian Denning.’
Catherine shook his hand with a smile. He had bridged an awkward silence. A whirl of introductions took place. There were about thirty people present, an even mix of nationalities, fairly split between the business ;aaelite and the upper crust. It was a relief when she finally made it into a seat to catch her breath.
‘You have the most fabulous legs.’ Christian dropped down on to the arm of her sofa. ‘Why do I have the feeling that Luc would rather have kept the view an exclusive one?’
‘Have you known Luc for long?’ she asked in desperation.
‘About ten years. And I saw you at a distance once in Switzerland, seven years ago,’ he confided in an undertone. ‘That was as close as I was allowed to get.’
A wave of heat consumed her skin. This was someone who had to have a very fair idea of what her former association with Luc had been. ‘Was it?’ She tried to sound casual.
‘Luc’s very possessive,’ he responded mockingly. ‘But he must have snatched you right out of your cradle. I must remember to tease him about that.’
Luc strolled over. ‘Enjoying yourself, Christian?’
‘Immensely. There isn’t a man in the room who doesn’t envy me. Why did I have to wait this long to meet her?’
‘Perhaps I foresaw your reaction.’ Luc reached for Catherine’s hand. It was time to go into dinner. ‘Everybody likes you,’ he breathed, pressing his mouth with fleeting brevity to her bare shoulder, fingertips skating caressingly down her taut spinal cord. ‘You forgot they were coming, didn’t you?’ He was smiling at her, she registered dazedly. ‘Cara, if you had seen your face when you realised what you had done! But in this gathering you don’t look quite as shocking as you no doubt thought you would.’
On that point, he was correct. There was no conventional garb on display. At this level, the women were more interested in looking different from each other. She might look startling to her own eyes and to those of anyone who knew her, but nobody was likely to suspect that she had deliberately dressed up as some sort of pantomime hooker. Had it been her intent to embarrass Luc in company, she would not have succeeded and, since that had not been her intent, she was relieved until it occurred to her that he would endure more than embarrassment when she walked out on him at the airport. A sneaking twinge of guilt assailed her. Immediately she was furious with herself. Luc had set the rules and she was playing by his rules now. He had given her no other choice. What transpired, therefore, was of his own making.
A middle-aged woman with a beaky nose took a seat to the left of her at the dining-table and asked, ‘Do you hunt?’
‘Only when I lose something,’ Catherine replied abstractedly.
Someone hooted with amusement as though she had said something incredibly witty. A wry smile curved Luc’s mouth. ‘Catherine’s not into blood sports.’
‘She must be planning to reform you, then,’ a blonde in cerise silk said with smiling sarcasm. ‘Blood sports are definitely your forte.’
‘And yours, sister, dear,’ Christian interposed drily.
The long meal was not the ordeal she had expected but it was impossible for her to relax. Luc was in an exceptionally good mood, which somehow had made her feel uncomfortable. She was flagging by the time the Viennese coffee was served in the salone. Christian’s sister settled down beside her and she struggled to recall her name. Georgina, that was it.
‘I didn’t see you with Luc in Nice last week,’ Georgina remarked.
‘I wasn’t there.’
Georgina contrived to look astonished. ‘But he was with Silvana Lenzi. Naturally, I assumed…Oh, dear, have I said something I oughtn’t?’
‘You’ve said exactly what you intended to say, young lady,’ the kindly woman with the beaky nose retorted crisply, and changed the subject.
Across the room, Luc was laughing with a group of men. Catching her eye, he gave her a brilliant smile. Hurriedly, she glanced away. Her nails dug into the soft flesh of her palm. She really couldn’t understand why she should feel so shattered. Luc had not spent the past four and a half years without a woman in his bed. Celibacy would come no more naturally to him than losing money.
The South American film actress was notorious for her passionate affairs. He certainly hadn’t been boldly going where no man had gone before, Catherine thought with a malice that shook her. She was speared by a Technicolor picture of that beautiful, lean, muscular, suntanned body of his engaged in intimate love-play with the gorgeous redhead. It made her feel sick. She felt betrayed.
Obviously she had had too much to drink. It had unsettled her stomach, confused her thoughts. If she felt betrayed, it was only because she had been the chosen one this week and the awareness was bound to distress her. Really, she didn’t care if he had been throwing orgies in Nice. His womanising habits were a matter of the most supreme indifference to her.
A few minutes later, Luc interceded to conclude her evening. She was tired. He was sure everyone would excuse her. With his usual panache, he swept her out of the salone. She shook off his arm with distaste.
‘It’s ten minutes to midnight.’ Impervious to hints, he was reaching for her. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck for me to see you after midnight?’ he teased, glittering golden eyes tracking over her in the most offensively proprietorial way.
Without even thinking about it, Catherine lifted her arm and slapped him so hard across one cheekbone that she almost fell. ‘That’s for Nice!’ she hissed, stalking up the staircase. ‘And if I see you after midnight, it won’t be just bad luck, it’ll be a death-trap!’
‘Buona notte, carissima,’ he said softly, almost amusedly.
Incredulous at the response, she halted and turned her head.
He stared up at her and smiled. ‘You’re crazy, but I like it.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she snapped helplessly.
He checked his watch. ‘You have six minutes to make it out of my sight. If you start talking, you’ll never make it.’
Her fingermarks were clearly etched on one high cheekbone. The sight of her own handiwork filled her with sudden shame. She really didn’t know what had come over her. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that,’ she conceded.
‘I’d forgive you for anything tonight. Even keeping me awake,’ he advanced huskily.
That did it. She raced up to her room as though all the hounds in hell were pursuing her.
* * *
The beautiful breakfast brought to Catherine on a tray couldn’t tempt her. The hair-stylist arrived, complete with retinue, followed by the cosmetics consultant and then the manicurist. The constant female chatter distanced her from the proceedings. As the morning moved on, she felt more and more as if she were a doll playing a part. She had nothing to do. Everyone else did it for her. And finally they stood back, hands were clapped, mutually satisfied sm
iles exchanged and compliments paid…the doll was dressed.
It wasn’t real, not really real, she told herself repeatedly and stole another glance at her reflection, for it so closely matched that teenage dream. Certainly she had never before looked this good. No wonder they were all so pleased with themselves.
The little church was only a mile from the castle. It had been small and plain and dark when she had seen it earlier in the week. Today it was ablaze with flowers that scented the air heavily. She was in a daze. She went down the short aisle on the arm of a Spanish duke she had only met the night before. It’s five years too late, five years too late; this doesn’t mean anything to me now, she reasoned at a more frantic pitch as Luc swung round to take a long unashamed look at her. But somehow from that moment she found it quite impossible to reason at all.
‘The most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen.’ Luc brushed his lips very gently across hers and the combination of a rare compliment and physical contact sent her senses reeling dizzily.
Sunlight was warming her face, glinting off the twist of platinum on her finger next, and Christian was dropping a kiss on her brow, laughingly assuring her that Luc had said her mouth was out of bounds.
In the limousine, he caught her to him and took her mouth with all the hunger he had earlier restrained. Her bouquet dropped from her fingers, fell forgotten to the floor, and her arms went round his neck, her unsteady fingers linking in an unbroken chain to hold him to her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
VIOLINS were thrumming in Catherine’s bloodstream. She drifted round the floor in a rosy haze of contentment.
‘Catherine?’
‘Hmm?’ she sighed dreamily into Luc’s shoulder, opening her eyes a chink and vaguely surprised to recognise that the light, cast by the great chandeliers above, was artificial. In her mind she had been waltzing out under the night stars. ‘Candles would have been more atmospheric,’ she whispered, and then, ‘You’re thinking of the fire hazard and the smoke they would have created.’
‘I’m trying very hard not to. I know what’s expected of me,’ Luc confessed above her head, and she gave a drowsy giggle. A lean hand tipped her face back, lingered to cup her chin. ‘It’s time for us to leave.’
‘L-leave?’ she echoed, jolted by the announcement.
His thumb gently eased between her parted lips and rimmed the inviting fullness of the lower in a gesture that was soul-shatteringly sensual. A heady combination of drowning feminine weakness and excitement spread burning heat through her tautening muscles. He might as well have thrown a high-voltage switch inside her. Dark eyes shaded by ebony lashes glimmered with gold. ‘Leave,’ he repeated, the syllables running together and merging. ‘Fast,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘Everybody’s still here.’ She trembled as the hand resting at her spine curved her into contact with the stirring hardness of his thighs. ‘Oh.’
‘As you say, cara…oh,’ he murmured softly. ‘Our guests will dance quite happily to dawn without me. I have other ambitions.’
Her body was dissolving in the hard circle of his arms. She would have gone anywhere, done anything to stay there. The very thought of detaching herself long enough to get changed scared her. She was waking up out of the dream-like haze which had floated her through the day. And waking up was absolutely terrifying.
Had she really been stubborn enough to cling to the conviction that she hated him? It hadn’t been hatred she’d felt when she saw him at the altar. It wasn’t hatred she felt when he touched her. It was love. Love. She was blitzed by that reality. Her emotions had withstood the tests of pain and disillusionment, time and maturity. Why? But she knew why; scarcely had to answer the question. And in the beginning there was Luc…and there ended her story.
He steered her out of the ballroom, quite indifferent to the conversational sallies of several cliques in their path. In the shadow of the great staircase, he moulded her against him, his mouth hard and urgent, long fingers framing her cheekbones as he kissed her, at first roughly, then lingeringly with a slow, drugging sexuality that devastated her.
A low-pitched wolf-whistle parted them. Hot-cheeked, still trembling with the force of the hunger Luc had summoned up, she let her hands slide down from his shoulders, steadying herself.
Christian was regarding them from several feet away, a smile of unconcealed amusement on his face. Dealing him an unembarrassed glance, Luc directed her upstairs with the thoughtful precision of someone who doubted her ability to make it there without assistance. Guilia was waiting to help her out of her gown.
Dear God, Catherine thought in numbed confusion, was there a strong streak of insanity in her bloodline? Nothing less than madness could excuse her behaviour over the past twenty-four hours. Did all women lie to themselves as thoroughly as she had? Luc knew her better than she knew herself. He knew her strengths and insecurities, her likes and dislikes, even, it seemed, her craven habit of avoiding what she couldn’t handle and denying what she was afraid of…
Why did she deceive herself this way? She had been like a child with an elaborate escape-plan, a child who secretly wanted to be caught before she did any real damage. Almost seven years ago she had given her heart without the slightest encouragement, and that heart was still his. And that love was something she couldn’t change, something that was simply a part of her, something that it was quite useless to fight. Luc was her own personal self-destruct button. But leaving him less than five years ago had still been like tearing her heart from her body.
‘I need you,’ he had said once in the darkness of the night in Switzerland. The admission had turned her over and inside out. She would have walked on fire for him just for those three little words. But he had never said them again, never even come close to saying them once he had been secure in the knowledge that she adored him.
It hadn’t been very long before he’d begun to smoothly remind her that what they had wouldn’t last forever. He had hurt her terribly. He had taught her to walk floors at night, to feel sick at a careless word or oversight, to panic if a phone call was late…to live from day to day with this dreadful nagging fear of losing him always in the background. Inside, where it didn’t show, he had killed her by degrees.
‘He was very bad for you,’ Harriet had scolded. ‘You’re not cut out to cope with someone like that. But you did what you had to do. You protected Daniel. Be proud that you had that much sense.’
Whenever she had wavered, as waver she had for far longer than she wanted to recall, Harriet had been the little Dutch boy, sticking her finger in the dam-wall of her emotions, preventing the leak from developing into a torrent that might prompt her into some foolish action. Oh, yes, she had thought about phoning him times without number. She had always chickened out. Once she had even stood in the post office a couple of days before his birthday, crazy enough to consider sending him a card because she knew that since his family’s death there was nobody else but her to remember. Harriet had had her work cut out and no mistake. That first year keeping her away from Luc had been a full-time occupation.
But Catherine had been lucky enough to have had Daniel on whom to target her emotions. How could anyone understand what Daniel meant to her? The first time she held him in her arms she had wept inconsolably. Nobody but Harriet had understood. Daniel had been the first living person she had ever seen to whom she was truly related. Between them, Daniel and Harriet had become the family she had never had.
Why had she planned to leave Luc again? This time she was honest with herself about her most driving motivation. She was terrified of telling him about Daniel, as terrified as she had been when she had realised she was pregnant. Luc did not have and clearly never had had the smallest suspicion that she might have been pregnant.
It was all so horribly complicated and she had so much to lose. Daniel believed his father was dead. He had asked very few questions and she really hadn’t understood that he actually resented not having a father until that day at Greyfriars when he had
raged at her, na;auively sharing his secret belief that his father, had he still been alive, would have been able to work miracles.
Daniel would accept Luc with very little encouragement. How Daniel would react to the discovery that his mother had lied to him was another question entirely. And could she trust Luc with Daniel? Daniel was very insecure right now, very breakable. If Luc could not accept him wholeheartedly, Daniel would know it. In addition, he was illegitimate. That couldn’t be hidden and, sooner or later, it would hit the newspapers. Luc would find that intolerable.
And on what basis did she dare to assume that Luc saw their marriage as a permanent fixture? Luc was so unpredictable. Did she turn Daniel’s life upside-down in the hope that Luc could come to terms with the decision she had made five years ago, and the fact that he had a four-year-old son?
Yesterday she had believed she had a choice. Today she accepted that she had merely talked herself into taking the easy way out and running away again. It wouldn’t work this time. And the irony was that she didn’t want it to work anyway. She loved Luc. She wanted to hope. She wanted to trust. She wanted to believe that somehow all this could be worked out. And that meant telling Luc about Daniel.
There was no time to be lost. The day after tomorrow, Peggy would be driving down to London. How did she tell him? The enormity of the announcement she had to make sunk in on her, another razor edge to hone her nerves. She would tell him on the flight to London…it wouldn’t be very private, though. She would tell him whenever they arrived at their destination, wherever that was. But the more she dwelt on the coming confrontation, the more panic-stricken she became at the prospect.
‘You’re very pale.’
In the limousine, she didn’t feel up to that narrowed, probing gaze. How would Luc react? That was all she could think about. Yesterday she had been telling herself that he was cold, callous and calculating in an effort to shore up her reluctance to tell him about Daniel. Yesterday she had been determined to hate him, determined to see him as a threat to Daniel. Now she had come down out of the clouds again, but the view was no more encouraging. She had deceived him. She had lied by omission. Those who crossed Luc lived to regret the miscalculation. Since she had never put herself in that position before, how could she possibly predict how he would react?