by Kim Lawrence
More muscle than brain, Luc translated. Why did women go for men like that? ‘I’m sure he is,’ he agreed pleasantly. He probably thought marrying the owner would be a good career move.
Megan warmed to her theme. ‘The hours he puts in are unbelievable; I sometimes feel quite guilty,’ she admitted.
‘So your mother’s been running the estate for you…with the help of John?’
‘Gracious, no, she’d hate that. When Dad died, John just carried on running things. He’s very committed. He runs things by me but I trust him implicitly.’ The hints he’d been making recently about retiring were a source of concern. There were not many like John out there—plenty of people with impressive paper credentials but not many with a genuine love of the land.
‘And how did your mother feel about all this?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Being effectively disinherited. Being out of the loop?’
‘Relieved,’ Megan said immediately.
Luc looked sceptical and, annoyed by his response, she pushed home her message.
‘You can take the girl out of the city…’ Her slender shoulders lifted expressively before she went on to explain. ‘Mum got married and moved into the place with Dad when she was eighteen. She tried to love it because he did. Dad,’ she recalled with a reminiscent smile, ‘almost threw a fit when she suggested moving into a vacant cottage on the estate.’
‘That must have put a lot of pressure on their marriage,’ Luc observed.
‘Not really, they were both prepared to compromise. Dad bought the house in town and spent time there even though he hated it. He said if Mum could spend time in a drafty old pile with bad plumbing, he could put up with London traffic and fashionable dinner parties.’
She knew she’d lost him before she’d reached the end of her explanation. Luc had tuned her out.
She watched as he ran his fingers along his jaw. His expression indicated his thoughts were not just elsewhere…but another solar system.
‘This changes things.’
‘It does…?’ she said, expectant. What?
He flicked her an impatient look. ‘Obviously. If we’re not going to get our own place together, I suppose the logical alternative would be for me to move in with you.’
Mouth open, she looked at him in disbelief. Had he really said logical…?
‘Did I miss something…? Get a place together? Since when were we getting a place together?’ Had he planned on mentioning this at some point? she wondered…
‘Ah.’ His speculative gaze skimmed her face. ‘You were thinking of marriage?’
She gasped. ‘No, I was not thinking of marriage!’ she denied, turning prettily pink.
‘Most women are,’ he observed, ‘no matter what they say to the contrary. Are you telling me it hasn’t even crossed your mind?’
She directed a narrow-eyed look at the tall, lean figure sprawled on the sofa; his contemptuous attitude made her want to hit him. ‘No, it damn well hasn’t! I can’t think of anything more stupid than marrying someone you have not the slightest thing in common with.’
‘Outside the bedroom…’ Megan froze at this soft addition, her eyes sealed with his brilliant cynical gaze…and beyond the cynicism was a primitive hunger that made the core of heat in her stomach tighten.
His sensual mouth twisted. ‘Not that we made it to the bedroom.’
By sheer force of will she made herself smile back as though the subject were one that amused her. Inside her head she could feel every inch of his hard, vital body pressed up against her. She had perfect recall of every insane, intoxicating moment up to and including the moment of shattering climax. If he asked, she’d do it again in a heartbeat. This insight really shook her.
‘I didn’t come here to ask you to make an honest woman of me,’ she croaked contemptuously.
‘Why did you come here, Megan?’
‘Do you need to ask?’ she exclaimed indignantly. ‘Fine! I came because I thought you had a right to know about the baby, and I’m not cold enough to send news like this via an e-mail. The fact is I wouldn’t marry you if you came gift-wrapped!’
‘That makes you my sort of woman. The fact is, Megan, I’ve been married once and I’m not very good at it.’
She widened her eyes and, not wanting to drop Uncle Malcolm in it, feigned ignorance. ‘You were married…?’ My sort of woman…If only that were true, she thought sadly. How different this would feel if she were carrying the baby of the man who loved her.
He nodded. ‘For ten years.’
This time her surprise was genuine. Ten years was a long time! ‘You must have been very young,’ she observed.
‘I was twenty, Grace, my wife, was a couple of years older.’
‘Were you unfaithful?
There was a startled silence during which Megan wished herself anywhere but here and now. Me and my wretched tongue!
‘No, I was never unfaithful,’ he said, scanning her flushed face, his glance lingering longest on the full soft contours of her mouth. He pressed back harder into the seat; it was getting increasingly difficult to ignore the voice that urged him to part those delicious rosy lips and slide his tongue inside her mouth.
‘But I was a lousy husband,’ he framed matter-of-factly, ‘who wasn’t there when my wife needed me.’
A comment like that and you’d have to be not human not to be curious, but from the closed expression on Luc’s face and his body language as he picked up his mug of tea it was obvious that, as far as he was concerned, the subject was closed.
I’ll respect his privacy, she decided.
Almost as soon as she had made this resolve, a sudden thought came to her that made it impossible for her to honour it. ‘Did you and your wife…did you…have you got any children?’
Why hadn’t she thought of this earlier? She had been assuming parenthood was as new an experience for him as it was for her, when for all she knew Luc might have a brood of children already!
‘Grace was pregnant once,’ he told her without any discernible expression in his voice, ‘but she lost the baby.’
He’d come to realise that by that point in their marriage they had drifted so far apart that the prospect of the baby had been the only thing holding them together. Perhaps if he’d spent more time with Grace and less trying to make money to buy her the pretty things she loved things might have turned out differently. The irony was he had hated the job that he had put before his wife.
Megan felt the deep, abiding pain behind his pragmatic words as if it were her own. She wanted to hold him so badly it hurt.
‘I’m so sorry.’ The trite response was wildly inadequate, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
His bleak eyes narrowed on her face. ‘She had a fall,’ he supplied without her asking.
It had been at the height of the scandal and the press pack, who had been after blood—specifically his—had latched onto the personal tragedy. Without anyone printing anything libelous, they had managed to intimate that there was a question mark over the accident.
Had the wife fallen or had she been pushed? Grim statistics about domestic violence would coincidentally appear on the same page. The fact he had been in Spain trying to locate his treacherous partner at the time had been no obstacle to a good rumour.
‘That must have been terrible for you both.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t meant to be,’ he reflected. ‘The baby had a congenital abnormality; they picked it up on a scan. Nothing life-threatening or anything—a cleft palate.’
Megan nodded. She had a friend who had been born with the condition, not that you could tell—the surgery she had had as a child had been very successful.
‘Grace,’ he recalled in a voice wiped clean of all emotion, ‘wanted to have the pregnancy terminated when they told us. She couldn’t stand the idea of having a baby that wasn’t perfect,’ he explained.
Megan tried not to let her natural repugnance to the idea show on her face. You coul
dn’t judge another person’s actions without standing in their shoes, her father had always said, and he was right. Who knew what pressures the other woman had been under?
‘But she changed her mind.’
‘I changed it for her,’ Luc admitted. ‘And in the end she lost him anyway. If I hadn’t pressured her she wouldn’t have had to go through the pain and trauma of a miscarriage.’
‘It wasn’t your fault!’ Megan protested, horrified by this insight into the burden of guilt he carried with him. ‘It was an accident, a terrible accident,’ she added, her voice thick with emotion.
Her spontaneous outburst brought his eyes to her face. The tears trembling on the end of her dark lashes made his jaw clench. ‘Please don’t go all soft and understanding on me, Megan.’
His sardonic sneer, the sudden cold hostility in his manner, made Megan tense.
‘I can see you’re just aching to be a shoulder for me to cry on. Frankly I don’t have any use for your pity. And before you suggest therapy, I’m totally in touch with my feelings,’ he pronounced caustically. ‘And I don’t believe in living in the past or pointlessly dwelling on things I have no ability to change.’
To have her sympathy thrown back in her face was incredibly hurtful. Megan instinctively hit back. ‘If you’re so over it…’ she gave a derisive snort and sketched invisible inverted commas in the air ‘…tell me how is it you got writer’s block when your wife wanted a divorce?’
His eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. ‘How would you know that?’
Oh, God! She felt as if guilt were written all over her face. ‘Never mind how—’
‘Oh, but I do mind,’ he cut in silkily. ‘I’m assuming you’ve had a heart-to-heart with Malcolm…’ An icy note of menace entered his voice as he added softly, ‘Just exactly what did Malcolm tell you?’ His expression was so savage that Megan began to feel concerned for her uncle.
‘Malcolm didn’t tell me anything…well, he might have mentioned in passing that you had got divorced.’
‘So you already knew I’d been married?’
She nodded. ‘And don’t blame Uncle Malcolm; he didn’t want to tell me where you were. In fact he refused point-blank until I told him about the baby. He was pretty shocked.’
‘And exactly who else knew about the baby before me…?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MEGAN stuck her chin out. She was getting pretty cheesed off with Luc’s attitude. ‘I told my mother,’ she announced. ‘Do you have a problem with that? Actually, I don’t care if you do because what I do or don’t do is none of your damned business. You may prefer to grit your teeth and be a man when your life falls apart, and I’d be the first to defend your right to behave like a total prat.’ She paused briefly for breath; she was so mad that she was shaking.
At any other time the gobsmacked expression on Luc’s face might have made her laugh, but right now she was too angry to see any humour in this situation.
‘But when I’m upset,’ she continued, ‘I talk to people, the people who care about me!’ She swallowed as her voice developed a wobble. ‘They’d be hurt if I didn’t.’
For a moment Luc sat there watching her struggling not to cry. ‘That’s some temper you have.’
She sniffed and found a tissue placed in her hand.
‘Thank you. I’m generally considered to be a pretty placid sort of person.’
He grinned. ‘Sure you are.’
‘It’s not me,’ she protested. ‘It’s you! You just…’ The tissue between her clenched fingers mangled as she struggled to come up with a suitable definition for what he did to her. ‘You’re hopeless,’ she pronounced irritably.
‘And you’re delicious.’
Her mouth fell open at the unexpected tribute. Delicious…? For God’s sake, don’t start reading too much into it, she cautioned herself.
‘I’m glad you had people to share this with over the past few weeks, Megan,’ he continued as though he’d not said anything out of the ordinary. ‘You’re lucky you have people who care about you.’
‘People care about you…or they would do if you let them!’ She was going to have to stop blurting out the first thing that popped into her head. ‘That is…’
Without warning he leaned across and brushed a strand of soft honey hair from her brow. This time he made contact, his touch was brief, but enough to send a shiver of intense longing through her body…
‘Don’t worry too much—there are still one or two people who are prepared to put up with me.’ It had been a brutal method of learning who your real friends were, but he did have a group of loyal friends who had stood by him during the scandal.
Megan flushed. She felt a total idiot—of course he had friends!
‘And would you be one of those people who cared if I let you, Megan?’
Megan stiffened and felt her heightened colour intensify until she felt as though she were burning up. She was going to have to learn to guard her tongue in the future.
‘Well, you’re my baby’s father; it would be better if we learnt how to get on.’
‘That’s a reply but not to the question I asked.’
‘It’s the only reply you’re getting.’
Her grim retort drew a reluctant bark of laughter from Luc. Then his expression hardened. ‘Grace and I separated not long after she lost the baby, but we wouldn’t have if the baby had survived.’
‘Can you be so sure?’ Megan wanted to know.
Luc responded without hesitation with a firm nod of his dark head. It would have taken compromises but he would have made it work. ‘A child needs two parents, whether they are married or not is irrelevant,’ Luc announced, nursing the hot drink between his big hands. ‘What matters is that they operate as a single unit where that child is concerned.’
‘I think they call that a family. Hardly a new concept, Luc.’
While she respected his views, and even shared them, there was no way she would countenance going along with what he planned. Her smooth brow creased, she searched his lean face. It was weird—while she felt emotionally and physically drained by this difficult scene, now that it had sunk in that he was going to be a father Luc appeared incredibly energised. Never an easy man to say no to, he looked so charged up and resolute at the moment that she knew it was going to be difficult to make him recognise that his idea was a non-starter.
‘Like they say, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,’ he quoted. ‘Families work.’
‘Not all families are nice or safe places to grow up in,’ Megan pointed out gently.
His eyes narrowed on her face. ‘But yours was?’
She nodded. ‘I was very lucky,’ she agreed.
‘Would you deny your child what you enjoyed?’
She gave a sigh of frustration, he was trying to tie her in knots and mostly succeeding. ‘It isn’t the same thing,’ she gritted.
‘Why?’
Her eyes slid evasively from his. ‘My parents loved one another.’
‘I loved my wife…’ Or thought he had. Lately he had begun to appreciate that what he and Grace had shared had been an infatuation, strong, but not long-lasting.
His honesty had inflicted more pain than she would have believed mere words could.
‘But love isn’t a magic formula for happy ever after,’ he continued. ‘My father brought me up alone. He didn’t have any option—my mother died when I was ten.’ His dark lashes swept downwards, making it impossible for her to read his expression. ‘I don’t want that for my child.’
This explained his determination to make sacrifices for his unborn child. The image of Luc as a small boy without a mother flashed across her vision and immediately Megan felt the sting of tears behind her eyelids. Maybe it was her newly awakened maternal instincts that made her empathise so strongly with the motherless child? Then again, she had grown to accept that all her emotional responses seemed to be heightened where Luc was concerned.
‘Are you all right?’ His deep voice held a ro
ugh note of concern.
She blinked to clear her blurred vision. Her throat ached as she shook her head and tried to get a grip. ‘God, yes, I’m fine. Totally fine,’ she assured him, smiling to illustrate the point.
‘When did you last have anything to eat?’ He gave a self-condemnatory grimace. ‘I should have thought.’
Megan pushed her hair behind her ears. ‘I had something on the motorway.’ The something had been a sandwich, which had tasted like plastic; she had left most of it untouched on her plate.
‘That was hours ago.’
‘Was it?’ The last twenty-four hours had been such a blur that she had lost all sense of time.
His searching scrutiny took in the dark shadows beneath her big china-blue eyes. ‘You’re running on pure adrenaline, aren’t you?’ he accused.
‘Please don’t fuss—I hate being fussed.’
Her frown deepened ominously as he talked right across her petulant complaint. ‘You’ve got to look after yourself now,’ he reproved.
‘I do…I am…’
‘How about an omelette? You sit there…better still, lie there, and I’ll…’
As he began to rise Megan reached out and caught him by the wrist. She lifted her eyes to his and thought she saw something move at the back of Luc’s eyes as he stared fixedly at the pale, slim fingers curved over his much darker skin.
Self-consciously she let her hand fall away and struggled to regain her composure.
The muscles in Luc’s brown throat rippled as he swallowed hard, but still he didn’t meet her eyes.
‘I couldn’t eat now…not with things the way they are.’
He turned his head and their eyes locked, smoky grey on shimmering blue. Megan’s breathing slowed, everything slowed as she registered the build-up of tension in the air around them.
Even in the privacy of her own thoughts Megan was reluctant to use the only adjective that could begin to describe this dangerous tension—sexual. It had a tactile quality and like an invisible envelope it enclosed them in a highly charged bubble.
‘The way they are…?’
The throaty rasp of his voice vibrated through her. ‘I’m sorry that you didn’t have the sort of upbringing every single child deserves, but proposing that we set up home together is no solution. You can’t realistically expect us to pretend that we are a couple…?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a crazy idea. I can’t even believe you’re suggesting it.’