by Penny Jordan
She hated the look of cynical satisfaction she could see in Luc’s eyes.
‘Even if in giving him that help you were guilty of insider trading?’ he challenged softly.
Carrie heard her own audible indrawn breath of anguished despair.
‘No, that’s not true,’ she protested ‘It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t insider trading at all. I—’
‘Not in your eyes, maybe, and perhaps not under the strict terms of the law. But, as I am sure you will agree, Catherine, in the right hands and with the right kind of publicity—or rather in the wrong hands and with the wrong kind of publicity—what you did could be made to look very bad indeed for you. For starters you’d probably lose your job and your professional status, and without you to rely on your little brother would certainly lose his. I could quite easily destroy you both, Catherine.’
‘You’d do that? But what about Maria? Or is it Maria you really want to hurt?’ she demanded.
‘Certainly not! My proposed marriage to Maria was a diplomatic arrangement, not a love-match. She is the last person I would want to hurt in any way. As a matter of fact I am extremely fond of her, more than enough to keep a watchful eye on your young brother. If he does anything—anything—to hurt her or make her regret her decision to marry him—’
‘You say that, and yet you’re the one who is threatening to…to lose him his job,’ Carrie reminded him fiercely.
‘And you are the one who has the means to make sure that I do not,’ Luc reminded her smoothly. ‘The decision is yours, Catherine.’
Carrie stared at him. The room was warm, but she felt as though she were encased in ice. She could feel the coldness seeping into her bones, dripping through her veins, as deliberate and insidious as Luc’s threat to compromise and ultimately ruin her brother!
‘You would do that?’
All the horror and disgust she felt was in her voice, but Luc seemed impervious to it.
‘I am glad to see that you do not question that I can do it, Catherine. That shows an admirable grasp of reality. What would be even more admirable would be for you to show an equal grasp of the inevitability of our closer relationship. Don’t worry. No one expects a modern marriage to last for very long. I am sure I shall very quickly realise the error of my ways in marrying you and we shall be free to go our separate ways.’
‘You’re threatening me with blackmail!’ Carrie accused him, adding darkly, ‘There’s a law against that kind of thing.’
‘You seem to forget,’ Luc returned in an ominously silky tone. ‘In S’Antander, I am the law!’
‘You’re despicable!’ Carrie told him, her voice thick with loathing.
‘The choice is yours,’ Luc told her calmly. ‘Either you agree to marry me or your brother—’
‘You know I can’t do that to Harry. I have no choice,’ Carrie told him bitterly. ‘You haven’t changed, have you, Luc? I can’t imagine why I was ever naïve enough to—’
Carrie stopped, her face beginning to burn.
‘Go on…’ Luc taunted. ‘To…what, exactly? Beg me to take you to bed…to show you what it meant to be a woman…to…?’
‘Stop it. Stop it!’ Frantically Carrie covered her ears with her hands as she tried to blot out not just his cruel words but also the haunting and disturbingly clear images they were conjuring up inside her head.
‘It’s a bit too late to take on the role of injured innocent now, Catherine. After all, you never made any secret of the fact that you put what you learned in my bed to good use during your time at university.’
Carrie’s teeth sank into her bottom lip as she forced back her instinctive response.
After all, it was true that she had written to her father describing her social life at university in terms which had made it seem as though her life was one long party—and that she was dating a different boy virtually every week. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The pain of Luc’s rejection had caused her to retreat into herself and hold the opposite sex at a distance, concentrating instead on her studies. It had only been her pride that had made her write to her father pretending that she was having the time of her life! She knew that her father had never been entirely happy about her youthful passion for Luc.
‘You’re only eighteen, Carrie, with your whole life and its opportunities ahead of you,’ he had told her. ‘Whilst Luc already knows what his future and its responsibilities will entail.’
Her father, Carrie remembered, had felt that the task that lay ahead of Luc was an extremely daunting one.
‘His grandfather ruled S’Antander as though it was still a medieval state,’ he had once told Carrie. ‘And it will be Luc’s task to broker a way of bringing S’Antander into the twenty-first century. I certainly don’t envy him!’
He had admired him, though; Carrie knew that…
‘Luc, you’re back! How did it go in Brussels?’
Carrie tensed as the salon door was suddenly thrown open, her breath catching in her throat as she stared in shock at the man who had walked in. His physical resemblance to Luc was so extraordinarily marked that it was obvious that they had to share the same blood—indeed, could have been brothers, if not twins!
Carrie didn’t recognise him, though, and she frowned slightly, detecting an American accent.
‘Oh!’ As he saw Carrie he stopped speaking and looked enquiringly at Luc. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that you weren’t alone!’
‘It’s all right, Jay. In fact you can be the first to hear our news and to congratulate me. Allow me to introduce you to my bride-to-be—Catherine Broadbent.’
His eyes were a different colour from Luc’s, Carrie recognised as he focused on her. A bright warm blue instead of that cold steely grey, and she guessed that he was probably a couple of years younger in age—maybe a thousand years younger in terms of personality and self-will.
‘Your bride-to-be? But I thought that Maria…’ Jay stopped, looking uncomfortable.
‘A common misconception,’ Luc told him calmly. ‘But, as it happens, Catherine and I go back a long way. Circumstances beyond our control led to us parting, but happily we have now rediscovered one another.’
‘Well, I guess the old brigade don’t mind too much who you marry, just so long as you do! They were beginning to get real twitchy that you might decide to step down and turn the country over to self-rule because of all the hassle you’ve been getting. I suppose as an American citizen I ought to claim that is what you should do, but I confess that I kinda like being able to boast that I’m related to a real-life ruling prince—even if it is on the wrong side of the blanket. I guess that tracing my family tree has to be one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.’
‘You’re a billionaire, Jay, and you’ve earned that success by your own efforts. I should have thought that was something to be far more proud of than any merit bestowed by a mere act of birth.’
‘Careful, Luc, otherwise I might begin to believe that you think I got the best out of our shared gene pool. Remember, I know for a fact that you could have done exactly what I’ve done. You’ve got one of the best financial brains going, and don’t forget I had the advantage of being handed my first million by my old man. All you inherited was a load of problems and a set of state regalia!’
Carrie’s eyes rounded as she listened to the two of them subtly teasing one another. This was quite definitely a side to Luc she had never seen before.
‘By the way, do I get to be the first to kiss the bride-to-be?’
Carrie smiled as he came towards her, but to her bemusement, just as he reached her, Luc put his hand on her arm and drew her to his side, keeping his own body between them.
‘Catherine, allow me to introduce you to my second cousin—Jay Fitz Kleinburg. As you will probably have gathered, Jay and I have only recently discovered our shared relationship.’
‘Yup, that’s true. Luc’s granddaddy was also mine! Only thing was he kinda neglected to put his name on my father’
s birth certificate! It’s my grandmother I’ve got to thank for the “Fitz” in my name. Seems she’d read that in olden days in England royal bastards were given the prefix “Fitz” to their names, so she decided to do the same for my dad, and he passed it on to me!
‘She only told us what had happened when she knew she was dying. Up until then she pretended that she’d married during the war and lost her husband! But I’m boring the pants off you. I guess what you both really want right now is to be on your own…’
Being on her own with Luc was the very last thing she wanted, Carrie acknowledged, but before she could say anything Jay was turning to Luc.
‘I guess we can talk later about Brussels. You ought to know, though, Luc, that there’s one hell of a lot of speculation going on amongst the tax exiles. Seems like most of them fear that you might be forced to make a change of policy, and give in to those young hotheads who are causing you so much trouble.’
‘There’s no question of that.’ Luc’s voice was terse. ‘For one thing this country is almost wholly dependent on the income it derives from its tax exile inhabitants, although…’ He started to frown. ‘There are certain issues to do with the way things were conducted here during my grandfather’s time which are going to have to be addressed.’
‘Well, at least the news of your coming marriage will put a stop to the gossip going round that you intend to sell out to the money men wanting to take over the country and step down as ruler.’
As an economist herself Carrie was well versed in the financial status of S’Antander, but she had not realised that there was internal pressure on Luc regarding the way the country was run.
‘Nice to meet you, Catherine.’ Jay was smiling. ‘You’ll both have to come down to the yacht and have dinner with me—although I guess you’ll both be pretty busy with formal engagements from now until the wedding. When is it to be, by the way?’
‘At the end of the month. We shall be getting married on the same day as we celebrate our country’s National Day. As you know, it is five hundred years this year since my family were given the country by the Pope. It seems fitting to celebrate my marriage at the same time.’
‘As a symbol of your intention to see that the family continues to rule for another five hundred years?’ Jay suggested.
Carrie was too shocked to speak. When Luc had told her that she must marry him she had had no idea he intended that marriage to take place so speedily! Maria had implied that her marriage to Luc was something that was to take place at some unspecified date well into the future.
Luc’s cousin was leaving. Shaking herself free of the disbelief immobilising her, Carrie waited until the door had closed behind him before pulling away from Luc and telling him fiercely, ‘This has gone far enough. We can’t do this, Luc. It’s crazy. No one is going to believe this marriage is anything other than a pathetic sham! We don’t have the slightest thing in common!’
‘No? What about this?’
Before she could say a word, Luc’s hands had clamped on her upper arms and she was being jerked towards him. His head bent over hers, his body language predatory and dangerous.
It had been eight years since she had last felt his mouth against hers, since she had last tasted the sweet savagery of his kiss, since she had last felt the shocking pleasure of the hardness of his body, all lean muscle and bone, against her own, and in those eight years she had, she had believed, taught herself to forget the pleasure her foolish, immature self had felt at his touch, and to remember instead the corrosive pain of her disillusionment and humiliation.
And yet…and yet…
Some instincts…some senses…some memories were perhaps so deeply etched on a person’s consciousness that nothing could ever erase them.
Her lips softened and parted, her brain clouded by a dizzying swarm of disempowering pleasure. A feeling like an electric shock jolted through her, heightening every one of her senses.
Desire, pain, anger—she could feel them all, and could have wept tears of aching anguish for the girl she had been and the memories Luc was forcing on her. It wasn’t fair that he should do this to her—but then, when had Luc ever been fair? When had he ever done anything that wasn’t motivated entirely by self-interest? He had taken her to his bed because he had desired her and then he had rejected her, dismissed her from his life like a toy he had grown bored with.
‘No!’
Frantically, Carrie tried to pull away, but Luc was too powerful for her. His mouth possessed hers with an easy strength, his tongue reinforcing his control of the situation, snaking between her lips, thrusting powerfully into the tender, vulnerable warmth she was trying to withhold from him.
The fog clouding her brain became a white-out of sheeting panic. She should not be feeling like this. She lifted her hands and pushed against Luc’s chest, at the same time wrenching her mouth from beneath his. Abruptly he released her, freeing her to drag air into her aching lungs.
‘Odd. You still kiss like an innocent.’
The way he was looking at her made Carrie’s stomach lurch with anxiety. That steely grey gaze was far too sharp and penetrating.
Defensively she snapped back at him, ‘Actually, I wasn’t doing any kissing. But of course it’s typical of you, Luc, that you were too intent on doing what you wanted to notice. You are the last man I would ever want to kiss. In fact, you are the last man I would ever want in any way at all.’
‘Really?’ His tone was even more sardonic than the look he was giving her. ‘That’s not what this says,’ he told her mercilessly, and he reached out and very deliberately ran his finger down the curve of her breast, to where her nipple jutted tightly against the fabric of her tee shirt.
Carrie’s face flamed in angry humiliation.
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ she told him fiercely, pushing his hand away. ‘I—’
‘You what?’ Luc challenged her ‘You react to every man who touches you in that way? Well, let me warn you, Carrie, that from now on, for as long as our marriage lasts, there will be no other men in either your life or your bed.’
‘You can’t tell me what to do—’ Carrie began, but Luc stopped her immediately,
‘You have no option other than to do as I say, Carrie,’ he said gently, but there was no gentleness in his eyes, just a hard, implacable determination that warned her he meant every word he was saying. ‘Because if you don’t, both you and your brother…’
She couldn’t allow him to carry out his threats against Harry, Carrie acknowledged, no matter how strong her feelings of outrage and disgust towards him were.
‘Very well,’ she told him through gritted teeth. ‘As you say, it seems that I have no option, Luc. But I promise you that I shall hate every single day, every single minute, every single second I spend shackled to you, and I shall do my utmost to make sure that you hate them too.’
‘My charming wife-to-be…so loving, so tender, so complaisant.’ Luc taunted her. ‘I am sure that ours shall be a match made in—’
‘Hell,’ Carrie supplied savagely for him.
‘So much passion! But then, you always were…passionate.’
The look he was giving her was an open insult, but somehow Carrie managed to bite back the words she was longing to throw at him.
CHAPTER THREE
THE soft swish of her bedroom curtains being opened followed by a bright shaft of morning sunlight woke Carrie from the sleep she had only finally fallen into a couple of hours previously. For most of the night she’d been kept awake by a turbulent inner warfare in which her instinct for self-preservation had battled with her lifelong elder sister instinct to protect her younger brother—and lost! She had eventually fallen into an exhausted sleep, knowing that she could not expose Harry to Luc’s diabolic cruelty!
Her mouth compressed now as she was dragged back into the dilemma which had tormented her all through the previous evening and into the soul-searching long night.
Nothing would have given her a greater sense o
f satisfaction or…or fierce justification than to expose Luc for what he was: to state publicly the contempt she held him in and to give him a taste of just how it felt to be helpless within someone else’s power, devoid of pride and self-respect. But how could she, knowing the power he had to destroy her younger brother?
It was not the farce of marriage itself that bothered her; she knew Luc well enough to know that he meant exactly what he had implied by that throw-away comment about modern marriages being of short duration. Once Luc’s purpose was served their marriage would be brought to a very swift and uncompromising end, and of course it would not be a marriage at all, merely a pretence to suit Luc’s own ends.
No, it was the fact that he had the power to force her to do as he wished that she hated, the fact that once again she was allowing herself to be used and manipulated to suit him!
The maid had finished opening the curtains and was standing at a respectful distance from her bed.
‘My name is Benita. I am to be your maid. If you wish to have breakfast here in your suite…’
Her English was perfect, if slightly stilted—it had been Luc who, during the years of his minority, had insisted that S’Antander’s schools taught all its pupils English as a second language. Even then he had been strong-willed enough to oppose the old-fashioned views of the Regency of Ruling Elders, who had felt that such a course was an unnecessary expense.
‘S’Antander is a very small country,’ he had told them. ‘It is only to be expected that many of my people will want to go and live and work in the wider world, and when they do it is only right that they should be equipped with the means to do so. They must have the opportunity of learning a second language!’
Carrie remembered sardonically now how much she had admired him for his stance when her father had related the episode to her! But at that time, of course, she had been only too inclined to admire anything and everything that Luc did. As well as admiring Luc himself. Admiring? She had adored him, worshipped him…’
‘Thank you, Benita. Breakfast would be—’ she began, and then stopped speaking as the door to her bedroom was thrust open and Luc strode in.