‘It was exactly like that. No ring, no child. I was playing Russian roulette over that breakfast table and I didn’t know it!’ He looked at her with hatred. ‘To think that I tortured myself over what I said to you that day! You had no right to conceal the truth from me. It was my right to know that you were carrying my child. Cristo, did you hate me so much that you couldn’t even give me a chance?’
Her legs were shaking. She sank down in the nearest seat and covered her face with damp hands. ‘I loved you. I loved you so much.’
‘That was love?’ He emitted a harsh laugh of incredulity. ‘I lash out at you once. In nearly two years, I lose my temper with you once! Once! And I’ve been paying for it ever since. It was revenge you took, and I understand revenge very well:’
‘I don’t think like you,’ she said in defeat.
‘If you thought like me, you’d have been my wife five years ago! Si, I’d have married you.’ Lancing dark eyes absorbed her white face with a kind of grim satisfaction. ‘I probably wouldn’t have done it with the best of grace, but I’d have married you.’
She shrank in retrospect from such a fate. Luc, forced into marriage shotgun-style. It would have been a nightmare. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted you to marry me feeling like that.’
‘Dio! What would your feelings or my feelings have had to do with it with a child on the way?’
‘I couldn’t have lived with you under those circumstances,’ she muttered limply.
His mouth twisted chillingly. ‘The only truly honest woman I ever met—that’s what I told Rafaella about you. It’s a wonder she didn’t laugh in my face! But then,she has one virtue you don’t have. She’s loyal even when I turn on her as I did last week.’
‘Daniel and I will go away.’ Hardly knowing what she was saying, Catherine spoke the thought out loud. ‘You won’t hear from us again.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘You’re not taking him anywhere!’
‘You don’t want him. You didn’t even want him to be yours. That has to be the sickest, cruellest thing you’ve ever said to me.’ Catherine’s voice wobbled alarmingly on the contention.
‘Sick?’ Luc thundered. ‘I’ve lost five years of his life! He’s illegitimate. What will he suffer in later years? Don’t you realise that all this will hit the papers? Did you think you’d be able to shelter behind the fallacy that you were a widow with a child for the rest of your days? It will come out… of course it will, and how will the child feel then? About you? About me? That is why my first wish was that he should not be mine. For his sake, not my own. The papers are already sifting what few facts they have, already hinting that all is not as it appears. Why else was he left in England?’
‘The papers?’ She was ghost-pale, paralysed by the sheer force of the condemnation coming her way.
‘Surely you didn’t believe that you could step from nowhere into the life that I lead and conceal the truth? If it hadn’t been for Rafaella, his face would already have been splashed all over the gutter Press! When she tracked him down to your friend’s home in the Lake District, she got him out before the paparazzi could make a killing.’
‘Got him out? To take him where?’ she pressed feverishly, registering that the threat of Press interest had been roused far more swiftly than she had naively expected.‘She persuaded your friend to bring him south before the Press arrived. They’re waiting for us at the house.’
‘What house?’ she mumbled dazedly.
His strong jawline clenched, a tiny muscle tugging at the hardened line of his mouth. ‘1 bought it for you as a wedding present. Five years ago… five long, wasted years ago!’ he vented rawly.
In the state she was in, it took a little while for the significance of that admission to sink in. ‘Five years ago?’
Smouldering dark eyes black as pitch bit into her. ‘I was such a fool. I, who prided myself on my superior judgement! Haven’t you worked it out yet, carai I was in love with you.’
‘F-five years ago?’ It was a shattered gasp.
‘I didn’t know it myself until you had gone.’ His inflexion, his whole demeanour, was chillingly cold and harsh. ‘The last laugh really was on me. I believed you would return… phone… send a postcard with “x marks the spot” on it.. .something, anything! I couldn’t believe you would stay away forever. I could not have done that to you.’ That confession appeared to awaken another scorching tide of anger. His teeth gritted as he stared at her. ‘I spent a fortune trying to trace you. In an excess of conscience-stricken self-reproach, I intended to marry you as soon as I found you! So much for the fresh start!’
Slow tears brimmed up in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She swallowed back her sobs in the seething silence that throhbed and tortured and taunted. But Luc was not finished with her.
‘And when I find you, I close my eyes to the evidence of what you are. I make excuses for you. I cling to an illusion that probably never existed anywhere outside my own imagination. Why?’ A savage bitterness stamped his dark taut features. ‘It can only be because you’re the best lay I’ve ever had. That is all I will ever allow it to be now.”Don’t,’ she begged brokenly, sensing his destructive determination to smash the bonds between them… or had she already done that for herself?
‘You did this to me before. I will never let you do it to me again.’ The assurance carried all the lethal conviction of an oath.
‘What did I do?’ she whispered.
‘Five years ago I trusted you more than anyone else in this world, Catherine. And you betrayed that trust,’ he delivered contemptuously. ‘You spent all night in my arms, telling me how much you loved me and then you walked out…’
‘I was saying goodbye the only way I could.’ It was a dulled murmur.
‘Of course, it would not occur to you that one of the reasons I was so angry with you the next morning was that I felt that I had been set up!’
‘How could you feel that?’
‘How could I fail to feel that? And then I didn’t want to marry you, I didn’t want to marry anyone. My parents did not give me a very entrancing view of the married state. They hated the sight of each other!’
She looked up in shock at that grated revelation. ‘You never told me that!’
‘You have so many illusions about happy family life, I could never bring myself to tell you the truth.’ His dark gaze was unrelentingly grim. ‘My parents married because they had to marry. My mother was pregnant. They didn’t love each other. They didn’t even like each other. They lived together all those years in absolute misery. And the only thing they ever wanted from me was money. As long as the money came, they hadn’t the slightest interest in what I was doing. But it took me a long while to face that reality. When that plane went down, the only things I lost were a sister and two parents who never wanted to be parents in the first place.‘Shutting her eyes tightly, she lowered her head. ‘I always thought your family loved you.’
‘They loved what I could give them,’ he contradicted fiercely. ‘And you’re not so very different, are you? Ten days ago, you were sitting in Huntingdon’s apartment ready to marry him. Miraculously, you converted to me!’ ‘He asked me to marry him that day you saw us. There was never anything between us before that. At least not on my side. I should have been honest about that sooner,’ she conceded uncertainly.
‘Honest?’ he gritted. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word. I look forward to you telling my son in another few years that the reason for my late appearance in his life lies with your fear of my intentions towards him before he was even born!’ She flinched at the image he projected. ‘What have you told him about me?’ She might as well have been hanging from a cliff by her fingernails. One by one, he was breaking them, loosening their hold, bringing the jagged rocks of retribution closer and closer. She chose, to jump. ‘Nothing,’ she admitted shakily.
‘Nothing?’ he exclaimed. ‘You must have told him something about his father!’
She broke into a
faltering explanation of Harriet’s cover-story. She could not have said that he absorbed the details. He zoomed in on only one, cutting her short in another surge of shuddering rage when he realised that Daniel thought his father was dead. The last straw had broken the camel’s back. That Luc should not know he had had a son was bad enough. But that Daniel should not know about him was unforgivable.
She was desperately confused by what he had told her in anger, confidences which she sensed that in his present mood would never have been made otherwise. He had said that he loved her five years ago. All else receded before that single stated fact. The love she had longedto awaken had been there. And she had been too blind and too insecure to even suspect its existence for herself. Why had she listened to Harriet? Why, oh, why? But it wasn’t fair to blame Harriet. Harriet had judged Luc on the evidence of what Catherine herself had told her. Harriet had influenced her only in so far as she had confirmed what Catherine had already believed. And Luc had just brought down the convictions that had sustained her through the years like a pack of cards.
Enormous guilt weighted her now. She had run away when she should have stood her ground, stayed away when she should have returned. A little voice said that what Luc said so impressively now with the benefit of hindsight was no very good guide to how he might have reacted to her pregnancy without having sustained the shock of first losing her. That voice was quashed because the guilt was greater. Luc would have married her. Daniel would have had a father. Daniel would have had many things and many advantages which she had not had the power to give him.
Luc was right on one count. She had not given him a chance. In her own mind, the result had been a foregone conclusion. Then, she had to admit, it had been easier to run away than face a confrontation. In those days, she had been out of her depth with Luc, unable to hold her own. She could not have dreamt then that Luc could be so bitter or indeed that losing her could have brought him so much pain. For it had been pain that powered that bitterness, that fierce conviction that she had betrayed him for the second time. Luc viewed her response to his lovemaking last night in the same light as he had viewed that long-ago last night in New York.
And she understood facets of his temperament which she had not understood before. The heat in the bedroom, the coolness beyond it. Recently he had begun to break out of that pattern. But he must have learnt early in lifenot to show his emotions. And he must have been hurt. His parents, by all accounts, had not encouraged or sought his affection. The financial generosity, which in the past had made her feel like an object to be bought, was shown now in a different light. Luc had had a long history before her of giving to those closest to him. It had been expected of him. When his family had died, he had simply continued the same habit with her.
There was so much fear trapped inside her. Luc was more than disappointed in her: Luc was embittered and disillusioned. Five years ago, whether she knew it or not, she had thumped the last nail into her coffin. It had never occurred to Luc that she might have been pregnant because it had equally never occurred to him that, if she was, she might go to such lengths to conceal the fact from him.
But what a disaster it would have been had Luc felt forced to marry her, repeating what he surely would have believed to be his parents’ mistake. He had not been ready to make such a commitment of his own free will. It wouldn’t have worked, it couldn’t have worked, but Luc could not see that. No, at this moment Luc saw only Daniel, and he was already demonstrating a voracious appetite for knowledge of his son. He wanted Daniel. Right now, he did not want Daniel’s mother.
Anger was within him still, anger dangerously encased in ice which could shatter again. When Luc came to terms with the awareness that he was a father, how would he feel about her then? He had trusted her. He had blamed himself entirely for her defection in the past. He had wanted to put the clock back, make everything right… she could see that now. And now he had learnt that that wasn’t possible. It was very probable, she registered strickenly, that the driving determination of his to take what he wanted had resulted in a too hasty marriage.
‘I love Daniel very much,’ she murmured tightly.‘You have a fine way of showing it,’ he censured. ‘You dump him in the back of beyond with some seething feminist––’
‘Don’t you dare call Peggy that!’ Catherine interrupted hotly. ‘She’s a university lecturer and she’s written three books. She’s also a very good friend.’
But possibly Peggy wouldn’t be a friend any more in the midst of this nightmare that had erupted. Kept in the dark about Luc’s identity, railroaded from her family home by Rafaella, and told goodness knew what, Peggy was sure to be furious as well.
Catherine’s wedding present was an Elizabethan country house. It wasn’t enormous, it wasn’t ostentatious and it would have stolen her heart had she been in a less wretched mood… and had Rafaella not been emerging from the front entrance, wreathed in welcoming smiles…
‘Not bad as a pressie, not bad at all.’ Hands on her slim hips, Peggy scanned the house in the early-evening sunshine, her wryly admiring scrutiny glossing over manicured lawns, a stretch of woodland and the more distant glimmer of a small lake. ‘Strewth, Catherine, it’s incredibly hard not to be impressed by all this.’
Catherine glanced at her watch helplessly again.
Too observant to miss the betraying gesture, Peggy frowned. ‘They’ll show up again sooner or later. Stop worrying. Daniel will come round. It’s my fault,’ she sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have left him alone with Rafaella for a second. The woman’s poisonous.’
Catherine thought back reluctantly to their arrival. Luc had gone straight to greet Rafaella. Catherine had no idea what had passed between them but the brunette had been smiling and laughing, switching on to the ultra-feminine mode she invariably employed around Luc. Then, with a pretty little speech about not wanting to intrude, she had climbed into her car, no doubt smuglyaware that she was leaving bedlam in her wake between husband and wife.. .and mother and son.
Daniel had been sitting like a solemn little old man in one of the downstairs rooms. Her attempt to put her arms round him had been fiercely rejected. ‘You toF me my daddy was dead!’ Daniel had condemned and, from that point on, the reunion had gone from bad to worse.
Rafaella had done her work well. Daniel might be a very clever child but his grasp of adult relationships was no greater than any other four-year-old’s. He understood solely that his mother had lied to him. Hurt and confused, terribly nervous of meeting this father Rafaella had described in over-impressive terms, Daniel had taken the brunt of his conflicting emotions out on Catherine.
Luc had taken over the same second he chose to join them, crouching down on his son’s diminutive level to engage his attention. ‘I don’t know anything about being a father,’ he had confided cleverly. ‘I’ll probably make mistakes. You’ll have to help me.’
‘I don’t want a daddy who bosses me around all the time,’ Daniel had traded in a small voice, but quick as a flash with the return.
‘I wouldn’t either,’ Luc had agreed smoothly.
‘I’m not sure I want one,’ Daniel had admitted less argumentatively.
‘I can understand that, but I am very sure that I want you to be my son.’
‘Have you got any other ones?’ Daniel asked innocently.
‘Only you. That is what makes you so special.’
Catherine had hovered like a third wheel, watching without great surprise as Daniel had responded to Luc. Luc had put in a performance of unsurpassed brilliance, quieting all of Daniel’s fears. It had gone on for ages. A series of extremely subtle negotiations on Luc’s side and of blossoming confidence and curiosity on Daniel’s.Luc hadn’t moved too far, too fast. A mutual sizing-up had been taking place. After an hour, Daniel had been chattering confidingly, flattered by Luc’s interest in him, relaxed and unthreatened by his manner. Clover had been mentioned. It had taken Luc precisely five seconds to recognise that the retrieva
l of an elderly donkey from an animal sanctuary would do much to cement his new relationship with his son. And never let it be said that Luc would look a gift horse or, in this case, a gift donkey in the mouth. A phone call had established that Clover was still in residence.
‘I think we should go and get her now, don’t you?’ Luc had suggested with the innate cool of a master tactician, and Daniel had been so overcome with tears, excitement and gratitude that he had flung himself at Luc, breaking the no-physical-contact barrier he had until that moment rigidly observed.
They had departed before lunch. ‘He’s a beautiful child,’ Luc had murmured, choosing then to notice Catherine for the first time since their arrival. ‘And I am very proud that he is mine.’
She still wasn’t sure whether that had been a compliment, a veiled apology, a mere acknowledgement of Daniel’s attractions or a concealed criticism that he had had to wait this long to meet his own son.
‘You should have gone with them,’ Peggy told her.
‘I wasn’t invited. Anyway,’ she sighed, ‘I needed to talk to you. I thought you’d be furious over all that’s happened.’
‘Are you kidding? The last two days have been excitement all the way!’ Peggy laughed. ‘I was staggered when Rafaella showed me that picture of you with Luc at the airport and by that time the first reporter was ringing. Someone in the village must have tipped them off. Lots of people knew I was taking Daniel up to my parents’ place. When I go back, I can bask in your reflected glory…”There’s not a lot of it around at the moment. You’ll catch a chill,’ Catherine warned ruefully. ‘When all of this comes out––’
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