by Lynne Graham
‘What did I say? What didn’t I say?’ Luc demanded. ‘OK, so this is not how you imagined me proposing.’
‘I never imagined you proposing!’ she sobbed.
With a succinct expletive, he slid his hands beneath her very gently and tugged her on to his lap, hauling off the light bedspread and wrapping it round her. She sniffed and sucked in oxygen, curving instinctively in the heat of him. ‘I’m so h-happy,’ she told him.
‘You have a very individual way of being happy, but then,’ a caressing hand smoothed through her silky, tumbled hair, ‘you have an individual way of doing most things. We’ll get married in Italy. And now that we’ve decided to do it, we don’t want to waste time, do we?’
She rested her head against his chest as he lounged back into a more comfortable position to accommodate her. He was being so gentle and once she had honestly believed that he didn’t know how to be. Had her fall given him that much of a shock? Certainly something had provoked an astonishing alteration in Luc’s attitude to her…or had she really never understood Luc at all? Did it matter if she couldn’t understand him? She decided it didn’t.
Luc was planning the wedding. The royal ‘we’ did not mislead her. She could have listened to him talk all night, but the kind of exhaustion that was a dead weight on her senses was slowly but surely dragging her towards sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE sapphire-blue suit was unfamiliar but it had ‘bought to please Luc’ stamped in its designer-chic lines. The shoes? Catherine grimaced at the low heels which added little to her diminutive height. She must have been in a tearing hurry when she chose them. They weren’t her style at all, but they were a perfect match for the suit. Since co-ordinating her wardrobe had never been one of her talents, she was surprised by the discovery. Luc must have ransacked her luggage to pull off such a feat.
He had been gone when she’d woken, securely back within her bed. Her clothes had arrived after breakfast. Although the effort involved had left her weak, she had been eager to get dressed. A nurse had lightly scolded her for not asking for assistance, adding that Mr Ladwin, the resident consultant, would be in to see her shortly. Catherine couldn’t help hoping that Luc arrived first. The prospect of a barrage of probing questions which she wouldn’t be able to answer unnerved her.
So, a few weeks had sort of got lost, she told herself bracingly. A few weeks didn’t qualify as a real loss of memory, did it? Subduing the panicky sensation threatening, she sat down in the armchair. Of course it would come back and, as Luc had pointed out, it wasn’t as though she had forgotten anything important.
Even so, the silliest little things kept on stirring her up. When had she had her hair cut to just below her shoulders? And it was a mess, a real mess! Heaven knew when she had last had a trim. Then there were her hands. She might have been scrubbing floors with them! And there was this funny little dent on her wedding finger, almost as if she had been wearing a ring, and she never put a ring on that finger…
She didn’t even recognise the contents of her handbag. She had hoped that something within its capacious depths might jog her memory. She had hoped in vain. Even the purse had been unfamiliar, containing plenty of cash in both dollars and sterling but no credit cards and no photos of Luc. Even the cosmetics she presumably used every day hadn’t struck a chord. And where was her passport?
Luc’s proposal last night already had a dream-like quality. Luc hadn’t been quite Luc as she remembered him. That was the most bewildering aspect of all.
When she had broken an ankle in Switzerland last year, Luc had been furious. He said she was the only person he knew who could contrive to break a limb in the Alps without ever going near a pair of skis. He had stood over her in the casualty unit, uttering biting recriminations about the precarious height of the heels she favoured. The doctor had thought he was a monster of cruelty, but Catherine had known better.
Her pain had disturbed him and he had reacted with native aggression to that disturbance in his usually well-disciplined emotions. Telling her that he’d break her neck if he ever saw her in four-inch stilettos again had been the uncensored equivalent of a major dose of sympathetic concern.
But last night, Luc hadn’t been angry…Luc had asked her to marry him. And how could that seem real to her? Her wretched memory had apparently chosen to block out a staggeringly distinct change in her relationship with Luc. Her very presence in London with him when he always jetted about the world alone fully illustrated that change in attitude. But what exactly had brought about that change?
She could not avoid a pained recall of the women Luc had appeared with in newsprint in recent months. Beautiful, pedigreed ladies, who took their place in high society without the slightest doubt of their right to be there. Socialites and heiresses and the daughters of the rich and influential. Those were the sort of women Luc was seen in public with—at charity benefits, movie premi;ageres, Presidential dinners.
‘I don’t sleep with them,’ Luc had dismissed her accusations, but still it had hurt. She had looked into the mirror that day and seen her own inadequacy reflected, and she had never felt the same about herself since. It was agonising to be judged and found wanting without ever being aware that there had been a trial.
The door opened abruptly. Luc entered with the consultant in tow. Sunk within the capacious armchair, tears shimmering on her feathery lashes, she looked tiny and forlorn and defenceless in spite of her expensive trappings.
Luc crossed the room in one stride and hunkered down lithely at her feet, one brown hand pushing up her chin. ‘Why are you crying?’ he demanded. ‘Has someone upset you?’
If someone had, they would have been in for a rough passage. Luc was all Italian male in that instant. Protective, possessive, ready to do immediate battle on her behalf. Beneath the cool fa;alade of sophistication, Luc was an aggressively masculine male with very unliberated views on sexual equality. His golden eyes were licking flames on her in over-bright scrutiny. ‘If someone has, I want to know about it.’
‘I seriously doubt that any of our staff would be guilty of such behaviour.’ Mr Ladwin bristled at the very suggestion.
Luc dropped a pristine handkerchief on her lap and vaulted upright. ‘Catherine’s very sensitive,’ he said flatly.
Catherine was also getting very embarrassed. Hastily wiping at her damp cheeks, she said, ‘The staff have been wonderful, Luc. I’m just a little weepy, that’s all.’
‘As I have been trying to explain to you for the past half-hour, Mr Santini,’ the consultant murmured, ‘amnesia is a distressing condition.’
‘And, as you also explained, it lies outside your field.’
Catherine studied the two men uneasily. The undertones were decidedly antagonistic. Ice had dripped from every syllable of Luc’s response.
Mr Ladwin looked at her. ‘You must feel very confused, Miss Parrish. Wouldn’t you prefer to remain here for the present and see a colleague of mine?’
The threat of anything coming between her and the wedding Luc had described so vividly filled Catherine with rampant dismay. ‘I want to leave with Luc,’ she stressed tautly.
‘Are you satisfied?’ Luc enquired of the other man.
‘It would seem that I have to be.’ Scanning the glow that lit Catherine’s face when she looked at Luc Santini, the older man found himself wondering with faint envy what it felt like to be loved like that.
Mr Ladwin shook hands and departed. Luc smiled at her. ‘The car’s outside.’
‘I can’t find my passport,’ she confided abruptly, steeling herself for the disappearance of that smile. Luc got exasperated when she mislaid things.
‘Relax,’ he urged. ‘I have it.’
She sighed relief. ‘I thought I’d lost it…along with my credit cards and some photos I had.’
‘You left them behind in New York.’
She smiled at the simplicity of the explanation. Her usual disorganisation appeared to be at fault.
‘Why were yo
u crying?’
She laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, but she did. ‘Has someone upset you?’ he had demanded with a magnificent disregard for the obvious. Nobody could hurt her more than Luc and, conversely, nobody could make her happier. Loving Luc put her completely in his power and, for the first time in a very long time, she no longer felt she had to be afraid of that knowledge.
A brown forefinger skimmed the vulnerable softness of her lower lip. ‘When I’m here, you don’t have to worry about anything,’ he censured.
Since meeting Luc, worry had become an integral part of her daily existence. The sharp streak of insecurity ingrained in her by her rootless childhood had been roused from dormancy. But it wasn’t going to be like that any more, she reminded herself. As Luc’s wife, she would hold a very different position in his scheme of what was important. Depressingly, however, when she struggled to picture herself in that starring role, it still felt like fantasy.
‘Why do you want to marry me?’ Her hands clenched fiercely together as she forced out that bald enquiry in the lift.
‘I refuse to imagine my life without you.’ He straightened the twisted collar of her silk blouse and tucked the label out of sight with deft fingers. ‘Do you think we could save this very private conversation for a less public moment?’ he asked lazily.
Catherine made belated eye-contact with the smiling elderly couple sharing the lift with them and reddened to her hairline. She had been too bound up in her own emotions to notice that they had company. Catherine Santini. Secretly she tasted the name, savoured it, and the upswell of joy she experienced was intense.
‘Life doesn’t begin with “once upon a time”, cara, and end “and they all lived happily ever after”, Luc had once derided. But, regardless, Luc had just presented her with her dream, gift-wrapped and tagged. Evidently if you hoped hard enough and prayed hard enough, it could happen.
As she crossed to the limousine, the heat of the sun took her by surprise. Her eyes scanned the climbing roses in bloom at the wall bounding the clinic’s grounds and her stomach lurched violently. ‘It’s summer,’ she whispered. ‘You had the flu in September.’
With inexorable cool, Luc pressed her into the waiting car. Her surroundings were then both familiar and reassuring, but still she trembled. Luc hadn’t said a word. Of course, he had known. He had known that she had lost more than a few weeks, had seen no good reason to increase her alarm. Everything now made better sense. No wonder Mr Ladwin had been reluctant to see her leave so quickly. No wonder she didn’t recognise her clothes or her hairstyle or the change in Luc. She had lost almost a year of her life.
‘Luc, what’s happening to me?’ she said brokenly. ‘What’s going on inside my head?’
‘Don’t try to force it.’ His complete calm was wondrously soothing. ‘Ladwin advised me not to fill in the blanks for you. He said you should have rest and peace and everything you wanted within reason. Your memory will probably come back naturally, either all at once or in stages.’
‘And what if it doesn’t?’
‘We’ll survive. You didn’t forget me.’ Satisfaction blazed momentarily in his stunning eyes before he veiled them.
The woman who could forget Luc Santini hadn’t been born yet. You could love him passionately, hate him passionately, but you couldn’t possibly forget him. Hate him? Her brow creased at that peculiar thought and she wondered where it had come from.
‘Are you thinking of putting off the wedding?’ she asked stiffly. It was the obvious thing to do, the sensible thing to do. And what she most feared was the obvious and the sensible.
‘Is that what you want?’
Vehemently she shook her head, refusing to meet his too perceptive gaze. How could she still be so afraid of losing him? He had asked her to marry him. What more could he do? What more could she want?
He didn’t love her, he still didn’t love her. If she was winning through, it was by default and staying power. She wasn’t demanding or difficult, spoilt or imperious. She was loyal and trustworthy and crazy about children. She had had no other lovers. Luc would have a problem coming to terms with a woman who had a past to match his own. And in the bedroom…her skin heated at the acknowledgement that she never said no to him, could hardly contain her pleasure when he touched her. Most importantly of all, perhaps, she loved him, and he was content to be loved as long as she never asked for more than he was prepared to give. All in all, he wasn’t so much marrying her as promoting her and, though her pride warred against that reality, it was better than severance pay.
‘The wedding will take place within a few days,’ Luc drawled casually and, picking up the phone, he began the first of several calls. Finding himself the focus of her attention, a smile of almost startling brilliance slashed his hard mouth and he extended a hand, drawing her under the shelter of his arm. ‘You look happy,’ he said approvingly.
Only a woman who was fathoms deep in love could lose a year of her life and still be happy. Kicking off her shoes, she rested blissfully back into the lean heat of him, thinking she had to be the luckiest woman alive. Maybe if she worked incredibly hard at being a perfect wife, he might fall in love with her.
‘We’re in a traffic jam,’ she whispered teasingly, tugging at the end of his tie, feeling infinitely more daring than she had ever felt before. The awareness that they would soon be married was dissolving her usual inhibitions.
Luc tensed into sudden rigidity and stumbled over what he was saying. Leaning over him, bracing one hand on a taut thigh, Catherine reached up and loosened his tie, trailing it off in what she hoped was a slow, seductive fashion.
‘Catherine…what are you doing?’
Luc was being abnormally obtuse. Colliding with golden eyes that had a stunned stillness, she went pink and, lowering her head, embarked on the buttons of his shirt. Hiding a mischievous smile, she understood his incredulity. Undressing Luc was a first. Initiating lovemaking was also a first. She ran caressing fingertips over warm golden skin roughened by black curling hair. His audible intake of oxygen matched to the raw tension in his muscles encouraged her to continue.
There was so much pleasure in simply touching him. It was extraordinary, she thought abstractly, but, although sanity told her it couldn’t be possible, she felt starved of him. As she pressed her lips lovingly to his vibrant flesh and kissed a haphazard trail of increasing self-indulgence from his strong brown throat to his flat muscular stomach, he jerked and dropped the phone.
‘Catherine…’ he muttered, sounding satisfyingly ragged.
Her small hand strayed over his thigh. As she touched him he groaned deep in his throat and a sense of wondering power washed over her. He was trembling, his dark head thrown back, a fevered flush accentuating his hard bone-structure. All this time and it was this easy, she reflected, marvelling at the sheer strength of his response to her.
‘Catherine, you shouldn’t be doing this.’ He was breathing fast and audibly, the words thick and indistinct.
‘I’m enjoying myself,’ she confided, slightly dazed by what she was doing, but telling the truth.
‘Per amor di Dio, where’s my conscience?’ he gasped as she ran the tip of her tongue along his waistband.
‘What conscience?’ she whispered, lost in a voluptuous world all of her own as she inched down his straining zip.
‘Cristo, this is purgatory!’ Taking her by surprise, Luc jackknifed out of reach at accelerated speed. ‘We can’t do this. We’re nearly at the airport!’ he muttered unsteadily.
‘We’re in a traffic jam.’ In an agony of mortification more intense than any she had ever known, she stared at him, her hauntingly beautiful eyes dark with pain.
With a succinct swear-word, he dragged her close, taking her mouth with a wild, ravishing hunger that drove the breath from her lungs and left her aching for more. Every nerve-ending in her body went crazy in that powerful embrace. Plastered to every aroused line of his taut length, the scent of him and the taste of him and the feel of
him went to her head with the potency of a mind-blowing narcotic.
Dragging his mouth from hers, he buried his face in her tumbled hair. The sharp shock of separation hurt. His heart was crashing against her crushed breasts. She could literally feel him fighting to get himself back under control. A long, shuddering breath ran through him. ‘You’re not strong enough for this, Catherine. You’re supposed to be resting,’ he reminded her almost roughly. ‘So, have a little pity, hmm? Don’t torture me.’
‘I’m not ill. I feel great.’ She ignored the throbbing at the base of her skull.
With a hard glance of disagreement, he set her back on the seat. ‘You’re quite capable of saying that because you think that’s what I want to hear. How could you feel great? You must feel lousy, and, the next time I ask, lousy is what I want to hear! Is that clear?’
‘As crystal.’ Bowing her head, she fought to suppress the silent explosion of amusement that had crept up on her unawares. Why was she laughing? Why the heck was she laughing? Her body was shrieking at the deprivation he had sentenced them both to suffer. It wasn’t funny, it really wasn’t funny, but if she went to her dying day she would cherish the look of disbelief on his dark features when she, and not he, took the initiative for a change.
She had shocked Luc, actually shocked him. Who would ever have dreamt that she could possess that capability? It made her feel wicked…it made her feel sexy…and his reaction had made her feel like the most wildly seductive woman in the world. And wasn’t it sweet, incredibly sweet of her supremely self-centred Luc to embrace celibacy for her benefit?
Once, she was convinced, Luc would have taken her invitation at face value, satisfying his own natural inclinations without further thought. That he had thought meant a great deal to her. That brand of unselfish caring was halfway to love, wasn’t it? In a state of bliss, Catherine listened to him reeling off terse instructions to some unfortunate, no doubt quailing at the other end of the phone line. She wanted to smile. She knew why Luc was in a bad mood.
