by Lynne Graham
Her vague idea of explaining what had really happened died there. Somehow she felt it would be disloyal to Luc. Drew had no need of that information. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, half under her breath, and then, looking up, asked, ‘Did you get your contract?’
Unexpectedly, he smiled widely. ‘Not the one I went out for. Quite coincidentally, an even more promising prospect came up. It’s secured the firm’s future for a long time to come. What’s that saying? Lucky at cards, unlucky in love?’
Her eyes clouded over, but she was shaken to realise that Drew was quite unaware that his firm had been under threat and had ultimately profited from the change in contracts. He had undergone no anxiety, and the news that he had achieved that second contract through Luc’s influence would not be welcome.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘I’ve agreed to go to counselling with Annette, but I don’t know if it will change anything.’
A smile chased the tension from her soft mouth. ‘I’m glad,’ she said sincerely.
‘I still think you’re pure gold, Catherine.’ His mouth twisted. ‘I just hope that he appreciates how lucky he is.’
Not so’s you’d notice, she repined helplessly as she climbed back into the limousine. A male, punch-drunk on his good fortune, did not willingly vacate the marital bed and avoid all physical contact. Quite obviously, Luc couldn’t bring himself to touch her. The white-hot heat of his hunger had died along with the illusion. But it hadn’t died for her. Her love had never been an illusion. She had never been blind to Luc’s flaws or her own. She still ached with wanting him. And soon she would despise herself again for that weakness.
It was wrong to let Luc do this to her. It was undignified, degrading…cowardly. Their marriage had been a mistake. Continuing it purely for the sake of appearances demanded too high a cost of her self-respect. Nor could she sacrifice herself for Daniel’s sake. Daniel was like Luc. Daniel would survive. It was her own survival that was at risk. She couldn’t afford to sit back and let events overtake her as she had done so often in the past. A clean break was the only answer and it was for her to take the initiative.
Dazed by the acknowledgement, she wandered round Harrods in the afternoon. The heavens were falling on her. The ground was suddenly rocking beneath her feet. It was over…over. She had felt this way once before and she had never wanted to feel like this again.
The chauffeur was replacing the phone when she returned to the car. ‘Mr Santini’s back from Paris, madam. I said we’d be back within two hours, allowing for the traffic.’
Dear heaven, for someone who didn’t give two hoots about her, Luc certainly kept tabs on her! She was suddenly very reluctant to go home. It would be better, she reasoned, if Daniel was in bed when she returned.
‘We’ll be later,’ she said. ‘I want to stop somewhere for a meal.’
She selected a hotel. She spent ages choosing from the chef’s recommendations, chasing each course round the plate and deciding what she would say to Luc, how she would say it and, more importantly, how she would look when she said it. Cool, calm and collected. Not martyred, not distressed, not apologetic. When she told Luc that she wanted an immediate separation, she would do it with dignity.
She was tiptoeing up the stairs, deciding that she would feel fresher and more dignified in the morning, when Luc strode out of the drawing-room. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded, making her jump with fright.
‘Out.’ Carefully not sparing his lean, dark physique a single visually disturbing glance, she murmured, ‘I want a separation, Luc.’
‘Prego?’ It was very faint. She studied him then, unable to resist the temptation. The lights above shed cruel clarity on the sudden pallor defining his hard bone-structure. For some reason, he looked absolutely shattered by her announcement. It also occurred to her that he had lost weight over the last few days.
‘We can talk about it tomorrow.’ Consumed by raging misery, she lost heart in her prepared speeches about incompatability.
‘We talk about it now. You’ve been with Huntingdon!’ The condemnation came slamming back at her with ferocious bite as he mounted the stairs two at time.
He was seething, she registered bemusedly.
‘You go slinking back to him the instant my back’s turned. I won’t let you go,’ he swore fiercely. ‘I’ll kill him if he comes near you!’
‘I can’t think why. After all—’
‘After all nothing,’ he cut in wrathfully. ‘You’re my wife.’
Gingerly, she pressed open her bedroom door. ‘Your room’s next door, I seem to recall,’ she reminded him for want of anything better to say.
‘I was a fool to take that lying down! How dare you put me out of your bed?’ he ground out between clenched white teeth, following her in, slamming the door with a resounding crash.
She blinked. ‘I didn’t—’
‘I should never have stood for it. You played on my guilt!’
Catherine was frowning. ‘Mrs Stokes must have moved your luggage. I remember her asking me how many bedrooms Castelleone had. We talked a lot about bedrooms but I really wasn’t paying much attention—’
‘Is this a private conversation or can anyone join in? I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘She must have realised we had separate bedrooms in Italy and she probably assumed we wanted the same set-up here.’ She smiled at him sunnily. ‘You thought I was responsible?’
A dark flush had risen over his cheekbones. ‘I came in very quietly and you were asleep that night. My clothes had gone.’
‘I thought you’d told her to move them.’ She could hardly credit that a mistake on the housekeeper’s part had led to such a misunderstanding. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
He looked ever so slightly sheepish. ‘I didn’t know what to say. All that day I was in shock at what you said to me on the jet.’ He shifted a beautifully shaped brown hand in a movement of frustration. ‘It only happens with you,’ he breathed tautly.
She watched him move fluidly across the room like a restive cat night-prowling on velvet paws. ‘What only happens with me?’
His jawline clenched. ‘I lose my temper and I say things I don’t mean.’ Long fingers balled into a fist and then vanished into the pocket of his well-cut trousers. Discomfiture was written all over him. ‘But that you should distrust me to such an extent…it…it hurt.’
So did saying it. She longed to reach out and put her arms round him, but sensed how unwelcome it would be. He was so proud, so defensive and ill-at-ease with words that came so easily to her. He was fluent in every other mood but this one, where deeper emotions intruded. And he was only talking now because anger had spurred him to the attempt.
‘I was very insecure when I was pregnant,’ she said uncertainly. ‘You were breaking me up, Luc. Emotionally I was in a mess. I just didn’t have the courage to face you with a complication you didn’t want. It never occurred to me that you might choose to insist on marrying me or want to take any responsibility for the child I was expecting…’
The muscles in his strong brown throat worked. ‘You don’t have to justify your decision. I don’t blame you for what you did,’ he said almost indistinctly. ‘I had to lose you before I could appreciate what you meant to me.’
He hadn’t vacated the marital bed. He understood what she had done five years ago. He wasn’t holding it against her as if she had failed him. He was accepting that, whether he liked it or not, it had been inevitable.
‘Actually, if I hadn’t been hit by that car,’ she muttered, ‘I would have phoned you.’
He paled. ‘What car?’
She told him about the accident in the car park and the months she had spent in hospital. He was visibly appalled and shaken, but he didn’t take her into his arms as she had secretly hoped. He wandered over to the window and looked back at her with glittering dark eyes. ‘The first time I saw you, you reminded me of a Christmas-tree angel. Very fragile, not intended for human handling. Y
ou were wearing a hideous dress covered with roses and you were so tiny, it wore you. When I smiled at you you lit up like an electric light and you chattered non-stop for fifteen solid minutes,’ he extended very quietly. ‘You got lost in the middle of sentences. You didn’t hear the phone ringing. You didn’t notice that a woman came in and walked round while I was there. You were so dizzy, you fascinated me. I’d never met anyone like you before. You want to hear that I was ravished at first glance but I wasn’t.’
‘I never thought you were.’ Her cheeks were hot enough to light a fire.
‘That night I didn’t think of you in a sexual way,’ he was scrupulously careful to tell her.
‘Nostalgia’s not your thing,’ she muttered fiercely.
‘But I’d never met anyone with so much natural warmth. Being with you was like standing in the sunshine. When I walked away, I felt as though I’d kicked a puppy…’
Her nails ploughed furrows into her palms.
‘It was surprisingly hard to walk away,’ he confided in an undertone. ‘Over the next two months, you kept drifting into my mind at the oddest times. I slept with another woman and then I would think about you. It was infuriating.’
‘I’m not overcome by it either!’ she snapped.
‘When I was next in London, I didn’t intend to look you up again. In fact, I had a woman with me on that trip. I deliberately went to a different hotel that was nowhere near the gallery.’
‘Am I supposed to want to hear this?’
Tense dark eyes flickered over her and veiled. ‘I never slept with her. She got on my nerves and I sent her back to New York. I was callous about it. I was callous in most of my dealings with women in those days. But I found I couldn’t be callous with you. You had incredible pulling-power, cara. I was back at the gallery the second she left for the airport.’
‘Why?’ Involuntarily, she was finding that this was compulsive listening, a window on to a once blank wall.
‘I didn’t know why then. You were so extravagantly pleased to see me, it was as though you’d been waiting for me. Or as though you knew something I didn’t. And perhaps you did.’ An almost tender smile softened his mouth. ‘It was unsettling. It threw me. I haven’t asked a woman to go for a walk since I was thirteen. I was in a foul mood and you talked me out of it. You were so painfully honest about yourself and so agonisingly young, but somehow…’ he hesitated ‘…you made me feel ten feet tall.’
‘I made you feel so good it took you another two months to show up again!’ she protested.
He released his breath in a hiss. ‘You were only eighteen. You didn’t belong in my world. I didn’t want to hurt you. I also never wanted to make love to anyone as badly as I wanted you that night. I was twenty-seven, but I felt like a middle-aged lecher!’ he gritted abruptly. ‘I didn’t plan to see you ever again.’
‘Have you any idea how many nights I sat up, waiting for you to call?’
‘I knew it.’ He sounded grimly fatalistic. ‘I could feel you waiting and I couldn’t get you out of my head. I also found that I couldn’t stay away from you. I believed that once I went to bed with you I would be cured.’
‘That’s disgusting!’ she gasped.
‘Per Dio, what do you want? The truth or a fairy-tale?’ he slashed back at her in sudden anger. ‘You think it is easy for me to admit these things? The lies I told to myself? That first night in Switzerland—how is it you describe euphoria? You thought you’d died and gone to heaven? Well, so did I, the first time I made love to you!’
The shocked line of her mouth had softened into a faint smile.
‘But naturally I assured myself that I only felt that way because it was the best sex I’d ever had.’
Her smile evaporated like Scotch mist.
‘I was in love with you but I didn’t want to accept that fact,’ he admitted harshly. ‘I hated being away from you but I didn’t want to take you abroad with me. The papers would have got hold of you then.’
‘Would that have mattered?’
‘Seven years ago, cara, you couldn’t have handled a more public place in my life.’ He shrugged in a jerky motion. ‘And I didn’t want to share you with anyone. I didn’t want other women bitching at you. I didn’t want gossip columnists cheapening what we had.’
She lowered her head. ‘And perhaps you didn’t want anyone realising that I had a literacy problem.’
‘Yes. That both embarrassed and angered me.’ He had to force out the admission. ‘But I wouldn’t have felt like that had I known you were dyslexic. I could have been open about that. In spite of that, wherever you were was home for me. If something worried me, I forgot about it when I was with you. I didn’t realise until you had gone just how much I relied on you.’
She was trying very hard not to cry. He pulled her rigid figure into his arms very slowly, very gently. ‘I have few excuses for what I did five years ago. But, if it is any consolation to you, I paid; Dio…’ he said feelingly, ‘I paid for not valuing you as I should have done. If only I’d intercepted you before you left the apartment that morning! I must have missed you by no more than an hour.’
She bowed her head against his broad chest, drowning in the warm masculine scent of him, feeling weak, shivery and on the brink of melting. ‘I hated leaving you.’
‘For a while, bella mia, I too hated you for leaving.’ The hand smoothing through her hair was achingly gentle. ‘It was the one and only time I lost interest in making money. I hit the bottle pretty hard…’
She was shocked. ‘You?’
‘Me. I felt unbelievably sorry for myself. I let everything slide.’
Her brow indented. ‘Drew told me that you almost lost the shirt off your back a few years ago. Was that true?’
‘It was.’
‘Over me?’ she whispered incredulously.
‘I needed you,’ he said gruffly. ‘I missed you. I felt very alone.’
Tears swimming in her eyes, she wrapped her arms tightly round him, too upset by the image he invoked to speak.
‘I picked myself up again because I believed you would come back,’ he shared. ‘When I saw you in the Savoy two weeks ago there was nothing I would not have done to get you back.’
‘No?’ She positively glowed at the news.
‘It was not, however, how I pictured our reconciliation. You shouldn’t have been with another man. You should have looked pleased to see me, instead of horror-stricken. I’m afraid I went off the rails that day,’ he breathed tautly.
‘Did you?’ She smiled up at him, unconcerned.
He frowned down at her. ‘I threatened you. I took advantage of your amnesia to practically kidnap you. You could have been madly in love with Huntingdon and I was determined that you would get over it. When you came round in the clinic and smiled at me, I was lost to all conscience. When I realised you’d lost your memory, all I could think about was getting you out of the country.’
‘You were always quick to recognise a good opportunity,’ she sighed approvingly.
Long fingers cupped her cheekbones. ‘Catherine, what I did was wrong. This week, after I learnt about Daniel and cooled down, which I did very quickly, I felt very ashamed of what I had done. It was completely unscrupulous of me.’
‘If you say so.’ She wound her arms round his neck, stretching up on tiptoe. ‘Personally I think it was thrilling. I waited twenty-four and a half years to be spirited off to an Italian castle, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’
‘Be serious.’ He was alarmingly set on contrition. In fact, the more forgiving she became, the more grim he looked. ‘Be honest with me. Can you forgive me for what I have said and done?’
‘I forgive you freely, absolutely and forever. Do you want to know why?’ she whispered teasingly. ‘You’re crazy about me…aren’t you?’ She drew back to stare up at him, suffering a sudden lurch in overwhelming confidence.
Brilliant golden eyes shimmered almost fiercely over her anxious face. ‘Only a lunatic would
behave the way I did if I wasn’t,’ he grated. ‘Of course I love you!’
‘I don’t want a separation…I don’t even want a separate bedroom,’ she swore.
‘Relax—you weren’t getting either. What I have, I hold.’ He lifted her with wonderful ease off her feet. ‘But I should never have made love to you before you regained your memory. Unfortunately that night I found you in my bed,’ his voice thickened betrayingly, ‘I could not resist you.’
‘I can’t resist you, either.’ She sank small determined hands into his black hair and drew his mouth down to hers. He lowered her to the bed without breaking the connection. It was some minutes before she remembered to breathe again.
‘It’s been torture to stay away from you,’ he admitted roughly. ‘But I believed that was what you wanted. I went to all that trouble arranging to go to Paris, thinking that you would be tempted to come, and you said no.’
‘Serves you right for being so casual about it.’
He shuddered beneath the caressing sweep of her hands. ‘Don’t do that,’ he groaned, pinning her provocative hands to the mattress. ‘When you do that, I react like a teenager.’
‘Why do you think I do it?’ she murmured wickedly.
‘Dio, I want you so much,’ he said raggedly, removing her dress with more speed than expertise. Abruptly he stopped dead, staring down at her. ‘It isn’t safe, is it? I could make you pregnant.’
‘The best things in life are dangerous. It’s your choice,’ she whispered.
‘You wouldn’t mind?’ He looked dazed. ‘By the pool that day, you weren’t very enthusiastic about the idea. That’s why I worried that it was too late.’
She ran a loving fingertip across his sensual mouth. ‘I’m afraid all those intensely erotic experiences in Italy were unproductive.’
He nipped at her fingertip with his teeth, a brilliant smile curving his lips. ‘Give me a month’s trial.’
‘You’re so modest.’ She blushed under raking golden eyes, heat striking her to the very centre of her body, making her tremble deliciously. He started to kiss her slowly and deeply and hungrily until conversation was the last thing on either of their minds.
