Luc decided to let the matter drop. As he had discovered to his cost, that soft mouth and innocent face belied a stubborn streak that was a match for his own. Nearly.
‘I won’t be here all of the time, so there’s no need to get in a panic. I’ve employed someone to be here between nine and six, so you’ll have company. She’ll cook, clean and do whatever else around the house that you want her to. It should give you lots of time to stretch your legs in the garden. Also, she can drive you into town whenever you want, although I won’t expect you to go in more than is strictly necessary. In fact, scratch that—if you want to venture into town, I will make myself available to take you there.’
If he was intent on making himself indispensable, then he was going about it the right way, Agatha thought.
‘How will you do that? ‘ she asked carefully. ‘I thought you said you’d be in London.’
‘Some of the time. But it’s perfectly possible to conduct business from here. You haven’t been to the back of the kitchen, but there’s a very passable office space there, and I’ve kitted it out with everything I need to keep going.’
‘You’ll go nuts being cooped up here in the middle of nowhere.’
‘Then maybe you could distract me,’ he dropped into the silence, wondering what she would do with his provocative remark. He hadn’t laid a finger on her for weeks. Just at the moment, making love was out of the question, but he could do so many other erotic things with her body…
Could too many cold showers lead to some kind of health risk in a guy? If so, then he was slap bang in the firing line. After his abortive date over a week ago, he had been reluctantly forced to concede that, at least at the moment, he only desired Agatha. It was infuriating but it was undeniable. And even more infuriating was how much he missed her warm, willing body. However much he put his back out to penetrate her friendly but polite façade, he was still uneasily aware that a lot of that façade was there because she just didn’t have much of a choice. She wasn’t going to bite the hand to which she was temporarily indebted. It was all far from ideal.
Agatha was feverishly wondering what he had meant by it. Was he flirting with her? Trying to ensure that she didn’t forget how meaningful he was to her? Laying all her cards on the table had made her vulnerable, and Luc, knowing as much as he did about women, would know precisely the extent of power he wielded over a vulnerable ex-lover. Maybe he thought that the odd word here and there, the occasional look that lingered a little too long, would keep her ensnared so that even without the bonds of marriage there would still be the bonds of emotions left intact.
No way!
‘If you want distracting, then my suggestion is that you get out into that beautiful garden,’ she said lightly, stepping around any contentious issues and adopting the firm, detached stand she was intent on pursuing. ‘I find that always works for me.’ She folded her arms and yanked her rebellious imagination back from unsteady images of her distracting him in all sorts of ways that were now one-hundred percent forbidden. ‘Especially at this time of year, when it’s such lovely weather to really explore what’s growing out there. And I noticed an adorable wooden bench under a tree. Maybe you could take your computer out there if you happen to be around. You’ll find it very relaxing. And, if it’s distraction that you’re looking for, then the sounds of the birds in the trees can do the job.’
Eyes narrowing, Luc abruptly turned away. ‘Sounds idyllic,’ he drawled, recognising the polite dismissal. ‘Should I keep a watch out for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in case they decide to pop into this slice of paradise? I have some work to catch up on. Is there anything you want to know about the house?’
Agatha shook her head, glumly fascinated at how every changing nuance of his moods had such an ability to alter her own. When he was relaxed, she relaxed, even though she knew she should always be on guard. When he was tense, she tensed. When he was attentive, she blossomed inside like a flower opening up to the first rays of the sun. And when like now he withdrew from her, with that cool, shuttered expression on his face, she just wanted to burst into tears and launch into the sort of open-ended, heart-on-sleeve speech that had sent him heading for the hills the first time.
‘I’ll just have a look around the garden. Then, shall I get something cooked for us to eat later?’
‘No need. The freezer has a hundred and one home-cooked meals. I arranged for my chef in London to handle that. And there’s ample food in the fridge as well.’
‘Do you do that every time you come here?’ Agatha asked, driven to hold him in conversation. ‘Get your chef to prepare food for you? I guess it saves you having to go out and find somewhere to eat. What’s the nearest town like?’
Since Luc had never seen it, he had to think quickly on his feet, coming up with something so stupendously vague that she was left more in the dark after his reply than she had been before it: post office. A few shops—and why would he know what ones, because he had no interest in exploring them. A pub or two. The usual. Weren’t all these small, rural towns and villages much the same? he decided on the spot.
‘So if you don’t go into the town very often, and you really aren’t into gardens, what was the appeal?’
‘This is beginning to sound like the Spanish Inquisition.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean it to. I was just curious. I mean…’ She continued awkwardly as she tried to backpedal rapidly away from giving the impression that she was over-interested—or else, worse, clinging to conversation because when he wasn’t around something inside her went out, like a light switch being dimmed. ‘If we’re going to be cooped up here together off and on, then it would be nice for us to keep the conversation light.’
Several things in that one sentence annoyed the hell out of Luc: ‘cooped up’, ‘off and on’, and ‘light conversation’, to be precise.
‘As you may have noticed,’ Luc said through gritted teeth, ‘It’s peaceful here. It makes a change.’ He had purchased this quaint little house with a plan in sight. Now his subterfuge was beginning to cause him some disquiet. He hadn’t banked on being quizzed over something as innocuous as owning a place in the country. He owned several apartments—one in New York, another in Paris and three in London which he used, occasionally, for visiting clients. What was the big deal?
‘I think it’s really great that you get away from work sometimes,’ Agatha confided. ‘Working too hard is bad for a person.’
‘I think we part company on that one, Agatha.’ Luc remembered just why he had been forced to break off their relationship in the first place. He reminded himself of the folly of a man like him—driven and entirely focused on his work and on the rigorous demands of having to run a multi-billion-pound empire—ever contemplating a relationship with any woman who saw the need to rein him back. Applying his intellect brought him back down to earth: he was here for a reason. She was carrying his baby, and when that baby was born he fully intended to be the sole father figure in its life. No sideline job. No visiting rights. And a ring on her finger so that there would be no temptation for her to imagine that there was a single life out there beckoning.
‘Right. Yes. We do.’ His coolly delivered words had the same effect as a bucket of cold water being thrown over her, and Agatha blushed and turned away. ‘I’ll go explore the garden,’ she said in a stilted voice. Then, before he could remind her that she was a fragile piece of spun glass that needed careful handling because his baby depended on it, she added, irritably, ‘And there’s no need for you to worry. You won’t have to rescue me because I’ve over-exerted myself by having a five-second stroll!’
But it was hardly the peaceful stroll she would have wanted. Everything around her was sumptuous, but her head was a whirlwind of tangled thoughts, and the more she picked away at them, the more tangled they became.
After half an hour, and with the temperature beginning to drop, she returned to the house, only glancing across at the kitchen on her way to the stairs. Once Luc was enscon
ced in front of his computer, wild horses wouldn’t be able to drag him away, and she needed some time to herself.
In the corner of the room, her emptied suitcase had been tucked away under a pretty trestle table which housed an ornate, flowered jug in its matching bowl. Wandering into the adjoining bathroom, she saw the immaculate towels and an array of bath products that would have been worthy of the most expensive hotel in the world. All brand new. But, then again, why shouldn’t they be? Luc hadn’t said how often he visited this place, but she suspected not very, and he wouldn’t want to find himself using products that had been hardened over time from lack of use.
She began running the bath, and it was only when it was run and the air was fragrant with the rose-petal smell from the bubble bath that she noticed the glaring absence of any lock on the door.
And on the bedroom door.
Old house, she thought, dismayed. Fantastically modern in all aspects except for this one.
But her room was far from his. He was currently lost in some intricacy to do with business. And she wasn’t going to be long.
The weight of the anxiety she had tried to bury seeped out of her as she settled her now slightly more ungainly body into the bath, relaxing with a sigh into the foam and closing her eyes.
On the plus side it was undeniably good to be out of London, even taking into account the efforts she had made to relocate herself to somewhere a little less cramped. It was, however, the only plus that sprang to mind. Hot on its heels were a series of towering minuses; starting with the fact that she was now hopelessly dependent on a man who had only weeks previously turned his back on her, and ending with the miserable suspicion that there was more to his grand displays of attentiveness than he was letting on.
She had the trapped feeling of something very small and vulnerable slowly being circled by a much bigger, much cleverer predator.
And how was she going to deal with it? She could be entirely wrong about everything, and Luc might, just might, have turned into Mr Nice Guy, but even in her wildest dreams she found that difficult to get her head around.
Had she dozed off just for a few seconds? Had she been having a dream that involved her clutching a posy of flowers, just like the ones in the rambling garden outside, watching as Luc smiled down at some other woman in front of an altar before slipping a ring on her finger?
The clarity of the dream jerked her awake. Or was it the sound of the door being pushed open?
In the first few confused seconds of disorientation, the figure of Luc by the bathroom door was like the manifestation of her dream. Except this manifestation wasn’t smiling. His mouth was drawn into a tight, grim line and his eyes glittered in the subdued lighting in the bathroom.
Agatha gave a little squeak of horror when the manifestation spoke, and she struggled into a sitting position, dazed, flushed and staring wide-eyed like a rabbit suddenly caught in the headlights of a speeding car.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
Agatha’s mouth fell open and she heard herself stammer something about a stroll and the garden and then a bath. In spreading dismay, she realised that the bath water was now tepid and the bubbles had disappeared, leaving her exposed to Luc’s raking green eyes.
With his blood pressure back to normal now that he had managed to locate her, Luc took in the scene that confronted him. And what a glorious picture it was. A now slightly more rounded Agatha was frantically trying to hide herself, but there was only so much two hands could do, and his eyes feasted on the smooth swell of her belly, the fullness of her breasts. He had dreamt of this and his body reacted as though a thousand volts of electricity had suddenly been shot through it. He almost lost his cool completely and groaned out loud. Instead, he moved swiftly towards her.
‘You’re shivering!’ He dipped his hand into the water and grimaced. ‘It’s stone cold!’
‘I must have nodded off.’ Agatha stared at him helplessly. In the faded jeans in which he had traveled, and an equally faded rugby jumper harking back to his university days, Luc was drop-dead gorgeous. She would have given anything for him not to have had this effect on her but there was no denying the stirring she felt between her thighs and the way her nipples tightened and hardened, standing to immediate, aroused attention.
‘Do you call this taking care of yourself?’ Luc growled. With no escape-route handy, she felt herself scooped out of the water and deposited gently on the ground. And because something appeared to have happened to her legs, making it impossible for them to move, she was a very naked and willing recipient of one of the large, fluffy towels that had been hanging on the heated towel-rail.
‘I’ve been out in that bloody garden for the last thirty minutes hunting you down!’ he delivered with biting reproach, as he once again swept her off her feet, kicking open the bathroom door and heading towards the king-sized bed. ‘I’ve been worried sick! ‘
CHAPTER NINE
‘YOU’VE been worried?’ Agatha couldn’t stop the tingle of delight that gathered in the pit of her stomach at those telling words. In fact, the feeling obscured the very fact that she was still naked, wrapped in the towel and sharing the same space as Luc: three things that should have had her running for cover.
‘You should have informed me the minute you got back inside the house.’
‘You were working. I didn’t want to disturb you. Besides, I didn’t think that I was supposed to clock in and clock out like one of the temps in your office!’ Noticeably, he had dropped the ‘worried sick’ line of chat. Maybe he thought that an admission like that, an admission that might just possibly border on the not-entirely unemotional, would give her inappropriate ideas: ideas that he cared about her, when he patently didn’t.
‘It occurred to me that you might have got lost in the garden. It looks small, but there’s acres of it, and quite a bit of it is woodland. With the sun going down, it would be difficult for you to find your way around.’ That cool explanation was a far cry from the sudden pounding panic he had felt when he had walked round and round, calling her name with ever more urgency, imagining her merrily getting lost in the sprawling countryside like Gretel, but without the trail of breadcrumbs to find her way back home.
Rage, that she should take such little effort to look after herself, when she had been warned often and well about the necessity of doing so, was easier to deal with.
He had been flipping his phone open, ready to call the local police, when he had decided to do a check of the house.
Pushing open the bathroom door had been the last resort, for he had again called her name various times and received no response.
Little wonder when she had fallen asleep in the bath! How long had she been there? ‘Are you beginning to warm up? ‘ he asked gruffly and she nodded and pulled the towel tightly around her.
‘You need to change,’ he said, moving towards her. ‘You’ll catch some kind of chill otherwise.’
Agatha was tempted to tell him not to be foolish, but what leg did she have to stand on when she had slept in a cold bath for heaven only knew how long? Now, instead of getting her act together and putting on her adult hat, she was yawning, feeling sleepy again and not really wanting to do anything except look at him and savour the concern etched into his harsh, beautiful features.
‘This is exactly why you can’t be left on your own,’ he fulminated grimly, searching through her drawers and coming up with underwear, a tee-shirt and a pair of stretchy jogging bottoms. He turned to look at her darkly. ‘What if you’d been on your own and fallen asleep in the bath? ‘
‘I expect I would have woken up eventually, a little wrinkled and a little cold.’
‘The doctor said you’re to take it easy. Freezing half to death in a bath because you’ve nodded off isn’t taking it easy by anyone’s standards.’
Agatha was only half-taking in what he was saying. She was fixated by the way he was moving towards the bed, her clothes in his hands and an expression of intent on his face.
&nb
sp; ‘Wh…what are you doing?’ she squeaked, when the mattress depressed under his weight as he sat next to her on the bed.
In truth, Luc wasn’t entirely sure. He was only now coming down from his extraordinary flight of panic. He looked down at her upturned face and frowned.
He was taking charge, he thought, as the fog cleared. It was what he did. And good thing too, because she certainly seemed to be pretty poor at it. He swept aside the memory of that sickening rush that had overwhelmed him when he had gone outside to look for her. Instead, he focused on the potential hazard she posed to herself and their unborn baby.
He hooked his finger under the towel where she had pulled it tight across her breasts and felt the whoosh of her sharply indrawn breath. But, although she reached to cover his hand with hers, her eyes remained locked with his; what he read there gave the lie to her pitiful show of brushing him off.
‘I…I can dress myself, Luc.’ Agatha heard the breathlessness in her voice with a sense of dismay. The warmth of his finger nestling in her cleavage was scorching hot against her skin. When she shivered compulsively, she prayed that he might mistakenly jump to the conclusion that she was still cold after her silly experience in the bath.
The hot flare in his eyes told her that, whatever conclusion he had jumped to, it certainly wasn’t the wrong one and she felt an answering leap in her pulses that didn’t surprise her. Why should it? Even when she had been giving herself long lectures about staying away from him because he was bad for her health—even when she had told herself that he was only out to manipulate her because it suited him to have her firmly anchored under his thumb—she had still been susceptible to that ferocious charm of his and frighteningly undone by a love she hadn’t been able to sweep under the carpet.
How hard had she fought to hang on to her independence once she had discovered that she was pregnant? She might not have succumbed to his marriage proposal, because not all of her pride had been squashed into the ground, but the second her health had given cause for concern she had allowed him to step into the breach and take over.
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