The Secretary's Scandalous Secret

by Cathy Williams

  ‘You underestimate people.’

  ‘You don’t know Mum.’

  ‘I know her well enough. She’s not made of glass, and she’s not unaware that accidents happen.’ He turned to her, pathetically relieved that she was now, at least, talking. God, he wanted her to smile. He missed that. He missed her, even when she was right here, sitting next to him, and it was a missing that was physical. He wondered how it was that he could ever have constructed his life around the loss of a woman who, it now turned out, had been little more than an insignificant interference in his life. Miranda had left him with a jaded palate, but her importance had been greatly exaggerated. He couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Had he conclusively blown it with Agatha? He refused to entertain the notion.

  They pulled into the drive to her mother’s house after a very long and tedious journey and Agatha glanced at him, her hand on the door handle.

  ‘Thanks for the ride.’

  ‘You’re not getting rid of me that quickly’

  Agatha wished that he just wouldn’t look at her like that, with that half-smile of his that could melt every bone in her body. Was he doing it on purpose? ‘I guess you want to be a gentleman to the end and bring the bags in for me? ‘ she returned with a tight smile and an edge of bitterness in her voice. But she didn’t want to wait and hear confirmation of that, so instead she rustled in her bag for the door key which she had kept and then changed her mind at the last minute and rang the doorbell instead.

  There was no chance her mother would be out and, sure enough, after only a few minutes she heard the rustling of footsteps, then a tentative face peered through the peephole in the door and registered the caller with a broad smile. Warm, welcoming arms were outstretched to embrace her the second the door was open.

  ‘You didn’t tell me that you were coming down, Aggy. What a treat! Come in, darling. If you’d said, I would have cooked you something special!’ Edith was small and round, with short fair hair as flyaway as her daughter’s and the same bright blue eyes. When she smiled, there were the ghosts of dimples in her cheeks.

  ‘Mum… ‘

  ‘Let me look at you!’

  ‘Mum, I’ve come with, um, Luc—Danielle’s son? He kindly gave me a lift here.’ Propelled into the hallway, Agatha turned desperately to Luc for support, only belatedly realising how natural this instinct had become for her. He reassured her. She had handed him the power to become her backbone. She couldn’t even begin to think how long it would take for her to grope her way back to some sort of independence.

  ‘We’re both here for a reason.’ Luc placed his arm firmly around Agatha’s shoulders and Edith’s eyes rounded with surprise.

  Agatha, feeling the lazy weight of his arm around her, stiffened in shock. She smiled weakly at her mother, whose eyes were darting curiously between the two of them.

  ‘Reason?’ Edith asked, bewildered.

  ‘Ideally, my mother should be here as well, but we’ll be breaking the news to her very shortly.’

  ‘News?’ Edith and Agatha parroted with varying degrees of stunned surprise.

  ‘Darling.’ He leant towards Agatha and she felt his warm breath on her skin. ‘Would you like to tell your mother about our news…?’

  This wasn’t how Agatha had hoped to break it to her mother that she was going to be a grandma but without the ideal scenario of the perfect son-in-law. Cups of tea and a sitting position had been on the agenda but, thrown in the deep end, she managed to splutter, ‘I’m, eh, going to have a baby, Mum…’ She could feel the heat in her burning face and she couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes.

  ‘And that’s not all.’ At last, the words that had eluded him finally came to his rescue and everything settled into its rightful place. Not everything in life could be controlled; he accepted that and wouldn’t have had it any other way. ‘I am the very proud father and we’re going to be married just as soon as the formalities are worked out…’

  There might have been no fainting fit. In fact, the screech from her mother’s lips had contained pure joy.

  But he had put her in an impossible position and now, with her mother on the telephone tripping over her words to tell Danielle the glad tidings, Agatha finally turned to face him, white-faced and furious.

  ‘How could you? ‘ she nearly wept, walking into the sitting room on shaky legs and slumping onto the chair closest to the fireplace.

  Luc took a deep breath and moved towards her, gracefully lowering himself to one bended knee and resting his elbow on the side of her chair,

  ‘Look at me. I’m on my knees for you.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘I can’t. You do this to me. You bring me to my knees.’

  ‘Don’t joke. It’s cruel,’ Agatha whispered, risking a look at him.

  ‘I wouldn’t know how to joke about something like this. I know you think you were lied to over the house, and I’m sorry. And I know you think I took you there so that I could have my wicked way with you, and you’re right—I did. I wanted to weld you to me and I just happened to pick the most stupid way of achieving that goal. I didn’t stop to think about why it hurt so much when you weren’t in my life. I didn’t stop to think how it was that I couldn’t get you out of my mind. I just knew that I didn’t want you to have the freedom you kept harping on about.’

  ‘I didn’t want us to be together for the wrong reasons. And I didn’t harp on about it.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. You said it once and it was enough to bring me out in a cold sweat.’

  ‘But—’ her voice trembled ‘—you don’t love me.’

  ‘My life was under control. How was I to know that falling in love would feel like the equivalent of being hit by a lorry? I always figured that love would be as controllable as every other aspect of my life. Then along you came, and half the time I no longer recognised myself. The first time you went away…’ Luc’s fabulous eyes glittered with emotion. ‘I really made the mistake of thinking that things would revert back to normal. I would return to being the working machine I always had been, find another woman, begin the cycle all over again. How hard could it be? You were right when you said that the only lesson I learned from Miranda was how to become an island. I’ve only now woken up to the fact that being an island isn’t what I want to be. I’ve also realised that I never loved her. I never knew what love was until you came along.’

  Agatha found that she was holding her breath just in case this was all a wonderful dream and that blinking too much or breathing too hard would result in her having to wake up.

  ‘Was it….hard?’ she whispered, eager for the details, and he gave her a wry smile.

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

  ‘No! Yes…Okay…a lot.’ She stroked the side of his face and thought that she might just burst with happiness. ‘I never thought you’d ever love me. When we broke up, I just decided that I had to get over you and get on with my life, and then I found out that I was pregnant…’

  ‘And I asked you to marry me.’

  ‘And I turned you down,’ Agatha murmured ruefully, thinking how much misery and heartbreak could have been saved had she only known how he felt about her, then blissfully thinking about how much joy and happiness lay ahead. ‘I just couldn’t imagine marrying you when you didn’t love me. I thought ahead to a time when you’d begin to resent the ring on my finger and start hating me for having tied you down with a baby you never asked for.’

  ‘I may not have asked for a baby,’ Luc growled with such loving tenderness in his eyes that her heart sang. ‘But when you told me that you were pregnant… Put it this way, I got used to the idea in record time, and just as quickly I knew that I wasn’t going to let you go again. When you turned me down, I was determined not to let it get in the way of having you. I played on the importance of the baby having a father for all it was worth, and believe me when I tell you that you were never going to a single mother in search of a suitable husband. The only husband you were
going to have was me.’

  ‘So you sneaked off and bought me the perfect house.’

  ‘I figured, how could you resist a house like that? Ergo, how would you be able to resist me? It may have looked conniving to you but it was just my clumsy way of trying to show you that I intended to stay in your life. I should have found the words to say so, but I…didn’t know how.’

  ‘You are the most determined guy I’ve ever met in my entire life, and I’m so glad you are,’ Agatha breathed with heartfelt emotion.

  ‘I put my life on hold, pretty much,’ Luc confessed, his expressive face darkening. ‘And weirdly I enjoyed it. I was out of step with the rest of the world, but I found that, as long as I had you in my sights, I couldn’t have given a damn—and then you found the estate agent’s brochure and everything blew up in my face.’

  ‘Let’s not dwell on that,’ Agatha said anxiously. ‘I just love you so much and I just want to hear you tell me that you love me.’

  ‘Isn’t that what I’ve spent the past half an hour doing? Hmm? I love you. Madly. And if we didn’t happen to be under your mother’s roof…’

  There was no need for him to continue the speculation because Agatha knew exactly what he meant and it sent a thrill of anticipation rushing through her like an injection of adrenaline.

  ‘But we’re here,’ he said with a hungry, possessive look in his eyes. ‘And, before your mother comes back in, tell me that you’ll marry me and I haven’t shot my mouth off for nothing.’

  ‘What do you think, my dearest love? ‘

  Luc did not let the grass grow under his feet. Within three weeks they were married in a quiet but beautiful ceremony surrounded by family and friends. The house which he had cunningly bought as a ploy to win her over became their main residence, with Luc finally admitting defeat and recognising that the only times he really felt truly alive were the times when he was with her. All those domestic values which he had previously abhorred he now embraced, with an alacrity that brought a smile to Agatha’s lips and a resigned but contented shrug from him.

  ‘We’ll see how long that will last when there’s a screaming baby in the house,’ she teased him as she grew bigger with her pregnancy, laughing when he fussed over her, even though after the initial poor beginning she proceeded to thrive.

  But when Daisy Louise was born two days shy of her due date, an apple-faced cherub with her mother’s big blue eyes and her father’s thatch of dark hair, Luc proved himself a force to be reckoned with. He had always given one-hundred percent to every single thing he had ever set out to do, and he poured the same unfailing enthusiasm into fatherhood.

  He had been gifted a miracle, he smugly told Agatha, and their daughter was destined to achieve every superlative he could think of.

  ‘Don’t you want to try for another beautiful miracle? ‘ he murmured lazily, looking at her in a way that could still make her bones melt.

  Agatha, having forsaken her job in London in favour of opening a small landscaping concern with two of the mums she had met in the village, resisted for precisely six months. Second time round, her pregnancy was stress free and trouble free, and between Luc and her mother—who was a devoted grandmother and apt to sing the praises of her son-in-law to all and sundry—she was spoiled rotten.

  But no passage of time could diminish the love they felt for one another.

  She was, to Luc, the very breath of his life. And, well, for Agatha? Who ever said that fairy tales couldn’t come true?

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  First published in Great Britain 2011

  Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited,

  Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR

  © Cathy Williams 2011

  ISBN: 978-1-408-92525-6