The chill she had invoked was intimidating. A shiver ran down her backbone. She felt like a reckless child rebuked for embarrassing the adults. But his contempt for Drew deeply angered her. Yet, at heart, she knew he was right. Drew had never been ambitious or hungry enough to become successful. He had allowed his family to live at a level beyond their means, draining the firm of capital that should have been reinvested for the future. However, those facts didn’t lower Drew in her estimation. He was not a born wheeler-dealer and he never would be. When she thought of the dreadful week of worry Drew had had to endure waiting for that contract, she tasted the full threat of Luc’s savagery. No…no, she reflected tautly, she would never have cause to regret concealing Daniel’s existence from Luc.
‘You’ve hurt Drew,’ she whispered, thinking that, once she was gone, Drew would be safe from all interference. She saw no reason to disabuse Luc of his conviction that she had had a relationship with Drew. It infuriated her that Luc should believe he had the right to stare at her with such chilling censure. ‘And you don’t own me.’
Confusingly, his wide mouth curled into a sudden, almost tender smile. ‘I don’t need to own you. You are mine, body and soul. So, you strayed a little, got lost, but you didn’t stray as far as I’d feared, and now you are back where you belong.’
Seething temper gripped her. ‘I don’t belong with you!’
‘Why do you fight me?’ he demanded softly. ‘Why do you fight yourself?’
As she collided unwarily with ebony-fringed dark eyes, a squirming helpless sensation kicked at her stomach. It was hard to withstand that burning, blatant self-assurance of his. ‘I’m not fighting myself.’
‘Come here,’ he invited very quietly. ‘And prove it.’
The magnetic force of his will was concentrated on her. Her body shivered, though she was not cold, her heart raced, though she was not exerting herself, in reaction to the sheer physical pull he could exert. It crossed her mind crazily that he ought to be banned like a dangerous substance.
He strolled closer and refilled her glass in the throbbing silence. ‘You’re afraid to,’ he noted. ‘Indeed, you behave as though you are afraid of me. I don’t like that. I don’t want a little white ghost with fear in her eyes in my bed tomorrow night. I want that scatty, loving, happy creature you’ve been all week.’
He was so close now she couldn’t breathe. ‘I don’t love you.’
‘If I weren’t so certain that you loved me, I wouldn’t be marrying you.’
She backed off hastily from his proximity. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it would have mattered a damn to you either way!’
‘If you take refuge in the bathroom again, I’ll break the door down,’ he delivered conversationally. ‘You started this and I’ll finish it. I want to know why you’re putting up barriers again.’
‘Why?’ she echoed breathlessly. ‘Why? After what you’ve done?’
A brown hand inscribed a graceful arc. ‘What have I done? I spend all these years looking for you and, the moment I find you again, I ask you to marry me. Isn’t that a compliment?’
‘A c-compliment?’
‘It is certainly not an insult, bella mia.’
‘But I don’t want to marry you!’
‘I’m becoming fascinated by what must go on in your subconscious mind,’ he confessed huskily.
God, he was incredibly attractive. He could talk his way round a lynch mob, she conceded in panic. What she was experiencing right now came down to hormones. That was all. Luc was turning up the heat, stalking her like the pure-bred predator he was. If she lost her head for a second, she would be flat on her back on that bed. Somehow he contrived to say the most outrageous things charmingly. Or maybe it was just that her brain had packed up in disgust at her own frailty.
‘You can’t persuade me differently with sex either!’ she asserted, her spine meeting unexpectedly with a wall that concluded her retreat.
Dancing golden eyes, alight with mockery, arrowed over her. He took her glass from her hand and set it aside. ‘We don’t have sex, we have intensely erotic experiences,’ he countered, his wine-dark voice savouring the syllables.
‘Sex!’ She hurled the reiteration like a forcefield behind which she might hide. ‘And I’m not some tramp…Are you listening to me?’
‘I might listen if you say something I want to hear, but you’ve been rather remiss in that department this afternoon.’ Instead of moving closer, he stayed where he was, confusing her. ‘And I’m not about to make it easy for you by persuading you into bed.’
She straightened from the wall jerkily, no longer under threat, pink flying into her cheeks. ‘You couldn’t persuade me.’
‘I wouldn’t try. I’m saving you up for an intensely erotic experience tomorrow night,’ he murmured softly, before closing the door behind him.
She darted after him and turned the key. Then she slumped. Heavens, he was so modest, such a shrinking violet. Wiping her damp forehead, she lay down on the bed, acknowledging, now that he was gone, just how much the past hours of stormy emotion had taken out of her. She had time for a nap before dinner.
She was terribly hot and sticky and thirsty when she woke up. Filling a glass to the brim with flat champagne, she drank it down much as she would have treated lemonade. Had someone been banging on the door a while ago, or was that her imagination?
Nobody’s victim, eh? Her earlier fighting thoughts came back to haunt her. Luc had walked the last round. He had switched back to the intimate playful mood of the last few days and she hadn’t expected that; she hadn’t been prepared. He was in for a heck of a shock when she took her leave at the airport. He hadn’t given serious consideration to a single thing she said. Her temper sparked again.
It maddened her to have to admit it, but hating Luc did not make her immune to his physical attraction. It was a hangover from the bad old days—what else could it be? Once she had believed he was a bit like the measles. If you caught him once, you couldn’t catch him again.