Tempestuous Reunion

‘I don’t think like you,’ she said in defeat.

‘If you thought like me, you’d have been my wife five years ago! Si, I’d have married you.’ Lancing dark eyes absorbed her white face with a kind of grim satisfaction. ‘I probably wouldn’t have done it with the best of grace, but I’d have married you.’

She shrank in retrospect from such a fate. Luc, forced into marriage shotgun-style. It would have been a nightmare. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted you to marry me feeling like that.’

‘Dio! What would your feelings or my feelings have had to do with it with a child on the way?’

‘I couldn’t have lived with you under those circumstances,’ she muttered limply.

His mouth twisted chillingly. ‘The only truly honest woman I ever met—that’s what I told Rafaella about you. It’s a wonder she didn’t laugh in my face! But then, she has one virtue you don’t have. She’s loyal even when I turn on her as I did last week.’

‘Daniel and I will go away.’ Hardly knowing what she was saying, Catherine spoke the thought out loud. ‘You won’t hear from us again.’

CHAPTER NINE

‘YOU’RE not taking him anywhere!’

‘You don’t want him. You didn’t even want him to be yours. That has to be the sickest, cruellest thing you’ve ever said to me.’ Catherine’s voice wobbled alarmingly on the contention.

‘Sick?’ Luc thundered. ‘I’ve lost five years of his life! He’s illegitimate. What will he suffer in later years? Don’t you realise that all this will hit the papers? Did you think you’d be able to shelter behind the fallacy that you were a widow with a child for the rest of your days? It will come out…of course it will, and how will the child feel then? About you? About me? That is why my first wish was that he should not be mine. For his sake, not my own. The papers are already sifting what few facts they have, already hinting that all is not as it appears. Why else was he left in England?’

‘The papers?’ She was ghost-pale, paralysed by the sheer force of the condemnation coming her way.

‘Surely you didn’t believe that you could step from nowhere into the life that I lead and conceal the truth? If it hadn’t been for Rafaella, his face would already have been splashed all over the gutter Press! When she tracked him down to your friend’s home in the Lake District, she got him out before the paparazzi could make a killing.’

‘Got him out? To take him where?’ she pressed feverishly, registering that the threat of Press interest had been roused far more swiftly than she had na;auively expected.

‘She persuaded your friend to bring him south before the Press arrived. They’re waiting for us at the house.’

‘What house?’ she mumbled dazedly.

His strong jawline clenched, a tiny muscle tugging at the hardened line of his mouth. ‘I bought it for you as a wedding present. Five years ago…five long, wasted years ago!’ he vented rawly.

In the state she was in, it took a little while for the significance of that admission to sink in. ‘Five years ago?’

Smouldering dark eyes black as pitch bit into her. ‘I was such a fool. I, who prided myself on my superior judgement! Haven’t you worked it out yet, cara? I was in love with you.’

‘F-five years ago?’ It was a shattered gasp.

‘I didn’t know it myself until you had gone.’ His inflexion, his whole demeanour, was chillingly cold and harsh. ‘The last laugh really was on me. I believed you would return…phone…send a postcard with “x marks the spot” on it…something, anything! I couldn’t believe you would stay away forever. I could not have done that to you.’ That confession appeared to awaken another scorching tide of anger. His teeth gritted as he stared at her. ‘I spent a fortune trying to trace you. In an excess of conscience-stricken self-reproach, I intended to marry you as soon as I found you! So much for the fresh start!’

Slow tears brimmed up in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She swallowed back her sobs in the seething silence that throbbed and tortured and taunted. But Luc was not finished with her.

‘And when I find you, I close my eyes to the evidence of what you are. I make excuses for you. I cling to an illusion that probably never existed anywhere outside my own imagination. Why?’ A savage bitterness stamped his dark taut features. ‘It can only be because you’re the best lay I’ve ever had. That is all I will ever allow it to be now.’

‘Don’t,’ she begged brokenly, sensing his destructive determination to smash the bonds between them…or had she already done that for herself?

‘You did this to me before. I will never let you do it to me again.’ The assurance carried all the lethal conviction of an oath.

‘What did I do?’ she whispered.

‘Five years ago I trusted you more than anyone else in this world, Catherine. And you betrayed that trust,’ he delivered contemptuously. ‘You spent all night in my arms, telling me how much you loved me and then you walked out…’

‘I was saying goodbye the only way I could.’ It was a dulled murmur.

‘Of course, it would not occur to you that one of the reasons I was so angry with you the next morning was that I felt that I had been set up!’

‘How could you feel that?’