Tempestuous Reunion

‘How could I fail to feel that? And then I didn’t want to marry you, I didn’t want to mar

ry anyone. My parents did not give me a very entrancing view of the married state. They hated the sight of each other!’

She looked up in shock at that grated revelation. ‘You never told me that!’

‘You have so many illusions about happy family life, I could never bring myself to tell you the truth.’ His dark gaze was unrelentingly grim. ‘My parents married because they had to marry. My mother was pregnant. They didn’t love each other. They didn’t even like each other. They lived together all those years in absolute misery. And the only thing they ever wanted from me was money. As long as the money came, they hadn’t the slightest interest in what I was doing. But it took me a long while to face that reality. When that plane went down, the only things I lost were a sister and two parents who never wanted to be parents in the first place.’

Shutting her eyes tightly, she lowered her head. ‘I always thought your family loved you.’

‘They loved what I could give them,’ he contradicted fiercely. ‘And you’re not so very different, are you? Ten days ago, you were sitting in Huntingdon’s apartment ready to marry him. Miraculously, you converted to me!’

‘He asked me to marry him that day you saw us. There was never anything between us before that. At least not on my side. I should have been honest about that sooner,’ she conceded uncertainly.

‘Honest?’ he gritted. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word. I look forward to you telling my son in another few years that the reason for my late appearance in his life lies with your fear of my intentions towards him before he was even born!’

She flinched at the image he projected.

‘What have you told him about me?’

She might as well have been hanging from a cliff by her fingernails. One by one, he was breaking them, loosening their hold, bringing the jagged rocks of retribution closer and closer. She chose to jump. ‘Nothing,’ she admitted shakily.

‘Nothing?’ he exclaimed. ‘You must have told him something about his father!’

She broke into a faltering explanation of Harriet’s cover-story. She could not have said that he absorbed the details. He zoomed in on only one, cutting her short in another surge of shuddering rage when he realised that Daniel thought his father was dead. The last straw had broken the camel’s back. That Luc should not know he had had a son was bad enough. But that Daniel should not know about him was unforgivable.

She was desperately confused by what he had told her in anger, confidences which she sensed that in his present mood would never have been made otherwise. He had said that he loved her five years ago. All else receded before that single stated fact. The love she had longed to awaken had been there. And she had been too blind and too insecure to even suspect its existence for herself.

Why had she listened to Harriet? Why, oh, why? But it wasn’t fair to blame Harriet. Harriet had judged Luc on the evidence of what Catherine herself had told her. Harriet had influenced her only in so far as she had confirmed what Catherine had already believed. And Luc had just brought down the convictions that had sustained her through the years like a pack of cards.

Enormous guilt weighted her now. She had run away when she should have stood her ground, stayed away when she should have returned. A little voice said that what Luc said so impressively now with the benefit of hindsight was no very good guide to how he might have reacted to her pregnancy without having sustained the shock of first losing her. That voice was quashed because the guilt was greater. Luc would have married her. Daniel would have had a father. Daniel would have had many things and many advantages which she had not had the power to give him.

Luc was right on one count. She had not given him a chance. In her own mind, the result had been a foregone conclusion. Then, she had to admit, it had been easier to run away than face a confrontation. In those days, she had been out of her depth with Luc, unable to hold her own. She could not have dreamt then that Luc could be so bitter or indeed that losing her could have brought him so much pain. For it had been pain that powered that bitterness, that fierce conviction that she had betrayed him for the second time. Luc viewed her response to his lovemaking last night in the same light as he had viewed that long-ago last night in New York.

And she understood facets of his temperament which she had not understood before. The heat in the bedroom, the coolness beyond it. Recently he had begun to break out of that pattern. But he must have learnt early in life not to show his emotions. And he must have been hurt. His parents, by all accounts, had not encouraged or sought his affection. The financial generosity, which in the past had made her feel like an object to be bought, was shown now in a different light. Luc had had a long history before her of giving to those closest to him. It had been expected of him. When his family had died, he had simply continued the same habit with her.

There was so much fear trapped inside her. Luc was more than disappointed in her: Luc was embittered and disillusioned. Five years ago, whether she knew it or not, she had thumped the last nail into her coffin. It had never occurred to Luc that she might have been pregnant because it had equally never occurred to him that, if she was, she might go to such lengths to conceal the fact from him.

But what a disaster it would have been had Luc felt forced to marry her, repeating what he surely would have believed to be his parents’ mistake. He had not been ready to make such a commitment of his own free will. It wouldn’t have worked, it couldn’t have worked, but Luc could not see that. No, at this moment Luc saw only Daniel, and he was already demonstrating a voracious appetite for knowledge of his son. He wanted Daniel. Right now, he did not want Daniel’s mother.

Anger was within him still, anger dangerously encased in ice which could shatter again. When Luc came to terms with the awareness that he was a father, how would he feel about her then? He had trusted her. He had blamed himself entirely for her defection in the past. He had wanted to put the clock back, make everything right…she could see that now. And now he had learnt that that wasn’t possible. It was very probable, she registered strickenly, that the driving determination of his to take what he wanted had resulted in a too hasty marriage.

‘I love Daniel very much,’ she murmured tightly.

‘You have a fine way of showing it,’ he censured. ‘You dump him in the back of beyond with some seething feminist—’

‘Don’t you dare call Peggy that!’ Catherine interrupted hotly. ‘She’s a university lecturer and she’s written three books. She’s also a very good friend.’

But possibly Peggy wouldn’t be a friend any more in the midst of this nightmare that had erupted. Kept in the dark about Luc’s identity, railroaded from her family home by Rafaella, and told goodness knew what, Peggy was sure to be furious as well.

Catherine’s wedding present was an Elizabethan country house. It wasn’t enormous, it wasn’t ostentatious and it would have stolen her heart had she been in a less wretched mood…and had Rafaella not been emerging from the front entrance, wreathed in welcoming smiles…

* * *

‘Not bad as a pressie, not bad at all.’ Hands on her slim hips, Peggy scanned the house in the early-evening sunshine, her wryly admiring scrutiny glossing over manicured lawns, a stretch of woodland and the more distant glimmer of a small lake. ‘Strewth, Catherine, it’s incredibly hard not to be impressed by all this.’

Catherine glanced at her watch helplessly again.

Too observant to miss the betraying gesture, Peggy frowned. ‘They’ll show up again sooner or later. Stop worrying. Daniel will come round. It’s my fault,’ she sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have left him alone with Rafaella for a second. The woman’s poisonous.’