‘I should never have stood for it. You played on my guilt!’
Catherine was frowning. ‘Mrs Stokes must have moved your luggage. I remember her asking me how many bedrooms Castelleone had. We talked a lot about bedrooms but I really wasn’t paying much attention—’
‘Is this a private conversation or can anyone join in? I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘She must have realised we had separate bedrooms in Italy and she probably assumed we wanted the same set-up here.’ She smiled at him sunnily. ‘You thought I was responsible?’
A dark flush had risen over his cheekbones. ‘I came in very quietly and you were asleep that night. My clothes had gone.’
‘I thought you’d told her to move them.’ She could hardly credit that a mistake on the housekeeper’s part had led to such a misunderstanding. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
He looked ever so slightly sheepish. ‘I didn’t know what to say. All that day I was in shock at what you said to me on the jet.’ He shifted a beautifully shaped brown hand in a movement of frustration. ‘It only happens with you,’ he breathed tautly.
She watched him move fluidly across the room like a restive cat night-prowling on velvet paws. ‘What only happens with me?’
His jawline clenched. ‘I lose my temper and I say things I don’t mean.’ Long fingers balled into a fist and then vanished into the pocket of his well-cut trousers. Discomfiture was written all over him. ‘But that you should distrust me to such an extent…it…it hurt.’
So did saying it. She longed to reach out and put her arms round him, but sensed how unwelcome it would be. He was so proud, so defensive and ill-at-ease with words that came so easily to her. He was fluent in every other mood but this one, where deeper emotions intruded. And he was only talking now because anger had spurred him to the attempt.
‘I was very insecure when I was pregnant,’ she said uncertainly. ‘You were breaking me up, Luc. Emotionally I was in a mess. I just didn’t have the courage to face you with a complication you didn’t want. It never occurred to me that you might choose to insist on marrying me or want to take any responsibility for the child I was expecting…’
The muscles in his strong brown throat worked. ‘You don’t have to justify your decision. I don’t blame you for what you did,’ he said almost indistinctly. ‘I had to lose you before I could appreciate what you meant to me.’
He hadn’t vacated the marital bed. He understood what she had done five years ago. He wasn’t holding it against her as if she had failed him. He was accepting that, whether he liked it or not, it had been inevitable.
‘Actually, if I hadn’t been hit by that car,’ she muttered, ‘I would have phoned you.’
He paled. ‘What car?’
She told him about the accident in the car park and the months she had spent in hospital. He was visibly appalled and shaken, but he didn’t take her into his arms as she had secretly hoped. He wandered over to the window and looked back at her with glittering dark eyes. ‘The first time I saw you, you reminded me of a Christmas-tree angel. Very fragile, not intended for human handling. Y
ou were wearing a hideous dress covered with roses and you were so tiny, it wore you. When I smiled at you you lit up like an electric light and you chattered non-stop for fifteen solid minutes,’ he extended very quietly. ‘You got lost in the middle of sentences. You didn’t hear the phone ringing. You didn’t notice that a woman came in and walked round while I was there. You were so dizzy, you fascinated me. I’d never met anyone like you before. You want to hear that I was ravished at first glance but I wasn’t.’
‘I never thought you were.’ Her cheeks were hot enough to light a fire.
‘That night I didn’t think of you in a sexual way,’ he was scrupulously careful to tell her.
‘Nostalgia’s not your thing,’ she muttered fiercely.
‘But I’d never met anyone with so much natural warmth. Being with you was like standing in the sunshine. When I walked away, I felt as though I’d kicked a puppy…’
Her nails ploughed furrows into her palms.
‘It was surprisingly hard to walk away,’ he confided in an undertone. ‘Over the next two months, you kept drifting into my mind at the oddest times. I slept with another woman and then I would think about you. It was infuriating.’
‘I’m not overcome by it either!’ she snapped.
‘When I was next in London, I didn’t intend to look you up again. In fact, I had a woman with me on that trip. I deliberately went to a different hotel that was nowhere near the gallery.’
‘Am I supposed to want to hear this?’
Tense dark eyes flickered over her and veiled. ‘I never slept with her. She got on my nerves and I sent her back to New York. I was callous about it. I was callous in most of my dealings with women in those days. But I found I couldn’t be callous with you. You had incredible pulling-power, cara. I was back at the gallery the second she left for the airport.’
‘Why?’ Involuntarily, she was finding that this was compulsive listening, a window on to a once blank wall.
‘I didn’t know why then. You were so extravagantly pleased to see me, it was as though you’d been waiting for me. Or as though you knew something I didn’t. And perhaps you did.’ An almost tender smile softened his mouth. ‘It was unsettling. It threw me. I haven’t asked a woman to go for a walk since I was thirteen. I was in a foul mood and you talked me out of it. You were so painfully honest about yourself and so agonisingly young, but somehow…’ he hesitated ‘…you made me feel ten feet tall.’
‘I made you feel so good it took you another two months to show up again!’ she protested.