‘I feel that I’ve come between you and Annette,’ she whispered guiltily.
He frowned. ‘That’s nonsense. It’s only since I left her that I began to realise just how much I enjoyed being with you.’
‘But if I hadn’t been around, maybe you would have gone back to her,’ she reasoned tautly. ‘You’re a very good friend, but I’m…’
He covered her hand again with his. ‘I’m not trying to rush you, Catherine. We’ve got all the time in the world,’ he assured her evenly, and deftly flipped the subject, clearly registering that further discussion at that moment would be unproductive.
They were in the River Room Restaurant when she heard the voice. Dark-timbred, slightly accented, like honey drifting down her spine. Instantly her head spun on a chord of response rooted too deep even to require consideration. Her eyes widened in shock, her every sinew jerked tight. The blood pounded dizzily in her eardrums. With a trembling hand she set down her wine glass.
Luc.
Oh, God…Luc. It had been him earlier. It was him. His carved profile, golden and vibrant as a gypsy’s, was etched in bold relief against the light flooding through the window behind him. One brown hand was moving to illustrate some point to his two male companions. That terrible compulsion to stare was uncontrollable. The lean, arrogant nose, the hard slant of his high cheekbones and the piercing intensity of deep-set dark eyes, all welded into one staggeringly handsome whole.
His gleaming dark head turned slightly. He looked straight at her. No expression. No reaction. Eyes golden as the burning heart of a flame. Her ability to breathe seized up. A clock had stopped ticking somewhere. She was sentenced to immobility while every primitive sense she possessed screamed for her to get up and run and keep on running until the threat was far behind. For a moment her poise almost deserted her. For a moment she forgot that he was very unlikely to acknowledge her. For a moment she was paralysed by sheer gut-wrenching fear.
Luc broke the connection first. He signalled with a hand to one of his companions, who immediately rose from his seat with the speed of a trained lackey, inclining his head down for his master’s voice.
‘I’ve upset you,’ Drew murmured. ‘I should have kept quiet.’
Her lashes dropped down like a camera shutter. The clink of cutlery and the buzz of voices swam back to her again. One thing hadn’t changed, she acknowledged numbly; when she looked at Luc there was nothing and nobody else in the world capable of stealing her attention. Perspiration was beading her upper lip. Luc was less than fifteen feet away. They said that when you drowned your whole life flashed before you. Oh, for the deep concealment of a pool.
‘Catherine—’
Belatedly she recalled the man she had been lunching with. ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ she mumbled. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get something for it.’
Up she got, on jellied knees, undyingly grateful that she didn’t have to pass Luc’s table. Even so, leaving the restaurant was like walking the plank above a gathering of sharks. An unreasoning part of her was expecting a hand to fall on her shoulder at any second. Feeling physically sick, she escaped into the nearest cloakroom and ran cold water over her wrists.
Drying her hands, she touched the slender gold band on her wedding finger. Harriet’s gift, Harriet’s invention. Everyone but Peggy thought she was a widow. Harriet had coined and told the lie before Catherine had even left hospital. She could not have publicly branded Harriet a liar. Even so, it had gone against the grain to pose as something she wasn’t, although she was ruefully aware that, without Harriet’s respectable cover-story, she would not have been accepted into the community in the same way.
Her stomach was still heaving. Calm down, breathe in. Why give way to panic? With Luc in the vicinity, panic made sense, she reasoned feverishly. Luc was very unpredictable. He threw wild cards without conscience. But she couldn’t stay in here forever, could she?
‘I think there must be a storm in the air,’ she told Drew on her return, her eyes carefully skimming neither left nor right. ‘I often get a headache when the weather’s about to break.’
She talked incessantly through the main course. If Drew was a little overwhelmed by her loquacity, at least he wasn’t noticing that her appetite had vanished. Luc was watching her. She could feel it. She could feel the hypnotic beat of tawny gold on her profile. And she couldn’t stand it. It was like Chinese water-torture. Incessant, remorseless. Anger began to gain ground on her nerves.
Luc was untouched. It was against nature that he should be untouched after the scars he had inflicted on her. There was no justice in a world where Luc continued to flourish like a particularly invasive tropical plant. Hack it down and it leapt up again, twice as big and threatening.
And yet some day…somehow…some woman had to slice beneath that armour-plating of his. It had to happen. He had to learn what it was to feel pain from somebody. That belief was all that had protected Catherine from burning up with bitterness. She would picture Luc driven to his knees, Luc humanised by suffering, and then she would filter back to reality again, unable to sustain the fantasy.
Religiously she stirred her coffee. Clockwise, anti-clockwise, clockwise again, belatedly adding sugar. Her mind was in turmoil, lost somewhere between the past and the present. She was merely one more statistic on the long Santini casualty list. It galled her to acknowledge that demeaning truth.
‘I’ve been cut dead.’ Drew planted the observation flatly into the flow of her inconsequential chatter.
‘Sorry?’ she said, all at sea.
‘Luc Santini. He looked right through me on the way out.’
She was floored by the casual revelation that Drew actually knew Luc. Yet why was she so surprised? Even if he was in a much smaller category, Drew was in the same field as Luc. Huntingdon’s manufactured computer components. ‘Is th-that important?’ she stammered.
‘It’ll teach me not to get too big for my boots,’ Drew replied wryly. ‘I did do some business with him once, but that was years ago. I’m not in the Santini league these days. Possibly he didn’t remember me.’
Luc had a memory like a steel trap. He never forgot a face. She was guiltily conscious that Luc had cut Drew because of her presence and for no other reason. And she wasn’t foolish enough to pretend that she didn’t know who Luc was. The individual who hadn’t heard of Luc Santini was either illiterate or living in a grass hut on a desert island.
Drew sipped at his coffee, clearly satisfied that he had simply been forgotten. ‘He’s a fascinating character. Think of the risks he must have taken to get where he is today.’
‘Think of the body-count he must have left behind him.’
‘That’s a point,’ Drew mused. ‘To my knowledge, he’s only slipped once. Let me see, it was about four…five years ago now. I don’t know wh