Lynne Graham: Tempestuous Reunion

‘You’ll be late,’ she whispered tautly, disconcerted by the glitter of gold now burnishing the night-dark scrutiny skimming her upturned face. When Luc decided to leave, he didn’t usually linger.

The supple fingers resting against her spine pressed her closer, his other hand lifting to wind with cool possessiveness into the curling golden hair tumbling down her back. ‘Bella mia,’ he rhymed in husky Italian, bending his dark head to taste her moistly parted lips with the inherent sensuality and the tormenting expertise which all along had proved her downfall.

Stabbed by her guilty conscience, she dragged herself fearfully free before he could taste the strange, unresponsive chill that was spreading through her. ‘I’m not feeling well,’ she muttered in jerky excuse, terrified that she was giving herself away.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that sooner? You ought to lie down.’ He swept her up easily in his arms, started to kiss her again, and then, with an almost imperceptible darkening of colour, abstained long enough to carry her into the bedroom and settle her down on the tossed bed.

He hovered, betraying a rare discomfiture. Scrutinising her wan cheeks and the pared-down fragility of her bone-structure, he expelled his breath in a sudden sound of derision. ‘If this is another result of one of those asinine diets of yours, I’m likely to lose my temper. When are you going to get it through your head that I like you as you are? Do you want to make yourself ill? I don’t have any patience with this foolishness, Catherine.’

‘No,’ she agreed, beyond seeing any humour in his misapprehension.

‘See your doctor today,’ he instructed. ‘And if you don’t, I’ll know about it. I’ll mention it to Stevens on my way out.’

At the reference to the security guard, supposedly there for her protection but more often than not, she suspected, there to police her every move, she curved her cheek into the pillow. She didn’t like Stevens. His deadpan detachment and extreme formality intimidated her.

‘How are you getting on with him, by the way?’

‘I understood that I wasn’t supposed to get on with your security men. Isn’t that why you transferred Sam Halston?’ she muttered, grateful for the change of subject, no matter how incendiary it might be.

‘He was too busy flirting with you to be effective,’ Luc parried with icy emphasis.

‘That’s not true. He was only being friendly,’ she protested.

‘He wasn’t hired to be friendly. If you’d treated him like an employee he’d still be here,’ Luc underlined with honeyed dismissal. ‘And now I really have to leave. I’ll call you from Milan.’

He made it sound as if he were dispensing a very special favour. In fact, he called her every day no matter where he was in the world. And now he was gone.

When that phone did ring tomorrow, it would ring and ring through empty rooms. For tortured minutes she just lay and stared at the space where he had been. Dark and dynamic, he was hell on wheels for a vulnerable woman. In their entire association she had never had an argument with Luc. By fair means or foul, Luc always got his own way. Her feeble attempts to assert herself had long since sunk without trace against the tide of an infinitely more forceful personality.

He was now reputedly one of the top ten richest men in the world. At twenty-nine that was a wildly impressive achievement. He had started out with nothing but formidable intelligence in the streets of New York’s Little Italy. And he would keep on climbing. Luc was always number one and never more so than in his own self-image. Power was the greatest aphrodisiac known to humanity. What Luc wanted he reached out and took, and to hell with the damage he caused as long as the backlash did not affect his comfort. And, having fought for everything he had ever got, what came easy had no intrinsic value for him.

‘The lone wolf,’ Time magazine had dubbed him in a recent article, endeavouring to penetrate the mystique of a rogue among the more conventional herd of the hugely successful.

A shark was a killing machine, superbly efficient within its own restricted field. And wolves mated for life, not for leisure-time amusement. But Luc was indeed a land-based animal and far from cold-blooded. As such he was all the more dangerous to the unwary, the innocent and the over-confident.

Technical brilliance alone hadn’t built his empire. It was the energy source of one man’s drive combined with a volatile degree of unpredictability which kept competitors at bay in a cut-throat market. She could have told that journalist exactly what Luc Santini was like. And that was hard, cruelly hard with the cynicism, the self-interest and the ruthless ambition that was bred into his very bones. Only a fool got in Luc’s path…only a very foolish woman could have given her heart into his keeping.

Her eyes squeezed shut on a shuddering spasm of anguish. It was over now. She would never see Luc again. No miracle had astounded her at the eleventh hour. Marriage was not, nor would it ever be, a possibility. Her small hand spread protectively over her no longer concave stomach. Luc had begun to lose her one hundred per cent loyalty and devotion from the very hour she suspected that she was carrying his child.

Instinct had warned her that the news would be greeted as a calculated betrayal and, no doubt, the conviction that she had somehow achieved the condition all on her own. Again and again she had put off telling him. In fear of discovery, she had learnt to be afraid of Luc. When he married a bride with a social pedigree, a bride bred to the lofty heights that were already his, he wouldn’t want any skeletons in the cupboard. Ice-cold and sick with apprehensions that she had refused to face head on, she wiped clumsily at her swollen eyes and got up.

He would never know now and that was how it had to be. Thank God, she had persuaded Sam to show her how to work the alarm system. She would leave by the rear entrance. That would take care of Stevens. Would Luc miss her? A choked sob of pain escaped her. He would be outraged that she could leave him and he had not foreseen the event. But he wouldn’t have any trouble replacing her. She was not so special and she wasn’t beautiful. She never had grasped what it was about her which had drawn Luc. Unless it was the cold intuition of a predator scenting good doormat material downwind, she conceded shamefacedly.

How could she be sorry to leave this half-life behind? She had no friends. When discretion was demanded, friends were impossible. Luc had slowly but surely isolated her so that her entire existence revolved round him. Sometimes she was so lonely that she talked out loud to herself. Love was a fearsome emotion, she thought with a convulsive shudder. At eighteen she had been green as grass. Two years on, she didn’t feel she was much brighter but she didn’t build castles in the air any more.

‘ Arrivederci , Luc, grazie tanto ,’ she scrawled in lipstick across the mirror. A theatrical gesture, the ubiquitous note. He could do without the ego boost of five tear-stained pages telling him pointlessly that nobody was ever likely to love him as much as she did.

Luc, she had learnt by destructive degrees, didn’t rate love any too highly. But he had not been above using her love as a weapon against her, twisting her emotions with cruel expertise until they had become the bars of her prison cell.

* * *

‘What are you doing with my books?’

Catherine straightened from the cardboard box and clashed with stormy dark eyes. ‘I’m packing them. Do you want to help?’ she prompted hopefully. ‘We could talk.’

Daniel kicked at a chair leg, his small body stiff and defensive. ‘I don’t want to talk about moving.’