Chapter 33

'But you didn't miss a trick in making use of it!' she condemned. 'And I've been through all this before with you. When we came back from Switzerland, my employers had mysteriously vacated their flat and shut down the art gallery, leaving me out of a job! Coincidence?' she prompted. 'I don't think so. You made that happen as well, didn't you?'

A faint darkening of colour flared over his cheekbones, accentuating the brilliance of his dark eyes. 'I bought the building,' he conceded in a driven tone.

'And it made it so much easier for you to persuade me to come to New York.' Her breath caught like a sob in her throat.

'I wanted you very much. And I was impatient.' He looked at her in unashamed appeal. 'I am what I am, bella mia, and I'm afraid I don't have the power to change the past.'

'But I had. Don't you understand that?' Moisture was hitting her eyes in a blinding, burning surge and she could not bear to let him see her cry. 'I had!' she repeated in bitter despair.

'Catherine…what do you want me to say in answer?' he demanded. 'If you want me to be honest, I will be. All that I regret in the past is that I lost you.'

'You didn't lose me…you drove me away!' she sobbed.

He spread eloquent, beautifully shaped hands. 'All right, if semantics are that important, I drove you away. But you might try to see it from my point of view for a change. You shoot a crazy question at me out of the blue one morning over breakfast—'

'Yes, it was crazy, wasn't it?' she cut in tremulously. 'Absolutely crazy of me to think that you might actually condescend to marry me!'

'I didn't know there was going to be no court of appeal!' he slashed back at her fiercely. 'So I said the wrong thing. It was cruel, what I said. I admit that. If you want an apology, you should have stayed around to get it because I don't feel like apologising for it now! I came back to the apartment an hour and a half after I left it that morning. I didn't go to Milan. And where were you?'

She was shattered by the news that he had returned that morning. It shook her right out of her incipient hysteria.

'Yes, where were you?' Luc pressed remorselessly. 'You'd gone. You'd flounced out like a prima donna, leaving everything I'd ever given you, and if you wanted your revenge you got it then in full!'

With a stifled sob, she fled into the bathroom and locked the door, folding down on to the carpet behind it to bury her face in her hands and cry as though her heart was breaking. The past and the present had merged and she could not cope with that knowledge.

What a fool Catherine had been, what a blind, besotted fool! The instant Luc had asked her to marry him, her wits had gone walkabout. So many little things had failed to fit but she had suppressed all knowledge of them, trusting Luc and determined to let nothing detract from her happiness. If it had been his intent to divert her from her amnesia, he could not have been more successful.

How dared he suggest that she had somehow chosen to return to a period of the past when they had still been together? That night in Drew's apartment, Luc had trapped her between two impossible choices. Either she sacrificed Drew or Daniel. With every fibre of her being she would have fought to keep Daniel from Luc.

But Drew also had a strong hold on her loyalty, both in his own right and in his sister's right as well. She owed Harriet a debt she could never repay for helping her when she had hit rock-bottom. How could she have chosen between Daniel and Drew? Faced with the final prospect of telling Luc that he had a son, she had shut her mind down on Daniel to protect him.

Luc poisoned all that he touched. And if he was prepared to marry her simply to ensure her continuing presence in his bed, why shouldn't he accept Daniel as well? Luc, she sensed fearfully, would want his son. Five years ago, Daniel would have been a badly timed, unwelcome complication. Luc had not over-valued her precise importance to him. She was convinced that he would have expected her to have an abortion. But times had changed…

Daniel was innocent and vulnerable, a little boy with a lion-sized intellect often too big for him to handle. Once Luc had been a little boy like that…and look how he had turned out. Hard as diamonds. Cold, calculating and callous. Did she want to risk that happening to Daniel? Daniel already had too many of Luc's traits. They had been doled out to him in his genes at birth.

He was strong-willed, single-minded and, if left to his own devices unchecked, exceedingly self-centred. Catherine had spent four and a half years endeavouring to ensure that Daniel grew up as a well-rounded, normal child rather than a remote, hot-house-educated little statistician, divorced by his mental superiority from childish things.

She hated Luc, oh, God, how she hated him! Enshrouded in lonely isolation, she clung ferociously to the hatred that was her only strength. She squashed the sneaking suspicion that Luc was not as callous and cold as she had once believed he was, tuned out the little voice that weakly dared to hint that Luc might have changed. Anger and self-loathing warred for precedence inside her as she cried.

So what if she had to go through the wedding first? As soon as they landed in London, she would leave him. She had done it before; she would to it again, and this time she wouldn't be so dumb. She would take her jewellery with her and sell it. With the aid of that money, she could make a new life for herself and Daniel. She would do it for Daniel's sake.

Misery crept over her with blanket efficiency. It hadn't been real; none of it had been real. She had been living out a fantasy. The background had been so cruelly perfect. A castle for the little girl who had once dreamt about being a princess. A white wedding for the teenager who had once believed in living happily ever after. But, for the woman she was now, there was nothing, less than nothing. And wasn't that her own fault? A grown woman ought to have been able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

A certain je ne sais quoi, he had called it. A certain three-letter word would have been less impressive but more accurate. Sex. Luc's fatal flaw and probably his only weakness. A certain je ne sais quoi, unsought and on many occasions since unwelcome, he had admitted. And you really couldn't blame him for feeling like that, could you? It must be galling to acquire that much wealth and power and discover that you still lusted after a very ordinary little blonde with none of the attributes necessary to embellish your image.

'Catherine? Are you OK?' Luc demanded, startling her.

'You b-bloody snob!' she flared on the back of another sob.

Silence stretched.

'What the hell are you talking about?' he blazed from the other side of the door. 'If you don't come out of there, I'll smash the lock!'

'Force is your answer to everything, isn't it?' Abruptly galvanised into action by the mortifying awareness that he had been listening to her crying, she stood up, stripped off, and walked into the shower, hoping the sound of it would make him go away.

Sex, she thought, loathing him. The lowest possible common denominator. And, after a five-year drought, her value had mushroomed. In fact it had smashed all known stock-market records. In return for unlimited sex, Luc was graciously ready to lower his high standards and marry her. Well, bully for him, and wasn't she a lucky girl?