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‘You have to be the most incredibly modest woman of my acquaintance. Do you really think I would go to these lengths for anything less?’ Strolling over to the table, Luc uncapped one of the decanters, lifted a glass off the tray and poured a single measure of brandy.
‘I can’t believe that you can say that to me,’ she mumbled.
‘Console yourself with the reflection that I have not said one quarter of what I would like to say.’ Luc slotted the glass between her nerveless fingers, cupped them helpfully round to clasp it, the easy intimacy of his touch one more violently disorientating factor to plague her. ‘I feel sure that you are grateful for my restraint.’
Dimly she understood how a rabbit felt, mesmerised by headlights on the motorway. Those golden eyes could be shockingly compelling. The brandy went down in one appreciative gulp and she gasped as fire raced down her throat. It banished her paralysis, however, and retrieved her wits. ‘You…you actually think that Drew is keeping me?’ she demanded with a shudder of distaste. ‘Is that what you’re insinuating?’
‘I rarely insinuate, cara. I state.’
‘How dare you?’ Catherine exclaimed.
Luc dealt her an impassive look. ‘I find it particularly unsavoury that he should be a married man, old enough to be your father.’
Restraint, she acknowledged, was definitely fighting a losing battle. Fierce condemnation accompanied that final statement. ‘There’s nothing unsavoury about Drew!’ she protested furiously. ‘He’s one of the most decent, honourable men I’ve ever met!’
‘Only not above cheating on his wife with a woman half his age,’ Luc drawled in biting conclusion. ‘A little word of warning, cara. After tonight, I don’t ever wish to hear his name on your lips again.’
Catherine was too caught up in an outraged defence of Drew to listen to him. ‘He wouldn’t cheat on his wife. He’s been separated from her for almost a year. He’ll be divorced next month!’
‘I know,’ Luc interposed softly, taking the wind from her sails. ‘He should have stayed home with his wife. It would have been safer for him.’
‘Safer?’ she whispered, recalling what he had said some minutes earlier. ‘You threatened him—’
‘No. I delivered a twenty-two-carat-gold promise of intent.’ The contradiction was precise, chilling.
‘But you didn’t mean it, you couldn’t have meant it!’ she argued in instinctive appeal.
Dark eyes lingered on her reflectively and veiled. ‘If you say so.’ A broad shoulder lifted in a very Latin shrug of dismissal. ‘We have more important things to discuss.’
Her stomach executed a sick somersault. Under that exquisitely tailored suit dwelt a predator of Neanderthal proportions, ungiven to anything as remote as an attack of conscience. ‘It’s absolutely none of your business,’ she conceded tightly, ‘but I’m not having an affair with Drew.’
‘Everything that concerns you is my business.’
It went against the grain to permit that to go past unchallenged, but she was more concerned about Drew. ‘Why should you want to damage Huntingdon Components? What has he ever done to you?’
‘You ask me that?’ It was a positive snarl of incredulity. ‘You live in his apartment and you ask me that?’
‘It’s not what it seems.’
‘It is exactly what it seems. Cheap, nasty.’ His nostrils flared as he passed judgement.
‘Like what I had with you?’ She couldn’t resist the comparison.
‘Cristo!’ He threw up both hands in sudden lancing fury. ‘How can you say that to me? In all my life, I never treated a woman as well as I treated you!’
The most maddening quality of that assurance was its blazing, blatant sincerity. He actually believed what he was saying. Her teeth ground together on a blistering retort.
‘And what did I receive in return? You tell me!’ he slashed at her rawly, rage masking his dark features. ‘A bloody stupid scrawl on a mirror that I couldn’t even read! I trusted you as though you were my family and you betrayed that trust. You stuck a knife in my back.’
She should have been better prepared for that explosion, but she wasn’t. His legendary self-control had evaporated right before her stricken eyes, revealing the primitive depth of the anger she had dared to provoke. ‘Luc, I—’
‘Stay where you are!’ The command cracked like a whiplash across the room, halting her retreat in the direction of the door. ‘You were with me two years, Catherine. Two years,’ he repeated fiercely, anger vibrating from every tensed line of his lean, powerful physique. ‘And then you vanish into thin air. In nearly five years, what do I get? Hmm? Not so much as a postcard! So, I look for you. I wonder if you’re starving somewhere. I worry about how you’re managing to live. I think maybe you’ve had an accident, maybe you’re dead. And where do I find you?’ he grated in soaring crescendo. ‘In the Savoy with another man!’
Her feet were frozen to the carpet under that searing onslaught. She had never seen Luc betray that much emotion. Dazedly, she watched him swing away from her, ferocious tension etched into the set of his broad shoulders and the angle of his hard, taut profile. She could not quite credit the evidence of what she was seeing, never mind what he had said.
He had worried about her? He had actually worried about her? In her mind she fought to come to terms with that revelation. When she had left him, sneaking cravenly out of the service entrance like a thief, she had foreseen his probable response to her departure. Disbelief…outrage…contempt…acceptance. The idea of his worrying about her, looking for her, had never once occurred to her.
In a strange way which she could not understand, she found the idea very disturbing, and it was in reaction to that that she chose to say nothing in her own defence. One fact had penetrated. Luc had no suspicion of Daniel’s existence. That fear assuaged, she could only think of Drew.
