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‘Leave Drew alone,’ she said. ‘He needs that contract.’
‘Is that all you have to say to me?’ There was a formidable chill in his dark eyes.
She swallowed hard. ‘Losing that contract could ruin him.’
A grim smile curved his lips. ‘I know.’
‘If you’re angry with me, take it out on me. I can’t believe you really want to harm Drew,’ she confided.
‘Believe it,’ Luc urged.
‘I mean…’ she made a helpless movement of her small hands, eloquent of her confusion ‘…you walk in here and you say…you say you want me back, but there’s absolutely no question of that,’ she completed shakily.
‘No?’
‘No! And I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me!’ she cried.
‘Maybe you should try.’
She refused to look at him. He had hurt her too much. In Luc’s presence she was as fearfully wary as a child who had once put her hand in the fire. The memory of the pain was a persistent barrier. ‘I won’t try,’ she said with simple dignity. ‘You’re an episode which I put behind me a long time ago.’
‘An episode?’ he derided incredulously. ‘You lived with me for two years!’
‘Nineteen months, and every month a mistake,’ Catherine corrected, abandoning her caution by degrees.
‘Madre de Dio.’ A line of colour demarcated his high cheekbones. ‘Hardly a one-night stand.’
Visibly she flinched. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I often used to feel like one.’
‘How can you say that to me? I treated you with respect!’ he ground out.
‘That was respect?’ A chokey laugh escaped her. She felt wild in that instant. If she had been a tigress, she would have clawed him to death in revenge. Her very powerlessness taunted her cruelly. ‘When I look at you now, I wonder why it took me so long to come to my senses.’
‘Since I arrived, you have looked everywhere but at me,’ Luc said drily, deflatingly.
‘I hate you, Luc. I hate you so much that if you dropped dead at my feet I’d dance on your corpse!’ she vented in a feverish rush.
‘The near future promises to be intriguing.’
‘There isn’t going to be one for us!’ Catherine had never lost her head with anyone before, but it was happening now. As if it were not bad enough that he should stand there with the air of someone handling an escaped lunatic with enviable coo
l, he was ignoring every word she said. ‘I’m not about to fall into line like one of your employees! Come back to you? You have to be out of your mind! You used me once, and I’d sooner be dead than let you do it again! I loved you, Luc. I loved you much more than you deserved to be loved—’
‘I know,’ he interposed softly.
A hectic flush carmined her cheeks, fury running rampant through her every skin-cell. ‘What do you mean…you know? Where do you get the nerve to admit that?’
Unreadable golden eyes arrowed into her and lingered intently. ‘I thought it might be in my favour.’
‘In your favour? It makes what you did to me all the more unforgivable!’ Catherine ranted in a fresh burst of outrage. ‘You took everything I had to give and tried to pay for it, as though I were some tramp you’d picked up on a street-corner!’
His jawline clenched. ‘I might have made one or two unfortunate errors of judgement,’ he conceded after a very long pause. ‘But, if you were dissatisfied with our relationship, you should have expressed that dissatisfaction.’
‘I beg your pardon? Expressed it?’ Catherine could hardly get the words out, she was so enraged. ‘God forgive you, Luc, because I never will! Let me just make one little point. You can go out there and you can buy anything you want, but you can’t buy me. I’m not available. I’m not up for sale. There’s no price-tag attached, so what are you going to do?’
Trembling violently, she turned away from him, emotion still storming through her in a debilitating wave. She had never dreamt that she could attack Luc like that, but somehow it had simply happened. Yet in the aftermath she experienced no sense of pleasure; she felt only pain. A tearing, desperate pain that seemed to encompass her entire being. Just being in the same room with him hurt. She had sworn once that she would not let him do this to her. She would not let hatred poison the very air she breathed. But that wall inside her head was tumbling down brick by brick, and the vengeful force of all the feelings she had buried behind it was surging out of control. With those feelings came memories she fiercely sought to blank out…
That day he had given her the rose, he had escorted her down to a limousine. Cinderella had never had it so good. There had been no glass slipper to fall off at midnight. He had swept her off her feet into a world she had only read about in magazines. He had revelled in her wide eyes, her innocence, her inability to conceal her joy in merely being with him. For five days, she had been lost in a breathless round of excitement. Fancy night-clubs where they danced the night away, intimate meals in dimly lit restaurants…and his last evening in London, of course, in his hotel suite.
