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‘I—’
‘Daniel’s having a fabulous time. The weather’s been terrific. We were planning to camp out tonight but, of course, if you want to speak to him…’
‘No, that’s OK.’ I’ve been kidnapped. I’m in Italy. I’m getting married tomorrow. The revelations went unspoken. Peggy would think she was a candidate for the funny farm. In any case, she would be home before they were back in London. Nobody need ever know, she thought in that first frantic flush of desperation.
‘Catherine, somebody’s just driven into the yard. Wow, fancy car. Can I ring you back?’
‘No…no, I’m out…I mean, I’m ringing from somewhere else. Give my love to Daniel.’ She dropped the phone as though it burnt, and tottered backwards on to the lounger.
The hideous, absolutely inexcusable events of the past week were suddenly all crowding in on her. She flinched and she shrank and she cringed over the replay. Humiliation scored letters of fire into her soul. From rock-bottom there was only one way to go, and that was up, as she relived what Luc had done to her.
And really, there wasn’t anything that Luc hadn’t done. While she was in no condition to know what was happening to her, he had moved in for the kill. Plotting and intrigue were a breath of fresh air to that Borgia temperament of his. It had been as easy as stealing candy from a baby. Baby. Baby! She blenched and recoiled from that terrifying train of thought, completely unable to deal with it on top of everything else.
For a week she had been unaware that she was living four years in the past. He had left nothing within her possession that might jog her memory. Not a newspaper or a television set or a calendar had been allowed anywhere within a mile of her.
Every detail had been bloodlessly, inhumanly precise. It had Luc stamped all over it. He hadn’t made a single error. She had been baited, hooked and landed like a fish. Only even a fish would have had more sense of self-preservation. A fish wouldn’t have scrambled up the line, thrown itself masochistically on to the gutting knife and looked forward to the heat of the grill…but she had.
What Luc wanted, he took. Scruples didn’t come into it. Costs didn’t come into it. The end result was all that interested him. He had believed that she had planned to marry Drew and, with Drew’s freedom so close, time had been a luxury Luc hadn’t had. No doubt if she had thrown herself gratefully at his feet that night marriage would never have been mentioned. But in resisting Luc, she had challenged Luc. And he could not resist a challenge.
Her teeth ground together and her stomach heaved. That degrading fish image wouldn’t leave her alone. Her small hands clenched into fists. Rage shuddered through her; rage that knew no boundaries; rage so powerful that it boiled up in a violent physicality she had not known she could experience.
At that precise moment, Luc appeared, striding down the steps set into the slope, and she remembered the episode in the back of the limousine and death would have been too quick a release for him to satisfy her. Springing upright, she grabbed up a glass and threw it at him. As it smashed several feet to the left of him, he stilled.
‘You filthy, rotten, cheating, conniving swine!’ she railed at him, snatching up the second glass and hurling it with all her might. ‘You rat!’ she ranted, and the phone went in the same direction. ‘You louse!’ she launched, bending in a frenzy to take off a shoe, her rage only getting more out of control at her failure to hit a fixed target. ‘Bastard!’ She broke through her loathing for that particular word and punctuated it with her other shoe. ‘I want to kill you!’
‘Poison would be a better bet than a gun.’ Luc spread a speaking glance over the far-flung positions of the missiles, entire and smashed. ‘Marksmanship wouldn’t appear to be one of your hidden talents.’
Her rage reached explosive, screaming proportions. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘It seems fairly safe to assume that you’ve retrieved your memory,’ he drawled. ‘I’m not sure it would be safe to assume anything else.’
‘No, it wouldn’t be!’ His complete cool was maddening her even more. ‘If you were dying of thirst, I wouldn’t give you a drink! If you were starving, I wouldn’t feed you! If you were the only man left alive on this earth and I was the only woman, the human race would grind to a halt! You deserve to be horsewhipped and keelhauled and hung, and if I was a man I’d do it!’
‘And if you were a man, you wouldn’t be in this situation,’ Luc input helpfully as she paused to catch her breath.
‘I’m going to report you to the police!’ Catherine blazed at him, satisfied to have at last found a realistic threat.
Luc angled his dark head back, piercing golden eyes resting on her. ‘What for?’
‘W-what for?’ she stammered an octave higher. ‘What for? You kidnapped me!’
‘Did I drug you? Physically abuse you? Have you witnesses to these events?’
‘I’ll make it up; I’ll lie!’ she slashed back at him.
‘But why did you stand so willingly at my side at the airport when I announced our marriage plans?’ Luc enquired with the same immovable, incredibly outrageous cool.
‘You’ve kept me a prisoner here all week!’ In desperation, she set off on another tack, determined to nail him down to a crime on the statute books.
An ebony brow quirked. ‘With locked doors? I don’t recall refusing to let you go anywhere.’
‘Physical abuse, then!’ Catherine slung through gnashing teeth. ‘I’ll get you on that!’
Luc actually smiled. ‘What physical abuse?’
Catherine drew herself up to her full five feet and one quarter inch and shrieked. ‘You know very well what I’m talking about! While I…while I was not in my right mind, you took disgusting advantage of me!’
‘Did I?’ he murmured. ‘Catherine, it is my considered opinion that over the past week you’ve been more in your right mind than you’ve been for almost five years.’
