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‘The staff are under the illusion that the request was made because you are keen to improve your Italian.’
She covered her face with shaking hands, what composure she had retained threatening all of a sudden to crumble. ‘I loathe you!’
‘You are angry with me,’ he contradicted steadily. ‘And I suppose you have some reason for that.’
‘You suppose?’ Wild-eyed, she surveyed him over the top of her white-boned fingers. Reaction was setting in.
‘You belong with me, Catherine. Use the brain God gave you at birth.’ The advice was abrasive. ‘You have been happy, happier than I have ever known you to be, here.’
‘I was living in the past!’
‘But why did you choose to return to that particular part of the past?’ His sensual mouth twisted. ‘Ask yourself that.’
‘I didn’t choose anything!’ she protested. ‘And what I ended up with isn’t real!’
‘It can be as real as you want it to be.’
The sense of betrayal was increasing in her. He had betrayed her. But, worst of all, she had betrayed herself. She had betrayed everything she believed in, everything that she was, everything that she had become after leaving him. In one week she had smashed four years of self-respect. In one week she had destroyed every barrier that might have protected her.
‘Can you turn water into wine as well?’ she demanded wildly, choking on her own humiliation. ‘You must have been laughing yourself sick all week at just how easy it was to make a fool of me!’
A muscle pulled tight at his hard jawline. ‘That is not how it has been between us.’
‘That’s how it’s always been between us!’ she attacked shakily. ‘You plot and you plan and you manipulate and you make things happen just as you want them to happen.’
‘I d
idn’t plan for you to lose your memory.’
‘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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
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.
