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‘The most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen.’ Luc brushed his lips very gently across hers and the combination of a rare compliment and physical contact sent her senses reeling dizzily.
Sunlight was warming her face, glinting off the twist of platinum on her finger next, and Christian was dropping a kiss on her brow, laughingly assuring her that Luc had said her mouth was out of bounds.
In the limousine, he caught her to him and took her mouth with all the hunger he had earlier restrained. Her bouquet dropped from her fingers, fell forgotten to the floor, and her arms went round his neck, her unsteady fingers linking in an unbroken chain to hold him to her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
VIOLINS were thrumming in Catherine’s bloodstream. She drifted round the floor in a rosy haze of contentment.
‘Catherine?’
‘Hmm?’ she sighed dreamily into Luc’s shoulder, opening her eyes a chink and vaguely surprised to recognise that the light, cast by the great chandeliers above, was artificial. In her mind she had been waltzing out under the night stars. ‘Candles would have been more atmospheric,’ she whispered, and then, ‘You’re thinking of the fire hazard and the smoke they would have created.’
‘I’m trying very hard not to. I know what’s expected of me,’ Luc confessed above her head, and she gave a drowsy giggle. A lean hand tipped her face back, lingered to cup her chin. ‘It’s time for us to leave.’
‘L-leave?’ she echoed, jolted by the announcement.
His thumb gently eased between her parted lips and rimmed the inviting fullness of the lower in a gesture that was soul-shatteringly sensual. A heady combination of drowning feminine weakness and excitement spread burning heat through her tautening muscles. He might as well have thrown a high-voltage switch inside her. Dark eyes shaded by ebony lashes glimmered with gold. ‘Leave,’ he repeated, the syllables running together and merging. ‘Fast,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘Everybody’s still here.’ She trembled as the hand resting at her spine curved her into contact with the stirring hardness of his thighs. ‘Oh.’
‘As you say, cara…oh,’ he murmured softly. ‘Our guests will dance quite happily to dawn without me. I have other ambitions.’
Her body was dissolving in the hard circle of his arms. She would have gone anywhere, done anything to stay there. The very thought of detaching herself long enough to get changed scared her. She was waking up out of the dream-like haze which had floated her through the day. And waking up was absolutely terrifying.
Had she really been stubborn enough to cling to the conviction that she hated him? It hadn’t been hatred she’d felt when she saw him at the altar. It wasn’t hatred she felt when he touched her. It was love. Love. She was blitzed by that reality. Her emotions had withstood the tests of pain and disillusionment, time and maturity. Why? But she knew why; scarcely had to answer the question. And in the beginning there was Luc…and there ended her story.
He steered her out of the ballroom, quite indifferent to the conversational sallies of several cliques in their path. In the shadow of the great staircase, he moulded her against him, his mouth hard and urgent, long fingers framing her cheekbones as he kissed her, at first roughly, then lingeringly with a slow, drugging sexuality that devastated her.
A low-pitched wolf-whistle parted them. Hot-cheeked, still trembling with the force of the hunger Luc had summoned up, she let her hands slide down from his shoulders, steadying herself.
Christian was regarding them from several feet away, a smile of unconcealed amusement on his face. Dealing him an unembarrassed glance, Luc directed her upstairs with the thoughtful precision of someone who doubted her ability to make it there without assistance. Guilia was waiting to help her out of her gown.
Dear God, Catherine thought in numbed confusion, was there a strong streak of insanity in her bloodline? Nothing less than madness could excuse her behaviour over the past twenty-four hours. Did all women lie to themselves as thoroughly as she had? Luc knew her better than she knew herself. He knew her strengths and insecurities, her likes and dislikes, even, it seemed, her craven habit of avoiding what she couldn’t handle and denying what she was afraid of…
Why did she deceive herself this way? She had been like a child with an elaborate escape-plan, a child who secretly wanted to be caught before she did any real damage. Almost seven years ago she had given her heart without the slightest encouragement, and that heart was still his. And that love was something she couldn’t change, something that was simply a part of her, something that it was quite useless to fight. Luc was her own personal self-destruct button. But leaving him less than five years ago had still been like tearing her heart from her body.
‘I need you,’ he had said once in the darkness of the night in Switzerland. The admission had turned her over and inside out. She would have walked on fire for him just for those three little words. But he had never said them again, never even come close to saying them once he had been secure in the knowledge that she adored him.
It hadn’t been very long before he’d begun to smoothly remind her that what they had wouldn’t last forever. He had hurt her terribly. He had taught her to walk floors at night, to feel sick at a careless word or oversight, to panic if a phone call was late…to live from day to day with this dreadful nagging fear of losing him always in the background. Inside, where it didn’t show, he had killed her by degrees.
‘He was very bad for you,’ Harriet had scolded. ‘You’re not cut out to cope with someone like that. But you did what you had to do. You protected Daniel. Be proud that you had that much sense.’
Whenever she had wavered, as waver she had for far longer than she wanted to recall, Harriet had been the little Dutch boy, sticking her finger in the dam-wall of her emotions, preventing the leak from developing into a torrent that might prompt her into some foolish action. Oh, yes, she had thought about phoning him times without number. She had always chickened out. Once she had even stood in the post office a couple of days before his birthday, crazy enough to consider sending him a card because she knew that since his family’s death there was nobody else but her to remember. Harriet had had her work cut out and no mistake. That first year keeping her away from Luc had been a full-time occupation.
But Catherine had been lucky enough to have had Daniel on whom to target her emotions. How could anyone understand what Daniel meant to her? The first time she held him in her arms she had wept inconsolably. Nobody but Harriet had understood. Daniel had been the first living person she had ever seen to whom she was truly related. Between them, Daniel and Harriet had become the family she had never had.
Why had she planned to leave Luc again? This time she was honest with herself about her most driving motivation. She was terrified of telling him about Daniel, as terrified as she had been when she had realised she was pregnant. Luc did not have and clearly never had had the smallest suspicion that she might have been pregnant.
It was all so horribly complicated and she had so much to lose. Daniel believed his father was dead. He had asked very few questions and she really hadn’t understood that he actually resented not having a father until that day at Greyfriars when he had
raged at her, na;auively sharing his secret belief that his father, had he still been alive, would have been able to work miracles.
Daniel would accept Luc with very little encouragement. How Daniel would react to the discovery that his mother had lied to him was another question entirely. And could she trust Luc with Daniel? Daniel was very insecure right now, very breakable. If Luc could not accept him wholeheartedly, Daniel would know it. In addition, he was illegitimate. That couldn’t be hidden and, sooner or later, it would hit the newspapers. Luc would find that intolerable.
And on what basis did she dare to assume that Luc saw their marriage as a permanent fixture? Luc was so unpredictable. Did she turn Daniel’s life upside-down in the hope that Luc could come to terms with the decision she had made five years ago, and the fact that he had a four-year-old son?
Yesterday she had believed she had a choice. Today she accepted that she had merely talked herself into taking the easy way out and running away again. It wouldn’t work this time. And the irony was that she didn’t want it to work anyway. She loved Luc. She wanted to hope. She wanted to trust. She wanted to believe that somehow all this could be worked out. And that meant telling Luc about Daniel.
