She bent her head. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
‘But I have plenty to say to you.’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Jerkily she crossed her arms to conceal the fact that her hands were shaking, and moved over to the window, her back protectively turned on him.
‘When I talk to people, I prefer them to look at me,’ Luc imparted with irony.
‘I don’t want to look at you.’ She was dismayed to realise that she was perilously close to tears. If wishes were horses, she would have been a thousand miles from this confrontation.
‘Since I arrived, I’ve been having a marvellous conversation with myself.’ The sardonic criticism of her monosyllabic responses drove much-needed colour into her cheeks. ‘Perhaps I should approach this from a different angle.’
Taking a deep breath, she spun back to him. ‘I want you to leave.’
An ebony brow elevated. ‘The carpet or me?’
She flung her head back, sharp strain etched into every delicate line of her features, but she said nothing, could not trust her voice to emerge levelly or her gaze to meet directly with his.
‘May we dispense with the imaginary husband, whose name you have such difficulty in recalling?’ Luc murmured very quietly. ‘I don’t believe he exists.’
‘I don’t know where you get that idea.’ Wildly disconcerted by the question thrown at her without warning, she was dismally conscious that her reply lacked sufficient surprise or annoyance to be convincing.
‘I won’t play these games with you.’ The victim of that hooded dark stare holding her by sheer force of will, she felt cornered. ‘I play them everywhere else in my life, but not with you. I saw you with Huntingdon outside the hotel. No doubt you believe that that ring lends a certain spurious respectability to your present position in his life. It doesn’t,’ he concluded flatly.
Desperation was beginning to grip her. ‘You misunderstood what you saw.’
‘Did I? I don’t think so,’ Luc murmured. ‘Relax, he’s still all in one piece…but he’s halfway to Germany in pursuit of a contract he’s not going to get.’
Her lower lip parted company with the upper. ‘I b-beg your pardon?’
‘You are not, I believe, hard of hearing.’
Unbearable tension held her unnaturally still. ‘What have you got to do with that contract?’
‘Influence alone,’ Luc delivered. ‘And influence will be sufficient.’
‘But why? I mean, Drew?’ she whispered strickenly.
‘Unfortunately for him, this is his apartment.’ Luc sent her a glittering glance, redolent of unashamed threat. ‘And when a man trespasses on my territory, it must hurt. If it does not, who will respect the boundaries I set? Surely you do not expect me to reward him for bedding my woman?’
CHAPTER THREE
CATHERINE went white. Luc was hitting her with too much all at once. It was as if she were drowning and unable to breathe. Shock was reverberating with paralysing effect all the way down from her brain to her toes.
Luc surveyed her without a tinge of remorse. And this time she could sense the savage anger he was containing. A dark aura that radiated violent vibrations into the thickening atmosphere. It was an insidiously intimidating force, for Luc had never lost his temper with her before. Luc rarely unleashed his emotions. People who let anger triumph invariably surrendered control of the situation. Luc would not be guilty of such a gross miscalculation. Or so she had once believed…
She tried and failed to swallow. The tip of her tongue nervously crept out to moisten her dry lips. ‘I am not your woman,’ she said unsteadily.
Black spiky lashes partially screened a blaze of gold. ‘For two years you were mine, indisputably mine, as no other woman ever has been. Some things don’t change. In the Savoy, you couldn’t take your eyes off me.’
Catherine was so appalled by the accusation that she momentarily forgot the threat to Drew. ‘That’s nonsense!’
‘Is it?’ She was reminded of a well-fed tiger indulgently watching his next meal at play. His brilliant gaze was riveted to her. ‘I don’t believe it is. And why should we argue about it? You have the same effect on me. I’m not denying it. A certain je ne sais quoi, unsought and, on many occasions since, unwelcome, but still in existence after six and a half years. Doesn’t that tell you something?’
A furrow between her brows, Catherine was struggling to follow what he was telling her, but every time she came close to comprehension she retreated from it in disbelief.
‘Plenty of marriages don’t last that long,’ Luc pointed out smoothly. ‘I want you back, Catherine.’
In the bottomless pit of the silence he allowed to fall, she was sure she could hear her own heartbeat thundering fit to burst behind her breastbone. Her throat worked convulsively but no sound emerged, and that was hardly surprising when he had deprived her of the power of speech. Shock had gone into counter-shock, and her capacity to think straight had gone into cold storage.