With inexorable cool, Luc pressed her into the waiting car. Her surroundings were then both familiar and reassuring, but still she trembled. Luc hadn’t said a word. Of course, he had known. He had known that she had lost more than a few weeks, had seen no good reason to increase her alarm. Everything now made better sense. No wonder Mr Ladwin had been reluctant to see her leave so quickly. No wonder she didn’t recognise her clothes or her hairstyle or the change in Luc. She had lost almost a year of her life.
‘Luc, what’s happening to me?’ she said brokenly. ‘What’s going on inside my head?’
‘Don’t try to force it.’ His complete calm was wondrously soothing. ‘Ladwin advised me not to fill in the blanks for you. He said you should have rest and peace and everything you wanted within reason. Your memory will probably come back naturally, either all at once or in stages.’
‘And what if it doesn’t?’
‘We’ll survive. You didn’t forget me.’ Satisfaction blazed momentarily in his stunning eyes before he veiled them.
The woman who could forget Luc Santini hadn’t been born yet. You could love him passionately, hate him passionately, but you couldn’t possibly forget him. Hate him? Her brow creased at that peculiar thought and she wondered where it had come from.
‘Are you thinking of putting off the wedding?’ she asked stiffly. It was the obvious thing to do, the sensible thing to do. And what she most feared was the obvious and the sensible.
‘Is that what you want?’
Vehemently she shook her head, refusing to meet his too perceptive gaze. How could she still be so afraid of losing him? He had asked her to marry him. What more could he do? What more could she want?
He didn’t love her, he still didn’t love her. If she was winning through, it was by default and staying power. She wasn’t demanding or difficult, spoilt or imperious. She was loyal and trustworthy and crazy about children. She had had no other lovers. Luc would have a problem coming to terms with a woman who had a past to match his own. And in the bedroom…her skin heated at the acknowledgement that she never said no to him, could hardly contain her pleasure when he touched her. Most importantly of all, perhaps, she loved him, and he was content to be loved as long as she never asked for more than he was prepared to give. All in all, he wasn’t so much marrying her as promoting her and, though her pride warred against that reality, it was better than severance pay.
‘The wedding will take place within a few days,’ Luc drawled casually and, picking up the phone, he began the first of several calls. Finding himself the focus of her attention, a smile of almost startling brilliance slashed his hard mouth and he extended a hand, drawing her under the shelter of his arm. ‘You look happy,’ he said approvingly.
Only a woman who was fathoms deep in love could lose a year of her life and still be happy. Kicking off her shoes, she rested blissfully back into the lean heat of him, thinking she had to be the luckiest woman alive. Maybe if she worked incredibly hard at being a perfect wife, he might fall in love with her.
‘We’re in a traffic jam,’ she whispered teasingly, tugging at the end of his tie, feeling infinitely more daring than she had ever felt before. The awareness that they would soon be married was dissolving her usual inhibitions.
Luc tensed into sudden rigidity and stumbled over what he was saying. Leaning over him, bracing one hand on a taut thigh, Catherine reached up and loosened his tie, trailing it off in what she hoped was a slow, seductive fashion.
‘Catherine…what are you doing?’
Luc was being abnormally obtuse. Colliding with golden eyes that had a stunned stillness, she went pink and, lowering her head, embarked on the buttons of his shirt. Hiding a mischievous smile, she understood his incredulity. Undressing Luc was a first. Initiating lovemaking was also a first. She ran caressing fingertips over warm golden skin roughened by black curling hair. His audible intake of oxygen matched to the raw tension in his muscles encouraged her to continue.
There was so much pleasure in simply touching him. It was extraordinary, she thought abstractly, but, although sanity told her it couldn’t be possible, she felt starved of him. As she pressed her lips lovingly to his vibrant flesh and kissed a haphazard trail of increasing self-indulgence from his strong brown throat to his flat muscular stomach, he jerked and dropped the phone.
‘Catherine…’ he muttered, sounding satisfyingly ragged.
Her small hand strayed over his thigh. As she touched him he groaned deep in his throat and a sense of wondering power washed over her. He was trembling, his dark head thrown back, a fevered flush accentuating his hard bone-structure. All this time and it was this easy, she reflected, marvelling at the sheer strength of his response to her.
‘Catherine, you shouldn’t be doing this.’ He was breathing fast and audibly, the words thick and indistinct.
‘I’m enjoying myself,’ she confided, slightly dazed by what she was doing, but telling the truth.
‘Per amor di Dio, where’s my conscience?’ he gasped as she ran the tip of her tongue along his waistband.
‘What conscience?’ she whispered, lost in a voluptuous world all of her own as she inched down his straining zip.
‘Cristo, this is purgatory!’ Taking her by surprise, Luc jackknifed out of reach at accelerated speed. ‘We can’t do this. We’re nearly at the airport!’ he muttered unsteadily.
‘We’re in a traffic jam.’ In an agony of mortification more intense than any she had ever known, she stared at him, her hauntingly beautiful eyes dark with pain.
With a succinct swear-word, he dragged her close, taking her mouth with a wild, ravishing hunger that drove the breath from her lungs and left her aching for more. Every nerve-ending in her body went crazy in that powerful embrace. Plastered to every aroused line of his taut length, the scent of him and the taste of him and the feel of
him went to her head with the potency of a mind-blowing narcotic.
Dragging his mouth from hers, he buried his face in her tumbled hair. The sharp shock of separation hurt. His heart was crashing against her crushed breasts. She could literally feel him fighting to get himself back under control. A long, shuddering breath ran through him. ‘You’re not strong enough for this, Catherine. You’re supposed to be resting,’ he reminded her almost roughly. ‘So, have a little pity, hmm? Don’t torture me.’
‘I’m not ill. I feel great.’ She ignored the throbbing at the base of her skull.
With a hard glance of disagreement, he set her back on the seat. ‘You’re quite capable of saying that because you think that’s what I want to hear. How could you feel great? You must feel lousy, and, the next time I ask, lousy is what I want to hear! Is that clear?’