‘I…I dither; it saves time,’ she muttered, making an abrupt move to walk away, but he was impervious to the hint.
‘And I’m just naturally insensitive to what you might choose for yourself?’ he chided. ‘Catherine, I’ve been aware that you have trouble reading since the first week I spent with you in London. I saw through all those painfully elaborate little stratagems and, I have to admit, I was pretty shocked.’
Her stricken gaze veiled as tears lashed her eyelids in a blistering surge. She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her. His deep voice, no matter how calm and quiet it was, stung like a whip on her most vulnerable skin. Her throat was convulsing and she couldn’t speak. All she wanted to do was get away from him, but his arms banded round her slim waist like steel hawsers.
‘We are going to have this all out in the open,’ Luc informed her steadily. ‘Why didn’t you tell me right at the beginning that you were dyslexic? I didn’t realise that. You were ashamed of it and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, so I pretended as well. I ignored it but, in my ignorance of the true situation, I hoped very much that you would do something about it.’
‘I can’t!’ she gasped. ‘They did all they could for me at school but I’ll never be able to read properly!’
‘Do you think I don’t know that now? Will you stop trying to get away from me?’ he demanded, subduing her struggles with determined hands. ‘I know that you’re dyslexic, but I didn’t know it then. I thought—’
‘You thought I was just illiterate!’ she sobbed in agonised interruption. ‘I’ll never forgive you for doing this to me!’
‘You’re going to listen to me.’ He held her fast. ‘I was at fault as well. I took the easy way out. What I didn’t like, I chose not to see. I should have tried to help you myself. Had I done that, I would have realised what was really wrong. But you should have told me,’ he censured.
‘Let go of me!’ she railed at him, shaken by tempestuous sobs of humiliation.
‘Don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you?’ He gave her a fierce little shake that momentarily roused her from her distress. ‘If I had known, if I had understood, I wouldn’t have been angry when you made no effort to improve your situation! I’m not getting through to you, am I?’
‘You’re ashamed of me!’ she accused him despairingly.
Sliding upright, he crushed her into his arms and laced one hand into the golden fall of her hair to tip her head back. ‘No, I’m not,’ he contradicted fiercely. ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of. Einstein was dyslexic, da Vinci was dyslexic. If it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for you!’
‘Oh, Luc!’ A laugh somewhere between a hiccup and a sob escaped her as she looked up at him. ‘Good enough? I probably have it worse than they did.’
‘I don’t know how I could have been so blind for so long,’ he admitted. ‘You have no sense of direction, you can’t tell left from right, the tying of a bow defeats you, and sometimes you’re just a little forgetful.’ There was a teasing, soothing quality to that concluding statement.
She was still shaking. Her distress had been too great to ebb quickly. She buried her face in his jacket, weak and uncertain, but beyond that there was this glorious sense of release from a pretence that had frequently lacerated her nerves and kept her in constant fear of discovery.
‘You don’t mind, you really don’t mind?’ she muttered.
‘All that I mind is that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me yourself, but, now I know, we can speak to an educational specialist—I’m sure you can be helped.’ Tipping her head back, he produced a hanky and automatically mopped her up, smiling down at her, and something about that smile made her heart skip an entire beat. ‘It wasn’t brave to suffer in silence, it was foolish. I would have understood your difficulties. We live in a world in which the capacity to interpret the written word is taken for granted. How did you manage to work in the art gallery? I’ve often wondered that,’ he confided.
‘Elaine taped the catalogue for me.’
He finger-combed her hair back into a semblance of order. ‘Secrets,’ he said, ‘create misunderstandings.’
‘That’s the only one I have,’ she sighed. ‘You’re always tidying me up and putting me back together again.’
‘Maybe I enjoy doing it. Have you thought of that?’ he teased, his husky voice fracturing slightly as she stared up at him.
All the oxygen in the air seemed to be used up without warning. Desire clutched at her stomach in a lancing surge. Her breasts felt constrained within their silken covering as her sensitive flesh swelled and her nipples peaked into tight aching buds. The sensations were blindingly physical, unnervingly powerful, and she trembled.
He withdrew his hand from her hair and stepped back. ‘It’s late. You should go to bed,’ he muttered harshly. ‘If you don’t, I’ll take you here.’
A heady flush lit her cheeks. She backed away obediently on cotton-wool legs. She couldn’t drag her eyes from his dark-golden beauty. The view was spiced by her intrinsic awareness of the savage sexual intensity contained below that surface calm and control. She wanted him. She wanted him so much that it scared her. In her memory there was nothing to equal the force of the hunger she was experiencing now. It confused her, embarrassed her.
‘I’m expecting an important call,’ he added, and, as she looked at him in surprise, said succinctly, ‘Time zones.’
She couldn’t picture Luc sitting up to take a phone call, no matter how important it was. People called at his convenience, not their own. Still watching him, she found the door more by accident than design and fumbled it open. ‘I really am feeling marvellous,’ she assured him in a self-conscious rush before she ducked out into the hall.
Although she had bathed earlier, Catherine decided to have a refreshing shower. Fifteen minutes later, liberally anointed with some of the scented essences she had found on a shelf in the en suite bathroom, she donned the diaphanous peach silk nightdress lying across the bed and slid between the sheets to lie back in a breathless state of anticipation and wait for Luc.
The minutes dragged past. She amused herself by thinking lovingly of how reassuring he had been about her dyslexia. He was right. She should have confided in him a long time ago. He would have understood. She saw that now, regretted her silence and subterfuge, and felt helplessly guilty about misjudging him so badly.
Somewhere in the midst of these ruminations, she dozed off and dreamt. It was the strangest dream. She was writing on a mirror, sound-spelling ‘Ah-ree-va’…and she was crying while she did it, reflections of what she was writing and her own unhappy face making the task all the more difficult. There was so much pain in that image that she wanted to scream with it, and she woke up with a start in the darkness, tears wet on her cheeks.
Somebody had switched the light out. She made that connection, bridging the gap between a piece of the past she had forgotten and the present. She slumped back against the pillows, clinging to the dream, but there was so little of it to hold on to and build on. It was the pain she recalled most, a bewildered, frantic sense of pain and defeat.