Chapter 14

'How can you say that to me? I treated you with respect!' he ground out.

'That was respect?' A chokey laugh escaped her. She felt wild in that instant. If she had been a tigress, she would have clawed him to death in revenge. Her very powerlessness taunted her cruelly. 'When I look at you now, I wonder why it took me so long to come to my senses.'

'Since I arrived, you have looked everywhere but at me,' Luc said drily, deflatingly.

'I hate you, Luc. I hate you so much that if you dropped dead at my feet I'd dance on your corpse!' she vented in a feverish rush.

'The near future promises to be intriguing.'

'There isn't going to be one for us!' Catherine had never lost her head with anyone before, but it was happening now. As if it were not bad enough that he should stand there with the air of someone handling an escaped lunatic with enviable coo

l, he was ignoring every word she said. 'I'm not about to fall into line like one of your employees! Come back to you? You have to be out of your mind! You used me once, and I'd sooner be dead than let you do it again! I loved you, Luc. I loved you much more than you deserved to be loved—'

'I know,' he interposed softly.

A hectic flush carmined her cheeks, fury running rampant through her every skin-cell. 'What do you mean…you know? Where do you get the nerve to admit that?'

Unreadable golden eyes arrowed into her and lingered intently. 'I thought it might be in my favour.'

'In your favour? It makes what you did to me all the more unforgivable!' Catherine ranted in a fresh burst of outrage. 'You took everything I had to give and tried to pay for it, as though I were some tramp you'd picked up on a street-corner!'

His jawline clenched. 'I might have made one or two unfortunate errors of judgement,' he conceded after a very long pause. 'But, if you were dissatisfied with our relationship, you should have expressed that dissatisfaction.'

'I beg your pardon? Expressed it?' Catherine could hardly get the words out, she was so enraged. 'God forgive you, Luc, because I never will! Let me just make one little point. You can go out there and you can buy anything you want, but you can't buy me. I'm not available. I'm not up for sale. There's no price-tag attached, so what are you going to do?'

Trembling violently, she turned away from him, emotion still storming through her in a debilitating wave. She had never dreamt that she could attack Luc like that, but somehow it had simply happened. Yet in the aftermath she experienced no sense of pleasure; she felt only pain. A tearing, desperate pain that seemed to encompass her entire being. Just being in the same room with him hurt. She had sworn once that she would not let him do this to her. She would not let hatred poison the very air she breathed. But that wall inside her head was tumbling down brick by brick, and the vengeful force of all the feelings she had buried behind it was surging out of control. With those feelings came memories she fiercely sought to blank out…

That day he had given her the rose, he had escorted her down to a limousine. Cinderella had never had it so good. There had been no glass slipper to fall off at midnight. He had swept her off her feet into a world she had only read about in magazines. He had revelled in her wide eyes, her innocence, her inability to conceal her joy in merely being with him. For five days, she had been lost in a breathless round of excitement. Fancy night-clubs where they danced the night away, intimate meals in dimly lit restaurants…and his last evening in London, of course, in his hotel suite.

But even then Luc hadn't been predictable. When he had reduced her to the clinging, mindless state in his arms after dinner, he had set her back from him with a pronounced attitude of pious self-denial. 'I'm spending Christmas in Switzerland. Come with me,' he had urged lazily as though he were inviting her to merely cross the road.

She had been staggered, embarrassed, uncertain, but she had always been hopelessly sentimental about the festive season. Initially she had said no, uneasy about the prospect of letting Luc pay her way abroad.

'I don't know when I'll be back in London again.' A lie, though she hadn't known it then, as carefully processed as she had been by the preparation of two-month absences between meetings. What Luc didn't know about giving a woman withdrawal symptoms hadn't yet been written.

Convinced that she might lose him forever by letting old-fashioned principles come between them, she had caved in. She had been so dumb that she had expected them to be staying in a hotel in separate rooms. Even in the grip of the belief that she would walk off the edge of the world if he asked her to, she hadn't felt that she had known him long enough for anything else. He had returned to New York. Elaine Gould had been stunned to see a photo of her with Luc in a newspaper the next day. Elaine had tried to reason with her in a curt, well-meaning way. Even her landlady, breathlessly hung on the latest instalment of her romance, had given the thumbs-down to Switzerland. But she had been beyond the reach of sensible advice.

Six hours in an isolated Alpine chalet had been enough to separate her from a lifetime of principles. No seduction had ever been carried out more smoothly. No bride could have been brought to the marital bed with greater skill and consideration than Luc had employed. And, once Luc had taken her virginity, he had possessed her body and soul. She hadn't faced the fact that she knew about as much about having an affair as Luc knew about having a conscience. The towering passion had been there, the man of her dreams had been there, but the wedding had been nowhere on the horizon. She had given up everything for love…oh, you foolish, reckless woman, where were your wits?

'Catherine.' As she sank back to the present, she shivered. That accent still did something precarious to her knees.

'What were you thinking about?'

Blinking rapidly against the sting of tears, she breathed unsteadily, 'You don't want to know.'

'If you come back to me,' Luc murmured expressionlessly, 'I'll let Huntingdon have the contract.'

'Dear God, you can't bargain with a man's livelihood!' she gasped in horror.

'I can and I will.'

'I hate you! I'd be violently ill if you laid a finger on me!' she swore. Her legs were wobbling and she couldn't drag her eyes from his dark, unyielding features.

Unexpectedly, a smile curved his sensual mouth. 'I'll believe that when it happens.'

'Luc, please.' When it came down to it, she wasn't too proud to beg. She could not stand back and allow Drew to suffer by association with her. She could not disclaim responsibility and still live with herself. Luc did not utter idle threats. 'Please think of what you're doing. This is an ego-trip for you…'

A dark brow quirked. 'I've seldom enjoyed a less ego-boosting experience.'