Chapter 26

'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.

Padding into the bathroom, s

he splashed her face and dried it. Who had switched the light off? It must have been Luc. He had come to her and she had been fast asleep. She lifted a weak hand to her forehead where the pounding in her temples was only slowly steadying. It was impossible to stifle a sudden, desperate, tearing need to be with him.

She approached the door in her bedroom which she assumed connected with his. Finding it locked, she frowned and crept out on to the gallery, dimly wondering what time it was. The bedroom itself was in darkness when she entered, but a triangle of light was spilling from the open bathroom door. She could hear a shower running and she smiled. It couldn't be that late. She scrambled into the turned-back bed as quietly as a mouse.

The shower went off and the light almost simultaneously. A second or two later the bedroom curtains were drawn back. Luc unlatched one of the windows and stood there in the moonlight, magnificently naked, towelling his hair dry.

He was asking to catch his death of cold but the urge to announce her presence dwindled. Whipcord muscles flexed taut beneath the smooth golden skin of his back. Her mouth ran dry. Feeling mortifyingly like a voyeur, she closed her eyes. The mattress gave slightly with his weight and three-quarters of the sheet was wrenched from her.

As he rolled over, punching a pillow and narrowly missing her head, he came into sudden contact with her. 'Dio!' Jerking semi-upright, he lunged at the light above the bed before she could prevent him.

One hand braced tautly on the carved headboard, he stared down at her in shock. 'Catherine?'

She could feel one of those ghastly beetroot blushes crawling in a tide over her exposed skin. Somehow his tone implied that the very last place he expected to find her was in his bed. 'I couldn't sleep.'

He slid lower on the mattress, surveying her intently, his cheekbones harshly accentuated. 'No more could I. Come here.' He reached out with a determined hand and brought her close, not giving her time to respond to what was more of a command than a request. 'I want you,' he admitted roughly. 'Do you have any idea how much I want you?'

'I'm here,' she whispered, suddenly shy of him.

Bending his dark head, he muttered something ferocious in Italian and crushed her lips apart with a savage urgency that took her very much by surprise. His tongue ravished the tender interior of her mouth. She might have been a life-saving draught to a male driven to the edge of madness by thirst. He bruised her lips and drank deep and long until her head swam and she couldn't breathe. Fire as elemental as he was leapt through her veins.

Her hands found his shoulders. He was burning up as though he had a fever, his skin hot and dry, his long, hard body savagely tense against hers. Lean fingers fumbled with an unusual lack of dexterity at the silk that concealed her from him. With a stifled growl of frustration, he drew back and tore the whisper-fine fabric apart with impatient hands.

'Luc!' Catherine surfaced abruptly from a drowning well of passion and fixed shocked eyes on him as he knelt over her, trailing the torn remnants from her and tossing them carelessly aside. As she made an instinctive attempt to cover herself from his devouring scrutiny, he caught at her wrists and flattened them to the bed.

'Please.' It was a word he very rarely employed and there was a note in that roughened plea that stabbed at her heart and made her ache.

Brilliant golden eyes ran over her in a look as physical as touch, exploring the burgeoning swell of her breasts, the smoothness of her narrow ribcage, the feminine curve of her hips and the soft curls at the juncture of her thighs.