Buch lesen: «Tempestuous Reunion»

is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon^® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

Tempestuous Reunion

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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CHAPTER ONE

‘MARRY you?’ Luc echoed, his brilliant dark gaze rampant with incredulity as he abruptly cast aside the financial report he had been studying. ‘Why would I want to marry you?’

Catherine’s slender hand was shaking. Hurriedly she set down her coffee-cup, her courage sinking fast. ‘I just wondered if you had ever thought of it.’ Her restless fingers made a minute adjustment to the siting of the sugar bowl. She was afraid to meet his eyes. ‘It was just an idea.’

‘Whose idea?’ he prompted softly. ‘You are perfectly content as you are.’

She didn’t want to think about what Luc had made of her. But certainly contentment had rarely featured in her responses. From the beginning she had loved him wildly, recklessly, and with that edge of desperation which prevented her from ever standing as his equal.

Over the past two years, she had swung between ecstasy and despair more times than he would ever have believed. Or cared to believe. This beautiful, luxurious apartment was her prison. Not his. She was a pretty songbird in a gilded cage for Luc’s exclusive enjoyment. But it wasn’t bars that kept her imprisoned, it was love.

She stole a nervous glance at him. His light intonation had been deceptive. Luc was silently seething. But not at her. His ire was directed at some imaginary scapegoat, who had dared to contaminate her with ideas, quite embarrassing ideas above her station.

‘Catherine,’ he pressed impatiently.

Under the table the fingernails of her other hand grooved sharp crescents into her damp palm. Skating on thin ice wasn’t a habit of hers with Luc. ‘It was my own idea and…I’d appreciate an answer,’ she dared in an ironic lie, for she didn’t really want that answer; she didn’t want to hear it.

Had the Santini electronics empire crashed overnight, Luc could not have looked more grim than he did now, pierced by a thorn from a normally very well-trained source. ‘You have neither the background nor the education that I would require in my wife. There, it is said,’ he delivered with the decisive speed and the ruthlessness which had made his name as much feared as respected in the business world. ‘Now you need wonder no longer.’

Every scrap of colour slowly drained from her cheeks. She recoiled from the brutal candour she had invited, ashamed to discover that she had, after all, nurtured a tiny, fragile hope that deep down inside he might feel differently. Her soft blue eyes flinched from his, her head bowing. ‘No, I won’t need to wonder,’ she managed half under her breath.

Having devastated her, he relented infinitesimally. ‘This isn’t what I would term breakfast conversation,’ he murmured with a teasing harshness that she easily translated into a rebuke for her presumption in daring to raise the subject. ‘Why should you aspire to a relationship within which you would not be at ease…hmm? As a lover, I imagine, I am far less demanding than I would be as a husband.’

In the midst of what she deemed to be the most agonising d;aaenouement of her life, an hysterical giggle feathered dangerously in her convulsed throat. A blunt, sun-browned finger languorously played over the knuckles showing white beneath the skin of her clenched hand. Even though she was conscious that Luc was using his customary methods of distraction, the electricity of a powerful sexual chemistry tautened her every sinew and the fleeting desire to laugh away the ashes of painful disillusionment vanished.

With a faint sigh, he shrugged back a pristine silk shirt cuff to consult the rapier-thin Cartier watch on his wrist and frowned.

‘You’ll be late for your meeting.’ She said it for him as she stood up, for the very first time fiercely glad to see the approach of the departure which usually tore her apart.

Luc rose fluidly upright to regard her narrowly. ‘You’re jumpy this morning. Is there something wrong?’

The other matter, she registered in disbelief, was already forgotten, written off as some impulsive and foolishly feminine piece of nonsense. It wouldn’t occur to Luc that she had deliberately saved that question until he was about to leave. She hadn’t wanted to spoil the last few hours they would ever spend together.

‘No…what could be wrong?’ Turning aside, she reddened. But he had taught her the art of lies and evasions, could only blame himself when he realised what a monster he had created.

‘I don’t believe that. You didn’t sleep last night.’

She froze into shocked stillness. He strolled back across the room to link confident arms round her small, slim figure, easing her round to face him. ‘Perhaps it is your security that you are concerned about.’

The hard bones and musculature of the lean, superbly fit body against hers melted her with a languor she couldn’t fight. And, arrogantly acquainted with that shivery weakness, Luc was satisfied and soothed. A long finger traced the tremulous fullness of her lower lip. ‘Some day our paths will separate,’ he forecast in a roughened undertone. ‘But that day is still far from my mind.’

Dear God, did he know what he did to her when he said things like that? If he did, why should he care? In probably much the same fashion he cracked the whip over key executives to keep them on their toes. He was murmuring something smooth about stocks and shares that she refused to listen to. You can’t buy love, Luc. You can’t pay for it either. When are you going to find that out?

While his hunger for her remained undiminished, she understood that she was safe. She took no compliment from the desire she had once naïvely believed was based on emotion. For the several days a month which Luc allotted cool-headedly to the pursuit of light entertainment, she had every attention. But that Luc had not even guessed that the past weeks had been unadulterated hell for her proved the shallowness of the bond on his side. She had emerged from the soap-bubble fantasy she had started building against reality two years ago. He didn’t love her. He hadn’t suddenly woken up one day to realise that he couldn’t live without her…and he never would.

‘You’ll be late,’ she whispered tautly, disconcerted by the glitter of gold now burnishing the night-dark scrutiny skimming her upturned face. When Luc decided to leave, he didn’t usually linger.

The supple fingers resting against her spine pressed her closer, his other hand lifting to wind with cool possessiveness into the curling golden hair tumbling down her back. ‘Bella mia,’ he rhymed in husky Italian, bending his dark head to taste her moistly parted lips with the inherent sensuality and the tormenting expertise which all along had proved her downfall.

Stabbed by her guilty conscience, she dragged herself fearfully free before he could taste the strange, unresponsive chill that was spreading through her. ‘I’m not feeling well,’ she muttered in jerky excuse, terrified that she was giving herself away.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that sooner? You ought to lie down.’ He swept her up easily in his arms, started to kiss her again, and then, with an almost imperceptible darkening of colour, abstained long enough to carry her into the bedroom and settle her down on the tossed bed.

He hovered, betraying a rare discomfiture. Scrutinising her wan cheeks and the pared-down fragility of her bone-structure, he expelled his breath in a sudden sound of derision. ‘If this is another result of one of those asinine diets of yours, I’m likely to lose my temper. When are you going to get it through your head that I like you as you are? Do you want to make yourself ill? I don’t have any patience with this foolishness, Catherine.’

‘No,’ she agreed, beyond seeing any humour in his misapprehension.

‘See your doctor today,’ he instructed. ‘And if you don’t, I’ll know about it. I’ll mention it to Stevens on my way out.’

At the reference to the security guard, supposedly there for her protection but more often than not, she suspected, there to police her every move, she curved her cheek into the pillow. She didn’t like Stevens. His deadpan detachment and extreme formality intimidated her.

‘How are you getting on with him, by the way?’

‘I understood that I wasn’t supposed to get on with your security men. Isn’t that why you transferred Sam Halston?’ she muttered, grateful for the change of subject, no matter how incendiary it might be.

‘He was too busy flirting with you to be effective,’ Luc parried with icy emphasis.

‘That’s not true. He was only being friendly,’ she protested.

‘He wasn’t hired to be friendly. If you’d treated him like an employee he’d still be here,’ Luc underlined with honeyed dismissal. ‘And now I really have to leave. I’ll call you from Milan.’

He made it sound as if he were dispensing a very special favour. In fact, he called her every day no matter where he was in the world. And now he was gone.

When that phone did ring tomorrow, it would ring and ring through empty rooms. For tortured minutes she just lay and stared at the space where he had been. Dark and dynamic, he was hell on wheels for a vulnerable woman. In their entire association she had never had an argument with Luc. By fair means or foul, Luc always got his own way. Her feeble attempts to assert herself had long since sunk without trace against the tide of an infinitely more forceful personality.

He was now reputedly one of the top ten richest men in the world. At twenty-nine that was a wildly impressive achievement. He had started out with nothing but formidable intelligence in the streets of New York’s Little Italy. And he would keep on climbing. Luc was always number one and never more so than in his own self-image. Power was the greatest aphrodisiac known to humanity. What Luc wanted he reached out and took, and to hell with the damage he caused as long as the backlash did not affect his comfort. And, having fought for everything he had ever got, what came easy had no intrinsic value for him.

‘The lone wolf,’ Time magazine had dubbed him in a recent article, endeavouring to penetrate the mystique of a rogue among the more conventional herd of the hugely successful.

A shark was a killing machine, superbly efficient within its own restricted field. And wolves mated for life, not for leisure-time amusement. But Luc was indeed a land-based animal and far from cold-blooded. As such he was all the more dangerous to the unwary, the innocent and the over-confident.

Technical brilliance alone hadn’t built his empire. It was the energy source of one man’s drive combined with a volatile degree of unpredictability which kept competitors at bay in a cut-throat market. She could have told that journalist exactly what Luc Santini was like. And that was hard, cruelly hard with the cynicism, the self-interest and the ruthless ambition that was bred into his very bones. Only a fool got in Luc’s path…only a very foolish woman could have given her heart into his keeping.

Her eyes squeezed shut on a shuddering spasm of anguish. It was over now. She would never see Luc again. No miracle had astounded her at the eleventh hour. Marriage was not, nor would it ever be, a possibility. Her small hand spread protectively over her no longer concave stomach. Luc had begun to lose her one hundred per cent loyalty and devotion from the very hour she suspected that she was carrying his child.

Instinct had warned her that the news would be greeted as a calculated betrayal and, no doubt, the conviction that she had somehow achieved the condition all on her own. Again and again she had put off telling him. In fear of discovery, she had learnt to be afraid of Luc. When he married a bride with a social pedigree, a bride bred to the lofty heights that were already his, he wouldn’t want any skeletons in the cupboard. Ice-cold and sick with apprehensions that she had refused to face head on, she wiped clumsily at her swollen eyes and got up.

He would never know now and that was how it had to be. Thank God, she had persuaded Sam to show her how to work the alarm system. She would leave by the rear entrance. That would take care of Stevens. Would Luc miss her? A choked sob of pain escaped her. He would be outraged that she could leave him and he had not foreseen the event. But he wouldn’t have any trouble replacing her. She was not so special and she wasn’t beautiful. She never had grasped what it was about her which had drawn Luc. Unless it was the cold intuition of a predator scenting good doormat material downwind, she conceded shamefacedly.

How could she be sorry to leave this half-life behind? She had no friends. When discretion was demanded, friends were impossible. Luc had slowly but surely isolated her so that her entire existence revolved round him. Sometimes she was so lonely that she talked out loud to herself. Love was a fearsome emotion, she thought with a convulsive shudder. At eighteen she had been green as grass. Two years on, she didn’t feel she was much brighter but she didn’t build castles in the air any more.

‘Arrivederci, Luc, grazie tanto,’ she scrawled in lipstick across the mirror. A theatrical gesture, the ubiquitous note. He could do without the ego boost of five tear-stained pages telling him pointlessly that nobody was ever likely to love him as much as she did.

Luc, she had learnt by destructive degrees, didn’t rate love any too highly. But he had not been above using her love as a weapon against her, twisting her emotions with cruel expertise until they had become the bars of her prison cell.

* * *

‘What are you doing with my books?’

Catherine straightened from the cardboard box and clashed with stormy dark eyes. ‘I’m packing them. Do you want to help?’ she prompted hopefully. ‘We could talk.’

Daniel kicked at a chair leg, his small body stiff and defensive. ‘I don’t want to talk about moving.’

‘Ignoring it isn’t going to stop it happening,’ Catherine warned.

Daniel kicked moodily at the chair leg again, hands stuck in his pockets, miniature-tough style. Slowly Catherine counted to ten. Much more of this and she would scream until the little men in the white coats came to take her away. How much longer was her son going to treat her as the wickedest and worst mother in the world? With a determined smile, she said, ‘Things aren’t half as bad as you seem to think they are.’

Daniel looked at her dubiously. ‘Have we got any money?’

Taken aback by the demand, Catherine coloured and shifted uncomfortably. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I heard John’s mum telling Mrs Withers that we had no money ’cos if we had we would’ve bought this house and stayed here.’

Catherine could happily have strangled the woman for speaking so freely in Daniel’s presence. He might be only four but he was precociously bright for his age. Daniel already understood far too much of what went on around him.

‘It’s not fair that someone can take our house off us and sell it to someone else when we want to live here forever!’ he burst out without warning.

The pain she glimpsed in his over-bright eyes tore cruelly at her. Unfortunately there was little that she could do to assuage that pain. ‘Greyfriars has never been ours,’ she reminded him tautly. ‘You know that, Daniel. It belonged to Harriet, and on her death she gave it to charity. Now the people who run that charity want to sell and use the money to—’

Daniel threw her a sudden seething glance. ‘I don’t care about those people starving in Africa! This is our house! Where are we going to live?’

‘Drew has found us a flat in London,’ she told him yet again.

‘You can’t keep a donkey in London!’ Daniel launched at her fierily. ‘Why can’t we live with Peggy? She said we could.’

Catherine sighed. ‘Peggy really doesn’t have enough room for us.’

‘I’ll run away and you can live in London all on your own because I’m not going without Clover!’ Daniel shouted at her in a tempestuous surge of fury and distress. ‘It’s all your fault. If I’d had a daddy, he could’ve bought us this house like everybody else’s daddy does! I bet he could even have made Harriet well again…I hate you ’cos you can’t do anything!’

With that bitter condemnation, Daniel hurtled out of the back door. He would take refuge in one of his hiding places in the garden. There he would sit, brooding and struggling to cope with harsh adult realities that entailed the loss of all he held dear. She touched the solicitor’s letter on the table. She would be even more popular when he realised that their holiday on Peggy’s family farm was no longer possible either.

Sometimes—such as now—Catherine had this engulfing sense of total inadequacy in Daniel’s radius. Daniel was not quite like other children. At two he had taken apart a radio and put it back together again, repairing it in the process. At three he had taught himself German by listening to a language programme on television. But he was still too young to accept necessary sacrifices. Harriet’s death had hit him hard, and now he was losing his home, a much-loved pet donkey, the friends he played with…in short, all the remaining security that had bounded his life to date. Was it any wonder that he was frightened? How could she reassure him when she too was afraid of the future?

The conviction that catastrophe was only waiting to pounce round the next blind corner had never really left Catherine. Harriet’s sudden death had fulfilled her worst imaginings. With one savage blow, the tranquil and happy security of their lives had been shattered. And right now it felt as though she’d been cruelly catapulted back to where she had started out over four years ago…

Her life had been in a mess, heading downhill at a seemingly breakneck pace. She had had the promising future of a kamikaze pilot. And then Harriet had come along. Harriet, so undervalued by those who knew her best. Harriet…in his exasperation, Drew had once called her a ‘charming mental deficient’. Yet Harriet had picked Catherine up, dusted her down and set her back on the rails again. In the process, Harriet had also become the closest thing to a mother that Catherine had ever known.

They had met on a train. That journey and that meeting had forever altered Catherine’s future. While they had shared the same compartment, Harriet had tried repeatedly to strike up a conversation. When you were locked up tight and terrified of breaking down in public, you didn’t want to talk. But Harriet’s persistence had forced her out of her self-absorption, and before very long her over-taxed emotions had betrayed her and somehow she had ended up telling Harriet her life-story.

Afterwards she had been embarrassed, frankly eager to escape the older woman’s company. They had left the train at the same station. Nothing poor Harriet had said about her ‘having made the right decision’ had penetrated. Like an addict, sick for a long-overdue fix, Catherine had been unbelievably desperate just to hear the sound of a man’s voice on the phone. Throwing Harriet a guilty goodbye, she had raced off towards the phone-box she could see across the busy car park.

What would have happened had she made that call? That call that would have been a crowning and unforgivable mistake in a relationship which had been a disaster from start to finish?

She would never know now. In her mad haste to reach that phone, she had run in front of a car. It had taken total physical incapacitation to finally bring her to her senses. She had spent the following three months recovering from her injuries in hospital. Days had passed before she had been strong enough to recognise the soothing voice that drifted in and out of her haze of pain and disorientation. It had belonged to Harriet. Knowing that she had no family, Harriet had sat by her in Intensive Care, talking back the dark for her. If Harriet hadn’t been there, Catherine didn’t believe she would ever have emerged from the dark again.

Even before his premature birth, Daniel had had to fight for survival. Coming into the world, he had screeched for attention, tiny and weak but indomitably strong-willed. From his incubator he had charmed the entire medical staff by surmounting every set-back within record time. Catherine had begun to appreciate then that, with the genes her son carried to such an unmistakably marked degree, a ten-ton truck couldn’t have deprived him of existence, never mind his careless mother’s collision with a mere car.

‘He’s a splendid little fighter,’ Harriet had proclaimed proudly, relishing the role of surrogate granny as only an intensely lonely woman could. Drew had been sincerely fond of his older sister but her eccentricities had infuriated him, and his sophisticated French wife, Annette, and their teenage children had had no time for Harriet at all. Greyfriars was situated on the outskirts of an Oxfordshire village, a dilapidated old house, surrounded by untamed acres of wilderness garden. Harriet and Drew had been born here and Harriet had vociferously withstood her brother’s every attempt to refurbish the house for her. Surroundings had been supremely unimportant to Harriet. Lame ducks had been Harriet’s speciality.

Catherine’s shadowed gaze roamed over the homely kitchen. She had made the gingham curtains fluttering at the window, painted the battered cupboards a cheerful fire-engine red sold off cheap at the church f;afete. This was their home. In every sense of the word. How could she persuade Daniel that he would be as happy in a tiny city flat when she didn’t believe it herself? But, dear God, that flat was their one and only option.

A light knock sounded on the back door. Without awaiting an answer, her friend Peggy Downes breezed in. A tall woman in her thirties with geometrically cut red hair, she dropped down on to the sagging settee by the range with the ease of a regular visitor. She stared in surprise at the cardboard box. ‘Aren’t you being a little premature with your packing? You’ve still got a fortnight to go.’

‘We haven’t.’ Catherine passed over the solicitor’s letter. ‘It’s just as well that Drew said we could use his apartment if we were stuck. We can’t stay here until the end of the month and the flat won’t be vacant before then.’

‘Hell’s teeth! They wouldn’t give you that extra week?’ Peggy exclaimed incredulously.

As Peggy’s mobile features set into depressingly familiar lines of annoyance, Catherine turned back to the breakfast dishes, hoping that her friend wasn’t about to climb back on her soap-box to decry the terms of Harriet’s will and their imminent move to city life. In recent days, while exuding the best of good intentions, Peggy had been very trying and very impractical.

‘We have no legal right to be here at all,’ Catherine pointed out.

‘But morally you have every right and I would’ve expected a charitable organisation to be more generous towards a single parent.’ Peggy’s ready temper was rising on Catherine’s behalf. ‘Mind you, I don’t know why I’m blaming them. This whole mess is your precious Harriet’s fault!’

‘Peggy—’

‘Sorry, but I believe in calling a spade a spade.’ That was an unnecessary reminder to anyone acquainted with Peggy’s caustic tongue. ‘Honestly, Catherine…sometimes I think you must have been put on this earth purely to be exploited! You don’t even seem to realise when people are using you! What thanks did you get for wasting four years of your life running after Harriet?’

‘Harriet gave us a home when we had nowhere else to go. She had nothing to thank me for.’

‘You kept this house, waited on her hand and foot and slaved over all her pet charity schemes,’ Peggy condemned heatedly. ‘And for all that you received board and lodging and first pick of the jumble-sale clothes! So much for charity’s beginning at home!’

‘Harriet was the kindest and most sincere person I’ve ever known,’ Catherine parried tightly.

And crazy as a coot, Peggy wanted to shriek in frustration. Admittedly Harriet’s many eccentricities had not appeared to grate on Catherine as they had on other, less tolerant souls. Catherine hadn’t seemed to notice when Harriet talked out loud to herself and her conscience, or noisily emptied the entire contents of her purse into the church collection plate. Catherine hadn’t batted an eyelash when Harriet brought dirty, smelly tramps home to tea and offered them the freedom of her home.

The trouble with Catherine was…It was a sentence Peggy often began and never managed to finish to her satisfaction. Catherine was the best friend she had ever had. She was also unfailingly kind, generous and unselfish, and that was quite an accolade from a female who thought of herself as a hardened cynic. How did you criticise someone for such sterling qualities? Unfortunately it was exactly those qualities which had put Catherine in her present predicament.

Catherine drifted along on another mental plane. Meeting those misty blue eyes in that arrestingly lovely face, Peggy was helplessly put in mind of a child cast adrift in a bewildering adult world. There was something so terrifyingly innocent about Catherine’s penchant for seeing only the best in people and taking them on trust. There was something so horribly defenceless about her invariably optimistic view of the world.

She was a sucker for every sob-story that came her way and a wonderful listener. She didn’t know how to say no when people asked for favours. This kitchen was rarely empty of callers, mothers in need of temporary childminders or someone to look after the cat or the dog or the dormouse while they were away. Catherine was very popular locally. If you were in a fix, she would always lend a hand. But how many returned those favours? Precious few, in Peggy’s experience.

‘At the very least, Harriet ought to have left you a share of her estate,’ Peggy censured.

Catherine put the kettle on to boil. ‘And how do you think Drew and his family would have felt about that?’

‘Drew isn’t short of money.’

‘Huntingdon’s is a small firm. He isn’t a wealthy man.’

‘He has a big house in Kent and an apartment in central London. If that isn’t wealthy, what is?’ Peggy demanded drily.

Catherine suppressed a groan. ‘Business hasn’t been too brisk for the firm recently. Drew has already had to sell some property he owned, and though he wouldn’t admit it, he must have been disappointed by Harriet’s will. As building land this place will fetch a small fortune. He could have done with a windfall.’

‘And by the time the divorce comes through Annette will probably have stripped him of every remaining movable asset,’ Peggy mused.

‘She didn’t want the divorce,’ Catherine murmured.

Peggy pulled a face. ‘What difference does that make? She had the affair. She was the guilty partner.’

Catherine made the tea, reflecting that it was no use looking to Peggy for tolerance on the subject of marital infidelity. Her friend was still raw from the break-up of her own marriage. But Peggy’s husband had been a womaniser. Annette was scarcely a comparable case. Business worries and a pair of difficult teenagers had put the Huntingdon marriage under strain. Annette had had an affair and Drew had been devastated. Resisting her stricken pleas for a reconciliation, Drew had moved out and headed straight for his solicitor. Funny how people rarely reacted as you thought they would in a personal crisis. Catherine had believed he would forgive and forget. She had been wrong.

‘I still hope they sort out their problems before it’s too late,’ she replied quietly.

‘Why should he want to? He’s only fifty…an attractive man, still in his prime…’

‘I suppose he is,’ Catherine allowed uncertainly. She was very fond of Harriet’s brother, but she wasn’t accustomed to thinking of him on those terms.

‘A man who somehow can’t find anything better to do than drive down here at weekends to play with Daniel,’ Peggy commented with studied casualness.

Unconscious of her intent scrutiny, Catherine laughed. ‘He’s at a loose end without his family.’

Peggy cleared her throat. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that Drew might have a more personal interest at stake here?’

Catherine surveyed her blankly.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Peggy groaned. ‘Do I have to spell it out? His behaviour at the funeral raised more brows than mine. If you lifted anything heavier than a teacup, he was across the room like young Lochinvar! I think he’s in love with you.’