The Secretary's Scandalous Secret (12 page)

‘There was no need,’ he drawled, shifting his attention away from the table and the candles and on to her, which was a far less thought-provoking sight.

‘I know, but I thought it would be nice for us to eat in. Honestly, I know it looks as though I’ve gone to a lot of trouble, but I really haven’t. It’s just a quick meal.’

Agatha tried to hide her disappointment at his less than enthusiastic response. But she felt awkward as she fussed around him, pouring him a glass of wine and laughing a little too brightly when he told her that candles were a fire hazard.

‘Aren’t you in the least bit romantic?’ She tried very hard not to sound wistful, but Luc’s shrewd green eyes still narrowed on her flushed, upturned face resting dreamily in the palm of one hand.

‘No,’ he told her abruptly, closing his knife and fork on a meal that he knew would have taken her quite a while to prepare. ‘So let’s not spoil the occasion by going down that
road. Believe me—it leads to a dead end.’ He pushed back his chair and watched her, his handsome face impassive.

Trapped in the suddenly uncomfortable silence, Agatha launched into a nervous explanation of what she had prepared for dessert. Luc relaxed. Hell, he wasn’t going to be seeing her for a week, possibly longer if his meetings overran. There were better things to do than eat chocolate fondant. He smiled, tilting his head to one side.

‘Let’s skip the fondant,’ he murmured, patting his lap and zeroing in on the sway of her magnificent body as she walked towards him. He eliminated his sense of foreboding with one decisive strike. ‘I’m hungry for something else.’

‘You only ever think about sex,’ Agatha half-laughed, although she could hear the thread of seriousness in her voice. But she sighed and yielded to her very passionate lover as he gently eased the stretchy dress off her shoulders, groaning with appreciation at the sight of her bare breasts.

He could do this to her, make all her thought processes come to a grinding halt just with one touch.

When he delicately lifted one heavy breast to his mouth, she wriggled on his lap and succumbed utterly to the soaring pleasure rushing through her like an unstoppable tide.

Somewhere along the line, he growled that this would be the last time he made love to her in her bedsit, because it was just too damned uncomfortable; she heard herself purr contentedly because that suited her fine.

Her bed might have been a lot smaller than his, but he still managed to touch her in all the right places, unerringly finding the pulsing heat of her womanhood and stoking it until she was whimpering to be brought to a climax.

He never tired of hearing that husky catch in her voice when she begged for him, and he never tired of the sight of her stripped bare with her fair hair in tousled curls around
her face and her creamy, smooth, voluptuous body writhing on the bed, caught up in the mindless pleasure only he could arouse in her.

Even though he knew that she was his, possession had not yet dimmed his craving for her. Sometimes at work he would find himself propelled down to her floor on the pretext of asking her something for no better reason than he wanted the pleasure of the accidental touch.

Knowing that he would not be with her for a while, he wanted to make their love-making last. Time and again he teased her, stroking her with his fingers, his mouth, his tongue, until she was lost. When he did finally thrust into her, she was wet and hot for him and it was an earth-shattering experience.

Still tender from their extended love-making, Agatha curled against him and half-closed her eyes when he ran his fingers through her hair.

‘Are you going to miss me?’ She eventually sighed, and Luc stilled, because there was an undercurrent to that question that was as loud to him as the clanging of church bells.

Which seemed an unfortunate allusion.

‘I’m going to be as busy as hell.’ He refused to be pinned down and he felt her shift against him, propping herself up and looking at him evenly.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I probably won’t have time to think about anything apart from making sure that we get this deal done.’

A chill breeze seemed to feather its way along her spine. She knew that she should just steer away from the topic, but perversely she couldn’t.

‘Will you call me?’

‘What’s going on here? What’s this all about?’

Two things were becoming blindingly clear to Agatha.

The first was that he couldn’t commit to calling her, and the second was that he couldn’t commit to calling her because he wasn’t even going to notice her absence. Maybe the absence of sex with her, but not
her.

She had dressed up what they had in lots of frills and bows and called it a relationship that was really going somewhere, but the truth was that it was all about the sex for Luc. Good heavens, he couldn’t even enjoy the dessert she had spent an hour and a half making the afternoon before, because he had wanted to get into bed with her.

Shame and anger curdled into a heady mix. She pulled away from him and sat up, arms folded, staring blindly ahead of her.

‘You tell me,’ Agatha said quietly. ‘I don’t know how it happened, but we’re lovers.’

‘You
don’t know how it happened?
It happened because we can’t resist one another.’ He pulled her against him but she resisted and Luc, sitting up now as well, threw his hands up in a gesture that was both elegant and telling.

‘Okay. What do you want me to say? That I’ll call you? I’ll call you.’ He was infuriated that she had contrived to spoil their last evening together for what might well run into two weeks by demanding answers from him that he wasn’t prepared to provide. He wasn’t a man who enjoyed being penned into a corner. Frankly, any such manoeuvre from a woman was charged with risk. But he would make the concession. Why not? He wanted her more than he had wanted any woman for a very long time. She did wonders for his jaded palate, and for that reason he would relinquish his natural urge to slam his instinctive barriers into place.

‘Now can we move on?’ he asked, trailing his finger along the tiny ridges of her spine and then smiling as he watched the tiny responsive flex of her body. Her mouth might be saying one thing but her body was singing a
completely different song, and the body could be very persuasive indeed. ‘I’ll phone you every day if you want,’ he volunteered magnanimously.

‘I don’t want you to phone me!’ Her eyes felt blurry now and she shrugged off his hand. She was rigid with tension. Like a high-wire walker who had taken the first step over the abyss, she now felt committed to carry on, no turning back. ‘I don’t want you to phone me because I’ve kicked up a fuss,’ she told him, her face half-inclined in his direction. ‘How desperate do you think I am?’

‘I never said anything about you being desperate,’ Luc groaned and muttered an oath of sheer frustration under his breath.

‘But it’s what you’re thinking. And I don’t blame you. I fell into bed with you and I’ve accommodated you every inch of the way!’

‘You’re getting hysterical.’

‘I am not getting hysterical!’ But she took a few deep breaths. ‘I just…I just want to know where this is going.’

‘Why is it important? We’re having fun, aren’t we?’

‘There’s more to life than having fun.’

Luc drew in a long, even breath. ‘I don’t want to get involved in this conversation. What we have is good. Why question it?’

‘Because I need to know if I’m wasting my time with you.’

Luc’s experience with women had not braced him for such a direct line of questioning. In the past, women had tried to infiltrate themselves into his life. They had never pinned him to the spot and demanded to know what his intentions were. They had nurtured implausible expectations which had manifested themselves in a sudden interest in the decor of his apartment, or a pressing need to prove what good cooks they were. Inevitably, that had signalled the end. Never had any
of them come right out and asked him if they were wasting their time. What kind of a question was that?

For a few seconds, he was literally speechless.

‘I’m going to have a shower,’ he hedged, getting out of bed. Agatha scrambled behind him, grabbing one of her oversized tee-shirts en route.

‘That’s not an answer!’ She screeched to a halt as he turned on the shower and stepped under it. He dwarfed the miniscule shower cubicle. Within seconds the bathroom was all steamed up. She took a few seconds to think about what she was going to say while she watched him with that compulsive fascination that she had always known to be a sign of weakness. She loved this man. She had let herself fall deeper and deeper in love with him while he had steadfastly stuck to the programme and enjoyed her for sex. In no way could she say that he had ever led her up a garden path.

‘I thought I could do this,’ Agatha managed to get out when the shower had been switched off and she wasn’t having to shout above the sound of running water. ‘I thought I could be a thoroughly modern person and have an affair with you because I’m attracted to you, but I can’t.’ She looked down at her fingers because it felt safer than to stare at him.

For a while, Luc didn’t say anything. He began putting on his clothes. He didn’t know why he should feel as if a rocket had exploded underneath him. Hadn’t he known all along that she was the old-fashioned sort of girl who engaged in relationships in the hope that they were going somewhere? He wondered how he could have ignored that simple, central truth and allowed his actions to be ruled by the driving power of lust. But he had, and he was repelled by his own weakness.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He addressed her downbent head, steeling himself against the insidious pull of sexual attraction which had been his downfall in the first place. ‘And I
wish I could let you buy into the fantasy that this will end in a walk up an aisle somewhere, but I can’t.’ He raked his fingers through his still-damp hair and frowned. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you. Please.’

Agatha reluctantly looked at him, although she strongly wanted to cover her ears and not hear what he was going to say.

‘I don’t know where this is going to end, or when, but marriage is never going to be on the cards.’

‘You can’t stay a bachelor all your life.’ There. It was out in the open.

‘When and if I ever do decide to get married,’ Luc delivered grimly, ‘It will be to a woman who understands my priorities. I’ve never told anyone this, but I’m going to tell you now because you deserve honesty: I was involved with a woman when my father died and I was summoned home.’ His mouth twisted in distaste at the memory. ‘I was faced with a mess that needed clearing up, and the only way I could clear it up was to jump in at the deep end. I worked twenty-four-hour days, seven days a week. Needless to say,’ he said with biting sarcasm, ‘The love of my life didn’t understand having to take a back seat to work commitments that were unavoidable. So, Agatha, I don’t do the romantic dramas. Not now, not ever.’

What he didn’t add was that he would eventually settle down with someone whose drive and ambition matched his own, or who was content to allow him the freedom to continue with life exactly as he wanted. He didn’t want the shrew in the background nagging away at him, telling him that he needed to work less, rolling her eyes to the ceiling every time he had to go abroad, trying to turn him into a domesticated, obedient man about the house. It was a well-rehearsed piece of wisdom he had lived by for as long as
he could remember. He wondered why it now sounded like a tired cliché.

‘I know you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, but believe me you’ll thank me for being honest with you one day. I’m not the sort of guy you need.’

‘No, you’re not,’ Agatha said bitterly.

‘You’re looking for someone who wants to join you with his head in the clouds and that person is never going to be me.’

‘Did you ever care about me at all?’ The question was torn out of her. She set her mouth in a stubborn line and looked at him.

‘Of course I cared about you.’ But his voice was rife with discomfort.

‘You mean you cared about sleeping with me. Maybe I was a complete idiot to think that we could be a significant part of each other’s lives. I just can’t believe that I’ve spent all this time,
wasted
all this time, falling in love with you!’ Agatha blinked rapidly to clear her vision, which was going a little misty.

‘I never asked you to,’ Luc told her, a dark flush accentuating the dramatic contours of his face. He squashed the treacherous streak of satisfaction her admission generated in him under the ruthless onward march of pure, cool logic.

A woman in love was a responsibility. However great the sex was, he could not and would not encourage her to nurture pointless dreams.

Agatha hung her head.

‘I could pretend that this was what you want, but I won’t, because I’m not that bloody minded.’ Her continuing silence, rather than hastening his departure, seemed to root him to the spot. ‘When…when did you realise that you were in love with me?’ On cue, his body reacted and he turned away abruptly.

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘No. Understandable.’

‘I didn’t want to. I
knew
that you weren’t the kind of guy who did commitment. But I started hoping.’

Luc was mesmerised by the lone tear that trickled down her cheek and plopped onto her fingers. He extracted a wad of tissues from the box on the chest of drawers and shoved them into her hand.

‘I should have done that Internet thing. It might have led somewhere.’

Luc didn’t want to get into a conversation about the dangers of Internet dating. Even knowing that she was already slipping into history, he still didn’t want to think of her sleeping with anyone else.

Agatha heard everything his silence was telling her. Yes, she should have done the Internet thing. They had had their fun, but she had a nesting instinct he was incapable of fulfilling. She cringed when she thought of how uncomfortable he must be, standing there while she wept and poured her heart out. It was just the sort of emotional weakness guaranteed to get on his nerves, but she wasn’t able to help herself.