A Proposal To Secure His Vengeance. Kate Walker
was a scent that jolted her sharply out of the present and right back to a holiday in Corsica two years before. A starlit night, still warm after the burning heat of the day. The slide of soft sand under her feet, the sound of waves breaking in her ear and the hard, warm palm of the man who had just become her very first lover tight against her own as they walked along the beach.
The man who, just six days later, had broken her heart.
‘No?’
That shockingly familiar voice was back, softly questioning in her ear, and she blinked hard against the red mist that had hazed her eyes.
This had to be a mistake; a crazy, mindless fantasy. Her unwanted memories had created a mirage in her mind, conjuring up an image of the man she had weakly let into her thoughts for a moment but now wanted so desperately to forget.
‘R-Raoul...’
The name stumbled from her lips as she forced herself to focus and found it only made matters worse. That tall, lean frame was a powerful, dark force in the silent atmosphere of the little church.
‘Ma chère Imogen.’
It was soft, almost gentle. But that gentleness was a lie, she knew. There was no tenderness in this man, as she should have realised from the start. If she had, she might have escaped with her body and her heart intact. Her baby might never have been conceived—or was that actually the worst thing that could have happened? To have known Raoul’s child growing inside her for even the shortest time had brought her such joy, such happiness, that she could never have wished it hadn’t happened. Even if it had ended so cruelly.
‘I’m not your chère anything!’ she retorted, pulling away from him with a force that rammed her hip into the wooden side of the pew. ‘Not now—not ever! And I never wanted to be.’
‘Of course not.’ His tone made a mockery of her declaration.
He moved slightly, stepping out of the direct light and into a spot where the multi-coloured gleam of the sun burning through the stained-glass windows turned his face into a mosaic of blues and reds, a tiny touch of gold gilding the hard slash of carved cheekbones. The skin was drawn rather more tightly across those bones than it had been before and there were a few more lines around his eyes than she recalled but, if anything, those tiny signs of the passing of years only added to the devastating appeal of his stunning features. The colours from the window played like a kaleidoscope over the white shirt he wore, sleeves rolled up over long, muscular forearms. The shadowy interior of the church hid the burnished glow of golden skin, softly hazed with crisp black hair, but Imogen didn’t need to see to remember.
She knew what those arms looked like when gilded by the Corsican sun; knew only too well the feel of them curled around her waist, pressed close up against her skin where it was exposed by the vivid blue bikini she’d felt brave enough to wear in the heat of the sun. And in the heat of his appreciative eyes. She knew what it felt like to lie with her cheek resting on the strength and solidity of his bones, the power of his muscles, the scent of his skin in her nostrils as the beat of her heart slowly ebbed and she slipped into sleep, exhausted after a night of love-making.
She knew too well—and she didn’t want to remember.
‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe that,’ he drawled now.
‘Believe it! It’s the truth.’
The burn in her veins chilled as she watched his beautiful mouth twist in a cynical response.
‘That wasn’t what you said at the time.’
It sounded almost gentle, but the ice in his golden-eyed stare warned her she’d be a fool to believe there was anything kind in him at all.
‘What I said at the time didn’t mean a thing.’
Imogen drew in her breath in a rush, fighting for control. She felt she was being dragged backwards into her past, swallowed up by a dangerous quicksand, suffocating slowly and painfully. Head over heels and crazy in love, all she’d done was to say that she didn’t want their sun-filled idyll to end, that she wanted to stay with him. She’d never expected he would turn on her, accuse her of being a greedy gold-digger and dismiss her—for good, he had declared.
‘Those were the foolish, thoughtless declarations of a naïve adolescent. I’d had too much sun, too much wine...or something.’
Too much of Raoul Cardini, certainly. But she’d never been drunk when she was with him—she’d never needed to be. He was intoxicating enough to make her mind swim in heated abandon. She’d never had a head for wine anyway, or the taste for it. Except for that one crazy evening she’d spent with Ciara just after they’d rediscovered each other. They’d both been struggling with the darkness that had fallen over their lives, and as a result the joy of the evening together had gone to their heads faster than the most potent alcohol.
‘None of it was true—none of it was real.’
‘And none of it is relevant now.’
Cold and cutting, it made her feel as if the ground beneath her had shifted disturbingly. She’d known two years ago that he could turn away from her without a second’s thought, dismissing all she’d believed they’d been to each other in between one breath and another. But she’d never heard him state it in words of pure ice that he tossed in her face without a blink. And once she knew just how impossible she had found it to forget him, that realisation slashed deep into her soul.
She wished she could find the strength to turn and walk right out of here. Brush straight past him and head for the door. The trouble was that she didn’t think ‘brush’ would be the word to describe the way she would encounter Raoul on the way. Even whispering past the tall, forceful body of the man before her would be like thudding straight into a brick wall.
‘Nothing between us is relevant at all. So, if you’d just let me past...’
An elegant wave of his hand indicated the fact that there was plenty of space for her to walk by him.
‘Be my guest.’
She was nearly past him when he stirred slightly and she could hear the hateful smile in his voice as it drifted after her.
‘I’ll see you back at the house.’
It stopped her dead, her head ringing as if his words had been a blow.
‘I think not!’
It was only now she realised, shockingly and disturbingly, that there was a question she had never asked. One that should have been right at the forefront of her mind from the moment he had first spoken to her but she’d been too stunned even to consider. She’d never thought fate could be so unkind. It was bad enough that he should be here, now, so close to her wedding day, but to think that this was not just an appalling error of chance...
‘You’re not coming back to the house!’
‘Oh, but I am.’
That brought her spinning round, needing to see his face. The deadly smile was still there in his voice but there wasn’t a trace of it in his expression.
‘No way. I mean...why are you here at all?’
There it was. The question she should have asked from the start. The one that, she now realised, she hadn’t dared to ask because she’d feared the answer.
Now the smile was not just in his eyes but very definitely curling the edges of that obscenely sexy mouth. At least, it was obscene for Imogen to consider anything about this man sexy. That was what had caught her in the first place, trapping her in the coils of his dark sensuality, taking her life out of her hands and putting it into his, to torment and break as he wished.
‘Your father invited me, of course.’
The deadly nonchalance with which he tossed the words at her made her stomach tighten.
‘Dad? You’re kidding!’
That