it should really have put me squarely in my lowly place.’
‘But it didn’t?’ He raised a questioning eyebrow.
Lizzy shook her head, aware that her heart was pounding erratically, but unaware that she was still holding onto his fingers—or that those fingers had curled around hers.
‘You are still the guy who blackmailed me into marrying you to salve your ravaged pride and I am still the woman you paid to salve that ravaged pride!’
‘You believe that there are no other women out there who would have jumped eagerly into your shoes?’
‘I would imagine there are hundreds,’ Lizzy said coolly. ‘But aren’t you the one that told me you could not be bothered to hunt?’
‘Quick.’ He smiled—then tugged on her fingers. Next thing she was lying in a slither of bridal silk across his chest. Her surprised gasp had barely broken free of her lips before she received the full passionate onslaught of his kiss. And this time it was hot and hard and deeply probing, as if he was deliberately piling on the passion in each kiss by carefully calculated degrees. By the time he raised his head again Lizzy felt dazed and shaken, her breathing fast and thick. Her lips felt bruised and the way he ran a finger across their warm, pulsing surface was a source of mockery in itself.
‘As you see,’ he murmured softly, ‘I still do not need to hunt.’
It was such a slap at the way she’d gone into the kiss without putting up a fight that Lizzy paled and scrambled off his lap. Her dress was dishevelled, and as she tried to smooth it with unsteady fingers she felt the sultry burn of his eyes as he watched her, felt the drumming pulse of his sexual domination and the worst feeling of all—his amusement.
‘I did warn you once, cara, that I am more experienced at these games than you are,’ he reminded her from his languid sprawl on the other side of the car. ‘Be a little wiser and stop trying to take me on.’
The car slowed then, sending her eyes to the side window to see that they’d arrived back at the villa without her noticing. Though her biggest surprise was that she hadn’t known there was a different way into the villa other than via the lake. Now a huge pair of heavy iron gates were in the process of swinging open. The car glided through them and on through extensive gardens to pull to a smooth halt beneath a covered portico to the side of the house.
She hadn’t dared to come outside while she’d been staying here because she hadn’t wanted any members of the press to snatch a picture of her from their siege position on the lake. But glancing towards the lake now as Luc helped her alight from the car, she was stunned to see that it was no longer there! All view of the lake had been totally blanked out by a wall of sturdy white canvas that had been erected along the cliff edge—she assumed to frustrate greedy camera lenses from taking pictures of the wedding celebration about to take place.
The whole celebrity-style over-the-top show intimidated her from that moment onward. If Bianca had been here Lizzy would have taken it all in her stride with a dose of healthy humour to help her along. But then if Bianca had been here, she would have been the bride at this wedding and taking the sparkling centre of attention as her due, with Lizzy happy to fade into the background, as she liked to do.
As it was, she wasn’t allowed to fade anywhere. She had to stand beside her new husband and welcome their guests in from the church.
His guests, she reminded herself. His wedding day. None of her friends had been invited, just her father, whose disapproval still showed when he arrived and gave her a stiff hug.
Her eyes pleaded with him for understanding, but all he saw when he looked at her was a woman like her mother, and there was no forgiveness in him at all. It was like being deserted by her only ally and she found she had to fight back the tears as she watched him turn his back on her and walk away.
‘Explain to me what the hell that was about,’ the man standing beside her demanded.
But Lizzy just gave a silent shake of her head and blinked the tears away. A man like Luc would never understand what it felt like to be crushed beneath the weight of someone’s disapproval. The feeling would be as alien to him as—as feeling uncomfortable with the sensation he’d caused with his quick change of bride! In all the years since her mother had left them, Lizzy had tried her best to show none of her wayward traits. But as she stood here now in this beautiful villa, wearing this beautiful gown, feeling so rejected by the one person she should have been able to rely upon for support, she had to ask herself if spending her life trying to earn her father’s approval had just been a useless waste of her time.
And her now very crushed heart.
The endless stream of elegant guests kept on coming. She smiled, she endured the looks of cool interest, the polite comments and the sometimes not so polite. Hurt clung heavily to her chest while her face maintained its placid composure and Luc kept her close to him, with his arm strapped at an angle across her back so his hand could rest in the indentation of her waist.
Eventually they began to circulate. No one got to speak to either of them individually. His hand remained a firm clamp at her waist. He was showing a united front and no amount of teasing from his closer friends about his possessive attitude to his bride could budge him from her side.
They ate from a beautiful serve-yourself banquet—Lizzy nibbled sparingly, held her untouched glasses of bubbling champagne and endured the amused, mostly ironical speech from Luc’s best man with her eyes carefully lowered, Luc with a wry but complacent smile on his face.
Nothing touched him, she noticed. The man had nerves of steel and no emotion at all. Yet she knew by the changing grip of his fingers on her waist that sometimes something violent erupted inside him, especially when they caught the edges of hushed conversations discussing Bianca and the fact that the poor jilted bride seemed to have slipped off the face of the earth.
Was his response due to anger or pain? When she glanced up at his face, it, of course, revealed nothing.
She caught fleeting glimpses of her father in the crowd and wanted to go and ask him if he’d heard from Matthew, but every time the thought hit, Luc was guiding her off in the opposite direction.
The afternoon wore on with agonising slowness until she began to really feel the strain of maintaining her smile. So when Luc bent his head to tell her quietly that it was time for her to go and change out of her dress, she was so pathetically relieved to be given an excuse to escape she didn’t even bother to ask him why she needed to change.
Carla the giggly maid was waiting for her when she reached her bedroom. She provided the answers as she helped her out of her wedding dress.
‘It is such a shame that you must remove this beautiful gown so soon, signora.’ Carla sighed wistfully. ‘But with your new clothes all packed in your bags and already on their way, it must be so exciting and romantic to be swept away by the signor to your secret honeymoon destination.’
Honeymoon—?
CHAPTER FIVE
OH, PLEASE don’t, Lizzy thought helplessly, so horrified that Luc was intending to take this romantic stuff that far that her lips came together with a snap to stop the groaned protest from slipping out.
But the protest glowed in her eyes as she came back downstairs dressed in a soft green wraparound dress that clung lovingly to her figure and swirled around her knees.
Luc was already waiting at the bottom of the stairs for her. He had changed too, into a soft coffee-coloured linen suit and a simple tee shirt that made him look cool and casual and superbly stylish and just too darn sexy to be fair.
He looked up at her and something flared in his eyes that made her steps falter as her heart gave a fluttering stir. Then the expression was gone and he was holding out a hand in a silent command for her to continue down the rest of the stairs.
When she came close enough, he took hold of her hand and drew her towards him. His lips arrived at her temple; she felt the