belligerently, ‘You should know that I happen to know I was great.’
‘You were great and then,’ he drawled, ‘you opened your mouth.’ Even as he spoke an image flashed into his head of those soft, moist lips running over his naked skin. His eyes half closed, Luc’s respiration started to come significantly faster as his body responded with painful urgency to the steamy image of Megan kneeling in front of him. It was so real that his long fingers flexed as he imagined himself winding them into the silky honey tresses as she knelt before him.
He touched the back of his hand to the beads of sweat along his upper lip and struggled to regain some control of his imagination.
Dear God, Luc, he told himself, you’re acting like a teenager with his first rush of hormones!
‘You seemed to think I was great too. In fact I seem to recall you saying you thought you were falling in love with me…?’
Megan froze. ‘I did not!’
‘I could say did too, but not being five any more I won’t. I’m prepared to give the benefit of the doubt…’
This man was quite simply unbelievable!
‘The fact is I’m not happy with unquestioning adoration. I hate clingy women.’
‘Do I look like I’m suffering from a case of adoration?’
‘For crying out loud, woman!’ he grated, an expression of seething frustration on his lean, strong-boned face. ‘I came here to apologise but you make me so damned mad.’ His heavy-lidded glance slid downwards from the twin beacons of her blazing blue eyes.
At about the same moment Megan awakened to the uncomfortable fact she was standing there in a skimpy, short nightie. Her discomfort would have been ten times worse had she realised that the moonlight had rendered the fabric virtually transparent.
Luc was not similarly unaware and hadn’t been since she had leapt from her bed. He was painfully aware of the outline of her slim, supple body. As much as he tried not to let them, his eyes were continually drawn to the gentle upward tilt of her rosy-tipped breasts and the strategic darker shadow at the apex of her long legs.
Megan resisted the urge to tug down the hem, and endured his scrutiny impassively. It isn’t what you wear, it’s the way you wear it—isn’t that what Mum always says? Of course her mother, who bought sexy silk pyjamas half a dozen at a time from her favourite designer, would never have been caught wearing a cheap chain-store nightdress.
‘Was it all a joke to you?’ Megan asked.
His smoky gaze returned to her face; his manner was uncharacteristically distracted. ‘Of course it wasn’t a joke…I didn’t expect tonight to go the way it did.’
‘Well, I don’t believe you,’ she countered furiously. ‘I think you planned everything. I think you’re a cold, callous, manipulative snake.’
‘Right, then, I don’t suppose there’s anything more to say.’
He’s going now…say something. ‘Fine, you know where the door is.’
Face like stone, Luc turned. ‘See you around, Megan.’
‘Not if I see you first,’ she hissed.
The moment the door closed she crumbled.
CHAPTER NINE
MALCOLM, wearing silk pyjamas and a dressing gown, looked relieved when he saw Megan.
‘I thought for a second you were your mother. I’ve been outside to have a couple of puffs on a cigar. You couldn’t sleep either, huh?’ He looked sympathetically at Megan, who was seated at the long scrubbed table in the cavernous kitchen.
Megan shook her head and nursed her mug of tea, which had gone cold while she’d sat there. She summoned up a weak smile and hoped her face had recovered from the worst of the tear damage. ‘Bad night, Uncle Mal?’
‘I never sleep in the country. Quite frankly I don’t see how anyone does. It’s so darned noisy,’ he complained, dragging himself up a chair.
Despite her bleak frame of mind Megan was amused by his comment. As a country girl born and bred she couldn’t let this comment go unchallenged.
‘What about London traffic?’ Even she, a sound sleeper—normally—found that hard to cope with sometimes.
‘You can tune out traffic noises—wild animals making all sorts of unearthly noises through the entire night you cannot. Frankly, it gives me the creeps. Mind you, it’s not as bad here as where Luc lives.’ He gave a shudder. ‘You have the sound of the sea to cope with there as well. God, the sound of the sea has to be the loneliest sound in the world.’
‘That’s really quite poetic, Uncle Mal.’
‘Yes, I thought so too,’ he agreed, looking pleased. ‘Is there any tea in the pot?’
She shook her head. ‘No, it’s cold,’ she said. ‘I thought Luc said he lived in London.’
‘Told you that, did he? Not like Luc to tell you anything beyond name, rank and serial number. He must have taken a shine to you.’
Megan laughed uncomfortably and said lightly. ‘I doubt it.’
‘No, the London place is a new thing. When he isn’t traveling—a bit of a gypsy, our Luc is. You never know when he’ll have the urge to take off. It’s in his blood.’
Megan, who had heard the Land Rover revving up at three in the morning, lowered her gaze to the cold depths of her mug. She had seen the note on the hall stand addressed to her mother in a strong scrawl. It wouldn’t be long before Malcolm discovered that Luc had taken off again…and good riddance!
‘Normally he buries himself out in the wilds of the country, some place with a name I can’t pronounce…Welsh. Not big on his fellow man, is Luc, but then,’ he reflected, ‘who can blame him under the circumstances?’
‘What circumstances would those be?’ Megan enquired.
‘Said too much,’ said Malcolm, looking alarmed.
‘No, you’ve not said enough,’ Megan corrected forcefully. She was sick to the back teeth with all this secrecy.
Malcolm sighed heavily. ‘You’re very like your mother sometimes,’ he said. ‘Now you must promise that what I tell you stays between us…?’
Megan gravely nodded.
‘Luc had a successful business, engineering, he had a partner and, to cut a long story short, the partner had been draining the firm of funds for ages. The chap finally did a runner and left Luc to face the music.’
‘Music…but I thought you said it was the partner…?’
‘True, the only thing he had done wrong was trusting the wrong man. The police were very good, he said.’
‘The police were involved!’ she exclaimed.
