Page 30 of Cipriani's Innocent Captive
Lucas frowned. ‘I thought everyone liked that sort of thing,’ he admitted. ‘There’ll be a host of well-known faces there.’
Katy laughed because his self-assurance was so deeply ingrained that it beggared belief. ‘Part of me didn’t really think about how this would play out when we returned to London,’ she admitted. ‘It felt very...unreal when we were in Italy.’
‘Yes it did,’ Lucas agreed. ‘Yet surely you would have expected a certain amount of outside attention focused on us...?’
He knew that this very naivety was something he found intensely attractive about her. Having experienced all the trappings of extreme wealth for the past fortnight, she still hadn’t joined the dots to work out what came as part and parcel of that extreme wealth, and intrusive media coverage at a time like this was one of those things. Not to mention a very necessary and unfortunately inevitable black-tie event. He decided that it would be unwise to mention just how much attention would be focused on her, and not just from reporters waiting outside the venue.
‘You’re going to tell me I’m an idiot.’
‘I’ve discovered I quite like idiots.’ He touched her thigh with his finger and Katy shivered and came close to forgetting all her apprehensions and doubts. They might be acting out a charade when it came to an emotional involvement with one another, or at least the sort of emotional involvement that came under the heading of ‘love’, but when it came to physical involvement there was no reporter who wouldn’t be convinced that what they had was the real deal.
‘When we get to the airfield, don’t be surprised if there are one or two reporters waiting and just follow my lead. Don’t say anything. I’ve given them enough fodder to be getting on with. They can take a couple of pictures and that’ll have to do. In a week, we’ll be yesterday’s salacious gossip. And don’t worry—you’ll be fine. You never run yourself down, and you’re the only woman I’ve ever met who gets a kick out of telling me exactly what she thinks of me. Don’t be intimidated by the occasion.’ He laughed and said, only partly in jest, ‘If you’re not intimidated by me, then you can handle anything.’
Buoyed up by Lucas’s vote of confidence, Katy watched as the door of the helicopter was pushed open to blue sky, a cooler temperature than they had left behind and a fleet of reporters who flocked towards them like a pack of wolves scenting a fresh kill.
Katy automatically cringed back and felt his arm loop through hers, gently squeezing her reassuringly as he batted aside questions and guided her towards the black car waiting for them.
A reporter yelled out asking to see the engagement ring. Katy gazed in alarm at her ring-free finger and began stumbling out something vague when Lucas cut into her stammering non-answer, drawing briefly to a halt and smoothly explaining that the jeweller’s was going to be their first stop as soon as they were back in the city.
‘But it won’t be, will it?’ she asked as soon as they were settled into the back of the car with the glass partition firmly shut between the driver and them.
‘Do you think you’re going to be able to get away without a ring on your finger at the ball?’ Lucas said wryly. ‘Brace yourself for a lot more attention than you got from those reporters back there at the air field.’ He settled against the door, inclining his big body towards her.
She was waking up to life inhis world. Not the bubble they had shared in the villa, and even more so on his yacht, where they’d been secluded and tucked away from prying eyes, but the real world in which he moved. She was going to be thrown into the deep end and it couldn’t be helped. Would she be able to swim or would she flounder?
He had told her that she would be fine and again he felt it—that strong streak of protectiveness when he thought about her lost and trying to find her way in a world that was probably alien to her. He knew from experience that the people who occupied his world could be harsh and critical. He disliked the thought of seeing her hurt, even though the practical side of him knew that the disingenuousness that he found so intensely appealing would be a possible weakness under the harsh glare of real life, away from the pleasant bubble in which they had been cocooned.
‘We can stop for a bite to eat, get freshened up at my place and then head out to the jeweller’s, or else we can go directly there. And, on the subject of things to be bought, there’ll be a small matter of something for you to wear this evening.’
‘Something to wear...’
‘Fancy. Long.’ He shrugged. ‘Naturally you won’t be expected to foot the bill for whatever you get, Katy.’ He wondered whether he should go with her, hold her hand.
Katy stilled and wondered how the insertion of money into the conversation could make the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. It felt as though something was shifting between them, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on what thatsomethingwas.
‘Of course.’ Politeness had crept into her voice where before there had only been teasing warmth, and she didn’t like it. But how could she pretend that things hadn’t changed between them? They had embarked on a course of action that wasn’trealand perhaps that was shaping her reactions towards him, making her prickly and on edge.
Yes, she was free to touch, but there were now inbuilt constraints to their relationship. They were supposed to project a certain image, and that image would require her to step out of her comfort zone and do things she wasn’t accustomed to doing. She was going to be on show and Lucas was right—she wasn’t in the habit of running herself down and she wasn’t going to start now. If she was hesitant and apprehensive, then that was understandable, but she wasn’t going to let sudden insecurities dictate how she behaved.
‘I think I’d rather get the ring and the outfit out of the way, then at least I can spend the afternoon relaxing, although I don’t suppose I’ll have much time to put my feet up.’ She sighed and said with heartfelt honesty, ‘I never thought I’d be getting an engagement ring under these circumstances.’ She looked at her finger and tried to think back to those days when she had stupidly believed that Duncan was the man for her. Then she glanced across at Lucas and shivered. He was so ridiculously handsome, so madly self-assured. He oozed sex appeal and her body wasn’t her own when she was around him. When she was around him, her body wanted to be his and only his.
What if this were a real engagement, not some crazy charade to appease other people?
She was suddenly filled with a deep, shattering yearning for a real relationship and for everything that came with it. This time it wasn’t just for a relationship to rescue her from making decisions about her future, which had been the reason she’d allowed herself to be swept away by fantasies about tying the knot with Duncan.
Time slowed. It felt so right with Lucas and yet he was so wrong. How was that possible? She had proposed a course of action that had made sense, and she had imagined she could handle it with cool and aplomb because what she felt for Lucas was lust and lust was a passing fever. But looking at him now, feeling his living, breathing warmth next to her... The time they had spent together flickered like a slow-motion movie in her head: the laughter they had shared; the conversations they had had; their lazy love-making and the soaring happiness that had engulfed her when she had lain, warm and sated, in his arms.
Katy was overcome withwanting more. She transferred her gaze blindly down to her finger and pictured that ring on it, and then her imagination took flight and she thought of so much more. She imagined him on bended knee...smiling up at her...wanting her to be his wifefor realand not a pretend fiancée for two months...
She loved him. She loved him and he certainly didn’t love her. Sick panic filled her at the horror that she might have opened the door for hurt, and on a far bigger scale than Duncan had delivered. Indeed, next to Lucas, Duncan was a pale, ineffectual ghost and obviously one who had not taught her any lessons at all.
Lucas noted the emotions flickering across her face and instantly barriers that had been carefully crafted over many years fell back into place. He didn’t do emotion. Emotions made you lose focus, sapped your strength, made you vulnerable in ways that were destructive. Gold-diggers had come close to destroying his business, but it had been his father’s own emotions that had finally let him down. Lucas could feel himself mentally stepping back and he had the oddest feeling that just for a while there he had been standing too close to an inferno, the existence of which he had been unaware.
He leaned forward, slid the glass partition to one side and instructed the driver to deliver them to a jeweller Katy had never heard of but which, she guessed, would be the sort of place to deal with very, very exclusive clients.
‘Where are we?’ she asked forty-five minutes later, during which time Lucas had worked on his computer, catching up on transactions he had largely ignored while they had been in Italy, he’d told her without glancing at her.
‘Jeweller’s,’ he said. ‘Stop number one.’
