The Undoing of de Luca (7 page)

‘Amelie is not my mistress,’ Larenz said calmly.

Ellery snorted in disbelief, despite the ridiculous lurch of hope she felt at his words. He had to be lying. ‘You really expect me to believe that?’

He gave a negligent little shrug. ‘I suspect you will believe what you will. I confess I had no idea you were making such assumptions about me. But, in point of fact, Amelie is the head of public relations for my company. That’s why she was here at all, trying to find a place suitable for the fashion shoot—’

‘You cannot expect me to believe that anyone finds this place suitable.’

‘Obviously you don’t.’ He dropped his voice to a lulling whisper. ‘Why are you here, Ellery? Why do you stay? I wonder if you even like this Manor of yours very much.’

Ellery recoiled. The questions were too revealing, too close to the truth. She was not about to answer them, or give Larenz any more information that his sense of perception had already gained him.

She tried to turn away but his finger was still against her lips, and now he touched her chin, forcing her to look at him.

‘Ellery, I do not pity you. I must admit, I would find it hard going to take care of this place on my own as you do, but that hardly translates to pity.’

‘When it sounds, looks and feels like pity, it generally is,’ Ellery retorted. She tried to jerk her chin away from Larenz’s grasp but he held on, smiling as he dipped his head so their faces—and lips—were no more than a breath apart.

‘I assure you,’ Larenz murmured, ‘
this
isn’t pity.’ And, before Ellery could process or protest that statement, his lips met hers and he was kissing her in a way she’d never been kissed before.

He was kissing her in a way that made her forget every resolution or regret she’d ever had.

Ellery remained unmoving under his caress for the briefest of seconds; she was too dazed to do or think anything, her mind and body both frozen with surprise. Then her senses took over, flooding with sweet, warm pleasure, and her body spurred into action, responding of its own accord, without the permission of her still-resistant mind.

Her arms came up and twined around Larenz’s shoulders, her fingers splaying across the taut muscles of his back, her head falling back and her body arching, as sinuous and sensual as a cat. She heard herself make a sound she never had before, part of her incredulously aware of how wanton she was being. She moaned, the sound trembling on her lips, reverberating through her body.

Larenz deepened the kiss.

His hands had drifted down her back and now cradled her hips, drawing her closer to him, the contact intimate and revealing. His hand moved upwards to stroke her breast through the thin fabric of her T-shirt, his lips still on hers, tasting and exploring, and the sudden nerve-tingling jolt the caress caused made Ellery stumble back, coming hard against the sink.

The moment, hazy with desire, had now turned crystalclear with cold reality. Ellery felt sick and when she swallowed she tasted the acidic bite of bile.

‘Don’t—’ she whispered. Her heart thudded as if she’d run a mile and her whole body still tingled with the aftershocks of his kiss.

Larenz smiled. Besides his hair being a bit rumpled, he looked remarkably composed. ‘Don’t what?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Don’t stop?’

‘Don’t tease me,’ Ellery burst out. ‘Don’t toy with me.’

For a moment Larenz looked genuinely nonplussed. ‘Why am I toying with you, Ellery?’ She liked how he said her name, the trace of an accent in the caress of the syllables. ‘I want you. You want me. Really, it’s very simple.’ His expression hardened for a single second as he added, ‘It doesn’t have to be difficult.’

She shook her head. She felt her throat clog and her eyes fill damningly with tears. She couldn’t speak without giving herself away, so she bit her lip—hard—instead. It wasn’t simple at all. Not to her, at least. Yet she could hardly explain that to Larenz, especially when she barely understood it herself. All she knew was that giving herself to a man like him now—like this—would not be the simple physical pleasure he seemed to think it would.

It would, Ellery knew, be the selling of her soul.

She shook her head again, managing to get one word out of her constricted throat. ‘No,’ she said and, pushing past him, she fled from the room.

Larenz stood in the quiet of the kitchen, trying to process the last few minutes. What had started so promisingly had ended, he realized ruefully, rather disastrously. Ellery Dunant had looked, damn it, near to tears. Had such a simple little kiss really affected her so deeply, so terribly?

It didn’t bode well for his planned seduction.

Moodily, Larenz wandered to the bank of windows that overlooked the walled garden. Sunlight made the puddles shimmer, and the dew-spangled grass looked as if it were gilded with silver. There was a strange, almost ethereal beauty to the Manor grounds, and Larenz could see why Amelie had thought it would be such a spectacular backdrop for the new couture gowns De Luca’s would be showcasing next spring.

Ellery was a bit like her beloved Manor, he thought with a philosophical bemusement. She shrouded herself in plain clothes and unflattering hairstyles but she still couldn’t hide the beauty underneath, the beauty he saw in her bruisecoloured eyes and elegant bone structure. And not only beauty but desire; he’d seen it in the way her eyes darkened to storm clouds, the way her body had trembled and yielded to his when he’d kissed her.

He hadn’t even meant to kiss her right then. Leaning against a kitchen sink was hardly the most comfortable place for seduction. Yet in that moment when he’d felt the velvety softness of her lips against his finger—skin on skin—he hadn’t been able to think of anything else. Want anything else. Kissing her hadn’t been an indulgence; it had been a necessity.

Larenz expelled his breath in a frustrated sigh. Yet what had that kiss been to Ellery? Judging by her response, he would have thought it an awakening. Yet, remembering the shattered look in her eyes as she’d fled from the room—and from him—Larenz wondered if it had, instead, been, bizarrely, a betrayal.

He pushed the thoughts aside. He didn’t want to wax philosophical about an insignificant little kiss; he certainly wasn’t going to
care.
All he wanted was a weekend of pleasure and if Ellery Dunant couldn’t handle that then he’d leave her damn well alone.

She was, Larenz decided firmly, nothing special. And, since he didn’t mix business with pleasure anyway, he should just forget all about her. Go and pack. Move on. He was good at that.

Yet still he remained staring out at the unkempt garden and in his mind’s eye all he saw was the hurt flaring in Ellery’s violet eyes.

Chapter Four

E
LLERY
didn’t see Larenz for the rest of the day. After she’d run from the kitchen like a frightened girl—shame and anger warring within her—she’d gone upstairs to deal with the dirty sheets. She needed to work, to do and not to think. She needed to regain some balance and some common sense.

Yet she found neither when she stepped into the Manor’s master bedroom, with its tangled sheets and the cold ashes of a fire in the grate. Ellery sagged against the bedpost, her mind replaying the images she’d envisioned last night—Larenz and Amelie in that bed, before the fire…

Firmly she pushed such thoughts away—along with the accompanying absurd jealousy—and stripped the sheets from the bed. An expensively cloying perfume she recognized as Amelie’s drifted up from the sheets. Ellery grimaced.

She bundled them into a pile to take downstairs to the rather ancient washing machine, another appliance on the brink of collapse, stopping only when she saw the door to the room next to Amelie’s was ajar. She kept the doors to all the bedrooms firmly closed in a somewhat futile effort to maintain some warmth in the main sections of the house.

Now she stepped inside, gazing around in surprise at the neatly made bed; a pair of shoes—men’s dress shoes—were lined up at its foot. The bag Larenz had carried in last night was on the divan by the window and she could see his woollen trench coat hanging in the wardrobe.

Had Larenz slept here? Had he and Amelie had a fight? Or had he actually been telling the
truth
?

Ellery took a step closer to the bed and reached down to smooth the faded counterpane. Then, on impish impulse, she bent and sniffed the pillow. It smelled of a citrusy aftershave. It smelled of Larenz.

Ellery straightened. She felt strangely unsettled, relief and uncertainty mixing uncomfortably within her. She also knew she did not want to be caught snooping in Larenz’s room. Quickly she backed out of the bedroom and hurried to pile the sheets in the washer.

Yet all afternoon vague unsettled thoughts drifted through her mind like wispy clouds, insubstantial and yet still greying her day. Had she misjudged Larenz? What kind of man was he, really? She wondered just how much of her assumptions had been based on her own experience and how much on what she saw and heard from the man himself.

‘So he had a fight with Amelie,’ she muttered as she went to the kitchen to see about dinner. ‘He slept in another room, and she flounced off in a huff. It doesn’t change anything.’ It shouldn’t change
her.

Kissing a man like that—
wanting
a man like that—still felt like a betrayal of who she was and every hard lesson she’d learned from another betrayal—her father’s.

The sun had started its descent and the gardens were already cloaked in dusky shadows. Larenz had left earlier that afternoon, speeding off in his Lexus, and he still hadn’t returned. Ellery had no idea if she should make a proper dinner or settle for her usual tinned soup or beans on toast. Yet if Larenz did return, he would undoubtedly expect a meal. The thought of waiting on Larenz alone in the huge, shadowy dining room made nerves leap low in her belly.

She pushed the feelings aside and made herself a cheese sandwich, eating it alone at the kitchen table as darkness claimed the grounds. Although she lived alone for most of the year, tonight she was especially conscious of the empty house all around her, still and silent, room after cavernous room yawning into infinity.

Ellery snorted in disgust at her own fanciful thoughts. She was getting maudlin again. She could go down into the village, visit a fellow teacher from the secondary school where she taught part-time. Get out of the Manor, and out of her own head. Yet she knew she wouldn’t. She was too restless, too wary. And, she acknowledged ruefully, she was waiting for Larenz to return.

She stood up abruptly and put her dishes in the sink. A gust of wind rattled the windowpanes and the boiler started clanking again.

She thought of Larenz’s knowing questions that afternoon:
Why are you here, Ellery? Why do you stay? I wonder if you even like this Manor of yours very much.

The questions pointed to a grim truth: sometimes she hated this house. She hated the memories made here that caused her to doubt who she was; she hated that she stayed because this house felt as if it was all that was left of who she was. She hated how her life was sucked into taking care of its empty rooms and endless repairs, and yet the thought of giving it up—selling her only home—was akin to selling her soul.

Just like kissing Larenz had been.

Ellery groaned. ‘Stop it,’ she said aloud. Living alone, she was used to talking to herself. Yet the words had little effect. She couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss, or how it had reached deep down inside her and shaken up all her longings and fears until she didn’t know which was which. She couldn’t stop remembering how it felt to be held in Larenz’s arms, to have his lips on hers, to feel touched and treasured and dare she even think it—loved.

Ellery didn’t consider herself enough of a dupe to imagine even for a second that love had anything to do with what Larenz wanted. It didn’t have anything to do with what
she
wanted.

Love was dangerous. Frightening. Forbidden. Especially with a man like Larenz.

No, all she wanted—all she could want—was a moment, a night of pleasure like Larenz had promised.

So why had she hightailed it like a scared rabbit or, more appropriately, a shy virgin after her first kiss? Why couldn’t she enjoy what Larenz offered? Why couldn’t she take what he offered without feeling afraid or, worse, used? Betrayed?

Why did it have to mean anything?

Tired of the questions that ran around in her head in useless circles, Ellery left the kitchen. There was still plenty for her to do: paperwork and paying bills, not to mention the general housekeeping she’d neglected for much of that day. The downstairs reception rooms needed a good dust and polish, and she’d been slowly—very slowly—plastering some of the cracks in the walls of the foyer. Yet her endless DIY list held little appeal as she wandered from room to room, wondering just how—and when—the house she’d once adored as a child had become an impoverished prison.

Of course she knew the answer, even if she didn’t like to think about it. It had started when her father had chosen to live two lives rather than one.

Larenz pulled up in front of Maddock Manor and groaned aloud. Under the sickly glow of a waxy moon the place looked even more decrepit than usual. He’d spent the afternoon driving around the country, motoring down narrow twisting lanes and through quaint sleepy villages—what had he been looking for? Another place for Amelie’s photo shoot? Or had he just simply been trying to forget?

Forget the look in Ellery’s eyes when he’d kissed her. Forget the feeling of her in his arms—fragile, precious, unforgettable.

Of course he couldn’t forget.

Even a whisky at the local pub—the man behind the bar had been particularly closed-mouthed when Larenz had casually asked about Lord Maddock and his damned Manor—had only blunted the raw edge of desire that had been knifing through him all afternoon.

Muttering a curse, Larenz slammed the door of his Lexus and stalked towards the Manor. He stopped halfway to the front portico for a light had flickered in the corner of his vision, somewhere in the gardens behind the house.