Читать книгу Modern Romance December 2019 Books 5-8 - Jane Porter - Страница 23

SHE HAD TO close her mind to Luc and that wasn’t easy. Thankfully her forward planning had borne fruit. The Party Planners team was ready to roll. Everything was in place. They could hold the event this very minute without a hitch. The biggest and most glamorous party of the season had taken over everyone’s thinking, and now it must take over hers, Stacey determined.

She hadn’t even asked where to find him. Luc hadn’t asked her—

Her throat dried as she remembered that she had his contact details safely logged in her file, where Luc and everything else to do with him should have remained.

Caressing her stomach, she thought, Not everything.

Lucas was a vitally important client, and she and the team had this chance to build on their success in Barcelona. She couldn’t allow her personal concerns to get in the way of that. ‘Go, team!’ she said as their meeting broke up. ‘This is going to be the most amazing event yet.’

He stowed his skis at a local hotel he owned, then had a meeting with his people, who confirmed arrangements for the party were well under way, and there was nothing for him to worry about. Except Stacey. His guts were in knots. News of a possible pregnancy had bulldozed every thought from his head. It was a relief to know that the business side of things was going well. He doubted he could sort a problem with the party in his current state of mind.

Leaving the hotel to pace the streets to eat up time until he could reasonably call Stacey for the promised meeting, he spotted her leaving the pharmacy. Jogging across the road, he caught up with her. ‘Coffee. Now,’ he prescribed, glancing across the road at a café with steamed-up windows.

‘Don’t we have a meeting?’

She seemed pale to him. ‘You need warming up. Business can wait.’

‘Isn’t the café a bit public for you?’ she asked with concern.

‘Aren’t you exposed out here on your own with a pregnancy test clutched in your hand?’ he countered.

‘Don’t,’ she bit out tensely. ‘Don’t do this to me, Luc.’

‘Don’t do what?’ he asked, uncomprehending.

‘Just stop it, okay?’

Her voice was tight, and, though she kept her face turned away from him, he cursed himself for being a fool. Stacey could never handle kindness. Aside from her brother’s care it was out of her ken. ‘Okay. I’ll back off,’ he agreed. ‘What you do and when you do it is up to you. All I ask is that you keep me informed. We could be starting a dynasty here.’ His last remark was a failed attempt to lighten the mood, and the look she gave him could strip paint. He deserved it and stuck out his chin. ‘Go on. Hit me,’ he offered. ‘You’ll feel better if you do.’

‘No. That’s a man thing, Luc.’ And then she smiled faintly. ‘Coffee sounds good to me. And then I’ve got some more work to do,’ she hurried to add.

‘Of course,’ he said, dipping his head in apparent meek submission. ‘Whatever you say, señorita.’

Her look now said as clearly as if she’d spoken the words out loud: But it’s always whatever you say, Luc. Swiftly followed by defiant eyes that warned him to get ready for a change of regime. If anything could persuade him she was pregnant, it was that, and not the test she’d bought at the pharmacy. Stacey remembered his mother’s care for her children; she would have died for them. And she had.

Luc looked as wound up as she felt, which was why she had agreed to a coffee before their meeting. And so here they were in a cosy café, sipping hot drinks, surrounded by happy people on holiday, and even some of Luc’s guests, whom he greeted with enthusiasm, as if he and they shouldn’t and didn’t have a care in the world. However incongruous it seemed to Stacey with a pregnancy test stuffed securely in the zip-up pocket of her snowsuit, she was the lover of this man, his possibly pregnant lover…

What was she? What was she really? Was she Luc’s friend? His lover? His girlfriend?

Or did she merely work for him, and had been his ‘bit on the side’?

None of the above, Stacey concluded as Luc shook his head as he stood talking to a group who knew him, causing his thick black hair to fly about his face. This exposed the gold hoop in his ear that glittered a warning to all and sundry—except to Stacey, who was blind to common sense when Luc was in the picture—that this was Lucas Da Silva, consummate lover, ruthless polo player, hard man of business, and a bona fide Spanish grandee who mixed in the most exalted circles, and who it sometimes seemed only resembled Stacey in as much as they both liked a good cup of coffee.

While they’d been stranded in his chalet she’d lost sight of the depth of his complexity. Luc didn’t belong to her, he belonged to the world, to this world, to this sophisticated world, where she had never been comfortable. Being brought up on a farm hadn’t given her airs and graces, it had given her grit. And now she could be having this man’s child. It hardly seemed possible. Until her body throbbed a pleasurable reminder that it was.

‘Okay?’ he asked, coming to sit down again at their table. ‘Excuse me for leaving you. As you could see, duty called.’

As it always would for both of them. What type of foundation was that for a child?

‘You look cold,’ he said. ‘Come on, drink up that coffee. It will warm you.’

If only life were that simple. There was no offer to warm her from Luc, she noticed, but they were in public now. ‘It’s cold outside,’ she commented lightly, looking out of the window.

‘Understatement,’ Luc agreed in the same disappointingly neutral tone. ‘They’re saying it might snow again.’

When he’d held her in his arms, she’d been warm enough. It was only when they’d reached the village that a chill had started creeping through her veins. It was the chill of anticipated loss of Luc when they parted, rather than anything she could blame on the weather. Though snow had started falling again, she noted with concern.

‘Weather conditions will impact everything,’ she observed. ‘Where possible, I’ve accounted for every eventuality.’

‘And where it’s not possible?’ he probed.

‘I’m still worried about getting people up the mountain for your torchlit descent and the firework display.’

‘Leave that to me.’

‘Really?’

‘I have an idea.’

‘Let me know as soon as you can.’

‘I will,’ he promised, holding her gaze. ‘And you let me know as soon as you can.’

‘Of course.’ Her heart lifted as she realised Luc hadn’t forgotten anything. ‘If we can get this right your guests will be talking about this party for the rest of their lives.’

‘And you?’ he pressed with a keen stare. ‘What will you be talking about, Stacey?’

‘Happy times.’ She pressed her lips flat as her eyes smiled. ‘I won’t let you down,’ she promised.

‘Okay?’

‘Not sure.’ The strangest feeling had just swept over her. It was the same not-alone-in-her-body feeling she’d had before. First stop: a bathroom.

‘I’m relying on you to get this right,’ Lucas said, draining his cup.

She nodded, half in business mode, half planning to dash off right away to see the doctor at the drop-in clinic. ‘I won’t let you down. It’s going to be the event of the year.’ The event of her life if she was pregnant.

‘What would you like to eat?’

‘No time to eat. The bathroom?’ she reminded him. ‘Coffee’s fine.’

‘Soup,’ he said. ‘You must eat something.’

‘Okay, soup,’ she agreed. ‘But this one’s on me.’

Luc had relaxed a little over a bowl of soup, and now she was on her way to one of the last briefings with her team before the big event with a pregnancy test stuffed in her pocket.

As they’d parted, he’d said, ‘Thank you for bringing me up to speed regarding the party, and now I must speak with my people.’

There’d been no mention of seeing each other again, but she’d taken that for granted, she supposed. Luc would obviously want to know the result of the test.

‘Your global empire calling?’ she’d teased.

‘Well, I’m more concerned about the party right now,’ he’d admitted, ‘as it’s only a couple of days away, but, yes, the global empire is always waiting in the wings. I never know from one day to the next when I’ll be called away at a moment’s notice.’

A cold wind had brushed her cheek when he’d said that but, keeping her promise to herself that she wouldn’t become a clinging vine, she’d simply nodded her head in agreement.

They’d done a lot of reminiscing over lunch, leaving out details like how it felt to make love after wanting and caring and needing for so long. Or how safe she’d felt when Luc had steered her down the mountain. They hadn’t mentioned taste, touch, or sensation, but it had been there all the time in their eyes—the glance that had lasted a beat too long, the small shrug of resignation that things couldn’t be different between them, because of who they were, and the very different paths they trod. Luc’s first memory of Stacey at the farm had been waking up in the morning to discover she’d squirted shaving cream into his hand while he was asleep, so the minute he raked his hair, he was covered in the stuff. ‘I remember your roar of fury,’ she’d told him with relish.

He’d looked like a great angry bear when he’d stomped out of his room in search of the bathroom with foam all over his face. She’d suspected at the time that no one treated Lucas Da Silva with such scant regard for his position in life, for, though his parents had been impoverished, they’d been aristocrats with a lineage stretching back through the mists of time. ‘And the chilli in my ice cream,’ he’d reminded her.

‘It was strawberry, so I thought you wouldn’t notice. Clever, huh?’ she’d said with a mischievous look over the rim of her coffee cup.

‘Deadly,’ he’d agreed, and then they’d laughed together before falling silent again.

Would she never lose this yearning for Lucas? The more she saw of him, the more she liked him. She couldn’t help herself.

And what was wrong with that?

Everything, Stacey concluded as she entered the hotel where the team was waiting. She was setting herself up to be hurt.