Annie's Secret

Having taken over as head of the family business empire four years ago following his father’s near-fatal heart attack, Luc was accustomed to being hotly pursued by women intent on becoming his wife or, failing that, his mistress. Whereas this woman could not have shown her lack of interest in him any more clearly.

Which only increased Luc’s own interest in her. An interest he intended pursuing, with or without her cooperation…

He gave a determined smile. ‘I would not be too sure of that, if I were you.’

Once again she blinked, her creamy throat moving convulsively as she swallowed before speaking. ‘Just talking to you has already made me late for a meeting.’ She gave a pointed look at the slender gold watch on her wrist.

He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘Then a few minutes more will not make any difference, hmm?’

The woman shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, but I dislike tardiness, in myself as well as others.’

Luc knew she was not in the least sorry. In fact, she couldn’t wait to get away!

The fiery snap in her stunning eyes, and the stubborn set of her chin, told Luc that she had no idea how her obvious determination to get away from him only increased his interest rather than diminished it.

‘In that case, I will say goodbye. For now,’ he added softly.

‘We will not meet again, signore,’ she insisted, the delicate colour that entered her cheeks now due to temper rather than embarrassment at her previous rudeness.

Luc found himself giving her one of his rare smiles. ‘Fate has a way of deciding these things for us, I have found.’

Fate had already led Annie into behaving completely irrationally in this man’s company once, and she had no intention of putting that temptation in her way ever again.

Yet, if anything, this Luc was even more devastatingly attractive than the man Annie had met before. There was a hard ruthlessness about him now, a haughty remoteness, that challenged as much as it beguiled.

As for his smile…!

Those moulded, sculptured lips had pulled back briefly over white and perfectly straight teeth, in a familiar wolfish smile that, although fleeting, had nevertheless made Annie’s heart pound harder and louder.

Despite everything, she realised with horror that she was still attracted to him!

Her mouth firmed. ‘I really do have to finish this call.’

Luc’s mocking humour faded as he recalled that she had been talking to someone called Oliver when they had collided a few minutes ago.

A man named Oliver, who, from the lack of rings on her long and slender fingers, had not yet made a public claim on this woman, despite the fact that she’d huskily assured him that she loved him too.

He nodded abruptly. ‘I too am late for an appointment.’

The woman’s smile was saccharin sweet. ‘Then I really mustn’t delay you any longer, must I?’

This woman needed to be put across someone’s knee, and her bottom firmly spanked, Luc decided ruefully. Her bare bottom. Her lush and curvaceous bare bottom.

It was an erotic image that flowered and grew in Luc’s mind and caused his thighs to throb and harden as he became fully aroused—something that hadn’t happened to him in years at just the thought of making love to a specific woman.

Luc had spent years rebuilding his family’s wealth and business empire. Four long years when he had allowed no other distractions, least of all an interest in a woman, to interfere with those plans.

Attractive as this woman was, Luc very much doubted that she would hold that interest for very long either. But her prickly nature indicated a passion that might prove fun while it lasted.

‘Signorina.’ He inclined his head in farewell, secure in the knowledge, in the pleasure, of her presence at Lake Garda for several more days at least.

Annie held her breath as she watched Luc’s long and arrogantly confident strides until he turned left at the end of the hallway, leaning weakly back against the wall of the hallway once he had disappeared from view.

Dear God!

How had this happened? Why had it happened?

It had happened for the simple reason that her father, newly fired with a desire to guide the lives of his wayward daughters into less notorious and hopefully more worthwhile channels, had decided that Annie was to take a more active role in the Balfour business empire by attending this management course!

Her protest that she had no interest in taking on a more high-profile role in her father’s management team hadn’t seemed to matter a jot to him. As the only one of Oscar’s eight daughters who actually worked for him, usually at the office complex at Balfour Manor, Oscar had just overridden all of Annie’s objections by threatening to sack her.

Annie had known that he had meant that threat too. That Oscar was absolutely adamant in his decision that it was time—past time—that all of his daughters went out into the world to find themselves and what they really wanted out of life. Even if the majority of them, Annie included, went kicking and screaming!

Which brought Annie back full circle to her presence here at this glamorous hotel set on the shore of beautiful Lake Garda in Italy.

A hotel at which Luc, her ex-lover, was obviously also a guest…

Chapter Two

‘SO, signorina, you have found time from your busy schedule to relax after all.’

Annie’s heart jolted in her chest just at the sound of that sexily familiar voice, and she was grateful for the dark glasses that shielded the expression in her eyes as she looked up to see Luc standing beside her. She had been hoping for a little peace and quiet as she lay on a towel on the sand of the private beach in front of the hotel.

But she would obviously get no peace today. The man was gorgeous. Decadently. Wonderfully. Indecently. Lethally gorgeous.

Luc had been vitally and excitingly handsome when Annie had met him all those years ago, but the skimpy pair of black bathing trunks that were all he wore now showed an added toughness to the lean and muscled contours of his body.

His skin had always been the colour of mahogany. But his shoulders were wider, and more muscled. A light dusting of dark hair covered a chest and washboard abdomen. His hips and thighs were lean and powerful, and those black bathing trunks seemed to emphasise rather than disguise the telling bulge between those spectacular thighs.

Thighs that Annie had once been intimately familiar with…

She sat up abruptly, her manner instantly defensive as she glared up at him from behind her brown sunglasses. ‘Are you following me?’

Luc felt only amusement at the accusation. Knowing that the flush of heat on her cheeks, and the way her nipples had hardened against the material of her blue bathing costume, was due to physical awareness rather than the angry indignation she wished to convey.

In truth, he’d had no idea she was even on the beach when he decided to indulge in a swim before his meeting later this afternoon. But as he had stood on the warmth of the sand looking for a place in which to place his towel, he had spotted that familiar chestnut-coloured hair that had seemed to glow a deeper auburn in the warmth of the midday sun.

Having swiftly established that it was the little firebrand of earlier this morning, Luc had been unable to resist the impulse to join her. To annoy her further perhaps? She did look so very beautiful when she was scowling at him.

The black business suit and white blouse she had been wearing this morning had not done her justice, Luc realised once he had crossed the beach to stand looking down at her from behind black sunglasses.

Her bare skin was tanned a pale gold, the top of the blue bathing costume cupping full and exquisite breasts, the thin strip of material that connected the top to the bottom of the costume at the front revealing the toned flatness of her waist and stomach above enticingly curvy hips and long, shapely legs.

‘What if I were following you?’ He answered her accusation teasingly.

A frown appeared between her eyes. ‘Then I really would have to report your harassment to the hotel management.’

‘Please feel free to do so,’ Luc invited as he dropped down onto the sand beside her.

The fact that he seemed so unconcerned by the threat told Annie that he somehow knew she would be wasting her time in making such a complaint.

Just as her inner feeling of panic also told her that she was completely aware—achingly aware—of the hard promise of Luc’s almost naked body so close to her own that their thighs were almost touching.

So close that she could feel the warmth emanating from his body. So close that she could smell his delicious masculine scent. So close she could have easily reached out and touched one of those hard and muscled thighs…

Her fingers clenched so tightly in an effort not to do exactly that, that her nails dug painfully into the palms of her hands. ‘What is it you want, signore?’ she asked instead. ‘Surely there are enough willing women at this hotel that you don’t need to harass the only one who isn’t interested in you?’ Annie hadn’t missed the openly lascivious female glances in Luc’s direction since he had joined her on the sand. ‘Or is that the challenge?’ she added in disgust.

An amused smile curved those sculptured lips. ‘Are you not being a little unkind to these other women?’ He ignored her second taunt.

‘I prefer to think of it as being truthful,’ Annie retorted waspishly.

He raised dark brows. ‘And are you always truthful?’

‘I like to think so, yes.’

‘Hmm,’ he mused softly. ‘So, are you truly not interested in me?’

Annie felt her cheeks colour in a revealing blush. ‘I’m not interested in any man who, when he’s away on business, just wants a weekend fling while out of sight of his wife and family.’

‘And if the man has no wife? Or family?’ he pressed.

Her mouth compressed. ‘Don’t they all say that?’

‘Do they?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Annie replied. She may prefer to spend most of her time at Balfour Manor but that didn’t mean that she didn’t occasionally accompany her father when he went away on business. Or that her father’s presence protected her from the advances of some of the business associates she met at those times. On the contrary; the often scandalous exploits of Annie’s sisters seemed to have given most of those men the impression that all the Balfour sisters were open to seduction!

Luc gave her a hard look. ‘In my case it happens to be the truth.’ Children to inherit, and a wife to provide those children, would one day be necessary, Luc accepted. But he would choose his own time, and the correct woman, when it came to filling that position.

‘I’m still not interested,’ she announced.

He arched mocking brows. ‘No?’

‘No!’ she said with finality. ‘And I very much doubt you usually have to try this hard to seduce a woman into your bed either,’ she added.

It was true that Luc usually only had to show the minimum of interest in a woman in order to make love with her. But of late, he recognised with a frown, those easy conquests had started to pall. To become boring.

To the point that boredom had succeeded in piquing his interest in this bristly brunette? A woman so unlike the tall and model-thin blondes he was usually attracted to? Perhaps.

He moved restlessly. ‘You presume to know me that well?’

Annie gave a derisive snort. ‘I know your type that well,’ she claimed.

‘Indeed?’ There was a dangerous edge to Luc’s voice now.

‘Indeed,’ Annie echoed tauntingly.

Luc continued to look at her for several long seconds, the colour burning in Annie’s cheeks by the time he stretched his long legs out in front of him and leant back on his hands in the sand to turn dismissively and gaze out across the lake.

Giving Annie the opportunity to study him at close quarters unobserved. To once again note the changes in him. What had happened in the past four and a half years to change Luc from that young man, who had met every challenge with a recklessness that bordered on dangerous, to this remote and ruthlessly unyielding man whose every word and action proclaimed contempt for the very wildness he had once possessed in such abundance?

Why should she care what had happened to him, Annie instantly rebuked herself, when the same intervening years had taken their toll on her own life and emotions? When he didn’t even remember their time together that had resulted in those changes in her life. When he didn’t even remember her!

‘If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go for a swim.’ Annie didn’t wait for Luc to reply as she rose abruptly to her feet and began to walk down the beach to the water’s edge.

Luc slowly turned his head, his gaze admiring as he watched her fluidity of movement as she walked across the sand, arms lightly swinging, shoulders straight, her back long and supple, her hips gently swaying—

He sat forward suddenly, the darkness of his narrowed gaze arrested on her lower back. On the tattoo revealed just above the soft rise of her left buttock!

Luc’s breath caught in his throat as he stared at that tattoo. As the memories of a lush body naked in bed beneath him, wrapped around him, riding him as the woman smiled down at him seductively and her breasts jutted forward temptingly, came crashing into his head.

He rose quickly to his feet to cross the sand in three long, determined strides, before reaching out to grasp her arm and swing her round to face him. ‘Annie?’ he exclaimed as he pushed his sunglasses up into the darkness of his hair to look down searchingly into her face.

Once again the memory of those golden limbs entwined with his flashed graphically into his head. As did the silky softness of her skin as he’d kissed and tasted every inch of her body—the length of her back, that distinctive tattoo, the full curve of her bottom—before he had turned her over and explored the curve of her neck, the hard pebbles of her breasts, the gentle slope of her belly, the tiny nubbin nestled amongst the auburn curls between her legs as she writhed beneath him in the throes of ecstasy…

The sudden pallor of her cheeks, and the slight trembling of her body, told him all too clearly that this woman had those same memories—just as she had when they’d met earlier this morning!

His eyes narrowed furiously. ‘You denied earlier that we had ever met before!’

Annie gave a bitter laugh. ‘No, what I actually said was that surely one of us would have remembered it if we had,’ she reminded him. And one of them had remembered; how could Annie ever forget? Yet obviously Luc had! ‘Something obviously just triggered your own memory,’ she added sarcastically. ‘What was it?’

A nerve pulsed in his tightly clenched jaw. ‘The tattoo,’ he bit out.

Annie’s eyes widened. ‘My unicorn?’

Several of her university friends had decided to acquire tattoos during their first year at Cambridge, and Annie, with a desire to be accepted for herself rather than as a Balfour, had foolishly allowed herself to be dragged along too. Most of the other girls had opted for dolphins or butterflies, but Annie had known as soon as she saw the unicorn that it was the one she wanted.

How ironic that its existence should have succeeded in alerting Luc to her identity when nothing else had!

‘Your unicorn,’ he echoed grimly as he grasped both her arms. ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier that we had met before?’ He shook her slightly.

‘And what was I supposed to say when you obviously had no memory of that meeting?’ Annie hissed. ‘“Hey, remember me? I’m the woman you spent the night making love to when you were on a skiing holiday four and a half years ago before dumping me the following morning.”?’ She scowled at him. ‘Somehow I don’t think so, Luc’

Well, when she put it like that…

Having spent the past few years deliberately blocking all memory of his ignominious fall from grace, and the dire consequences to his father because of that recklessness, Luc now clearly remembered the night he had spent making love with this woman.

Luc frowned. ‘We need to talk—’

‘I can’t imagine why,’ Annie interrupted derisively. ‘So we were lovers.’ She shrugged. ‘I remembered it. You obviously didn’t. End of story.’ She grimaced. ‘Now, would you please let go of me, Luc—you’re causing a scene.’ She looked about them pointedly to where several of the other hotel guests were now watching their exchange with open curiosity.

‘Ignore them!’ Luc rasped. He didn’t give a damn what the other hotel guests thought of them. Or him. He only cared that for some reason Annie had chosen not to remind him of their prior relationship.

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ Annie snapped. She only hoped, once Luc had released her, that she didn’t add to their curiosity by collapsing at his feet! Her legs certainly felt shaky enough for her to do that.

She couldn’t believe this was happening. Why did Luc have to suddenly remember their brief time together? It would have been so much easier, for everyone, if she could have just attended the rest of the conference without seeing him again—without him remembering—before returning home to England with no one any the wiser.

That Luc had now remembered their meeting was a complication she could well have done without. One that raised too many questions in her own mind…

The fact that he’d looked so grimly formidable at having remembered that meeting certainly wasn’t reassuring.

Annie forced the tension from her body and permitted a relaxed smile to curve her lips. ‘Let’s not make a big deal out of this, Luc,’ she dismissed lightly. ‘It was a little unflattering that you didn’t remember me initially, of course, but—’

‘Stop it, Annie!’ Luc said impatiently even as his fingers tightened on her arms.

‘Stop what?’ she asked, frustrated at his behaviour. ‘It’s great that you now seem to want to get together and discuss old times, but really, what would be the point when—’

‘I said, stop it!’ Luc repeated with controlled aggression. ‘The Annie I met before—’

‘The Annie you met, and who you’ve only just remembered,’ she pointed out fiercely, ‘was twenty years old and extremely naive!’ She gave a huff of derisive laughter. ‘I’ve grown up a lot in four and a half years, Luc. Enough to know when a man’s only interest is in taking me to bed!’ she added insultingly.

Luc felt the nerve pulsing in his tightly clenched cheek as he considered how she had learnt such a thing. Apart from that night she had spent with him, that is…

How could he not have remembered Annie when they met earlier this morning?

A part of him had remembered, came the instant answer to that question. An inner part of him had recognised both Annie and the huskiness of her voice. The part of him—that recklessly overindulged young man who had almost ruined his family and caused his father’s heart attack—that Luc had long tried to bury in the deepest, darkest recesses of his mind.

Until he saw the unicorn tattoo on her lower back and all of those memories came rushing back with a vengeance.

Her hair had been longer four years ago, of course—a wild cascade of wavy chestnut curls that reached almost to her waist. Her body had been more youthfully rounded then too, her curves lush rather than athletically toned as they were now, and her face had also been fuller, the cheekbones not so defined.

But he should have remembered the deep blue of her eyes and those long dark lashes. Should have remembered how he had enjoyed the plump fullness of her lips when he’d kissed them. When she had kissed him, on the lips, and other more intimate parts of his body. He should have remembered—

‘I was your first lover!’ he exclaimed.

The colour flooded briefly back into those pale cheeks. ‘Yes. Well.’ She shifted uncomfortably. ‘Everyone has to start somewhere, don’t they?’

Except in Annie’s case Luc had been both the start and the finish.

What would Luc say, what would he do, if she told him that a child had resulted from their night together? That waiting for Annie at her mother’s home was a little boy of almost four, who had Luc’s dark curly hair and sturdy body, and the Balfour blue eyes shining brightly in a face that also bore a very strong resemblance to this man?

To his father.

To Luc.

Annie repressed a shiver of apprehension as she looked up at him, having no doubts that the hard, implacable man Luc now so obviously was took no prisoners. It was there for everyone to see in the hard arrogance of his face and the cold, remorseless darkness of those black uncompromising eyes.

No prisoners perhaps, but if he were to learn of Oliver’s existence, would Luc want to claim his son?

And if he did, what would Annie do about it? Oh, she wouldn’t allow him to take Oliver from her, never that, but would Oliver want to know who his father was? One day maybe. And how would Oliver feel once he learnt that Annie could have told his father of his existence now but had chosen not to do so?

Annie needed time to think. To try to decide what to do for the best. For Oliver’s sake…

‘Would you please let go of me now, Luc?’ she requested calmly. ‘I think we’ve drawn enough attention to ourselves for one day, and I have another meeting to go to this afternoon,’ she added.

Luc’s eyes narrowed as his gaze raked over her face. A face that suddenly completely masked her inner emotions. ‘In that case we will dine together in my hotel suite this evening so that we can continue this conversation.’ He made it a statement rather than a question.

Her eyes widened. ‘I really don’t think—’

‘Think what you like, Annie, but your agreement is the price for my releasing you now,’ he added coolly.

‘The price for—!’ Annie glared. ‘You really have turned into an arrogant snake since we last met, haven’t you?’ she seethed.

Luc gave a hard, humourless smile as he slowly uncurled his fingers from her arm. ‘Perhaps I always was one.’

‘Perhaps,’ Annie said, aware that the anger she felt was the only reason her knees hadn’t buckled beneath her when Luc released her. This whole thing—meeting Luc again, torn between whether or not she should tell Luc about Oliver and what might happen once she had—was turning into her worst nightmare.

His mouth tightened. ‘Humour me, Annie.’

‘I have a feeling that far too many women have already done that!’ she retorted.

He gave a rueful smile. ‘Perhaps.’

Annie sighed her frustration with his obvious intractability. What should she do for the best? Should she tell Luc about Oliver or not? Not to tell him now that she had met him again seemed cruel to both Oliver and Luc, but at the same time Annie feared what Luc might do once he knew he had a three-year-old son.

She sighed again. ‘OK, Luc, I’ll have dinner with you this evening—on two conditions,’ she added swiftly as she saw the triumphant glitter in the depths of those coal-black eyes. ‘One, that I be allowed to leave when I want to.’

‘And if you wish to leave as soon as you have arrived?’

‘I won’t.’ She doubted she would be allowed to leave if she decided to tell him about Oliver!

‘How can I be sure of that?’

‘I don’t lie, remember?’ she pointed out.

‘Very well, I agree to your first condition.’

She looked at him from under long lashes. ‘Two, we dine in the hotel restaurant and not your hotel suite.’

He smiled mockingly. ‘You are…nervous at the thought of being alone with me?’

Nervous didn’t even begin to describe Annie’s feelings of apprehension concerning spending more time with him. She was only agreeing to have dinner with him at all because she already knew this older and harder Luc well enough to realise this situation needed closure. One way or another.

Besides, if she should decide to tell Luc about Oliver during dinner this evening, then Annie knew that the whole of the Balfour family would rise up protectively at any attempt by Luc to take Oliver away from her.