'We'll talk later,' Luca imparted with what sounded like collected self. 'You need to be alone for a while,'
He needed to be alone for a while, Darcy interpreted without difficulty. He's going to walk out on me,..what did I do wrong? a voice screamed inside her bemused head. Here she was, being as fair, honest and reasonable as she knew how to be, and the wretched man was withdrawing more from her with every second.
Tell me...would you have preferred a screaming row?'
'We have nothing to row about any more,' Luca countered, without a shade of his usual irony. In fact he sounded as if his only enjoyment in life had been wrenched from him by the cruellest of fates.
As the clock on the mantelpiece struck midnight, Darcy rose with a sigh. And that was when she heard the sound of footsteps in the hall. As the drawing room door opened, she tensed. For a split second Luca stilled at the sight of her, veiled eyes astutely reading the anxious, assessing look in hers.
'Would you like a drink?' he murmured quietly as he thrust the door closed.
'A brandy..." She watched him stride over to the ornate oriental drinks cabinet. Lithe, dark, strikingly good-looking, every movement fluid as poetry. He didn't look gutted any more—but then she hadn't expected him to. Luca was tough, a survivor, and survivors knew how to roll with the punches.
But she must have been born under an unlucky star. What savage fate had decreed that she should be involved up to her throat in the two biggest mistakes Luca had ever made? It was so cruel. He would judge himself harshly and he would never think of her without guilty unease again. She was like an albatross in his life, always a portent of doom. She hoved in to his radius and things went badly wrong. If he was like every other man she had ever known, he would very soon find the very sight of her an objectionable reminder of his own lowest moments.#p#分页标题#e#
Luca handed her the balloon glass of brandy, his lean, strong face sombre. 'I have come to some conclusions.'
Menaced by both expression and announcement, Darcy downed the brandy in one long, desperate gulp.
'You must have found the last few days very traumatic,' Luca breathed heavily, fabulous bone structure rigid. 'In retrospect, it is impossible to justify anything that I have done. I can make no excuse for myself; I can only admit that from the instant I found you gone from the apartment, the safe open, the Adorata gone, I nourished an obsessive need to run you to ground and even what I saw as the score between us—'
Predictably, Darcy cut to the heart of the matter. 'You thought I'd made a fool of you.'
'Yes...and that was a new experience for me. I must confess that there was nothing I was not prepared to do to achieve my objective,' Luca admitted with a grim edge to his dark, deep voice.
'If Ilaria hadn't confessed tonight, I'd still have believed you guilty, and since it would not have been possible for you to satisfy my demand that you help me to regain the Adorata...I would, ultimately, have dispossessed you of Fielding's Folly.'
Darcy was ashen pale now. 'No...you wouldn't have done that.'
Slowly, Luca shook his dark head, stunning dark eyes resting full on her disbelieving face. 'Darcy, you're a much nicer person than I have ever been...I would have done it. When I married you, I already held the future of the Folly in the palm of my hand.'
'What do you m-mean?' she stammered, moisture beading her short upper lip as she stared back at him.
From the inside pocket of his beautifully tailored dinner jacket, Luca withdrew a folded document. 'I bought the company which gave your father the mortgage on the Folly. This is the agreement. You're in default of the terms of the agreement now. I could have called in the loan and forced you out at any time over the next six months,' he spelt out very quietly. 'It would've been as easy as taking candy from a baby.'
Her shattered eyes huge dark smudges against her pallor, Darcy gazed back at him transfixed. 'You...you bought the company?' she gasped sickly.
As he absorbed the full extent of her horror at such calculated foreplanning, Luca seemed to pale too. 'I had to tell you. I had to be completely honest with you. You have the right to know it all now.'
Her lips bloodless, Darcy mumbled strickenly, 'I don't think I wanted to know that...how could anybody sink that low?'
'I wish I could say that I don't know what got into me...but I do know,' Luca murmured with bleak, dark eyes. 'My ego could not live with what I believed you had done to me that night. I had the power to take a terrible revenge and that was my intention when I replied to your advertisement.'
Darcy nodded like a little wooden marionette, too appalled to do anything but gaze back at him as if he had turned into a monster before her very eyes.