Gasping in air, she stared at him, wide-eyed. 'I saw this woman. I remembered something. She said I mustn't do it…'
'Do what?'
'She didn't say what.' Already overwhelmingly aware of the foolishness of her behaviour, her voice sank to a limp mumble. 'I had this feeling that I shouldn't board the jet, that I was leaving something behind. It was so powerful. I felt so scared.'
'Do you feel scared now?'
'No, of course not.' She flushed. 'I'm sorry. I went crazy, didn't I?'
'You had a flashback. Your memory's returning.'
'Do you think so?' She brightened, was faintly puzzled by his cool tone and the hard glitter of his gaze. 'Why was I so scared?'
'The shock and the suddenness of it,' he proffered smoothly. 'It couldn't have been a comforting experience.'
The flight lasted two hours. They were not alone. There was the steward and the stewardess, the two security men, a sleek executive type taking notes every time Luc spoke, and a svelte female secretary at his elbow, passing out files and removing them and relaying messages. And the weird part of it all was that if Catherine looked near any of them they hurriedly looked away as if she had the plague or something.
Sitting in solitary state, she beckoned the stewardess. 'Could I have a magazine?'
'There are no magazines or newspapers on board, Miss Parrish. I'm so sorry.' The woman's voice was strained, her eyes evasive. 'Would you like lunch now?'
'Thanks.' It was quite peculiar that there shouldn't even be a magazine on board. Still, she would only have flicked through it. Sooner or later, she would have to tell Luc that she was dyslexic. She cringed at the prospect. She had never expected to be able to fool Luc this long. But somehow he had always made it so easy for her.
If there was a menu in the vicinity, he ordered her meals. He accepted that she preferred to remember phone messages rather than write them down for him, and was surprisingly tolerant when she forgot the details. He never mentioned the rarity with which she read a book. Occasionally she bought one and left it on display, but he never asked what it was about. And why did she go to all that trouble?
She remembered how often she had been called stupid before the condition was diagnosed at school. She remembered all the potential foster parents who had backed off at the very mention of dyslexia, falsely assuming that she would be more work and trouble than any other child. She also remembered all the people who had treated her as though she were illiterate. And if Luc realised he was taking on a wife to whom the written word was almost a blur of disconnected images, he might change his mind about marrying her.
When they landed in Rome, he told her that they were completing their journey by helicopter. 'Where will we be staying?' she prompted.
'We won't be staying anywhere,' he countered. 'We're coming home.'
'Home?' she echoed. 'You've bought a house?'
Luc shifted a negligent hand. 'Wait and see.'
'I haven't been there before, have I? It's not something else that I've forgotten, is it?'
'You've never been in Italy before,' he soothed.
She hated the helicopter and insisted on a rear seat, refusing the frontal bird's-eye view that Luc wanted her to have. The racket of the rotors and her sore head interacted unpleasantly, upsetting her stomach. She kept her head down, only raising it when they touched down on solid ground again.
Luc eased her out into the fresh air again, murmuring, 'Lousy?'
'Lousy,' she gulped.
'I should've thought of that, but I wanted you to see Castelleone from the air.' Walking her way from the helipad, he carefully turned her round. 'This is quite a good vantage point. What do you think?'
If he hadn't been supporting her, her knees would have buckled at the sight which greeted her stunned eyes. Castelleone was a fairy-tale castle with a forest of towers and spires set against a backdrop of lush, thickly wooded hills. Late-afternoon sunlight glanced off countless gleaming windows and cast still reflections of the cream stone walls on the water-lily-strewn moat. She should have been better prepared. She should have known to think big and, where Luc was concerned, think extravagant. He might have little time for history but with what else but history could he have attained a home of such magnificence and grandeur?
'It wasn't for sale when I found it, and it wasn't as pretty as it is now…'
'Pretty?' she protested, finding her tongue again. 'It's beautiful! It must have cost a fortune.'
'I've got money to burn and nothing else to spend it on.' Idle fingertips slid caressingly through her hair. 'It's a listed building, which is damnably inconvenient. The renovations had to be restorations. Experts are very interfering people. There were times when I wouldn't have cared if those walls came tumbling down into that chocolate-box moat.'
'You're joking!' she gasped.
'Am I? Have you ever lived with seventeenth-century plumbing, cara? It was barbaric,' Luc breathed above her head. 'The experts and I came to an agreement. The plumbing went into a museum and I stopped threatening to fill in the moat. We understood each other very well after that.'