Her Tycoon Lover: On the Tycoon's Terms / Her Tycoon Protector / One Night with the Tycoon. Lee Wilkinson
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she said, “it’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Oh, yes, it does. We both know what I’m talking about.” He gave an uncouth burst of laughter. “A stain on your reputation. How’s that for starters?”
To Luke’s puzzlement, Katrin suddenly sagged against the white trunk of one of the birches. She looked defeated, he thought. Broken. What the hell was going on?
Guy laughed again. “I see you understand what I’m talking about. Well, I’ve got a little proposition for you. You come to my room, say in ten minutes, and we’ll forget the whole thing. But if you don’t, I’ll make sure before I leave here tomorrow morning that you don’t have a job—they wouldn’t want someone with your little secret working for them, now would they?”
Katrin said nothing. It wasn’t just defeat, Luke thought. It was despair. As though Guy had pushed her too far, to a place where she was defenseless. What was her secret? And why did she react like a startled deer whenever San Francisco was mentioned?
As though her silence infuriated him, Guy said nastily, “Room 334. In ten minutes—you be there, okay? If not, I’ll smear your name over every newspaper in Manitoba and you won’t get a job anywhere.”
He dropped her elbow and started weaving along the path toward the lodge. Luke sank back into the shadowed bushes, thorns scratching his neck and hands. Then he stayed very still, scarcely breathing. Guy stumbled past, never once glancing at the rosebushes. When he’d vanished around a bend in the path, Luke carefully extricated himself from the branches. His suit would never be the same again, he thought, and in a few long strides reached the woman who was still cowering under the birch trees.
“Katrin,” he said, “are you all right?”
She stared at him as though she’d never seen him before, as though he were some kind of apparition. She was trembling all over, Luke saw with a surge of compassion that rocked him to the roots. “What’s wrong?” he said gently, and reached out for her.
She shrank from him. “Don’t touch me,” she quavered, “I can’t stand it! Just go away. Please.”
“I can’t do that…you’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you? Tell me about it, and perhaps I can help.”
Help? he thought blankly. Get involved? Him? Normally he never got involved in the lives of others.
“No one can help,” Katrin said with such a depth of hopelessness in her voice that Luke was chilled to the bone.
“What was Guy talking about? What’s this secret all about?”
Her shoulders drooped. “So you heard him.”
“He let it drop after dinner that he had something to say to you. He’s a bad actor, we both know that. Hell, the whole conference knows it. So I followed him here.”
With none of her usual grace, Katrin pushed herself away from the tree. “Luke, this has nothing to do with you. Stay out of my life…I keep asking you, and you just don’t get it.”
“Are you going to his room?”
“So that’s what’s bothering you,” she flared. “If you can’t have me, then no one else can?”
Luke winced. Then he said in a hard voice, “Guy Wharton’s a sleaze. You can do better than him, Katrin…and no, I’m not referring to myself.”
“Oh, Luke, I’m sorry,” she cried, “I shouldn’t have said that. I hurt you, didn’t I? I know I’m doing this all wrong. But I—”
“I sure don’t like being put on a par with Guy Wharton.”
“I’m not going to his room,” she said rapidly. “I don’t care what he tells the management, he can tell them anything he likes. I’ve been feeling like a caged bear for the last six months, and I’m sick to death of this job anyway. If I got fired it would be no great loss.”
“A caged bear—strong language. Is that why you go sailing on the lake in a south wind?”
“Well, of course.”
Luke let out his pent-up breath in a long sigh. “I’ll deal with Guy. I’ve got enough leverage that I could ruin him if I chose to.”
“I don’t need your help! Let him say what he wants—I’m leaving here by the end of the summer, so why should I care? My friend Anna knows who I really am, and the rest don’t matter.”
“And where am I in that?”
“I’ve already told you,” she said stonily. “Whatever my secrets are, they’re nothing to do with you.”
“I do wish you’d tell me,” Luke said with such intensity that he was taken aback.
“Too bad.”
“You’re one heck of a stubborn woman!”
“If I weren’t, you’d be trampling all over me.”
She had a point. Taking a moment to gather his thoughts, Luke said, “Katrin, you egged Guy on in the dining room—if you were really scared of him, you wouldn’t have spilled the brandy, or showed him you knew your way around the financial pages. But when he was threatening you a few minutes ago, you looked…despairing, I guess, is the closest I can get. Beaten.”
The words tumbled from her lips. “Have you never had anything so awful happen to you that when you go back there, even in your imagination, all the old emotions overwhelm you? Just as they did when it was going on?” She drew a ragged breath. “Or are you immune from all that, Luke?”
As though time and space had collapsed, Luke was suddenly back in the shack at Teal Lake the day his mother had left, never to return. His father’s drunken rampage, smashing glasses and crockery, the flames from the old woodstove flickering crazily over the ceiling. And in one corner, clutching an old teddy bear, cowered a little boy with black hair and dark eyes, terrified and alone.
Katrin said slowly, “So you do know what I’m talking about. What happened to you, Luke?”
With a shuddering breath, Luke hauled himself back to the present, away from an abyss that he’d fled years ago, a nightmare filled with noise and fire and unending fear. God knows what he looked like. He raked his fingers through his hair. “Nothing happened. Your imagination’s working overtime.”
“I don’t think so.” With sudden violence she cried, “What’s wrong with admitting you’re vulnerable? Just like the rest of the human race?”
Had he ever, wittingly or unwittingly, revealed as much of himself to anyone else as he had to Katrin in the last few seconds? And how he hated himself—and her—for that revelation. Not knowing what else to do, Luke went on the attack. “What if Guy goes to the media? What then?”
She hugged her arms around her chest, lines of strain bracketing her mouth. “He won’t. He’ll be so hungover in the morning, he’ll do well to get out of bed.”
It was painfully obvious she was trying to convince herself as much as Luke. Luke said savagely, “In effect, he’s blackmailing you.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic!”
“I’m telling it like I see it.”
“You’re overreacting,” she said coldly. “Luke, I’ve got to go home, I’m really tired.”
She looked more than tired. She looked at the end of her rope, with faint blue shadows under her eyes, her face haunted and unhappy. His only desire to comfort her, to somehow let her know that she wasn’t alone with her secrets, he awkwardly rested his hand on her wrist.
She looked down. In a strange voice she said, “You have such beautiful fingers. Long and lean…”
By mutual compulsion they fell into each other’s arms, Luke’s hands locking around her waist, her mouth straining