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And she frowned because Cecelia recognised the packaging.
On one overseas trip, she had enjoyed staring into the window of a lavish boutique in the foyer of a Florence hotel where they had been staying. Whenever she’d been waiting for Luka, she had indulged herself with the joy of admiring the beautiful jewellery.
She pulled back the bow, but first she had a question for she didn’t quite believe what Luka had said. ‘You didn’t really come in just because it’s my birthday?’
‘Of course I did. I always try to do the right thing on my PA’s birthday.’
Luka knew full well that for Cecelia he had done more than just the right thing. Usually it was flowers and perfume, or a voucher for a spa hotel, but a few weeks ago, on a business trip, he had stepped out of the elevator and Cecelia’s back had been to him. He had looked to where her gaze had been focused and spied the sparkling window display of the hotel boutique.
The next morning she had been looking again.
And the next.
It had sat in his bureau at home for weeks now.
Last night, just after he had fired off the text to say that he wouldn’t be in, he had remembered her birthday.
Luka had been partying hard, trying to forget the news that had come in about his mother, trying to extend the weekend into a long one, just to delay the return home.
And then he had remembered the box inside his bureau.
‘Oh!’ She gave a gasp of recognition when she saw the necklace. ‘How on earth...?’ It was thick and lavish, coiled with rubies, or glass, she wasn’t sure—Cecelia hadn’t even asked the price at the time, for in either case it would have been way out of her league; she had simply adored it, that was all. ‘Luka, it’s far too much.’
‘It can double up as your leaving gift,’ Luka brooded. ‘Do you want to put it on?’
‘No,’ she said too quickly, ‘I’ll wait till I’m home.’
She wouldn’t be able to manage the clasp and she would burst into flames at the touch of his hands if he so much as brushed the sensitive skin of her neck.
The breeze from the river wasn’t helping at all now. The tiny cardigan felt like a thick shawl around her shoulders and she simply didn’t know how to react.
‘How did you even know it was my birthday?’ Cecelia asked, because she hadn’t mentioned it and certainly she hadn’t made a note of it in his diary.
‘I make it my business to know.’ He could see she was shaken and her reaction surprised him. He had thought she’d be more than used to a fuss being made but she actually seemed stunned, even close to tears. ‘I fired a PA once, about ten years ago,’ he explained as a waiter put down two small glasses, a bottle of ouzo and a carafe of iced water on the table between them.
‘No, thank you,’ Cecelia said as he went to pour one for her. ‘You were saying.’
Luka went ahead and added iced water to the ouzo and she watched as the clear liquid turned white.
How she would love to try it, but she had to keep her guard up, for it was becomingly increasingly difficult to remember that this was work.
He did this for all his PAs, Cecelia reminded herself, and forced herself to listen rather than daydream as he told her just why he had made such a nice fuss.
‘As I was firing her she started to cry.’
‘Tears don’t usually trouble you,’ Cecelia said, thinking of the many tears women had shed over him.
‘They don’t,’ Luka said, ‘but as she was clearing out her things she said that it was her worst birthday ever. She was a terrible PA and deserved to be fired, but I didn’t set out to ruin her birthday.’
‘You really felt bad?’ Cecelia checked, pleased that he did have a conscience after all.
‘A bit,’ he agreed. ‘Since then I have tried to keep track. Normally I would have taken you for lunch. In fact, that was what I had planned to do but when it came to it I was sulking too much to do so...’
She smiled again and back came summer.
‘I thought, given it’s your birthday, that you would have plans tonight. That’s why I checked what time you had to leave by.’
‘No, no plans.’
It was her best birthday ever.
Luka couldn’t know that, of course, but even Gordon hadn’t made much of a fuss.
They’d gone for dinner.
But there had been no candles and no cake.
Gordon had bought her a cloying perfume Cecelia hadn’t liked.
It wasn’t so much the lavishness of the gift Luka had given her that made it the best, more the thought behind it.
How he had seen her looking at the necklace.
That he had noticed...
Yes, she was right to leave.
Because of this.
Because of those moments when he put her world to rights and she was utterly and completely crazy about him.
She had grown up with the dour warning that she did not want to end up like her mother and that men like Luka could only lead her down a dangerous path.
Yet, to her shame, it beckoned her at times.
Times like tonight.
When the easiest thing in the world would be to thank him with a kiss.
She knew where it would lead, though, for that was exactly where she wanted it to lead.
And Luka wouldn’t be hard to convince!
He was easy.
That much she knew.
He was, though, at least with her, the perfect gentleman.
Well, not perfect, and not always a gentleman, but from the beginning Luka had, in the main, accepted her boundaries and there had been no overt flirting.
Occasionally he would slip, but he’d quickly rein it in. He wasn’t a sleaze and played only where welcome. More than that, though, his world worked far better with Cecelia in it. He recognised talent and certainly she was brilliant at her job. Luka knew full well that he would lose the best PA he’d ever had if he chased that perpetual want.
And there was want in him.
Yet he knew his own track record, and Luka had never lasted with anyone for more than a month.
But look where behaving had got him, Luka thought.
He’d lost her anyway.
He decided now was the time to find out more about her.
‘How did your mother die?’ Luka asked, though he had already guessed her response—That’s personal,Luka, or, That’s not your concern.
She was about to deliver a response just like that, but then she remembered she was leaving.
Perfection was no longer required now that she had resigned.
And so she told him the truth, or at least the little she knew of it.
‘I believe she took too much cocaine.’
CHAPTER FOUR (#u245a72a6-f6f3-5e34-95b9-5db1f3a65382)
OH, CECELIA!
Luka hadn’t expected to find out much at all, let alone that her mother had died from a cocaine overdose.
He thought of her, so prim and controlled, and had assumed her upbringing had caused that. Well, he concluded, it had, but not in the way he had imagined.
Still, he said nothing, because he didn’t want to say the wrong thing, and he desperately wanted to hear more.
Cecelia liked his patient silence. There wasn’t so much as a flicker of reaction that she could read in his expression as she revealed the dark truth, and Cecelia inwardly thanked him for that. ‘She was at a party, I’ve been told.’
‘Was it a one-off—?’ he started to ask, but Cecelia cut in.
‘No, it was a regular occurrence. My mother loved to party, she lived a very debauched life.’
‘And you lived with her?’
‘I did.’ Cecelia nodded.
‘What was that like?’
She wanted warm memories of her early childhood.
Cecelia wanted to say that in spite of everything there had been so many amazing times and that despite her mother’s ways she’d been loved.
Yet she could not, and so she described what it had been like to live with her mother. ‘Unsafe.’
Yes, he understood her a little better now.
He thought of her neat desk and tidy drawers and her utter reluctance to unbend and have fun, but now he watched as she reached for her purse and stood.
‘We had better get back,’ Cecelia told him, deciding that she had said far too much.
‘No, sit,’ Luka said, but she shook her head.
‘I don’t have time to sit by the river and reminisce,’ Cecelia said. ‘And neither do you. You have a meeting with Garcia at ten.’
‘I’ve already said he can wait.’
Well, she wouldn’t.
Cecelia walked off swiftly, embarrassed and unsure why she had told him about her mother when usually she did all she could to conceal that side of her past.
Usually she loathed people’s reactions to it—their shocked expressions and the recriminations. She felt like crying as she remembered her so-called friends’ reactions at boarding school when they had stumbled on the salacious news articles and the endless dissection of her mother’s death.
Schooldays had certainly not been the best times of Cecelia’s life.
They had read out every embarrassing detail to each other with relish as she had lain in her bed in the dorm, night after night. And then had come the endless questions.
‘Was it a party or an orgy your mother was at?’ Lucy, the ringleader had asked. ‘And what do they mean by “compromising position”?’
It hadn’t been much better during term breaks. Cecelia’s pace quickened as she thought of her aunt and uncle. They had rarely mentioned her mother and when they had they’d spoken in disapproving tones.
The deeper truth was that home had been no better, because actually her aunt and uncle had rarely spoken to her at all.
As for Gordon—well, with him, her mother had been she who must not be named, just a sordid part of Cecelia’s past that was best forgotten.
Yet Luka had wanted to know more about it.
‘Wait,’ he called, and though she did not slow down he soon caught up with her. ‘Why walk off when we’re talking?’
‘Because there’s work to do, because...’ You’re work.
Constantly she had to remind herself of that fact.
Four more weeks of this felt too long, but then Cecelia reminded herself that he would be away for the next two.
She would be mad to get involved with him.
Mad.
She wasn’t flattering herself to believe she could have him.
Cecelia also knew Luka well enough to know it would only be for a night, or a couple of weeks at best.
