One Night With His Wife

‘I’m so s-sorry, Luc…I really am,’ she stammered truthfully in the dim passageway which led past several doors into the basement kitchen. It was her only reception area, and although daylight was only just beginning to fade she already had candles lit, because it was a dark room, and the place needed rewiring.

One step into the kitchen, Luc surveyed her with dark eyes colder than frostbite. ‘By the time I have finished taking this betrayal out of your useless little hide, you’ll understand the true meaning of what it feels like to be sorry!’

Shaken by such a level of condemnation, Star turned even paler. Did he think that she should have terminated her pregnancy? Was that what he was getting at? Had it been a betrayal of trust to give birth to children he would not have wanted her to have? Her tummy muscles knotted up. ‘Sometimes things just g-go wrong, Luc—’

‘Not in my life they don’t…not once until you came along,’ he completed with icy exactitude.

In the face of an accusation that she was aware had more than a smidgen of truth, Star braced herself with one nerveless hand on the back of the sagging armchair by the range and stared helplessly at him, registering every detail of his appearance. His superb charcoal-grey silk suit sheathed his broad shoulders and the long, powerful length of leg in the kind of fabulous fit only obtainable from extremely expensive tailoring. His luxuriant black hair had been ruffled by the wind, but the excellence of the cut had ensured that the springy dark gleaming strands just fell back into place.

Briefly engaged in sparing his humble domestic surroundings a grim, lip-curling appraisal, Luc turned his attention back to her without warning.

Flash! As Star collided with the long-lashed brilliance of his stunning dark deep-set eyes, it was like finding herself thrust into an electric storm. Heat speared through her slight frame. Feverish pink sprang up over her slanted cheekbones. She trembled, every sense awakened to painful life and sensitivity, an intense awareness of her own body engulfing her to blur every rational thought.

Silence banged thunderously in her ears, her heart thumping a frantic tattoo against her breastbone. A wanting so powerful it left her weak had seized her, dewing her skin with perspiration, stealing her ability to breathe or vocalise. What was it about him? She had asked herself that so many times. The obvious? He was fantastically good-looking. So tall, so dark and beautifully built. His maternal grandmother had been an Italian countess. That heritage was etched in his fabulous bone structure, the blue-black ebony of his hair and the golden hue of his skin.

Was that really the only reason she yearned for him with every fibre of her being and when deprived of him, felt only half alive? It had to be the only reason, she told herself frantically.

‘So you have nothing to say for yourself,’ Luc drawled.

‘I’m still in shock,’ she mumbled truthfully.

Shock. Her shock was nothing to his, Luc decided with sudden ferocity. To find her living like this in abject poverty, candles lighting a room Gothic in its lack of modern conveniences or comfort. She was dressed like a gipsy and thin as a rail. Bereft of the support of Sarrazin money for just eighteen months, she’d clearly sunk without trace. Just as he had expected; just as he had forecast. He studied her bare feet, recalled that she had almost run across the rough gravel, and the most extraordinary ache stirred inside him. Frustrated fury leapt up to engulf and crush it out. Not enough sense to come in out of the rain, Emilie had once said of Star.

Emilie…Luc’s quick intellect zoomed in on that timely reminder at supersonic speed, but his hooded gaze was nonetheless still engaged on roaming up over Star’s veiling skirt with its silky fringe. Memory unerringly supplied a vision of the slender, shapely perfection of her legs. He tensed almost imperceptibly, his appraisal rising higher, finding no escape in the pouting thrust of her small braless breasts beneath her velvet wrap top.

As she flung her head back, his lean, powerful body hardened in urgent all-male response. Her hair glowed in the dimness, bright as beaten copper in sunlight, dancing round her triangular face. Her pallor highlighted exotic eyes, alive with awakening sensuality, and a wide, soft, voluptuously pink mouth.

And this was the woman he had spent over a hundred thousand pounds trying to trace over the past eighteen months? Tiny, skinny, irredeemably different from the rest of her sex. There was nothing conventional in her mercurial changes of expression, her fluid restive movements, her jangling bracelets, her outrageous earrings shaped like cats or her ridiculous clothing. She wasn’t beautiful either. There was nothing there that he admired or looked for in a woman—nothing but the drugging, earthy sexuality that was as much a part of her as her dusty bare feet, Luc told himself with driven determination.

Star had the soul and spirit of a small wild animal, always ready to fight for survival and use whatever she had to get what she wanted. Or trade? Why else was she surveying him with that melodramatically charged look of undeniable hunger? No, there was no doubt in Luc’s mind that Star knew exactly what he was here about. To look so ashamed and desperate, she had to have been involved up to her throat in persuading his father’s elderly cousin to part with her money!

‘How could you have done such a thing to Emilie?’ Luc demanded icily.

A frown line indented Star’s smooth brow. Colliding with his glittering dark gaze, she froze as if an icy hand had touched her heart. Perspiration beaded her short upper lip. Gooseflesh sprang up on her exposed skin. The chill he emanated was that powerful.

‘Emilie…?’ Star’s frown line deepened.

‘The loan, Star.’

‘What loan…what are you talking about?’

‘Si tu continues…’ Luc swore so softly that the tiny hairs at the nape of Star’s neck rose.

It was a threat. If she kept it up, he would get angry. But, Emilie and what loan?

‘I honestly don’t know what—’

Luc slowly spread the long brown fingers of one expressive hand. The atmosphere was so charged she could almost feel it hiss warningly in her pounding eardrums. ‘So that’s the way you’re trying to play it,’ he spelt out, framing each laden word with terrifying emphasis. ‘You’re acting all ashamed because of the two little bastards you’ve managed to spawn while you were still married to me?’

The offensive words struck Star in the face like a blow. She fell back in physical retreat. ‘Bastards?’ she whispered tremulously.

‘Illegitimacy seems to run very much in your family genes, doesn’t it?’ Luc pointed out lethally. ‘Your children…you…your mother—not one of you born with anything so conventional as a church blessing.’

Registering in disbelief that Luc believed that their twin babies had been fathered by some other man, Star gazed back at him with haunted eyes of bewildered pain. ‘No…no, Luc…I—’

‘Surely you don’t think I require an explanation?’ Luc elevated a winged ebony brow, studying her with sardonic disdain. ‘I shall divorce you for adultery and will not pay alimony, I assure you.’

Divorce…divorce! Even in the midst of her appalled incredulity that Luc should believe her capable of giving birth to another man’s children while still legally joined to him, that single word tore into Star like a bullet slamming into her body. And like a bullet rending tender flesh it brought unimaginable pain. Divorce was for ever and final. She stared back at him, eyes shadowing, slanted cheekbones taut with tension beneath her fair skin.

A roughened laugh escaped Luc. ‘You seem shocked.’

The atmosphere sizzled, hot with high-voltage tension. She sensed his rage, battened down beneath the icy façade he maintained. And aching, yearning sadness filled her to overflowing when she saw the grim satisfaction in his hard, dark gaze. Now he had the perfect excuse to be rid of her. But then he’d had excuse enough in any case. Not wanted, not suitable. Too young, too lowly born, possessed of embarrassing relations, unfit to be the wife of the chairman of a bank.

‘You should never have married me…’ Anguish filled Star as she remembered her ridiculous optimism against all the odds. Her manipulation, her manoeuvres, her final desperate attempt to force him to give her a trial as a real wife. What did it matter if he now chose to believe that the twins belonged to some other man? It had to be what he wanted to believe. He didn’t care; he had never cared.

Luc had swung away. His strong profile was rigid. He clenched his hands into fists and then slowly uncurled them again. But he could still feel the violence like a flickering flame darting along the edge of his self-control. She was a little slut. He despised her. In the circumstances, he was being wonderfully polite and civilised. Only he didn’t feel civilised. He wanted to punish her. He wanted to punish her even more when she stood there like a feckless child, who never, ever thought of the damage she might be doing. But he didn’t dare risk acting on that urge.

For eighteen endless months he had had Star on his conscience. He had worried himself sick about her. How she was living, where she was living, even whether or not she was still living. In Luc’s opinion, anyone with her capacity for emotional intensity had to be unstable. She had too much emotion, the most terrifying amount of emotion, and it had all been focused solely on him.

Eighteen months ago, in more anger than he had ever known, he had lashed out and ripped her apart with the force of his rejection. And she had taken off like a bat out of hell, leaving all her clothes behind, not to mention a letter which Luc had considered dangerously close to thoughts of self-destruction. He had had the moat dragged at the chateau, he had had frogmen in the lake day after day…

Sarrazin Bride Driven to Suicide by Unfeeling Husband. He had imagined the headlines. Over and over again, he had dreamt of her floating like the Lady of Shalott or Ophelia surrounded by lilies. He had been haunted by her! Freed of her ludicrous expectations, he should have found peace. Instead, he had got his nice quiet life back, and his freedom, but he had lived in hell!

Star studied Luc with pitying aquamarine eyes and tilted her chin. ‘You weren’t worthy of my love. You were never worthy of my love. I can see that now.’

Luc swung back to face her as if she had plunged a dagger into his strong back. Black eyes cold as charity assailed hers.

‘You’re unreachable. You’re going to turn into a man as miserable and joyless as your father,’ Star forecast with a helpless shake of her copper head. ‘You don’t even like children, do you?’

Luc stared back at her in silent derision, but the slight darkening of colour over his spectacular cheekbones, his sudden tension and the flare of hostility burning from him told her all she needed to know. Oh, yes, some day a recognised son and heir would be born to his next wife, Star reflected painfully. And Luc would naturally repeat all the cruelties of his own lonely childhood. What else did he know? That child would be banished to a distant nursery and a strict nanny. He would be taught to behave like a miniature adult and censured for every childish reaction until he learned not to cry, not to shout, not to lose control…indeed that emotions were messy, unnecessary and unmanly. At least that poor stifled child would not be Mars, Star told herself wretchedly.

‘Emilie…’ Luc reminded Star with icy bite. ‘How could you introduce Emilie to a vulture like your mother?’

Thrown into total confusion by that abrupt and confusing change of subject, Star had to struggle to recall the loan which Luc had mentioned earlier, but she could not stretch her mind to comprehend how anyone could possibly call Juno a vulture. Juno would give her last penny to anyone in need. ‘I don’t understand—’

‘Bon! Cela suffit maintenant…OK, that’s enough,’ Luc incised harshly, his darkly handsome features cold and set. ‘Lies are going to make me even angrier. In fact, lies may just prompt me to calling in the police!’

Lies? The police? The police? Star’s lashes lowered to screen her shaken eyes as she fought to concentrate her wandering thoughts. How much more did Luc expect from her? All right, so he acknowledged few human feelings and therefore could not understand what she was going through right now. But he arrived here without warning, disgustingly referred to their children as having been ‘spawned’, simply assumed that they had been fathered by a lover and then he announced that he wanted a divorce! Wasn’t that enough to be going on with?

‘I don’t tell lies,’ she stated.

‘That should make life simpler. So, you and Juno collaborated to persuade Emilie to loan your mother everything she had—’

‘No…’ Star stepped forward in aghast disconcertion at that charge.

‘Yes. Don’t you dare lie to me,’ Luc intoned in a low, vicious tone she had never heard or thought to hear from him. ‘Yesterday, Emilie’s accountant told me the whole story. Emilie cashed in her investments and gave Juno the money to open up that art gallery.’

Star froze. The pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place. Juno had borrowed from Emilie, not from a bank!