The Frenchman's Love-Child

‘I’ll try to take you out to lunch…’ Christien rephrased, golden eyes a smouldering gleam below sensually lowered lashes, his vibrant smile suddenly flashing out to chase the gravity from his sculpted mouth, for he was recalling that U-turn as well.

When he smiled that stunning smile, it brought back so much remembered pain for Tabby that it hurt her to look at him. Having won her release from his spellbinding gaze, she shivered, folded her arms tight in front of herself, suddenly cold and scared inside.

‘No, thanks…please take your cheque and leave,’ she told him unevenly.

‘You don’t mean that…you don’t want that,’ Christien purred with immense confidence, all caution thrown to the winds in the face of his own hunger.

No, but she knew that she would never forgive herself if she did not resist him. He had taught her that a level of wanting that went beyond the bounds of common sense or pride was destructive. That he was being his typical arrogant self also helped. He sauntered back into her life after years away and just assumed that she would be as eager for him as she had been at seventeen. But she was, wasn’t she? And he could feel that in her too, she conceded with a sinking heart, for when had he not been able to read her like a book?

Filled with fear of her own weakness, Tabby said abruptly, ‘Is Solange’s cottage close to your home at Duvernay?’

Christien frowned. ‘Non…miles by road.’

‘Do you go there often?’

In answer, Christien growled with impatience. ‘No. I want you to sell. If it is your wish to own property in France, I will instruct an agent to find somewhere more suitable for you.’

‘You have no right to demand that I sell!’ Tabby snapped in sudden furious denial of all the frightening raw feelings that his very presence was making her relive. ‘And who are you to decide what’s suitable for me?’

‘I can’t imagine what you could want with a dwelling in the remoter depths of the Breton countryside. I doubt if it is even habitable. It has been almost half a century since the property was used as anything other than a glorified summer house!’ In a raw gesture of impatience, Christien raked long, lean brown fingers through his luxuriant black hair. ‘Why won’t you see sense? Only a Laroche belongs on the Duvernay estate!’

Paling, Tabby turned her head away, wondering why she was letting him make her feel as if she were something less than he was.

‘In any case,’ Christien murmured in scornful addition, having read a message of poverty in her faded T-shirt and worn jeans, ‘You look like the money would be a lot more use to you.’

‘How do you know that? You know nothing about me now!’ Tabby flung back fiercely, furious that he was putting her down like that. ‘What I want…what I need, anything!’

Christien dealt her a brooding appraisal, anger at her unexpected stubbornness driving him, for once she had done exactly as he wished without hesitation. ‘Au contraire, I know many things about you that I would rather not know,’ he contradicted with a harsh edge to his rich drawl. ‘That you’re a compulsive liar—’

‘No, I’m not. I just told a few fibs. You never asked me what age I was!’ Tabby argued, feverish colour mantling her cheeks as she surged to her own defence.

Christien aimed a look of raw contempt at her. ‘That you can’t even take responsibility for your own actions—’

‘Shut up!’ Tabby suddenly hurled at him, half an octave higher.

‘And you still lose your head when you are confronted with your flaws—’

‘And you think you’re so perfect?’ Tabby hissed at him, rage jumping up and down inside her.

‘No, I wasn’t perfect, ma belle,’ Christien conceded in a black velvety purr, scorching golden eyes locked to her outraged face. ‘But even when I was at my most rampant I never ran two lovers at one and the same time. Sleeping with the lout on the Harley-Davidson while I was in Paris was sordid and sluttish…and not a trifling offence I felt I could overlook!’

The silence was charged with hard, hostile vibrations.

Tabby was staring at his lean, strong face with wide eyes of appalled disbelief. ‘Say that again…I mean, I didn’t…I didn’t do what you just said I did with any lout on a Harley!’

‘En voila` une bonne…that’s a good one! The compulsive liar bites again,’ Christien derided with a curled lip.

Grim at that degrading recollection, he strode past her back into the hall.

In a daze at what he had just let drop, Tabby halted in the sitting-room doorway. ‘Did you really think I’d been unfaithful? How could you think that?’

‘If you were easy with me, why shouldn’t you be equally easy with someone else?’ Christien lifted and dropped a shoulder, smouldering animosity laced with contemptuous dismissal in his insolent appraisal. ‘And let us be honest…five days was a long time for you to go without sex, chérie.’

‘I won’t forgive you for talking to me like this—’

‘I don’t want forgiveness.’ In fact, Christien felt forgiveness of even the most minor variety might be very, very dangerous to his own interests.

Tabby Burnside was nothing but trouble. She had no morals. That that should appeal to him was not a trait within himself that he ought to encourage. She would accept the cheque. Of course she would accept the cheque. However, if there were any further negotiations required, he would leave the matter in the hands of his English solicitor. After all, he was to marry to Veronique, who was a fine woman. Beautiful, honest, trustworthy. She would make an excellent wife. Eventually he would become a father and a grandchild might well lift his mother’s spirits a little. Was that not what had prompted him to become engaged in the first place? Wild, hot sex, fights and seething attacks of emotion would never feature in his alliance with Veronique. That was good, Christien told himself.

For a long time after Christien had departed, Tabby stared into space. The lout on the Harley-Davidson? Could he have been referring to the English student, Pete? Pete and two of his mates had been staying nearby. Pippa and Hilary had become friendly with them and Tabby had gone out with Pete on his bike one evening when Christien had been in Paris. But that had been all. Why had Christien accused her of sleeping with Pete? How could he have believed that she would have behaved like that? Why would he have believed that when she had been so patently crazy about him?

Once more time was sliding back for Tabby and she was reliving that summer. After that first ennervating sighting of Christien in the village, Tabby had lived in a daydream inhabited only by her fantasy of Christien and herself. Her stepmother had become noticeably less unpleasant when Tabby had opted to stay behind at the farmhouse most evenings while everybody else had gone out. Tabby had gloried in the quiet and the privacy and the daring freedom of bathing naked in the big blue-tiled pool. She still remembered the wonderful cool of the water on her overheated bare skin. At the outset of the second week while she’d still been in the water swimming, the electricity had cut out.

Wrapped in a towel, she had been attempting to find her way through the rambling farmhouse back to her bedroom when she had heard a car pulling up outside. Assuming everyone had come back early, she had gone to the door, but it had been Christien out on the front veranda with a torch.

‘I saw the lights go out and I guessed you’d be here alone. Join me for dinner, chèrie,’ he murmured.

‘But there’s a blackout—’

‘We have a generator.’

She stood there, teeth chattering with nerves, hair dripping round her. ‘I’m all wet—’

‘You would like me to dry you?’

‘I’ll need to get dressed.’

‘Don’t bother on my account.’ In the light of the torch, mocking tawny eyes set below the lush black fringe of his lashes rested on her hot face. ‘Are you sure you’re not too warm in that towel?’

‘You don’t even know my name. It’s—’

‘Not important right now.’

‘Tabby,’ she completed shakily, taken aback by the intensity of his appraisal.

‘You don’t look at all like a little brown cat. You’re smaller than I thought you would be, too,’ Christien confided, inspecting her with the torch beam. ‘But you have fabulous skin. Don’t bother with make-up. I hate it.’

For Tabby, his appearance was her every dream come true and she was terrified that he would disappear while she was getting dressed. Giving her the torch, he told her he would wait in the car.

‘I don’t know your name,’ she said when she climbed into his car.

‘Naturellement…of course you do,’ he contradicted with disturbing confidence.

‘All right…I asked one of the locals who you were,’ Tabby mumbled.

‘Don’t waste your best lines on me. I’ve heard them all before and honesty is fresher.’

‘I don’t know you…I shouldn’t have got into a car with you,’ Tabby exclaimed, because she was suddenly feeling very much out of her depth in his company.