One Night With His Wife

Luc ignored him. His attention was on Star. ‘Does he live here?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Rory stated curtly.

Luc turned his arrogant head back to study Rory. ‘Fiches le camp…get out of here!’

‘I’m not leaving unless Star asks me to…’ The younger man stood his ground.

‘If you stay, I’ll rearrange your face,’ Luc asserted with cool, unapologetic provocation.

‘Stop it, Luc!’ Star was aghast at Luc’s unashamed aggression.

Luc angled back his proud dark head and lounged back against the doorframe like a big powerful jungle cat ready to spring. ‘Stop what?’

‘What’s got into you?’ Star demanded in hot embarrassment.

‘This little punk got my wife pregnant and you dare to ask me that?’ Luc launched back at her, his husky accent scissoring over every syllable with raw incredulity.

‘Rory is not the father of my children!’ Star slammed back at him shakily.

Rory shot a thoroughly bemused look at both of them.

Luc had stilled again. His nostrils flared. His breath escaped in an audible hiss of reaction at that news. ‘So how many experiments did it take?’ he derided in disgust.

Star was ashen pale. She said nothing. Turning away, she closed a taut hand over Rory’s arm and walked him back outside. ‘I’m sorry about this, but it’s better if you go for now. Luc and I need to talk, sort some things,’ she explained tightly.

‘Obviously you haven’t told him about the twins yet.’

‘No…but he wants a divorce,’ she heard herself advance, because she was too ashamed to tell Rory what her mother had done to Emilie.

Rory sighed. ‘Probably the best thing in the circumstances. He seems a pretty aggressive character. I couldn’t see you ever being happy with someone like that.’

Happy? She almost laughed. What was happy? Being separated in every way from Luc had been like living in a void. It hadn’t cured her. Forcing a brittle smile, Star said, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to have a row with you about buying food for us.’

Closing the back door again, she leant against the solid wood, mustering all her strength. She had assumed that Luc had gone back into the kitchen. So as she moved back in that direction she was surprised to see that the twins’ bedroom door had been pressed more fully open.

Luc was poised several feet from the foot of the cots. Venus was curled on her side, an adorable thatch of copper curls screening her tiny face. Mars was flat on his back, silky dark hair fringing his sleep-flushed features, one anxious hand gripping the little bunny rattle which he never liked to get too far from him.

‘They’re what? Five…six months old?’ Luc queried without an ounce of emotion.

After the number of setbacks the twins had weathered, they were still quite small for their age. Star studied her children with her heart in her eyes, thanking God as she did every time she came into this room that they had both finally been able to come home to her, whole and healthy. She glanced from under her lashes at Luc. His bold dark profile was grim.

‘Would you have liked them to be yours?’ she heard herself whisper foolishly.

‘Tu plaisantes!’

You must be joking! Star reddened fiercely at that retort. What a stupid question to ask! Instead of asking it, she should just have told him the truth. Whether Luc liked it or not, Venus and Mars, fancifully christened by Juno, were his son and daughter.

Luc strode out past her. Leaving the door carefully ajar, Star followed him back into the kitchen.

‘In fact, I’m extremely grateful that they are not my children,’ Luc drawled in level continuation as he took up a commanding stance by the hearth, his lean, dark, devastating features cool as ice. ‘It would have complicated the divorce and made a clean break impossible. Considering that we have about as much in common as oil and water, joint custody would have been a serious challenge.’

Star was pale as death now. His reaction shook her to her very depths. All right, so he had never thought of her as his wife. Yet when Rory had walked in Luc had been angry, aggressive, powered, it had seemed, by some atavistic all-male territorial instinct. She had never seen that side of him before, but now she had to accept that his reaction to Rory had simply stemmed from his savage pride.

Didn’t he have any normal feelings at all? How could Luc just stand there telling her that he was relieved and grateful that her babies were supposedly nothing to do with him? In pained fascination, she searched his face, absently noting the very faint sheen of moisture on his dark golden skin, the unyielding blank darkness of his hooded gaze.

‘Luc…I—’

‘I was leaving…’ Luc studied his diminutive wife, struggling to distance himself, black fury like a thick, suffocating smoke fogging his usually ordered thoughts. Suddenly he understood why so many unfaithful wives had ended up losing their heads to Madame Guillotine during the French Revolution. Feeling the slight tremor in his hands, he dug them rawly into the pockets of his well-cut pants. Nobody will ever love you as much as I do. Such soft words, such empty promises. He was not a violent man. But he wanted to remind her who she belonged to. No, she did not belong to him, he adjusted at grim speed. He did not want her to belong to him. He had meant every word he had said.

Star moved anxious hands. ‘Could we just talk?’

‘Talk?’ Luc growled, not quite levelly, watching the way the flickering candlelight played over her porcelain-fine skin, accentuating the distinctive colour of her eyes and the full, inviting softness of her ripe mouth.

‘About Juno?’ Star moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue and watched Luc tense, his stunning dark eyes welding to her with sudden force.

‘No.’

‘No?’ Colour mantled Star’s cheekbones as the raw tension in the atmosphere increased. Her heart skipped a beat and then began to thump against her ribcage. Her mouth running dry, she tensed in dismay as she felt her breasts lift and swell, the rosy peaks tightening into mortifying prominence.

Luc’s brilliant eyes flamed over her. ‘If you spend the night with me, I’ll let you both off the hook…’

‘I b-beg your pardon?’ Star stammered dizzily.

‘I won’t put the police on Juno’s trail.’ He gazed back at her steadily, not a muscle moving in his lean, strong face. ‘One night. Tonight. That’s the price.’

Her soft full mouth fell open. She closed it again, and tried and failed to swallow. She felt as if the ground had suddenly fallen away beneath her feet. ‘You’re not serious…you can’t be!’

The silence shimmered like a heatwave between them.

Star trembled.

‘Why shouldn’t I be serious?’ Luc angled his well-shaped dark head back, a hard smile slanting his wide, sensual mouth. ‘One night only. Then tomorrow you travel down to London with me to see Emilie. Together we reassure her that she has nothing further to worry about. After that, we never see each other again in this lifetime.’

Her stomach twisted at that clarified picture. ‘But you don’t want me—’

‘Don’t I?’ Luc moved a slow, fluid step closer, dark eyes mesmerically intense as they scanned her bemused face. ‘Just one more time…’

‘You don’t want me. You never did! I’m not your type,’ Star argued, as if she was repeating a personal mantra, a fevered, disbelieving edge to her voice.

‘Except in bed,’ Luc extended without hesitation.

Star stilled in astonishment. Then she jerked in reaction to that revelation. He was finally acknowledging a fact he had refused to concede eighteen months earlier. Luc could find her desirable. The night the twins had been conceived, Luc had genuinely responded to her, not just to the anonymous invitation of a female body in his bed. The following morning, his cold silence on that point had shattered what little had remained of her pride.

Anger and regret now foamed up inside her in a bewildering surge. ‘Couldn’t you just have admitted that to me eighteen months ago?’

‘No,’ Luc drawled smoothly. ‘It would have encouraged you to believe that our marriage had a future.’

The heat still singing through Star’s blood suddenly slowed and chilled. Such cool calculation stabbed her to the heart and unnerved her.