At the Chateau for Christmas

“Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“I ate before I got off the plane, but maybe some coffee?”

“I’ll ask my housekeeper to prepare it and take your bag to your room.”

He was giving her the opportunity to compose herself. Nic had his emotions well under control—unlike Laura—and seemed to sense instinctively what she needed. The consummate host.

On her way back to the living room, she stopped to look at the photographs hanging in the hallway. One of the groupings caught her interest. The French-looking brunette in the photos had to be his wife. She was a cute little thing with stylish short hair. They were laughing together.

Laura couldn’t imagine feeling that happy and carefree. It depressed her that she’d never had a relationship like that. The more she thought about it, the more she knew she would have to end it with Adam. They didn’t bring out the best in each other. Look at the way Nic and his wife glowed in the photograph. You could feel their happiness.

Upset by her thoughts, she returned to the front room and found a tray of coffee and variety of cookies waiting for her. Nic was on the phone speaking his native tongue and stood behind one of the two sofas facing each other. Separating them was a tiled coffee table with a large copper tub filled with fresh-cut blue and red anemones.

While she waited for him, Laura wandered over to the doors. In the twilight, the terraced garden below the villa had taken on a surreal beauty.

“When your grandmother came to visit, she used to stand right there with that same expression on her face. She had several interests, especially gardening. Do you also have a green thumb, as you Americans say?”

He was good at making small talk. She needed to try, too. “I don’t know.” Laura had been studious in her growing-up years so she could go into her grandfather’s hotel business. It had been a man’s world then. Still was, in many ways. She had to work hard to make her mark, and spent a lot of time in the office. That’s where she’d met Adam, who was determined to rise to the top echelons of the company. They had that in common.

This trip to France hadn’t been on her agenda, but she’d seized at the opportunity to learn more about her grandmother. Laura had put her assistant in charge while she was gone, satisfied he could handle things for the few days she’d intended to be away.

She turned in Nic’s direction, bursting with questions. He was silent on several subjects, including his wife, but she needed to remember his personal life was his own. She felt his distrust, no doubt as great as her own. They were walking through a minefield, but especially after her rudeness to him in San Francisco, she had no right to expect information that was none of her business.

“Was that your grandfather on the phone?”

He nodded. “Maurice is coming now.”

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_68db3356-213e-59b4-95c1-70428e5f2feb)

LAURA SWALLOWED HARD. The man she’d been taught to hate would be here soon. What was the real truth about him and his affair with her grandmother? No one was all black or white. The muscles in her stomach started to clench with anxiety.

“The château in La Colle is only ten minutes away. Please help yourself to coffee while we wait.”

She sat across from Nic and sipped hers. “The word château conjures up images. Does it look like one of the Châteaux de La Loire?”

Nic eyed her over the rim of his cup with a bemused expression. “Would you believe me if I told you that when Maurice took her there for the first time, Irene thought he’d brought her to the château where Cinderella was born?”

This was the first time the man had allowed her to see behind that facade of suspicion. Laura couldn’t help but smile. “You made that up.”

He sat forward to reach for a cookie. One black brow lifted. “Ask my grandfather.” In the next breath he got up from the couch and walked into hall. When he returned, he handed her a five-by-seven photo in an antique frame, one she’d seen hanging among the others. “This is what the estate looks like. Hopefully it will satisfy your curiosity.”

With this picture he’d just extended an olive branch of sorts. Even if he wished his grandfather hadn’t put him in this position, she would take him up on it in order to uncover the truth. Nic had actually brought her to his home. She couldn’t have imagined it when they’d first met in California.

“Maurice said Irene lived for the day when you would come to visit and she would take you through it room by room, because you loved castles and princesses.”

“That’s true. I can’t believe she remembered that.”

He studied her for a moment, as if weighing her words. “Apparently you were taken with Cinderella, whose mean-spirited stepsisters had been cruel to her and made her sleep in the attic with the rats.”

“She told you all that? I do have a terrible aversion to rats. A married friend of mine has a little boy who loved the movie Ratatouille. I started to watch it with them, but I couldn—” She suddenly stopped talking. Good grief. She was babbling.

His mouth broke into the first genuine smile he’d given her. That’s when she realized how fabulous he was. Probably the most incredible looking and acting man she’d ever seen in her life. Laura had never met anyone remotely like him. Everything he said and did was starting to slide beneath her skin to draw her in. His wife had to be the luckiest of women.

Laura quickly looked down at the picture, only to cry out in wonder. After studying it, she lifted her eyes to him. “It does look like some of the pictures in my old fairy-tale book, the one my nana used to read to me. Your family home is beyond fabulous, Nic!”

“My great-grandfather Clement had the seventeenth-century château fully restored. He needed a lot of bedrooms and bathrooms so he could entertain business associates. There’s an original baronial-style fireplace, stone spiral staircases and an enviable wine cellar. The conical roof and spring-fed moat add the perfect ambience.”

“This is too much,” she cried softly. To think her grandmother had lived there for twenty-one years. “Did you love the château, too?”

“Bien sûr. My parents lived nearby. The whole Valfort clan congregated there whenever possible.”

“You must have had the time of your life!”

His smile slowly faded, letting her know his family had been in hell, too. That solemn pewter gaze of his traveled over her as if he were trying to figure her out. He had no idea that it sent an unwanted rush of guilty heat through her body. Heaven help her, but she was enjoying Nic too much in his wife’s absence. This had to stop.

All the talk about her grandmother having had an affair with Nic’s grandfather while she was still married to her first husband had horrified Laura for years. She couldn’t imagine getting involved with a married man. What would possess a woman to do that no matter how tempted?

Yet here she was feeling an attraction to this man who’d grown up disliking her and her family with the same disdain Laura had felt for his family. Was this how it had started with her grandmother? An attraction that eventually led to an addiction and in the end the two of them had thrown both families aside in order to be together?

One thing Laura did know. She shouldn’t be alone in this house with Nic any longer than necessary. Without realizing it, Laura pressed the photo to her chest, reminding herself that the only reason she was here was because of Irene. Not because of Maurice’s grandson, who was proving to be a disturbing distraction.

In a mournful tone she murmured, “My grandmother lived here all these years, yet I never once saw her after she married and moved away.”

Nic stood there with his powerful legs slightly apart, his hands on his hips in a male stance. “I heard many versions of the Holden-Valfort saga from my own relatives before I was grown up enough for my grandfather to sit me down and tell me the unvarnished truth about their situation.”

She lifted tormented eyes to him. “You condoned his version, whatever it was?”

Nic pursed his lips. “I love my grandfather without qualification. But I’d like to hear your version, if you’re willing to tell me. We’ll see if they match.”

She put the photo down on the table and got to her feet. “My grandmother disappeared from my life when I was six. I have a vague memory of her, but I know most of what I know from my aunt Susan, Mother’s elder sister, who has never married. She said that my grandmother had an affair with your grandfather even though his wife was still alive.”

“That would have been impossible!” Nic bit out.

“I’m just repeating what I was told. All this happened while my grandfather was battling cancer. Grandfather Richard died too young. Soon after his death, Maurice’s wife died, so he married my grandmother and they moved to France. Neither Susan nor my mother could ever forgive Irene for having an affair while their father was so ill.”

Nic’s face had darkened with lines, making her nervous to go on.

“They said your grandfather was an evil man whose ability to seduce her while his wife was still alive created the scandal. They told her to get out of their lives and never come back.

“When I grew old enough to understand what adultery meant, I could see why Mother and Aunt Susan had been so devastated. When I was told the truth, the bitter side of Mother’s nature came out. Our home was not a happy one.

“But over the years I’ve learned that no one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. To remain so angry at my grandmother was wrong, no matter what she or your grandfather did. I told her I wanted to go see Irene. She forbade it.

“That’s when I suggested she get professional help, but she accused me of turning on her. It was awful. Every time I tried to reason with Mother, she’d shut me out and accuse me of not loving her.

“I made things worse when I tried to talk to my aunt Susan. She told me that if I ever attempted to get in touch with my grandmother, my mother wouldn’t be able to handle it and it could push her over the edge.”

The forbidding expression on Nic’s arresting face filled her with alarm. He moved closer. “That story is so wrong and twisted, it’ll tear my grandfather apart when he hears it.” To her shock he clasped her upper arms, drawing her to his hard muscled body. His intensity was a revelation. “Maurice is euphoric you’re here. Promise me you won’t tell him what you just told me.” A vein stood out in his neck. “Not yet, anyway.”