His Mistress Proposal?: Public Scandal, Private Mistress / His Mistress, His Terms / The Secret Mistress Arrangement

‘I meant to show Veronica where it was. No, not you, Sophie, I want you to help Ashley get the table set and the vegetables ready for dinner, and no face-pulling either of you, you know what the deal is—while I’m in this sling I can’t lift things out of the oven, or chop safely.’

Veronica barely glanced at the inviting blue waters of the big, rectangular swimming pool, walking briskly around the white-paved edge and along the winding path through the shrubbery, past a huge vegetable garden next to a big, stone cistern of water and back onto a recognisable part of the driveway, her nervousness heightened by Luc’s brief directions framed in deafening silence.

She was surprised and relieved when he turned out to have been telling the truth and peeled off towards his parked car, leaving Veronica to quicken her pace and hurry off to the cottage, entering it with a thumping heart, and the feeling that she had just dodged a bullet.

She went into the deep recess of the bathroom and splashed water on her flushed face, leaving the dewy sheen of droplets to evaporate on her skin. Outside the sun was still shining as it dropped lower in the cloudless sky, radiating heat to the baked earth, but the drawn shutters made the interior of the cottage soothingly dim, so that when she first came out of the bedroom raking her hands through her thick hair to lift it away from her hot scalp, she didn’t immediately see the man braced against the frame of the sliding door she had left open to the faint breeze.

She gasped as she saw the shimmer of his white clothes and his brown arms flex as he shifted stance, leaning in across the threshold.

‘Why so shocked? Surely you were expecting me. Did you really think I was going to let you off that easily?’

CHAPTER FIVE

‘YOU can’t come in!’ Veronica blurted as he straightened up to step inside.

Lucien rested the hilt of his shoulder against the door, thrusting one hand into his trouser pocket, studying the woman who was the first in a very long time to confuse and confound him. Maybe it was the freckles, he brooded. They gave her an erroneous air of innocent playfulness, which his jaded senses had found irresistibly appealing. In fact, she had slipped under his well-protected guard with unsettling ease considering that he had already been on high alert after his nasty brush with notoriety in London. But although that situation had blown up in his face and given him a literal as well as a figurative bloody nose, it hadn’t shocked him to his cynical core—unlike his passionate run-in with the not-so-innocent seductress poised front of him, her body a symphony of curves beneath her summery-thin clothes.

He had the advantage of knowing exactly what she looked like without them … a life model for one of the great painters of sensuous female nudes.

Not Rubens, but Renoir, he decided, his imagination winging back to his Paris apartment to view his impressionistic memory of her reclining against the disordered pillows, her smooth skin rosy with a delicious warmth, her opulent breasts firm with excitement, their soft pink tips peaking with pleasure as he played with them, her lush hips and rounded limbs gilded by the light of the lamp, welcoming the weight of his big body as he wrestled her into eager submission and thrust into her tight, sultry heat.

He felt the hot stirring in his groin with a savage amusement, embracing the surge of predatory lust that powered his male desire to hunt, capture and dominate and refocused his wandering thoughts on his most immediate goal.

‘Why can’t I?’ he challenged, content for the moment to indulge her naïve belief that she was in control, for the sheer anticipated pleasure of proving otherwise. ‘You left your door wide-open, so you must have been expecting me to follow you …’

Veronica’s fingers contracted against her scalp in instinctive rejection of the Freudian possibility that she had wanted him to invade her private space.

‘I left it open for the breeze—’

‘And whatever the breeze blows in,’ he pointed out, his lazy smile belied by his watchful intent. ‘It’s not as if I’m a stranger. As you can see, I’m just the boy from next door.’

His darkening eyes swept over her and Veronica was suddenly made aware of her upraised arms and unconsciously provocative pose. She wrenched her hands down from her head, wincing as they took with them several tangled strands of hair.

‘Or is that the problem?’ he guessed wryly, boosting himself off the door and sauntering inside in brazen defiance of her expressed command. ‘You’re embarrassed to admit that you had a wild sex romp with the boy next door.’

‘You sound like a cheap tabloid newspaper headline,’ she snapped, instinctively jabbing at the place she thought he would be most vulnerable.

‘I’ve just had a crash course,’ he said with a grim smile.

‘And believe me, the tabloids are anything but cheap when they’re shelling out for sleaze.’

‘Well, thankfully that’s outside my experience.’

‘And what’s inside your experience? Picking up anonymous foreigners in bars for—well, what would you prefer to call it … a “torrid night of passion”?’

Veronica clenched her hands at her sides. Did he really think she was that shamefully indiscriminate? ‘I—you—’

‘Yes, you and I,’ he cut through her faltering attempt to fend off his barrage, ‘burning up the sheets together. And now you seem to want to act as if we never met. What frightens you more, Veronica—the fact that I’m a real person and not some obedient sexual fantasy-figure tucked away in your memories, or the fact that I’ve turned out to be someone you can’t just walk away from?’

She hunched her shoulders. It was his bruised male ego talking, she told herself, that was all. ‘I—it should never have happened,’ she said, moving over to pick up the apricot jam she had left by the sink and put it in the small under-bench refrigerator.

‘But it did happen, and I’m a naturally curious person, I want to know why,’ he pressed ruthlessly on her squirming conscience. ‘Why don’t you want to talk about it? Am I breaking some kind of taboo? Do you have some kinky fetish about bedding men who can only use a foreign tongue, so to speak?’

Her cheeks pinkened at his crude innuendo and she grabbed up a cloth and began to wipe down the spotless bench. ‘No! Of course not—I’m not in the habit of bedding anyone—’

‘You mean this was the first time for you?’ he asked cynically, planting his hip against the edge of the bench, effectively preventing her from continuing her pointless busy-work.

‘Yes—I mean, no,’ she added hastily, in case he thought she was trying to claim to have been a virgin. She threw down the cloth and drilled him with a defiant glare. ‘I don’t see why I should have to answer any more of your insulting questions. My love life is none of your business—’

‘Love life?’ His eyebrows shot up and she cursed herself for that unthinking choice of words. ‘Interesting that you find it insulting that I seek to understand how I fit into your … love life. As for questions—well, isn’t there one you’ve been wanting to ask me?’

Her heart began to thud unevenly in her breast, her breathing growing choppy. Questions could sometimes be as revealing as answers.

‘About this, for example.’ He withdrew his hand from his trouser pocket and she uttered a croaky little sound as he opened it to show her the jade pendant lying in his open palm. ‘I’d strung it from the rear-vision mirror of the car, to remind me to steer clear of perfidious jades,’ he said with gentle malice. ‘I found it in my bed in Paris—it has a damaged catch, otherwise I might have been left to wonder if you’d been a figment of my over-heated imagination. Pretty, isn’t it? Yet cruel in what it actually represents—a vicious hook on which to snag an unsuspecting fish and drag the poor, helpless victim to a painful fate.’

She took her eyes off the pendant only long enough to flick him a scathing look—surely he wasn’t implying that he was in any way a helpless victim? Or unsuspecting, come to that!

He watched her as he hefted it thoughtfully in his hand. ‘Quite valuable, too, I imagine …’ he mused with an infuriating smile.

Her hand darted out, but her fingertips barely grazed the delicate chain before his hand snapped shut over his prize, presenting her with an impenetrable fist.

‘Or does its sentimental value outweigh the price of the jade? Perhaps it was a romantic gift from a lover—someone you left back in New Zealand?’

She was unwillingly reminded of the modest diamond chip that Neil had demanded back after their failed engagement—the ring being the only piece of jewellery he had given her during their two-year relationship.

Lucien obviously wasn’t going to give the pendant back until she told him. ‘My parents gave it to me as a twenty-first birthday present,’ she admitted stiffly. ‘I don’t often take it off, so it’s not surprising that I didn’t notice that the catch was worn.’

But instead of handing it over he slipped it back into his pocket under her outraged eyes. ‘It would be a pity to risk losing it in someone else’s bed. They might not be as scrupulous as I am about returning it,’ he said glibly.

‘You haven’t returned it,’ she was stung to reply.

‘There’s no point at the moment, since it’s unwearable. I thought I’d find a jeweller somewhere and get it fixed for you.’

She didn’t believe his innocent look. He was tantamount to holding her pendant hostage to her good behaviour. ‘That’s not necessary—’

‘I know, but I want to do it. Consider it in the nature of an apology.’

‘For what?’ she said warily, mistrusting his silky sincerity.

‘For what I said to you out there on the road, when I thought you were a stalking journalist. I may have gone over the top with some of my remarks—’ He paused, watching as the most memorable of them popped back into her head.

‘The best lay I’ve had in a long, long time …’

Then as she visibly fought down her blush of chagrin he added simply: ‘About you staying away from me.’

That was all, and her blush exploded out of control as she realised what he was, oh, so clearly not apologising for …

‘I should have given you the slap you deserved,’ she choked.