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

‘Not the kind you’re worrying about, no,’ he said, to her evident relief. ‘I’ve been out of London for the past few days, remember.’

‘Oh, of course—you decided to forget your flights and come down via Paris instead. So you and Veronica must have been staying there at the same time, Luc—it’s a wonder you didn’t run across each other. It’s because Luc owns an apartment in the building that he heard the short-term rental was coming up for sale and persuaded us to buy it as a good investment,’ she told Veronica, who hadn’t realised that the Reeds owned the Paris apartment themselves. ‘He got it at a marvellous price for us. He’s such a cut-throat negotiator …’

‘And yet he looks so harmless.’ She couldn’t help the sarcastic comment. He was still looking at her with that bone-melting intensity, like a predator contemplating a tasty morsel.

‘I’m just a big pussy-cat,’ he purred at her, as if he could read her mind. ‘Actually, Veronica and I did have a brief encounter in the rue de Birague yesterday,’ he said, with what she briefly mistook for appalling candour. ‘She wanted to know the best place to watch the fireworks …’

‘Oh, what a pity you didn’t tell us about your change of plans, Luc. I could have suggested you take Veronica under your wing,’ said Melanie innocently. ‘It was her first time in Paris, you know.’

‘I rather gathered that from her schoolgirl attempts to communicate.’

Veronica’s lips tightened at the deliberate goad. ‘I thought your stepson was French, and at the time he didn’t see fit to enlighten me.’

While Melanie looked disconcerted at the revelation, Zoe’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘So that’s why you pokered up when he said hello? Don’t take it personally, girl, he was probably just trying to keep an extra-low profile, and that’s not so easy in this day and age. You’d be shocked at the ridiculous lengths some people will go to for money, or their fifteen minutes of fame …’

Oh, no, I wouldn’t, thought Veronica with a little shudder. She could only hope that Neil had lost his bid to drag her into the spotlight to relive the embarrassing lowlights of their relationship by the time she flew home.

‘Come and try this wine that Luc brought with him, Melanie,’ Miles broke in, drawing them over to the table where he sat with Ashley and Ross, sipping at a pale rosé. ‘It’s a local one. I think it might be worth a mention in your book.’

As Ross contributed his opinion as a self-proclaimed expert Luc linked arms with Zoe to escort her to her chair and Veronica jumped as his other hand hooked under her elbow, his sun-warmed arm sliding against hers as he anchored her to his side.

‘Relax,’ he murmured, inclining his head until a loose strand of jet-black hair drifted to cling against the mahogany tresses falling in smooth layers around her face. ‘Don’t be so jumpy, or you’ll make them suspicious.’

She was the one who was suddenly suspicious. ‘I thought you wanted me to rue the day,’ she muttered out of the corner of her mouth.

‘Ah, but that’s when I thought you were some ratbag freelance journalist out to get me.’

‘I’d already got you,’ she couldn’t help retorting.

‘But you weren’t scheming to sell me down the river over it … you really hadn’t looked at that newspaper. You had no idea who I was until just now.’ Even in an undertone his voice was rich with a gloating satisfaction. He took such pleasure in her ignorance that she was perversely annoyed.

‘Didn’t I?’ she murmured unwisely, savouring the way his head snapped sideways as she pulled her arm free and quickly slipped onto the empty chair between Sophie and Melanie. Serve him right for suspecting her in the first place.

To her frustration he waited until she was seated before dragging an empty chair around and squeezing it in between her and Sophie, hitching it forward with little bunny-hops of his legs that had the little girl in giggles as she was shunted into making room for him. Perforce, Veronica had to ease aside also, but not far enough to avoid the constant, casual brush of his shoulder and the not-so-casual shift of his hard calf against hers beneath the hanging tablecloth.

Although Veronica guessed she must not have seen him very often in her young life, Sophie obviously thought the world of Luc, for after a shy start she was soon peppering him with questions, to which he patiently responded.

‘Luc has been sending her regular emails at school,’ Melanie confided to Veronica, ‘ever since she wrote to him a few years ago. I didn’t know if he’d find the time to reply, let alone bother to keep it up, but he’s been absolutely marvellous, even helping her with some of her school assignments … which is more than her sister ever did for her,’ she added, with a pointed look across the table.

‘Luc’s the genius, it’s easy for him,’ said Ashley carelessly. ‘I was never any good at ordinary schoolwork. I’m the artistic type—I work on the visual plane.’

‘You could still find time to write occasionally, and not only to Sophie …’

‘What with having to work in the gallery and studying and constantly working towards my next exhibition—not to mention all Ross’s social obligations—I don’t have any spare time,’ was the plaintive reply.

‘What kind of painting do you do?’ asked Veronica politely.

Ashley gave her a patronising look. ‘I’m not a painter. I don’t restrict myself to revisiting dead conventions; I’m an environmental constructionist—I conceptualise space and remodel it with mixed-media and sculptural forms.’

‘Ashley is an installation artist,’ translated Luc, taking pity on Veronica’s look of confusion. ‘You know the kind of thing—covering objects in bubble-wrap, running hours of looped video in a room with the furniture glued to the ceiling …’

‘Oh, sorry, Ashley, I really don’t know much about modern art,’ Veronica said humbly, thinking it sounded quite ghastly. ‘I did enjoy the Picasso Museum in Paris, though.’

Her attempt to find common ground went down like a lead balloon. ‘Oh, Picasso—he’s accessible to pretty well everyone these days.’ Ashley shrugged.

‘Ashley prides herself on her inaccessibility,’ said Luc, his voice so exquisitely deadpan that Veronica glanced sideways at him, and almost made the mistake of laughing.

Ashley’s pretty face tensed, her blue eyes narrowing in fleeting doubt under the funky fringe of her bleached blonde hair before she decided to take the comment at its face value. ‘The struggle to be understood is part of the challenge of being on the cutting edge of art,’ she declared loftily.

‘Installation art is a hot-button for sponsorship in the Melbourne cultural scene at the moment,’ contributed Ross, pouring himself another glass of wine and reaching for the olives. ‘If you can get yourself noticed you can virtually write your own cheques. If I get posted to London, Ryder, perhaps you might be able to use some of your financial connections to help get sponsorship for an exhibition of Ash’s work,’ he said to Lucien, with an ingratiating smile that suggested he was well aware of the potential value of such contacts to himself.

‘Perhaps.’ Lucien’s voice was pleasant but noncommittal and Veronica, acutely attuned to every nuance of his tone, sensed his instinctive dislike of the other man.

Ashley flushed.

‘Luc’s got billions, he could afford to sponsor me himself, if he wasn’t such a philistine,’ she said, with a careless toss of her head.

‘No, he hasn’t, he’s only a millionaire,’ piped up Sophie. ‘I looked it up on the web. A billion is a thousand million and Luc only has—’

‘Sophie!’ her mother said sharply. ‘It’s rude to talk how much money people have right in front of them.’

‘That’s right, you should be like everyone else and do it sneakily, behind my back,’ grinned Lucien, giving Sophie a wink and making Melanie pinken.

‘Ashley said it first,’ the little girl was emboldened to say, ‘and she made a mistake, so I had to say something. Anyway, that’s what Luc does … he talks to people all the time about how much money they have and how much of his money they need to make their things work. That’s not rude, that’s just business.’

‘She means I’m a venture capitalist,’ said Lucien, catching the flicker of Veronica’s dark lashes. ‘I invest in other people’s ideas.’

He made it sound as simple as putting money in the bank, but Veronica knew that if he was making millions he was either incredibly astute or fantastically lucky … or a combination of both.

‘That’s a very high-risk field, isn’t it?’ she felt compelled to ask, wondering if a controversial investment gone wrong was the reason he was ducking the press.

He shrugged. ‘No risk, no gain—surely you subscribe to that philosophy yourself …’ It was a statement, not a question, the sensuality sheathed in his slow smile hinting of things that had nothing to do with finance.

Veronica chose to ignore the sly suggestions. ‘What kind of ideas do you invest in?’

‘Whatever happens to interest me at the time. I’m a maverick.’ His shoulder brushed her arm as he stretched across the table to snag the bottle that Ross had left at his elbow and offer to top up her almost-empty glass.

‘Oh, I don’t know that I should—’ she said weakly, denying the temptation offered by the deliciously chilled nectar. She hadn’t been drunk last night, but she had certainly been uninhibited. She didn’t dare risk the reappearance of the wild, wanton woman she thought that she had left in Paris.

‘Go on, say yes, you know you want it,’ Lucien said silkily, tilting the bottle and emptying it into her glass. ‘Don’t deny yourself pleasure just because you think it might be bad for you. Sometimes bad is very, very good.’

His words shivered over her, something warm and heavy coiling and uncoiling in her stomach. She was beginning to realise that she had made a silly mistake in not instantly acknowledging she’d spent the evening in his company, and laughing it off to the Reeds as just one of those crazy things. That would have been the mature, sophisticated thing to do. Instead, by hiding it, she had made it into something more important than it was, an intimate secret between the two of them, compounding her embarrassment if it ever came out—and handing Luc a licence to torment her for his own amusement.

‘Yes, you’d better have something to wash down the you-know-what,’ Sophie reminded her. ‘Didn’t you say you had something for Veronica, Gran?’ she urged.

‘Ah, yes, the Mas de Bonnard rite of passage,’ intoned Miles, lifting a little covered pottery dish painted in the bright colours of Provence and passing it along the table to his mother-in-law.

‘Fred and I used to come here on holiday every winter for years,’ said Zoe reminiscently as she cradled the dish. ‘We loved it so much we were even talking about buying Mas de Bonnard and retiring here to run a B&B—we ran a motel, you see, and Fred was a cook. He died just before his sixty-fifth birthday, but I knew he wouldn’t want me to stop coming, so I’ve been making it a kind of pilgrimage ever since. We have lots of friends here amongst the locals over the years, which is why we know where to go for the best of everything and dear Fred did love his marinated snails …’