The Frenchman's Love-Child

CHAPTER THREE

A SLIM blond male of around thirty with steady blue eyes and an attractive grin, Sean Wendell walked Tabby back to the town car park. He groaned out loud when he realised what time it was. ‘I’m going to have to rush off and leave you here…I have an appointment with a client.’

‘No problem. You’ve been a terrific help and thanks for the coffee,’ Tabby told him warmly, for her aunt’s former work colleague had proved to be a positive goldmine of local knowledge.

Regardless of the fact that he was already running late, Sean followed her across to the ancient van packed high with possessions. He continued to hover while she climbed back into the driver’s seat. ‘Look, don’t try to unload the van on your own,’ he urged. ‘I’ll come over this evening and give you a hand.’

‘Honestly, that’s very kind of you but I loaded it up, so I should be able to unpack it again.’ Colouring at the continued heat of Sean’s admiring appraisal, Tabby closed the van door and drove off with a wave. She liked him but wished that he had taken the hint that, while she was always happy to have another friend, nothing more intimate was on offer.

It was four o’clock on a warm June afternoon. She had made good time from the ferry port and Sean’s linguistic prowess had speeded up her dealings with the notaire. Now, she was barely twenty kilometres from her final destination. However, as Tabby drove out of Quimper again a glimpse of a shop window full of colourful faience pottery sent her thoughts winging back to her childhood. Her late mother had collected the elegant hand-painted pottery for which the cathedral city was famed and every year a fresh piece had joined the display on the kitchen dresser. Shortly before their move to a new and much bigger house, Tabby’s stepmother, Lisa, had disposed of the whole collection, along with everything else in the household that had reminded her of her husband’s first wife. After her father’s death, it had hurt Tabby to have no keepsakes with which to highlight her memories of her parents.

But on the day that she travelled through Brittany to claim her inheritance, it would have been impossible for her to forget that her mother’s biggest dream had always been to own a house in France. Indeed, by the time that Tabby finally identified the half-timbered one-and-a-half-storey cottage that was screened from the quiet country road by a handsome grove of oak trees, she was very much in the mood to be excited and to be pleased with all that she saw.

The front door of her new home opened straight into a big room with a picturesque granite fireplace and exposed ceiling beams. It was full of character and Tabby smiled. Her smile dimmed only a little when she glanced through a doorway at a kitchen that consisted of a stone sink and an ancient range that did not look as though it had been lit in living memory. The washing facilities were equally basic. However, the final room on the ground floor came as a delightful surprise for it was an old-fashioned sun room with good light, which would make a wonderful studio for her to work in. Up the narrow twisting oak staircase two rooms lay under the eaves. She unlatched stiff windows to let in the fresh air before strolling back downstairs and out of doors.

The garden rejoiced in splendid countryside views, an orchard and a pretty little stream. It would make a wonderful adventure playground for Jake, Tabby reflected cheerfully. Having seen all that there was to see, she endeavoured to take sensible stock of her inheritance. Christien’s description of the property as a ‘glorified summer house’ had been infuriatingly accurate for there was no central heating, no proper kitchen or bath. She had also rather hoped that there would be some furniture to supplement what little she had of her own, but apart from a couple of wicker chairs in the sun room the cottage was bare to the boards. On the other hand, the roof and walls seemed sound, her utility bills would be tiny and, once she was bringing in a decent income, she would be able to add a few frills.

Her good mood very much in the ascendant, Tabby sat down under a tree and took advantage of the provisions she had bought on the outskirts of Quimper. Her hunger satisfied by half a baguette spread with tomatoes and ham and washed down with water, she changed into shorts and a T-shirt in preparation for cleaning the room where she planned to stay the night. An hour later, every surface scrubbed, she unloaded her bed from the van. As the head and footboards were made of wood, getting them up to the bedroom was no mean task, but she persevered and indeed was finally struggling with what was left of her energy to drag up the mattress as well when a knock sounded on the ajar front door.

Having got the unwieldy double mattress squashed round the bend in the staircase, Tabby was lying across it to keep it there while she tried to catch her breath again. Determined not to let go of the mattress, she attempted to twist her head round and peer down to see who was on the doorstep, but it was an impossible feat. ‘Yes?’ she called, praying that it would be Sean Wendell arriving as promised to offer his male muscle.

‘It is I…’ A dark-timbred masculine drawl imparted with accented clarity and awesome cool. ‘Christien…’

She was unable to see him and taken badly by surprise; dismay provoked Tabby into loosing a rather rude word. It was ironic that it was a word that she had never said out loud in her life before and she cringed at her own lack of control over her wretched tongue. In fact she just wanted the ground to open up and swallow her and a fiery blush enveloped her complexion. Had he tried, Christien could not have chosen a worse moment to spring a visit on her.

Entering the cottage, Christien angled his proud dark head back and wondered if she had a man upstairs with her. ‘Are you planning to come down and speak to me any time soon?’

Feeling trapped and foolish, Tabby flipped over and struggled to wedge the mattress in place while she stretched forward as far as she dared in an effort to see Christien. But that movement was all that it took for the bulky item to spring free of her hold. The weight of the mattress against her back dislodged her feet from the step and as the mattress forced its passage back down the stairs at shocking speed it carried her with it. In dismay, she cried out but it was too late: the edge of the heavy mattress hit Christien hard on the knees, destroyed his balance and toppled him before he could move from its path.

Christien fell and he only managed to partially break that fall by bracing strong hands on either side of her startled face. Tabby was winded by the sheer impact of a well-built six-foot-three-inch male hitting the mattress and momentarily crushing the life out of her lower body.

‘Zut alors!’ Christien raked down at her with furious force.

For an instant as she careened down the stairs like a cartoon character on board a novel flying carpet the world had swum scarily out of focus, but now it had righted itself again and Tabby found herself gazing up into dark golden eyes as bright as gemstones in a masculine face handsome enough to take any woman’s breath away. Her slight body stilled taut as a bow string beneath the heavy imprint of his. Something as powerful as it was emotionally painful swelled inside her chest and her throat tightened, her mouth running dry. Physical memories were engulfing her to a level beyond bearing for her senses had gone off on a rollercoaster ride of rediscovery.

The clean, evocative aroma that was unique to Christien flared her nostrils: hard male heat braced with a faint exotic hint of citrus. The very scent of his skin was so immediately familiar to her that she was shaken by the leap of her own recognition even at that most primitive level. She searched his lean dark features, her attention lingering on his level ebony brows, straight nose, blunt cheekbones and stubborn jawline, and then she connected with his amazing eyes again and felt a deep, slow pulse begin a slow, dangerous beat way down low in her pelvis. Below her T-shirt, her nipples swelled and tightened into sudden embarrassing prominence. She didn’t want to feel like that, indeed she could barely credit that she could still react to the primal charge of his raw masculinity to such an extent, but it was as though a chain reaction of response had kicked off inside her and, once started, there was no stopping it.

Tabby trembled, her hips succumbing to a tiny, involuntary upward shift and her slender thighs sliding a little further apart to better bear his weight in a movement as old as history itself. That wicked throb at the heart of her could not be denied even while she struggled to recapture her ability to think.

‘What the hell do you think you are playing at?’ Christien demanded wrathfully as in fierce, fervent denial of the burning heat of his own arousal, he began to lever himself up and back from her.

It was those words of his that were Tabby’s ultimate undoing. The mere suggestion that she might somehow have choreographed a mattress to surf down the stairs and knock him off his feet was sufficient to send Tabby into a sudden helpless fit of giggles. Recalling how chillingly impressive Christien’s air of grave authority had been before the mattress intervened, she was in stitches.

‘You think this is funny…huh?’ Christien growled with savage incredulity.

‘I-Isn’t it?’ she prompted chokily.

A split second later, his hot, hungry mouth swooped down to possess hers and killed her near-hysterical amusement at source. He was pure erotic temptation. For the first time in almost four years, electrifying excitement seized Tabby. Her head spun and air rasped in her tortured throat. The explicit intrusion of his tongue in the moist interior of her mouth sent a wave of delirious hunger currenting through her slight body. Her last grip on reality snapped: suddenly she was reaching up to him and no longer a passive partner. Her arms locked round his lean, hard frame, her hands rising to shape his broad shoulders before her fingers snaked higher and delved deep into the black silk luxuriance of his hair to hold him to her.

‘Christien?’

‘Non…’ In an abrupt movement, Christien wrenched himself back from her again. Breathing raggedly, he stared down at her, his smouldering gaze blazing gold, febrile colour accentuating the savage line of his hard cheekbones, ferocious tension written into every hard, angular line of his lean, strong face. In one powerful movement he vaulted upright, but it took every atom of will-power he possessed to step back from her. That acknowledgement both outraged and shocked him but, more than anything else, he was disconcerted by an awareness of exactly what had ripped his formidable self-discipline to shreds a moment earlier: that husky laugh of hers had snatched him back in time to that summer.

He had never forgotten that streak of bubbling, contagious joy that was so much a part of her nature, her childish habit of giggling at the most inopportune moments and in the worst of places, or her mysterious ability to lift him from his darkest moods. Loner and cynic though he was, he had basked in that warmth of hers, the extravagant, trusting ease with which she seemed to love. His hard, sensual mouth set into a tough line. Love as she had offered wasn’t worth a damn but the sex had been out of this world, he reminded himself with bitter amusement.

‘Why did you touch me?’ Tabby condemned shakily.

‘Why do you think, chérie?’ The thickened note in his sexy drawl sent a responsive shiver travelling down her taut spinal cord.

‘You shouldn’t have. That’s all in the past.’ Shaking like a leaf in a cruel wind, Tabby scrambled off the mattress and turned away from him. Her knees were wobbling and her hands were trembling. Her reddened lips stung from the devouring heat of his and more than anything else in the world she just wanted to sink back into the lean, powerful strength of him and taste him over and over again until the terrifying ache of loss he had filled her with had finally evaporated and faded like a bad memory.

And that was not how she should be thinking about a male who had once used her and discarded her again with no more care or consideration than he might have utilised had she given him her body in a casual one-night stand. In fact it was frightening to recognise the longing still pent-up inside her and the extent of her own vulnerability. Where were her pride and her intelligence?

‘How did you even know I was moving in today?’ she demanded, desperate to keep herself busy and stooping down to snatch at the mattress and manhandle it up onto its side again.

Someone who knew that she had an appointment to collect the keys from the notaire had made the mistake of passing on that news to Matilde Laroche and Christien’s working day had been interrupted by his distraught parent and her announcement. He had left his mother in the soothing hands of her doctor but his own patience had been sorely tested. Only once in his life had his late father attended one of Solange’s rustic picnic parties, so his son could not see how the overgrown meadow outside could be regarded by the older woman as being in quite the same category as sacred ground.

‘I can understand that you would want to take a look at your inheritance,’ Christien remarked with studied calm. ‘Naturally you’re curious but I can’t believe that you’re planning to live here.’

‘Why can’t you believe it?’

‘Pas possible…it’s not habitable!’ he retorted drily.

Out of the corner of her eye, Tabby studied him. His silk business suit was a trendy black pinstripe of exquisite cut that accentuated his wide shoulders, narrow hips and long powerful thighs. He looked absolutely gorgeous and, without her even realising it, her sneaky covert glance had become a full-on stare. Cheeks reddening as he elevated a questioning brow at the intensity of her appraisal, Tabby hefted one corner of the bulky mattress up onto the bottom step of the stairs again and slung him an expectant look. ‘Are you going to give me a hand with this?’

Complete disconcertion pleated his level brows.

‘Of course, it must be hard to stay fit when you’re in an office all day.’ Tabby sighed.

An utterly unexpected slashing grin banished the gravity from Christien’s lean dark face. ‘Do you really think I’m about to fall for a bait that basic?’

Riveted to the spot by the sheer charisma of that knowing smile, Tabby tried and failed to swallow. Closing his lean, shapely hands into the mattress, he hauled it up the stairs, negotiated with ease the bend that had caused her such grief and came to a halt in the room where the bed frame already stood assembled. As she reached the doorway he settled the mattress down onto the frame.

‘Where did you find the bed? On a dump?’ he enquired.

‘It’s old but it’s solid.’ However, her bed had come closer to the dump than she would ever have admitted. Virtually all of the elderly furniture and household effects in the van had come from her aunt’s attic and garage, both of which Alison was clearing in preparation for letting her property.

‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,’ Tabby reminded Christien as she bent to rifle the cardboard box of bedding in the corner and emerged with a folded sheet.

Christien studied the sheet she was unfurling and noted that it had been carefully mended with a slightly different colour of cloth. Did people still patch linen these days? He was more shocked than he would have liked to admit by the sight of that mended sheet. He had a vague Cinderella-like image of her sitting darning by candlelight and, in defiance of that unusually colourful flight of fancy on his own part, he spread his hands in a scornful gesture. ‘Why are you wasting your energy with this? You can’t live here-’

‘You couldn’t,’ Tabby countered, tucking in the sheet at the corners with determined industry, because at least while she was attending to practicalities she was not gawping at him like a lovelorn schoolgirl. ‘You’d be lost without your luxuries, but I’ll be quite happy getting back to basics-’

‘That’s a double bed…who are you planning to share it with?’ Christien demanded without warning.

An image of Jake’s warm little body sneaking in below the covers first thing in the morning to cuddle up to her crossed Tabby’s mind and her green eyes softened and her lush mouth took on a tender curve as she thought of her son.

Raw anger flaring and tensing his hard dark features, Christien strode forward to scrutinise her with brilliant dark golden eyes. ‘If you choose to live on the Duvernay estate, there will only be one man in your bed, and that man will be me…tu comprends?’

In rampant disbelief, Tabby straightened to stare at him. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Is that what you wanted…is that why you’re here?’ Christien purred low and soft, though the sting of that insolent enquiry cut like glass against her tender skin. ‘You want to take up where we left off that summer?’

Without even thinking about what she was going to do, powered by hot, deep anger alone, Tabby slapped him. The crack of her fingers against his bronzed cheek sounded preternaturally loud in the hot, still room. ‘Does that answer that question?’

Christien was so taken aback by that physical attack that he fell back a step.

The shock in his stunning golden eyes was patent and Tabby flushed. ‘You made me do that-’

Lean bronzed hands snapped over her wrists like handcuffs. ‘Then I will have to make equally sure that you don’t do it again.’

Tabby tried to pull free of his hold and failed. ‘It is your fault that I hit you!’ she condemned like a spitting wildcat in her frustration. ‘You were very rude. I’m in my own house and I have every right to be here if I want to be. If you enter my home, I expect you to mind your manners-’

‘Or you’ll assault me?’

Still struggling without avail to slide her wrists free, she felt her face flame at that sardonic interruption. ‘Can’t I move to France without you getting the idea that I’ve only come here to chase you?’

Disturbingly, his wide, sensual mouth quirked. ‘Perhaps I want to be caught, chérie.’

‘But I don’t want to get involved with you again-’

‘Non?’ Christien prompted in a husky undertone, employing his hands to draw her closer.

‘Non…’ Tabby told him insistently, but her heart was starting to beat very, very fast behind her ribcage.

‘I can be very well mannered,’ Christien murmured silkily.

‘Not around me, you’re not-’

‘You burn me up, mon ange…’ His arrogant dark head bent as he released one of her hands and raised the other to press his mouth to the centre of her small pink palm.

The heat of that teasing caress made her shiver. Time was running backwards for her. She pressed her thighs together on the hot, liquid sensation of melting at the very heart of her. Already she felt tender and swollen and shame pierced her as sharp as an arrow. She was passionate and so was he and once that had been a source of joy and discovery to her. She had believed that they were a perfect match, but now when she felt the blood run hot in her veins it scared her and she judged it a weakness in herself. As that almost unbearable longing for him held her there, her troubled gaze lingered on his downbent dark head. ‘Don’t do this…’

‘Don’t do what?’ Christien husked. ‘Don’t do…this?’

He sank his other hand into her hair and tipped her head back to skim the very tip of his tongue over the full curve of her lower lip. His breath warmed her skin and she trembled.

‘Or…this?’

He delved between her readily parted lips and she jerked and moaned, only to be racked by a shudder of frustrated longing as he lifted his head again.

‘Tell me what you want, chérie.’

Her hand reached up of its own seeming volition and sank into his black hair. Stretching up on tiptoe, she drew him down to her, for she wanted his mouth on hers so badly that it hurt to be denied it. With an earthy groan, he lifted her up to him and crushed her mouth under his before he strode forward and lowered her down onto the bed. The moment he pressed her down on the mattress, the frame gave and collapsed with the most enormous crash down onto the floor.

Christien swore and snatched her back up again from the tumbled mattress. Still holding her slight body taut to his broad chest in a protective stance, he stepped back to the doorway and surveyed the disassembled bed with incredulous force.

‘I forgot…I still had to tighten up the screws holding the frame together,’ Tabby mumbled unevenly.

‘You could’ve been hurt.’ Christien set her down on her own feet again.

‘I’m glad it happened…it stopped us doing something stupid,’ Tabby asserted tightly.

Firm male footsteps sounded on the staircase. ‘Tabby?’ a familiar voice called. ‘Are you OK? I saw the door open and just came on in when I heard the noise.’

A relieved smile driving the taut tension from her generous mouth, Tabby flipped round Christien’s stilled figure and went to the head of the stairs. ‘Sean…you’re very welcome and I’m about to take shameless advantage of you. Are you any good with a screwdriver?’

Dark eyes veiled, Christien surveyed the young blond male with his self-satisfied smile and designer stubble and experienced a powerfully disturbing desire to kick him back down the stairs again.

‘I brought my tool-kit with me…’ Sean confided as he passed by Christien.

Christien was so pained that he almost winced. Who was this jerk?

‘Sean…er, this is Christien.’

Neither man extended a hand. Each awarded the other a stiff but studiously casual nod.

Tabby tried not to notice that Christien made Sean look small, skinny and in need of a good shave.

‘I’ll sort the bed out…no problem,’ the Englishman asserted, and started to whistle quietly.

‘May I talk to you downstairs?’ Christien murmured to Tabby.

Worrying at her lower lip, Tabby led the way, her slim back rigid.

‘Is the whistling handyman going to be living here too?’ Christien enquired flatly.

Tabby tensed. ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business-’

‘So I can just take care of him by going back up there and breaking his neck now, can I?’ Christien incised.

Tabby paled in disbelief.

‘I’m being straight. I don’t want any other guy anywhere near you. Who is he?’

Tabby focused on scorching dark golden eyes and her mouth ran dry. ‘You don’t have the right-’

Christien swung back to the stairs. ‘I’ll go ask him-’

‘No!’ Tabby snapped in horror. ‘He’s a friend of my aunt’s and lives locally…For goodness’ sake, I only met him today!’

As far as Christien was concerned at that moment, nothing that he himself had done or said since he entered the cottage seemed to have had the smallest intellectual input from his brain. But her admission that her visitor was only an acquaintance cooled the white-hot, irrational anger that he was fighting to restrain.

Tabby walked right out to the silver Ferrari parked at the side of the cottage. ‘I want you to leave…and I don’t want you to come back-’

‘Don’t lie to me-’

Her small hands closed into tight, hurting fists of self-control as she fought her own weak inclinations with all her might. ‘I won’t sell this place, I’m staying…that’s all you need to know-’

‘So that we can both lie awake on the hot nights?’ By the simple dint of moving forward, Christien cornered her against the wing of the car and backed her into contact with the sun-warmed metal. ‘Tell me now,’ he instructed in a raw-edged undertone.

‘No…’ Almost mesmerised by the smouldering heat of his golden eyes, Tabby stared back at him, pupils dilated, body humming with wild, hot, wicked awareness.

‘Say it like you mean it,’ Christien urged in a ragged undertone, leaning forward even as she leant back.

The front door slammed with a loud thud that made both of them leap back from each other in sudden mutual discomfiture.

Sean Wendell angled an apologetic grimace at Tabby. ‘Sorry…the wind caught it!’

‘He’s a smart ass,’ Christien growled with barely restrained menace.

Her colour high, Tabby walked away without another word. She didn’t dare look back at him, not when just turning her back on him had demanded almost superhuman will-power.

As the Ferrari drove off Sean rolled his eyes. ‘Watching you two together is certainly an education-’

‘Watching me with…Christien?’ Tabby frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen an attraction that powerful.’ Sean remarked in wry fascination. ‘I’ve just come out of a long-term relationship and now I know what was missing…the bonfire factor…stand back, feel the heat!’

Taken aback by the fact that her response to Christien was so painfully obvious that even a virtual stranger had recognised it, Tabby turned a fierce guilty pink. ‘You misunderstood-’

‘No, I don’t think so, but I do know how to mind my own business.’ With an easy grin, Sean asked her what she wanted to unload next from the van and she indicated the smart new furniture that she had bought specially for Jake’s room in the hope of giving it greater appeal.

A couple of hours later, the van emptied, and alone again, Tabby stripped off and learned how best to wash her hair and all the rest of herself with only a sink and a saucepan to help with the task. As she climbed into her old-fashioned bed her thoughts were still full of Christien. The lure of the past always hit her hardest in weak moments: she was forever looking back to try and pinpoint the exact moment when her fairytale fantasy of everlasting happiness had begun to crack…

At the end of her third week of holiday, and a week of being with Christien, his friend Veronique had called in for a visit. Christien had been talking on the phone and Tabby had been lying half asleep with her head on his lap. She still recalled glancing up to see the lovely brunette in her trendy beige linen dress standing in the doorway with her bright smile and her even friendlier wave. Veronique had seemed so very nice, Tabby recalled with a rueful grimace. And of course, being just seventeen, Tabby had taken Veronique at face value and the other woman had found it easy to win her trust.

‘I thought I’d find Eloise in residence…I shouldn’t be saying it,’ Veronique whispered like Tabby’s new best friend the minute Christien went out of hearing, ‘but I’ve been dying for Christien to meet someone new and you look so happy together! Oh, please don’t get me into trouble by saying I mentioned her!’

It had taken Christien’s childhood playmate only half an hour to plant the first seeds of distrust and insecurity. In no time at all, Tabby was hearing about the gorgeous Parisienne model whom Veronique had assumed Christien was still seeing, and the clever brunette was offering useful little nuggets of supposed girlie wisdom concerning Tabby’s relationship with him…

‘I don’t want to butt in but I think I ought to warn you that Christien really hates being pawed all the time.’

‘Mention other boyfriends…he loves competition.’

‘He has a very short attention span where women are concerned…’

Of course, with a few well-placed questions it was not difficult for Veronique to penetrate Tabby’s masquerade of being a twenty-one-year-old student at art college. Christien had never asked for any details. Why, oh, why had she ever pretended to be something she wasn’t? Tabby asked herself unhappily. Why had she not sat down and thought before she’d parted her silly lips and lied about who and what she was to Christien the very first time that they’d spoken? She had believed that no guy in possession of a Ferrari and a fantastic villa would be interested in dating a seventeen year old fresh out of school. In her lively imagination, she had fast-forwarded her real life into the life she expected to be living four years in the future. After that initial bout of creative fiction, little more pretence had been required from her for they enjoyed a relationship rooted very much in the here and the now.

Until the final week when Christien went off to Paris on business, they had not spent a single day apart. There had been nobody to question where she was or what she was doing, for her father had been challenged enough to cope with his youthful bride’s temper. In fact the older man had always seemed to be either hung-over or on the way to getting hung-over again, Tabby recalled with painful regret. Thanks to Lisa’s tantrums their family friends had engaged in a frantic round of activity in an effort to gloss over the reality that they were on the holiday from hell. Only the other teenagers in the party had understood that something more than a shrewish stepmother and a desire for her own space had been powering Tabby’s preference for remaining at the farmhouse alone every day and every evening.

‘What do you like most about me?’ Tabby asked Christien dreamily one evening.

‘How do you know I like anything?’ Christien laughed out loud when she mock punched his ribs before saying with striking seriousness, ‘You never try to be something you’re not. What you see is what you get with you and I really appreciate that…’

She was all smiles until it finally dawned on her that what he had just admitted ought to strike cold fear into her veins, because a male who prized honesty and sincerity was unlikely to be impressed by a teenager who had told him a pack of lies in an effort to seem more mature and sophisticated than she was. During those final days she was feeling very insecure because Christien had become quieter and more distant with her, making her suspect that he was getting bored with their relationship.

‘I think he’s going off me,’ she confided brittily to Solange on that second visit to the older woman’s villa further up the valley.

‘Christien has a very deep and serious nature,’ his great-aunt soothed. ‘Complex men are not easy to understand, especially when they’re young and hot-headed.’

When just a few days later the embarrassing truth of Tabby’s true age was ‘accidentally’ exposed by Veronique, Christien hit the roof and unleashed a temper that Tabby had never realised he had. Perhaps, however, her worst moment of humiliation occurred when, without any forewarning whatsoever, Christien came down to the farmhouse determined to finally meet her relatives. Lisa wandered in topless from the pool to flirt with him and a drunken argument then broke out between her father and her stepmother. Christien was excessively polite and reserved. Agonisingly aware of the distaste he was concealing, Tabby shrank with shame on her family’s behalf.

‘Do I still consider myself dumped?’ she asked in desperation as Christien climbed back into his elegant car.

‘I went into this too fast. I need to think,’ he ground out, capturing her willing mouth for a breathless instant that blew her away and then peeling her off him again with a grim look of restraint etched on his lean, strong face. ‘Without you around.’

‘Don’t expect me to sit around waiting for you!’ she warned him shakily, suddenly very, very scared at the new distance she sensed in him and the tough self-discipline he was now exerting in her vicinity.

Christien sent her a truly pained appraisal that made her squirm. ‘You sound so juvenile. I can’t believe it took someone else to point out what I should have seen for myself.’

He went to Paris and he neither phoned nor texted her. Veronique implied that he was heading for a reunion with Eloise, who had spent most of the summer working in London. Tortured by his silence, Tabby was thrown back into the company of her friends for the first time that holiday. She did her utmost not to parade the reality that her heart was breaking. She never dreamt that the next time that she would see Christien, it would be in a hospital waiting room in the immediate aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy that left no space whatsoever for personal feelings or dialogue…

A towel knotted round his lean hips and still damp from the shower, Christien gazed unseeingly out the tall bedroom windows that gave the vast frontage of the Château Duvernay such classical elegance.

The mere awareness that Tabby was only a few fields away on the edge of the rolling parkland that surrounded his ancestral home was making him restless. Thinking about her unshaven caller, Sean, it was finally dawning on Christien that he had just walked out and left Tabby alone with a strange man. A strange man with the hots for her as well. Wasn’t there something weird about a guy who went visiting with a tool-kit clutched in one hand? And might not some men misinterpret Tabby’s naturally playful friendliness as a come-on? Mon Dieu, why hadn’t it immediately occurred to him that Tabby might be at risk? He had left her at the mercy of a smirking handyman who might be a real sicko! Discarding the towel, Christien began pulling on clothes.

Dim light could be seen burning both upstairs and downstairs in the cottage. Swinging out of his car, Christien walked up the path and then paused beside a gnarled tree to check out the hole in the trunk. He drew out a dusty key and then with a frown returned it to its hiding place again. Strong jawline at a determined angle, he made loud and clear use of the door knocker…