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The silence was charged with hard, hostile vibrations.
Tabby was staring at his lean, strong face with wide eyes of appalled disbelief. ‘Say that again…I mean, I didn’t…I didn’t do what you just said I did with any lout on a Harley!’
‘En voila` une bonne…that’s a good one! The compulsive liar bites again,’ Christien derided with a curled lip.
Grim at that degrading recollection, he strode past her back into the hall.
In a daze at what he had just let drop, Tabby halted in the sitting-room doorway. ‘Did you really think I’d been unfaithful? How could you think that?’
‘If you were easy with me, why shouldn’t you be equally easy with someone else?’ Christien lifted and dropped a shoulder, smouldering animosity laced with contemptuous dismissal in his insolent appraisal. ‘And let us be honest…five days was a long time for you to go without sex, chérie.’
‘I won’t forgive you for talking to me like this—’
‘I don’t want forgiveness.’ In fact, Christien felt forgiveness of even the most minor variety might be very, very dangerous to his own interests.
Tabby Burnside was nothing but trouble. She had no morals. That that should appeal to him was not a trait within himself that he ought to encourage. She would accept the cheque. Of course she would accept the cheque. However, if there were any further negotiations required, he would leave the matter in the hands of his English solicitor. After all, he was to marry to Veronique, who was a fine woman. Beautiful, honest, trustworthy. She would make an excellent wife. Eventually he would become a father and a grandchild might well lift his mother’s spirits a little. Was that not what had prompted him to become engaged in the first place? Wild, hot sex, fights and seething attacks of emotion would never feature in his alliance with Veronique. That was good, Christien told himself.
For a long time after Christien had departed, Tabby stared into space. The lout on the Harley-Davidson? Could he have been referring to the English student, Pete? Pete and two of his mates had been staying nearby. Pippa and Hilary had become friendly with them and Tabby had gone out with Pete on his bike one evening when Christien had been in Paris. But that had been all. Why had Christien accused her of sleeping with Pete? How could he have believed that she would have behaved like that? Why would he have believed that when she had been so patently crazy about him?
Once more time was sliding back for Tabby and she was reliving that summer. After that first ennervating sighting of Christien in the village, Tabby had lived in a daydream inhabited only by her fantasy of Christien and herself. Her stepmother had become noticeably less unpleasant when Tabby had opted to stay behind at the farmhouse most evenings while everybody else had gone out. Tabby had gloried in the quiet and the privacy and the daring freedom of bathing naked in the big blue-tiled pool. She still remembered the wonderful cool of the water on her overheated bare skin. At the outset of the second week while she’d still been in the water swimming, the electricity had cut out.
Wrapped in a towel, she had been attempting to find her way through the rambling farmhouse back to her bedroom when she had heard a car pulling up outside. Assuming everyone had come back early, she had gone to the door, but it had been Christien out on the front veranda with a torch.
‘I saw the lights go out and I guessed you’d be here alone. Join me for dinner, chèrie,’ he murmured.
‘But there’s a blackout—’
‘We have a generator.’
She stood there, teeth chattering with nerves, hair dripping round her. ‘I’m all wet—’
‘You would like me to dry you?’
‘I’ll need to get dressed.’
‘Don’t bother on my account.’ In the light of the torch, mocking tawny eyes set below the lush black fringe of his lashes rested on her hot face. ‘Are you sure you’re not too warm in that towel?’
‘You don’t even know my name. It’s—’
‘Not important right now.’
‘Tabby,’ she completed shakily, taken aback by the intensity of his appraisal.
‘You don’t look at all like a little brown cat. You’re smaller than I thought you would be, too,’ Christien confided, inspecting her with the torch beam. ‘But you have fabulous skin. Don’t bother with make-up. I hate it.’
For Tabby, his appearance was her every dream come true and she was terrified that he would disappear while she was getting dressed. Giving her the torch, he told her he would wait in the car.
‘I don’t know your name,’ she said when she climbed into his car.
‘Naturellement…of course you do,’ he contradicted with disturbing confidence.
‘All right…I asked one of the locals who you were,’ Tabby mumbled.
‘Don’t waste your best lines on me. I’ve heard them all before and honesty is fresher.’
‘I don’t know you…I shouldn’t have got into a car with you,’ Tabby exclaimed, because she was suddenly feeling very much out of her depth in his company.
‘But I feel I know you so well already, ma belle. Every night of the past four I have watched you strip off and cavort naked in the pool down here.’
At the news that her swimming sessions had not been as private as she had believed them to be, Tabby gasped in shock. ‘I beg your pardon—?’
‘Don’t be coy. I respect nerve and enterprise in a woman. I also admire a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it,’ Christien breathed with a husky intimacy. ‘And the simple ploy was remarkably effective…here I am.’
Her aghast embarrassment fought with her recognition of his apparent respect for what he had interpreted as an adventurous campaign to attract his attention. The temptation to pose as an enterprising go-getting woman triumphed over all common sense. She did not angrily demand to know how he could possibly have seen her bathing in a pool surrounded by a wall or ask him how on earth he could have sunk low enough to spy on her. She did not contradict his outrageously self-satisfied assumption that she had been breaking her neck to get off with him and, as mistakes went, hiding behind that fake image was her first mistake with Christien.
There was no great mystery about why she ended up in Christien’s bed on their very first date either. She was so excited at dining alone with him in the incredibly opulent villa that she barely ate a mouthful but she did drink three glasses of wine. Nor did she have a prayer of resisting a guy with his seductive expertise. In fact she was a lost cause from the first kiss for nobody could kiss like Christien could.
‘Zut alors…I am crazy for you,’ Christien intoned with ragged emphasis, sweeping her off her feet in high romantic style as if she were not a healthy lump frequently scorned by her stepmother as being on the larger side of overweight. For that alone, for his simple ability to lift her without grunting with effort, she would have loved him.
‘You enchant me,’ Christien swore, so that she felt generous enough to try and hide the fact that the first time he made love to her and she lost her virginity without him noticing, it hurt. And when he seemed to suspect that things hadn’t gone quite as well for her as he seemed to have expected, she pretended to go to sleep because she was so embarrassed.
So for her, it was not sex, it was never just sex, because the first night she went to sleep in his arms, she very much hoped that he would not want to do what they had just done very often. In the middle of the night, she crept out of the bed and he sat up and switched on the light. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.
‘Er…back down the hill,’ Tabby muttered, worried sick that Pippa would have reported her absence from the bedroom they shared.
‘I don’t want to let you go but…Ciel!’ Christien groaned. ‘What was I thinking of? To keep you this late was madness. How liberal are your family?’
Her father would have taken a shotgun to him without hesitation, but it would have been the opposite of cool to admit that. He was very disconcerted when she refused even to let him take her back in the car. She was even more dismayed when he insisted on walking her down the road to the very entrance of the farmhouse. ‘Can I see you tomorrow morning for breakfast?’ he asked.
‘I’ll try to make lunch—’
‘You’ll try? Was I that bad?’ In the moonlight, Christien gave her a rueful grin that had so much charismatic appeal, it physically hurt her to leave him.
When she climbed in the window of the bedroom she was sharing with Pippa, Pippa was wide awake. ‘Have you gone crazy?’ the other girl hissed furiously. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t realise that you’ve been out all night with that guy in the flash sports car?’
‘How did you find out?’
‘I just watched you snogging him from an upstairs window! I’m been going out of my head worrying about you and wondering whether I ought to tell our parents you were missing,’ Pippa censured angrily. ‘What’s got into you? Don’t ever put me in a position like that again!’
What had got into her that summer? Tabby wondered with shamefaced regret. Mercifully, it had been a recklessness that had never touched her again. Disturbed by Tabby’s unfamiliar behaviour with Christien, Pippa had moved into Jen’s room instead. Tabby had been upset by her friend’s defection, but not upset enough to turn her back on Christien. Her need for him had been all-consuming, her love total, and nothing and nobody else had mattered to her. Only living and breathing for him, she had slept through the daylight hours she’d often been away from him like a vampire in a coffin who only came into real being and secret life after nightfall.
Angry tears stung Tabby’s eyes as she stared down at the cheque that Christien had left behind him. With hands that were all fingers and thumbs she tore it up into lots of little pieces. She had not even looked at it to see how much he had been prepared to pay for the cottage. He did not want her in France, but she had already made all her arrangements. How dared Christien assume that he could buy her off and make her do things she didn’t want to do? How dared he call her easy to her face? He had betrayed her, but then he had never given her any promises of fidelity, had he? Nor, she noted, had he mentioned his staggeringly beautiful blonde Parisienne girlfriend.
She would go to Solange’s cottage and she would use it for as long as she wished. It would be a mark of her respect for a sweet woman, whom sadly she had never got to know well. Perhaps at the end of the summer she would take stock on whether or not anywhere in the vicinity of Duvernay was the best place for her to embark on a new life with her son. But as for Christien Laroche, who had already caused her so much grief, he had better steer clear of her from now on!
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