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His hands tightened. She could feel his fingers, long and capable, strong, wrapped around hers. She looked down, feeling dazed. She could see her own much paler, smaller hands in a tangle of dark bronze. The image made her think of other parts of her body—limbs enmeshed with his in a tangle of bedlinen. With super-human effort, she pulled her hands free and tucked them well out of his way. She looked at him, and she knew she must look haunted. She felt hunted. Ryan had never reduced her to this carnal level of feeling, and the wound he’d left in her life was still raw. Too raw.
Pascal was close, still crowding her, his eyes roving over her face, but something had changed in the air. He wasn’t as intense. He reached out a hand and tucked some hair behind her ear.
‘I like your hair down.’
‘Look, Pascal…’
He felt something exultant move through him at her unconscious use of his name, and not the awful, prim ‘Mr Lévêque’. He dropped his hand. ‘Alana, it’s just dinner. We’ll eat, talk and I’ll drop you home.’
At that moment she could feel the car slowing down. They were pulling up outside a world-class restaurant on St Stephen’s Green. She seized on his words, his placating tone. She told herself she’d get a taxi home, and then she’d never have to see him again.
She looked at him and nodded jerkily. ‘OK.’
Alana was burningly aware of the interest she and Pascal had generated as they followed the maître d’ to the table. While the establishment was much too exclusive for the clientele to seriously rubberneck, nevertheless their interest was undeniably piqued.
It was another strike against the man who sat opposite her now, broad and so handsome, that despite her antipathy she couldn’t help that hot flutter of response.
He sat back in his chair. Alana could feel the whisper of his long legs stretching out under the table, and she tucked hers so tightly under her chair that it was uncomfortable.
‘You don’t have to worry, Alana, I’m under no illusions; you’re compartmentalising this very much in the “work” box.’
She just looked at him, and he quirked a brow at her.
‘The fact that you insisted on meeting me at my hotel rather than let me pick you up from your home, the fact that you haven’t changed out of your work clothes.’
Alana felt stiff and unbelievably vulnerable at the way he was so incisively summing her up. ‘I didn’t have time to change. And, yes, for me this is work.’ She leaned forward slightly then. His perceptiveness made her feel cornered. ‘I’ve had the experience of living with a level of public interest that I never want to invite into my life again. Being here with you, being seen with you, could put me in an awkward position. I don’t want people to think we’re here on some sort of date.’ She sat back with her heart thumping at the way his face had darkened ominously.
‘So who do you date, then, Alana?’
‘I don’t.’
‘But you were married to Ryan O’Connor.’
The fact that he’d already found that out made her feel inordinately exposed. Her mouth twisted cynically. ‘No doubt you didn’t have to dig too deep to find that out.’
‘No deeper than you dug to find out about my life.’
‘That was for a professional interview.’
‘Do I need to remind you that your questions didn’t exactly follow the script?’
She flushed hotly. His eyes flashed with that same icy fire she’d witnessed earlier. She said defensively, ‘You must know that if you open yourself up to any kind of press attention, then there’s a risk that you’ll be asked about things that are off- limits.’
He inclined his head, the ice still in his eyes. ‘Of course; I’m not so naïve. But somehow I hadn’t expected that of you.’
Ridiculously, Alana felt hurt and guilty. He was right; with another person who wasn’t pushing her buttons so much, she would never have taken the initiative to ask unscripted questions. It had been her reaction to him that had prompted her to try and provoke a response that would take his intense interest off her, that playful teasing he’d seemed set to disarm her with. Again she wondered what she’d scratched the surface of earlier.
She opened her mouth, but at that moment a waitress arrived and distracted them by taking their orders. Conversation didn’t resume until she had returned with a bottle of white wine. They’d both ordered fish. Once they were alone again, Pascal sat up straight. ‘You can tell yourself that you’re here for work, Alana, but I did not ask you here to talk about work. It’s a subject I have to admit I find intensely boring when we could be discussing much more interesting things….’
‘Such as?’ she asked faintly, mesmerised by the way his eyes had changed again into warm pools of dark promise.
He took a sip of wine and she followed his lead unconsciously, her mouth feeling dry.
‘Such as where you went last night, if you don’t date.’
Initially Alana had felt herself automatically tensing up at his question, but then something happened. She found herself melting somewhere inside, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Some part of her was responding to his heat, and it was just too hard not to give in just a little. So she told him about her brother’s fortieth birthday. And that led to telling him about her six brothers and sisters. And her parents.
‘They’re all happily married with kids?’
Alana had to smile at the vague look of horror on his face. She knew people sometimes couldn’t get over the entirely normal fact of large Irish families. She nodded, but felt that awfully familiar guilt strike her. She was the anomaly in her family. She tried to ignore the pain and spoke lightly. ‘My family are a glowing testament to the institution. I have a grand total of fifteen nieces and nephews and my parents have been happily married for fifty years.’
He shook his head in disbelief. ‘And where do you come?’
‘I’m the baby. Ten years younger than my youngest brother. Apparently I was a happy mistake. The age gap meant that despite coming from such a big family I’ve always felt in some ways like an only child. For most of the time that I can remember, it was just me and my parents.’
Alana fell silent as she thought of her parents. She was acutely aware of their increasing frailty, and especially her father, who had had a triple bypass the previous year. With her older siblings busy with families and their own problems, the care and concern of their parents largely fell to her. Not that she minded, of course. But she was aware nevertheless that they worried about her, that they wanted to see her settled like the others. Especially after Ryan.
Alana took a quick gulp of coffee and avoided Pascal’s laser-like gaze. They’d finished their meal, and the plates had been cleared. It was as if he could see right through her head to her thoughts. She hoped the coffee would dilute the effect of the wine, which had been like liquid nectar. She’d shrugged off her jacket some time ago, and the silk of her shirt felt ridiculously sensual against her skin. And she found that it was all too easy to talk to Pascal Lévêque. He was attentive, charming, interested. Interesting.
But then he cut through her glow of growing warmth by asking softly, ‘So what happened with you?’
At first she didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Your marriage. You were about to divorce your husband when he died, weren’t you?’
Immediately the glow left, Alana tensed. She could see his eyes flare, watching her retreat.
Unconsciously she felt for her jacket to pull it back on, instinctively seeking for some kind of armour. Her voice felt harsh. ‘I see that whoever your source was didn’t stop at the bare facts.’
Pascal’s jaw clenched. ‘I’m not judging you, Alana, or anything like it. I’m just asking a question. I can’t imagine it was easy to take a decision to divorce, coming from the family that you’ve described.’
Her arms stilled in the struggle to get her jacket on; his perceptiveness sneaked into some very vulnerable part of her. He didn’t know the half of it. Her own family still didn’t know the half of it. They’d been as mystified and dismayed as the rest of the country at her behaviour. Something her husband had ruthlessly exploited in a bid to win as much sympathy as possible.
She broke eye contact with effort and finished the job of putting on her jacket. Finally she looked at him again. ‘I’d really prefer not to talk about my marriage.’
Pascal was tempted to push her, but could see her clam up visibly. She’d become more and more relaxed over the course of the meal. He’d had to restrain his eyes from dropping numerous times to the soft swell of her breasts under the fine silk of her shirt. He still had no idea why she seemed so determined to cover up as much as possible. But, instead of his interest waning, the opposite was true. He had to admit that was part of the reason he’d asked her out—some kind of bid to have her reveal herself to be boring or diminish her attraction—yet she was intriguing him on levels that no other woman had ever touched.
He was not done with this, with her. But he knew that if he pushed her now, he could very well lose her. This was going to test all his patience and skill, but the chase was well and truly on. So now he flashed his most urbane smile and just said, ‘No problem.’ And he called for the bill. The abject relief on her face struck him somewhere powerful.
Pascal wouldn’t listen to Alana’s protests. He insisted on dropping her to her house, which was only ten minutes from the restaurant. Tucked in a small square in one of the oldest parts of Dublin, her house was a tiny cottage. Pascal’s car was too big to navigate past all the parked cars at the opening of the square, and she jumped out. But he was quick, too, met her at the other side of the car and insisted on walking her up to her door.
She turned at the door, feeling absurdly threatened, but by something in herself more than him. Standing close together, her eye level was on his chest, and she looked up into his dark face. The moon gleamed brightly in a clear sky, and the February air was chill. But she didn’t feel cold. She had the strongest feeling that if he attempted to kiss her, she wouldn’t be able to stop him. And something within her melted at that thought. She blamed the wine. And his innate French seductiveness.
But then suddenly he moved back. Alana found herself making a telling movement towards him, as if attached by an invisible cord and she saw a flash of something in his eyes as if he, too, had noted and understood her movement.
Before she could clam up, he had taken her hand in his and was bending his head to kiss the back of it, exactly as he had the previous night in the hotel. His old-fashioned gesture touched and confused her. Her hormones were see-sawing with desires and conflicting tensions. And then, with a lingering, unfathomable look, he started to walk away down the small square and back to his car. Against every rational notion in her head, Alana found herself calling his name. He half- turned.
‘I just…I just wanted to say thank you for dinner.’
He walked back up towards her with an intensity of movement that belied his easy departure just now. For a second she thought he was going to come right up to her and kiss her. She took a step back, feeling a mixture of panic and anticipation, with her heart thumping, but he stopped just short of her. He reached out a hand and tucked some hair behind her ear. It was a gesture he’d made earlier in the car, and she found herself wanting to turn her cheek into his palm. But then his hand was gone. And his eyes were glittering in the dark.
‘You’re welcome, Alana. But don’t get too complacent. We will be meeting again, I can promise you that.’
He turned again and strode back to his car. He got in, shut the door and the car pulled away. And Alana just stood there, her mouth open. Heat flooded her body and something much worse—relief. She knew now that she had called his name and said thanks, because something about watching him walk away had affected her profoundly. She had an uncontrollable urge to stop him.
She had to face it—even though she’d been telling herself she wasn’t interested in him from the moment their eyes had locked at the match, she was. He was smashing through the veritable wall she’d built around herself since she’d married Ryan O’Connor and her life had turned into a sort of living hell. It was frightening how, in the space of twenty-four hours, she found herself in a situation where she was actually feeling disappointed that a man she barely knew hadn’t kissed her. Her famously cool poise, which hid all her bitter disappointments and broken dreams from everyone, even her own family, was suddenly very shaky.
By the time Alana was standing in her tiny galley-kitchen the next morning drinking her wake-up cup of tea, she felt much more in control. She only had to look around her house, in which she quite literally could not swing a cat, to feel on firmer ground. This was reality. This was all she’d been able to afford after Ryan had died. Her mouth tightened. Contrary to what everyone believed, she hadn’t been left a millionairess after her football-star husband had died in the accident.
She was still picking up the pieces emotionally and financially from her five years of marriage. And, while her emotional scars might heal one day, the financial ones would be keeping her in this tiny cottage and working hard for a very long time. The truth was that Ryan had left astronomical debts behind him and, because their divorce hadn’t come through by the time he’d died, they’d become Alana’s responsibility. The sale of their huge house in the upmarket area of Dalkey had barely made a dent in what had been owed to various lenders.
Alana swallowed the last of her tea and grimaced as she washed out the cup. Pride was a terrible thing, she knew. But it had also given her a modicum of dignity. She’d never confided in anyone about the dire state of her marriage, had never told anyone about the day she’d walked into her bedroom to find Ryan in bed with three women who’d turned out to be call girls. They’d all been high on cocaine. He’d been too out of it to realise that it wasn’t even his bedroom. By then, it had been at least three years since they’d shared a bed.
That had been the day that her humiliation had reached saturation point. The pressure of having to maintain a façade of a happy marriage had tipped over into unbearability. She’d left and filed for divorce.
But her wily husband had quickly made sure that it looked as though Alana had coldly kicked him out. She hadn’t suspected his motives when he’d sheepishly offered to move out instead of her. But she should have known. The man she’d married had changed beyond all recognition as soon as he’d started earning enormous fees and tasted the heady heights of what it was to be a national superstar.
Admitting that she’d failed at her marriage had been soul destroying. She hadn’t wanted to confide the awful reality of it to anyone. Even if she had wanted to, her father’s health had been frail, and her mother had been focused solely on him. And, around the same time, one of her elder sisters had been diagnosed with breast cancer. With her sister having three children, and Alana being the only childless sibling and suddenly single again, she had moved into her sister’s home to help her brother-in-law for the few months that Màire had spent getting treatment. Alana’s marital problems had taken a backseat, and she’d been glad of the distraction while the divorce was worked out. She’d kept herself to herself and shunned her family’s well-meaning probing, too heart-sore and humiliated even to talk about it.
It was exactly as Pascal had intuited last night, and she hated to admit that. It had been so hard, coming from a family of successfully married siblings, to be the only one to fail and to cause her parents such concern. Her monumental lack of judgement haunted her to this day. She obviously couldn’t trust herself when it came to character assessment, never mind another man. And Pascal Lévêque was ringing so many bells that it should make it easy to reject his advances.
Alana brusquely pulled on her coat and got her keys. She refused to let her mind wander where it wanted: namely down a route that investigated the possibility of giving in to Pascal Lévêque’s advances. Alana reassured herself that by now he’d have forgotten the wholly unremarkable Irish woman who had piqued his interest for thirty-six hours.
Thirty-six hours. That’s all it had been. And yet it wasn’t enough. Pascal stood at the window of his Paris office and looked out over the busy area of La Défense with its distinctive Grande Arche in the distance.
Alana Cusack was taking up a prominence in his head that was usually reserved for facts and figures. Ordinarily he could compartmentalise women very well; they didn’t intrude on his every waking hour. They were for pleasure only, and fleeting pleasure at that. The minute he saw that look come into their eye, or heard that tone come into their voice, it was time to say goodbye. He enjoyed his freedom, the thrill of the chase, the conquest. No strings, no commitment.
But now a green-eyed, buttoned-up, starchy-collared, impertinent-questioning witch was making a hum of sexual frustration throb through his blood. He had to get her out of his system. Prove to himself that his desire had only been whetted because she was playing hard to get, and only because she seemed to be a little more intriguing than any other woman he’d met. The fact that she’d been married intrigued him too. Her marriage had obviously left her scarred. That had been clear from a mile away. Was that why she was so prickly, so uptight and defensive, so wary? Was she still grieving for her husband?
Pascal ran a hand through his hair impatiently. Enough! He turned his back on the view and called his PA into the room. She listened to his instructions and took down all the details, and she was professional enough not to give Pascal any indication that what he’d just asked her to do was in any way out of the ordinary.
But it was.
‘There’s something for you on your desk, Alana.’
‘Thanks, Soph,’ Alana answered distractedly as she flipped through her notes on her return from a lunchtime interview and walked into her tiny cubbyhole office just off the main newsroom. She looked up for a quick second to smile at Sophie, the general runaround girl, and her smile faltered when she saw the other girl’s clearly mischievous look. With foreboding in her heart, Alana opened her door, and there on her desk was the biggest bunch of flowers she’d ever seen in her life. Her notebook and pen slid from her fingers onto the table. With a trembling hand, she plucked the card free from amongst the ridiculously extravagant blooms.
She cast a quick look back out the door, and seeing no one, quickly shut it. She ripped the envelope open and took out the card, which was of such luxurious quality that it felt about an inch thick between her fingers. All that was written on the card in beautiful calligraphy was one mystifying letter: ‘I…’
She was completely and utterly bemused. Her dread was that they would be from him. But the card was enigmatic. They could actually be from anyone.
Not one person looked at her oddly afterwards, though, not even the junior reporter who covered current affairs who had drunkenly admitted at the office party last Christmas to having a crush on her. It wasn’t her birthday, and she hadn’t done an especially amazing babysitting-stint lately for any nieces or nephews, which sometimes resulted in flowers as a thank-you.
For the rest of the day Alana was like a cat on a hot tin roof. Distracted. She only left and brought the flowers home once she was sure nearly everyone had left the office.
The following day, as Alana walked in, flicking through her post, Sophie again said, ‘Morning! There’s something for you on your desk.’
Alana’s heart stopped. It was like groundhog day. She went into her office with a palpitating heart and shut the door firmly behind her. Another bunch of flowers. Slightly different, but as extravagant as yesterday’s. Her hands were sweating as she repeated the process of opening the envelope and taking out the card. This one read: ‘will…’
By the end of the week Alana sat at the wooden table in her sitting room and felt a little numb. The smell of flowers was overpowering in the tiny artisan-cottage. A vase sat in the centre of the table abundant with blooms. And also on the table in front of her, neatly lined up in a row, were the five cards that had accompanied a different bunch of flowers every single day of the week.
All together, they now made sense: ‘I will see you tonight’.
But of course she’d known what the full meaning of the cards was when she’d received the fifth one that morning. All day she’d experienced a fizzing in her veins and a sick churning in her belly. She’d vaguely thought of going to the cinema, or seeing if friends wanted to go out, anything to avoid being at home where she was sure he was going to call. An awful sense of inevitability washed over her. She wasn’t ready for this. She would just have to make him see that and send him on his way. But still…the gesture, the flowers, and his obvious intention to fly all the way back to Dublin just to see her, was nothing short of overwhelming.
Her phone rang shrilly in the silence and she jumped violently, her heart immediately hammering. Her mouth was dry. ‘Hello?’
‘What’s this about you and Pascal Lévêque?’
Alana sagged onto the arm of her sofa. ‘Ailish.’ Her oldest and bossiest sister was always guaranteed to raise her hackles. Twenty years separated them, and sometimes Ailish came across as a little overbearing to say the least. She meant well, though, which took the sting out of her harsh manner.
‘So? What’s going on? Apparently one of the world’s most eligible bachelors took you out for dinner last weekend.’
Tension held Alana’s body straight. ‘How did you hear about it?’
‘It was in the tabloids today.’
Alana groaned inwardly, wondering how she’d missed that. Someone at work must have leaked the story. God knew, enough people had heard him ask her. And it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to work out who the flowers had been from, either.
‘Look, I interviewed him and he took me for dinner, that’s all. Nothing is going on.’ The betraying vision of her house full to the roof with flowers made her wince.
Her sister harumphed down the phone. ‘Well, I just hope you’re not going to be gracing the tabloids every day with tales of sexual exploits with a Casanova like that. I mean, can you imagine if Mam and Dad saw that? It was bad enough having to defend you to practically the whole nation after you threw Ryan out—’
Alana stood up, her whole body quivering. The memory of her parents’ lined and worried faces was vivid. And her guilt. ‘Ailish, what I do and who I see is none of your business. Do I comment on your marriage to Tom?’
‘You wouldn’t need to,’ replied her sister waspishly. ‘We’re not the ones being discussed over morning coffee by the nation.’
Alana heard her doorbell ring and she automatically went to answer it. ‘Like I said, what I do is none of your business.’ Her sister’s ‘judge and jury’ act made anger throb through her veins, and she knew her voice was rising. She struggled for a minute with the habitually stiff lock, and tucked the phone between her neck and shoulder to use both hands.
‘I am a fully grown woman and I can see who I want, go where I want, and have sex with who I want whenever I please.’
The door finally opened. Her words hung on the cool evening air as she took in the devastatingly gorgeous sight of Pascal Lévêque just standing there, turning her inner-city enclave into something much more exotic. Her heart-rate soared. She’d forgotten all about him in the space of the last few seconds, and the high emotion her sister had been evoking. In her shock she lifted her head and her phone dropped to the ground with a tinny clatter.