o dress like a much younger man and party and behave like one too. He had no longer had time to spare for his daughter, because his bride had not only been jealous of his attention but also prone to throwing screaming tantrums if she hadn’t got it. To please Lisa, he had bought another house and spent a fortune on it. From the start, Lisa had resented Tabby and had made it clear that her step-daughter had been an unwelcome third wheel.
Lisa had certainly not wanted to go on the traditional French holiday with her husband’s friends that summer, but for once Gerry Burnside had stood his ground. Full of resentment, Lisa had made no attempt to fit in and had gloried in shocking her besotted husband’s friends with her behaviour. A helpless onlooker suffering from all the supersensitivity of a teenager, Tabby had died a thousand deaths of embarrassment and had avoided being in the adults’ company as much as she’d been able.
At the same time, unfortunately, Tabby had also felt like a fish out of water with Pippa, Hilary and Jen. Her friends, with their stable homes and loving parents still safe and intact, had seemed aeons removed from her in their every innocence. In addition she had been too loyal to her father to tell anyone just how dreadfully unhappy and isolated she’d been feeling. And then she had seen Christien and all her own petty anxieties and the rest of the world, and indeed everyone in it, had no longer existed for her.
It had only been the second day of their vacation. Mulling over the humiliation of having been called a ‘nasty little bitch’ and sworn at by Lisa in front of Pippa’s aghast parents at breakfast time, Tabby had been sitting on the wall under the plane trees in the sleepy little village below the farmhouse. A long, low yellow sports car had growled down the hill and round the corner like a snarling beast and had come to a throaty, purring halt a little further down the street.
A very tall, well-built male wearing sunglasses had climbed out and sauntered into the little pavement café. Clad in an off-white shirt with the cuffs carelessly turned back and beige chinos of faultless cut, he had sunk down at a table and tossed a note to the owner’s son, who had run into the shop next door to fetch him a newspaper. He had been so cool she had been welded to his every move.
The bar owner had greeted him with pronounced respect and had polished his already clean table. The coffee and the ubiquitous croissant had been delivered with an understated flourish and a moment later the newspaper. The little scene had been so French she had been fascinated. Then Christien had hooked his sunglasses into the pocket of his shirt. She had found herself staring at that lean bronzed face, the black hair flopping over his brow, the stunning dark-as-midnight eyes that seemed to glint gold in the sunlight, and her heart had hammered so fast it had been quite impossible for her to breathe.
For a heartbeat in time, Christien had looked back at her and she had been mesmerised, entrapped, taken by storm. That one look had been all it had taken. Un coup de foudre, love like lightning striking fast and hard. He had turned his attention to his newspaper. She had feasted her eyes on him, quite content just to stare and admire and marvel at his lithe bronzed perfection. Eventually he had strolled back across the pavement and swung back into his equally beautiful car and driven off again…slowly, certainly slowly enough to get a good look at her from behind his tinted car windows.
‘Who is he?’ she had asked the sullen youth who cleaned the pool at the farmhouse.
He had not recognised her enraptured description of Christien, but he had recognised the car she had described. ‘Christien Laroche…his family have a villa up the hill. He’s richer than a bank.’
‘Is he married?’
‘You must be joking. He has a string of hot slick chicks. Why? Do you fancy your chances? You’d only be a baby to a bigshot businessman like him!’ he had mocked.
On that recollection Tabby forced her thoughts back into the present, but she was annoyed with herself for thinking about Christien. Solange’s legacy had tempted her into looking back to events that had no relevance except insofar as they had taught her a few much-needed lessons. She tucked Christien’s son into bed and smiled down at him with tender appreciation. Whether she liked it or not, even at three years old Jake was his father in miniature, for his looks and height were pure Laroche and he was much too clever for his own good. But, if Tabby had anything to do with it, Jake would never, ever regard women as numbers to be scored off on some sexual hit list.
The following week, Tabby sold the one valuable item that she still possessed: a diamond hair clip that Christien had once given her. It did not hurt to part with it as she had not worn it since the night he’d given it to her and she did not live a life where diamond hair clips were of any use. She was delighted to discover that the clip was worth a great deal more money than she had ever appreciated. Indeed, with careful handling the proceeds of the sale enabled her to buy an old van to use for transport and left her with enough cash to meet the other expenses entailed in moving across the English Channel. Alison had persuaded her to make her first trip to France alone and Tabby planned to leave her son in her aunt’s care over a long weekend. The cottage was certain to need a good clean and clouds of dust would only leave poor Jake coughing and wheezing.
One week before her departure, Tabby had just got back from taking Jake to nursery school and was in the midst of eating her breakfast when the doorbell sounded. A piece of toast in her hand, she went to answer the front door. When she had to tip her head back to get a proper look at the tall dark male in the charcoal-grey business suit poised on the step, her toast fell from her nerveless fingers.
‘I would have phoned to tell you that I intended to call, but your aunt’s number is unlisted,’ Christien murmured, smooth as glass.
The breath feathered in Tabby’s constricted throat. His fabulous accent purred down her spine like the tantalising promise of something dark and forbidden. Her senses snapped onto instant alert and she could not drag her bewildered gaze from his lean, dark, exotic features. Without even knowing she was doing it, she backed away, reacting to a subconscious feeling of being under threat. Exciting threat, though, delicious threat, the kind of threat that appealed to all that was weak and wanton in her nature. But he was even more irresistible than she remembered and, no matter how much she hated herself for it, her heart was already thumping like a road drill inside her.
Yet she could not really believe that Christien Laroche stood in front of her again, that he should be on the brink of entering Alison’s home or that he should even deign to speak to her. How could that feel real?
Tabby trembled, dilated eyes green as emeralds pinned to him. At their last meeting, he had regarded her with a derisive distaste that had pierced her like a knife, and there might as well have been poison on that blade for the pain had not ended there. She had hated herself for loving him, loathed herself for the craving she could not suppress and despised her sorry self for striving to trace Christien’s features in her son’s innocent baby face.
‘What are you doing here?’ Tabby breathed shakily.
His brilliant dark eyes narrowed and a slight curve that only hinted at a smile softened the line of his wide, firm male mouth as he thrust the door shut in his wake. He dominated the space she was in and shrunk the hall of Alison’s house to claustrophobic proportions. He was much taller, broader and more powerfully impressive than she had ever allowed herself to recall. Breathtakingly good-looking too, and very well aware of the fact. He was the type of guy she should have run a mile from. That she had not had the wit to run, that she had to her own everlasting shame ended up in his bed within hours of first meeting him, was a continuing source of deep mortification to her.
‘I’ve come to make you an offer you can’t refuse.’
‘Oh, I can refuse, all right…there isn’t anything you could offer me that I wouldn’t refuse!’ Tabby launched back at him as wildly as though he were offering her the seven deadly sins all packed together in one handy bag.
Unmoved, watchful, Christien studied her, his attention travelling from the tumblin
g mane of her caramel-blonde hair to her bright eyes and the freckles scattered across her slanted cheekbones. But his gaze lingered longest on the soft, vulnerable fullness of her mouth. He only had to look at her ripe pink lips to remember how the caress of them had once felt against his skin. As his body betrayed him by hardening in instantaneous response and he recalled that no other woman had since given him that much pleasure, but that she had gone behind his back with some lout on a Harley-Davidson, raw anger seized Christien without warning.
‘You want to take a bet on that, chérie?’ he demanded in his sexy, whiplash drawl.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I DON’T bet on a certainty and I didn’t ask you to come in!’ Beneath the insolent onslaught of Christien’s appraisal, Tabby’s rounded face was burning like a furnace.
Nobody, but nobody, could do insolence as well as Christien Laroche did. Arrogant dark head high, he could elevate one satiric brow and make people feel about an inch tall. It was a talent that came from being the latest in the line of several hundred years of ancestors, every one of whom had thought of themselves as an exceptional being. Self-assured to a degree that was intimidating, Christien knew himself to be superior to most in intelligence and it could not be said that that knowledge had made him humble.
‘But then you were never very good at saying no to me, ma belle,’ Christien countered with silken sibilance.
Tabby flinched. Her hands snapped into small fists while he continued to look her over as though she were human flesh adorned with a sale board. His bold scrutiny lingered on the firm jut of her full breasts below the faded red T-shirt she wore and Tabby got even tenser. Beneath her bra, her own body was letting her down by reacting to his visual attention. As her tender nipples pinched into straining prominence, Tabby spun round and headed fast into the sitting room.