‘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 ask
ed 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.