Читать книгу One Night With His Wife - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

‘THE account no longer exists…’ Star repeated that shattering announcement shakily under her breath as she walked back out of the bank.

In her hand, she still gripped the cheque she had tried unsuccessfully to cash. Beneath her shining fall of copper hair, her delicate features were stamped with shock, her aquamarine eyes bemused. She climbed back into Rory Martin’s elderly classic car.

‘Why were you so long?’ Rory asked as he drove off.

Twisting round in her seat to check that the twins were still fast asleep in their car seats, Star muttered, ‘I had to see the assistant manager—’

‘That’ll be because you’re a lady of substance now,’ Rory teased, referring to the money which Star had proudly paid into the bank only a few weeks earlier.

‘And he told me that the account no longer exists,’ Star confided abruptly.

At the traffic lights, Rory’s fair hair swivelled. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Juno has closed the account—’

‘Your mother’s done what?’ Rory interrupted incredulously.

‘There must be something badly wrong, Rory.’

‘You’re telling me. How could your mother close your account?’ he demanded.

‘It was her account.’

At that revelation, Rory sent Star a bewildered glance. ‘Why didn’t you have a bank account in your own name?’ ‘Because until last month when I sold those canvases, I wouldn’t have had anything to put in an account of my own,’ Star stressed defensively. ‘Juno was keeping me!’

Looking unimpressed by that argument, Rory pulled away from the traffic lights again. ‘It was still your money in that account, the proceeds of the first couple of pictures you sold—’

His persistence made Star bristle with annoyance. ‘Juno and I work on a “what’s mine is yours” basis, Rory. We’re family. We stick together. If she drew out that money, she must’ve needed it.’ Then a further cause for alarm assailed her. ‘Do you realise that it’s over two weeks since I even spoke to my mother? Every time I call, all I get is that wretched answering machine!’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s simply moved the account elsewhere and just forgotten to tell you about it,’ Rory suggested in a soothing tone. ‘Let’s stop worrying about it. This is my day off. Where do you want to go next?’

Still in a bemused state, Star slowly shook her head. ‘I can’t go shopping without money—’

‘So, I’ll give you a loan to tide you over,’ Rory slotted in with an easy shrug.

‘No, thanks,’ Star told him hurriedly, determined not to lean on him that way. ‘You’d better just take us home again. I need to phone around and try to get hold of Juno to find out what’s happening.’

‘Be sensible, Star. She’s hardly ever at home. Meanwhile, you still have to eat,’ Rory pointed out with all the practicality of a male whose considerable family fortune was built on that same fact of life.

However, Star was immovable. Half an hour later, Rory drew up in the cobbled courtyard of a dilapidated fortified house complete with a tower surrounded by rusting scaffolding. Star lived rent-free as caretaker at Highburn Castle. The owner lived abroad. A friend of Juno’s, he didn’t have the money to maintain his inheritance, or the interest to apply for the grants available to repair a building listed as being of historical significance.

Star detached the belts from the baby seats in the back of the car. Rory unlocked the sturdy rear door of the castle and transported the first twin inside. Venus sighed in her sleep but remained comatose. Mars loosed an anxious little snort and shifted position. Both Star and Rory stilled until her restive son settled again. Mars had yet to prove the perceived wisdom that a baby could sleep through anything.

‘They’re great kids.’ As they entered the big basement kitchen, Rory scrutinised the sleeping babies with the interest of a male who, as an only child, had had little contact with young children. ‘I can never get over how tiny they are. When you think how premature they were, they’re a right little pair of miracles!’

Having noticed the winking light on the answering machine which her mother had installed, Star gave him an abstracted nod. She switched on the tape and a familiar voice broke into speech.

‘Star, it’s me…I’ve got into some real hot water,’ Juno gasped breathlessly into the sudden silence greeting her message. ‘I haven’t got time to explain, but I have to go abroad in a hurry and I had to borrow your money to pay for the flights! I’m absolutely skint. If I’ve left you in a hole, I’m sorry, but maybe you could contact Luc and get him to pay his dues for you and the twins…please, darling—’

‘Who’s Luc?’ Rory demanded abruptly.

Star wasn’t looking at him. She had jerked violently at the sound of that name. Her stomach somersaulting, she turned a whiter shade of pale. With an unsteady hand, she stopped the tape to absorb what she had so far heard and forcibly repressed all thought of Luc Sarrazin…Luc, her estranged husband, and the unwitting father of the twins.

What on earth had happened to the art gallery Juno was about to open in London? Only six weeks ago, Juno had been so confident of success. For goodness’ sake, she had borrowed a small fortune to open that gallery! At the time, Star had been secretly astonished that any bank would give her mother such a large loan. Investing in Juno was a risky venture. Twice before, her mother had set up businesses which had failed.

And now it seemed that once again everything had fallen through. Star sighed. Where Juno was concerned that was nothing new. There was nothing new in her sudden dramatic flight from trouble either. That was vintage Juno, Star reflected sadly. When things went wrong, Juno panicked.

But now she urged her daughter to approach Luc Sarrazin for child support, Star simply cringed. Her mother might be desperate to justify her bahaviour, but that particular suggestion had been way below the belt. Juno knew what a disaster her daughter’s short-lived marriage had been. Hadn’t it been partly her fault that Luc had felt constrained to marry Star in the first place?

‘Star…’ Rory said again more forcefully.

‘Shush! I need to hear the rest of this message.’ Star switched the tape back on.

‘I know you’re trying to tune me out because I’m not saying what you want to hear. Yes, I hate Luc because he’s a Sarrazin, but you made babies with him! He’s got no heart or imagination but he ought to be keeping his own kids.’ Juno paused. ‘You see, I don’t know how long it’ll take to sort this mess out, or even if I’ll be successful. But I promise you that if I am, I’m going to have the most wonderful surprise for you when I get back again!’ she forecast in a bright but not very confident tone. ‘Byee!’

‘Luc…so his name’s Luc,’ Rory continued in a sharp, flat tone unfamiliar to Star’s ears. ‘I’ve never understood why you won’t talk about the twins’ father, but now that I’ve finally got his name, maybe you could tell me who he is.’

‘My husband…well, sort of…’ Star’s voice just petered out again.

Rory’s jaw had dropped. He pushed a dismayed hand through his fair hair, making it stand on end. ‘You’re saying you’re married? But I thought—’

Star gave an awkward shrug. ‘Yes, I know what you thought, but I couldn’t see the point in contradicting you.’

‘You saw no point?’ His suntanned face was flushed, his hazel eyes bemused. ‘There’s a big difference between being a single mother and someone’s wife, Star!’

‘Is there? It wasn’t a proper marriage and it only lasted a few weeks. The twins were an accident…my accident, my mistake,’ Star stressed tautly. ‘It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. It’s something I just want to forget.’

‘But you can’t just forget you’ve got a husband!’ Rory’s dismay at that revelation was unconcealed. ‘My parents will hit the roof if they find out that you’re a married woman!’

It was make-your-mind-up time, Star conceded ruefully an hour later as she settled the twins into the wooden playpen with their toys. She had made a snack for their lunch from the few provisions that remained in the fridge. So where was she going with Rory?

Almost without her noticing, he had crossed the boundary of being just a good mate. But she could now pinpoint the exact date when that subtle change had begun. It had been the day he took her home to meet his family. Even though he had introduced her purely as the casual friend she had been at the time, his wealthy parents had seen her as a threat and acted accordingly. Rory had been embarrassed, and then furious at their behaviour. He was a decent guy, a really decent guy, and he had been a terrific friend.

They had met in the hospital canteen some weeks after the twins were born. The twins had been in the special care unit for a very long while. At the same time, Rory’s beloved grandmother had been seriously ill. When he had realised that Star had to walk miles just to catch a bus to the hospital, he had started synchronising his visits to his grandmother’s bedside and offering Star a lift home.

He’d been twenty-two then, and he had told her he worked in a supermarket. He hadn’t mentioned that it was his year working out to complete a degree in business management, or the even more salient fact that his father owned a vast chain of supermarkets which was a household name in the UK.

When she had angrily accused him of not telling her the truth, he had said straight off, ‘You’ve got a real prejudice against people with money.’

To be fair, she had not been very frank with Rory about her own past. She had told him that she had been a charity child, raised at a rich and reluctant French guardian’s expense. The child had been kept rigorously at arm’s length, lest she contaminate her guardian’s good name and reputation with her unconventional background and questionable parentage.

Luc Sarrazin’s father, Roland, had been that guardian.

And Star had only met Roland Sarrazin twice in her entire life. Once when she had first become his ward, at the age of nine, and the second and final time just over eighteen months earlier, when the old man had been dying. She had flown out to France to stay at the Sarrazins’ magnificent family home, the Chateau Fontaine, and dutifully pay her respects. Her conscious mind now recoiled from remembering the other events which had taken place that winter.

Instead she recalled her years of separation from her mother, Juno Roussel. Nine years of prim and proper imprisonment in a boarding school for a child who had once known what it was to run free. Nine years deprived of even written contact with her mother. She had spent the school holidays in London, as the guest of Emilie Auber, an elderly childless widow related to the Sarrazin family. Only Emilie had given Star affection during those years, but Emilie had also made the appalling mistake of encouraging Star to love Luc Sarrazin.

Dear sweet Emilie, with her sentimental dreams of romance…

‘Luc needs someone like you, but he doesn’t know it yet,’ Emilie had said.

No, Luc definitely hadn’t known. And he hadn’t needed her either. Indeed, Luc had given Star a taste of humiliation which she would never, ever forget.

‘You’re not in love with me. You’re in love with sex. Find a boy the same age and experiment on him!’

As Star stared into space, she shivered and hugged herself. The chill inside her seemed to bite right through to her bones. It had been eighteen months, and she hadn’t yet followed Luc’s advice and experimented. First she had discovered that that single reckless night in Luc’s bed had got her pregnant. Then she had become the mother of two tiny premature babies. The twins’ tenuous hold on life had sentenced her to months of tortured fear and anxiety. But now Venus and Mars were home, safe and healthy, and slowly catching up with their peers. And Rory was still here, being caring and supportive. He loved the twins and he wanted a girlfriend, not just a mate. He wasn’t likely to wait for her to make up her mind for ever…

His kisses were pleasant. They didn’t burn. But then being burned hurt, Star reminded herself fiercely. No more dancing too close to the fire. No more dizzy adolescent fantasising. The guy she loved, the only guy she had ever loved, had spent their wedding night in the arms of his exquisitely beautiful mistress, Gabrielle Joly. As rejections went, it had been pretty final. It had told her all she should have needed to know. But Star had always been a fighter, and stubborn with it. She hadn’t been willing to let go of her dream. Hating Luc, loving Luc, and determined to hang onto him by any means available, she had got down and dirty in the trenches of fighting for her man.

Getting him into bed had felt like a major coup. She had thought she had won; she had thought he was hers; she had thought surrender meant acceptance. She hadn’t really cared how he felt about it. After all, men didn’t always know what was good for them. In fact men could be pretty thick about recognising their soulmate if she came along in an unfamiliar guise. And Luc, even possessed as he was of an IQ of reputedly sky-high proportions, had been a really slow and exceedingly stubborn learner.

‘Look—’

Star glanced up.

Rory was watching her with a rueful smile. ‘I’ve got some things to do. I might call back later this evening.’

For a split second, Star studied him with blank eyes. Then she coloured and finally pulled free of her troubled thoughts. ‘OK…sorry, I was miles away.’

As she saw Rory out, she was conscious of a guilty sense of relief. Thinking about Luc had shaken her up and filled her with angry frustration. But regretting her mistakes was currently an unproductive waste of time. She would be far better occupied worrying about how she was to feed herself and the twins when Juno had left her literally penniless!

* * *

It was going to be a wild night, Luc Sarrazin acknowledged. On the exposed hill road, the wind buffeted his powerful car, forcing him to keep a hard grip on the steering wheel. But the gale-force wind was a mere breeze in comparison to the cold and lethal anger Luc was containing behind his habitually cool façade.

The day before, Emilie Auber’s accountant had flown to Paris to request an urgent meeting with Luc. Robin Hodgson had been the anxious bearer of bad news. Without consulting her accountant, or indeed anybody else, Emilie had loaned practically every penny she possessed to a woman called Juno Roussel.

Luc had been furious. But he had also been grimly amused that even in such trying circumstances Emilie had not admitted the embarrassing reality that Juno Roussel was in fact his mother-in law! The mother-in-law from hell, Luc conceded with a curled lip. He hadn’t been remotely surprised to learn that Juno had since disappeared without repaying the trusting Emilie any of the money she had borrowed.

‘I believe that from the outset of this unpleasant business there was a deliberate intent to defraud your father’s cousin,’ Hodgson had then gone on to contend heavily. ‘Emilie was first introduced to Juno Roussel by a young woman she had known as a child—the Roussel woman’s daughter, Star.’

That information had genuinely shaken Luc. The suggestion that Star might have been involved in ripping off Emilie had turned his stomach; Star had always been so honest.

However, what had truly shattered his legendary nerves of steel during that interview was hearing the entirely incidental news that Star had apparently become the mother of twins. Infants still in hospital at the time of Star’s visit to Emilie last autumn. A mother…Luc’s teenage bride, Luc’s runaway wife. Star had given birth to another man’s children while she was still his wife!

Luc had been incandescent at that revelation. He recalled little beyond that point. And he still felt wild with rage. He wanted to smash something; he wanted blood to flow. How dared Star do something so sordid? How dared she run around sleeping with other men while she was still legally married to him? But then she was faithfully following in her mother’s footsteps, wasn’t she? Juno, whose dangerous influence he had impulsively tried to protect her from. What a fool he had been to have any faith in the daughter of a blackmailer!

No doubt Star currently believed herself safe from retribution. In spite of all his efforts over the past eighteen months, Luc had been unable to find out where his runaway wife was living. But that very morning Luc had obtained entrance to the art gallery which Juno had abandoned. There he had found the address book which the older woman had left behind in her hasty departure…

* * *

That evening, Star had just finished settling the twins into their cots when the ancient front doorbell shrilled noisily on the old servants’ call board in the kitchen. Only a stranger would go to the front entrance, which was hardly ever used. Indeed, the bolts had long since rusted into place. But, even though there was a sign directing all callers to the rear entrance, it was amazing how many people chose to ignore it.

Not in the mood to rush out of the back door and trudge all the way round to the front, Star groaned. The bell shrieked again in two long, ferocious bursts. She tensed, wondering if urgent need lay behind such unreasonable impatience. Perhaps a walker had been injured or a car had crashed out on the road.

She raced out into the teeth of the wind that had been rising steadily throughout the day. It blasted her copper hair back from her brow and plastered her long fringed skirt to her legs, making it difficult for her to move quickly. As she struggled round the wall into shelter, she winced at the racket the scaffolding was making as it rattled in the gale.

The first thing her attention centred on was a stunningly expensive sports car, with a sleek golden bonnet. With disconcertion, her gaze whipped from the car to the tall, dark male positioned by the Victorian bellpull. Luc…it was Luc! But how could it be Luc? With Emilie Auber sworn to secrecy about her whereabouts, how could he possibly have found out where she was living?

The sheer shock of recognition stopped Star dead in her tracks. A wave of disorientating dizziness currented through her. She rocked back unsteadily on her heels and shivered violently in reaction. Registering her presence, Luc strode towards her, his devastatingly dark and handsome face hard as granite.

Huge aquamarine eyes fixed to him as her head tipped back to take in all of him. He was so big. Somehow she had forgotten how big. There he stood, six feet three inches of potent masculine intimidation, exuding a twenty-two-carat sophistication that came as naturally to him as breathing. He was, after all, one of the most powerful investment bankers in the world. He had the sleek, honed elegance of a prowling jaguar and a physical presence that was sheer intimidation.

Eyes dark as midnight glittered down like shards of ice crystal into Star’s. A pulse at the base of her slender throat beat convulsively fast and made it impossible for her to catch her breath.

‘Shock…horror,’ Luc enumerated with a sibilant softness that trickled down her sensitive spine like a hurricane warning. ‘You still wear every thought and feeling on your face, mon ange.’

While he still showed nothing, Star reflected in feverish abstraction, her attention glued to the smooth, hard planes of his lean, strong face. ‘Luc…’ she managed in a choky little voice before the tidal wave of horribly familiar guilt engulfed her and reduced her to squirming silence instead.

‘Oui, your husband,’ Luc drawled, his husky French accent dramatising every syllable with the most incredibly sexy edge.

A tide of colour washed over Star’s triangular face. She shut her eyes in dismay at that last forbidden thought about his accent and struggled to get a grip on herself.

‘Surely you expected me to track you down sooner or later?’

‘Not really, no…’ Star mumbled, eyes shooting wide again to telegraph a look of naked panic. She was trying to picture herself telling him the most unwelcome news he would probably ever hear. That he was the father of twelve-month-old twins.

Luc’s beautifully modelled wide, sensual mouth compressed into a hard line. ‘Guilt is written all over you!’ he ground out in icy disgust.

He knew. He knew about the twins! What else could he be talking about? He must have leant on poor Emilie and browbeaten her into spilling the beans. And he wasn’t wrong about the guilt. At that moment, Star was just eaten alive by that sensation, and at the same time savagely hurt. It had been one thing to imagine how Luc might react, quite another to be confronted with the brutal reality of that rejection.