Читать книгу One Night With His Wife - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

‘ALORS!’ Luc slung the noisy scaffolding girding the castle frontage a grim appraisal. ‘Take me inside,’ he instructed in imperious command.

‘The front door doesn’t open…you’ll have to come round the back.’ Alarmingly conscious of Luc powering along beside her, impatiently curtailing his long stride to her smaller steps, Star hurried breathlessly back round to the rear of the castle.

‘I’m so s-sorry, Luc…I really am,’ she stammered truthfully in the dim passageway which led past several doors into the basement kitchen. It was her only reception area, and although daylight was only just beginning to fade she already had candles lit, because it was a dark room, and the place needed rewiring.

One step into the kitchen, Luc surveyed her with dark eyes colder than frostbite. ‘By the time I have finished taking this betrayal out of your useless little hide, you’ll understand the true meaning of what it feels like to be sorry!’

Shaken by such a level of condemnation, Star turned even paler. Did he think that she should have terminated her pregnancy? Was that what he was getting at? Had it been a betrayal of trust to give birth to children he would not have wanted her to have? Her tummy muscles knotted up. ‘Sometimes things just g-go wrong, Luc—’

‘Not in my life they don’t…not once until you came along,’ he completed with icy exactitude.

In the face of an accusation that she was aware had more than a smidgen of truth, Star braced herself with one nerveless hand on the back of the sagging armchair by the range and stared helplessly at him, registering every detail of his appearance. His superb charcoal-grey silk suit sheathed his broad shoulders and the long, powerful length of leg in the kind of fabulous fit only obtainable from extremely expensive tailoring. His luxuriant black hair had been ruffled by the wind, but the excellence of the cut had ensured that the springy dark gleaming strands just fell back into place.

Briefly engaged in sparing his humble domestic surroundings a grim, lip-curling appraisal, Luc turned his attention back to her without warning.

Flash! As Star collided with the long-lashed brilliance of his stunning dark deep-set eyes, it was like finding herself thrust into an electric storm. Heat speared through her slight frame. Feverish pink sprang up over her slanted cheekbones. She trembled, every sense awakened to painful life and sensitivity, an intense awareness of her own body engulfing her to blur every rational thought.

Silence banged thunderously in her ears, her heart thumping a frantic tattoo against her breastbone. A wanting so powerful it left her weak had seized her, dewing her skin with perspiration, stealing her ability to breathe or vocalise. What was it about him? She had asked herself that so many times. The obvious? He was fantastically good-looking. So tall, so dark and beautifully built. His maternal grandmother had been an Italian countess. That heritage was etched in his fabulous bone structure, the blue-black ebony of his hair and the golden hue of his skin.

Was that really the only reason she yearned for him with every fibre of her being and when deprived of him, felt only half alive? It had to be the only reason, she told herself frantically.

‘So you have nothing to say for yourself,’ Luc drawled.

‘I’m still in shock,’ she mumbled truthfully.

Shock. Her shock was nothing to his, Luc decided with sudden ferocity. To find her living like this in abject poverty, candles lighting a room Gothic in its lack of modern conveniences or comfort. She was dressed like a gipsy and thin as a rail. Bereft of the support of Sarrazin money for just eighteen months, she’d clearly sunk without trace. Just as he had expected; just as he had forecast. He studied her bare feet, recalled that she had almost run across the rough gravel, and the most extraordinary ache stirred inside him. Frustrated fury leapt up to engulf and crush it out. Not enough sense to come in out of the rain, Emilie had once said of Star.

Emilie…Luc’s quick intellect zoomed in on that timely reminder at supersonic speed, but his hooded gaze was nonetheless still engaged on roaming up over Star’s veiling skirt with its silky fringe. Memory unerringly supplied a vision of the slender, shapely perfection of her legs. He tensed almost imperceptibly, his appraisal rising higher, finding no escape in the pouting thrust of her small braless breasts beneath her velvet wrap top.

As she flung her head back, his lean, powerful body hardened in urgent all-male response. Her hair glowed in the dimness, bright as beaten copper in sunlight, dancing round her triangular face. Her pallor highlighted exotic eyes, alive with awakening sensuality, and a wide, soft, voluptuously pink mouth.

And this was the woman he had spent over a hundred thousand pounds trying to trace over the past eighteen months? Tiny, skinny, irredeemably different from the rest of her sex. There was nothing conventional in her mercurial changes of expression, her fluid restive movements, her jangling bracelets, her outrageous earrings shaped like cats or her ridiculous clothing. She wasn’t beautiful either. There was nothing there that he admired or looked for in a woman—nothing but the drugging, earthy sexuality that was as much a part of her as her dusty bare feet, Luc told himself with driven determination.

Star had the soul and spirit of a small wild animal, always ready to fight for survival and use whatever she had to get what she wanted. Or trade? Why else was she surveying him with that melodramatically charged look of undeniable hunger? No, there was no doubt in Luc’s mind that Star knew exactly what he was here about. To look so ashamed and desperate, she had to have been involved up to her throat in persuading his father’s elderly cousin to part with her money!

‘How could you have done such a thing to Emilie?’ Luc demanded icily.

A frown line indented Star’s smooth brow. Colliding with his glittering dark gaze, she froze as if an icy hand had touched her heart. Perspiration beaded her short upper lip. Gooseflesh sprang up on her exposed skin. The chill he emanated was that powerful.

‘Emilie…?’ Star’s frown line deepened.

‘The loan, Star.’

‘What loan…what are you talking about?’

‘Si tu continues…’ Luc swore so softly that the tiny hairs at the nape of Star’s neck rose.

It was a threat. If she kept it up, he would get angry. But, Emilie and what loan?

‘I honestly don’t know what—’

Luc slowly spread the long brown fingers of one expressive hand. The atmosphere was so charged she could almost feel it hiss warningly in her pounding eardrums. ‘So that’s the way you’re trying to play it,’ he spelt out, framing each laden word with terrifying emphasis. ‘You’re acting all ashamed because of the two little bastards you’ve managed to spawn while you were still married to me?’

The offensive words struck Star in the face like a blow. She fell back in physical retreat. ‘Bastards?’ she whispered tremulously.

‘Illegitimacy seems to run very much in your family genes, doesn’t it?’ Luc pointed out lethally. ‘Your children…you…your mother—not one of you born with anything so conventional as a church blessing.’

Registering in disbelief that Luc believed that their twin babies had been fathered by some other man, Star gazed back at him with haunted eyes of bewildered pain. ‘No…no, Luc…I—’

‘Surely you don’t think I require an explanation?’ Luc elevated a winged ebony brow, studying her with sardonic disdain. ‘I shall divorce you for adultery and will not pay alimony, I assure you.’

Divorce…divorce! Even in the midst of her appalled incredulity that Luc should believe her capable of giving birth to another man’s children while still legally joined to him, that single word tore into Star like a bullet slamming into her body. And like a bullet rending tender flesh it brought unimaginable pain. Divorce was for ever and final. She stared back at him, eyes shadowing, slanted cheekbones taut with tension beneath her fair skin.

A roughened laugh escaped Luc. ‘You seem shocked.’

The atmosphere sizzled, hot with high-voltage tension. She sensed his rage, battened down beneath the icy façade he maintained. And aching, yearning sadness filled her to overflowing when she saw the grim satisfaction in his hard, dark gaze. Now he had the perfect excuse to be rid of her. But then he’d had excuse enough in any case. Not wanted, not suitable. Too young, too lowly born, possessed of embarrassing relations, unfit to be the wife of the chairman of a bank.

‘You should never have married me…’ Anguish filled Star as she remembered her ridiculous optimism against all the odds. Her manipulation, her manoeuvres, her final desperate attempt to force him to give her a trial as a real wife. What did it matter if he now chose to believe that the twins belonged to some other man? It had to be what he wanted to believe. He didn’t care; he had never cared.

Luc had swung away. His strong profile was rigid. He clenched his hands into fists and then slowly uncurled them again. But he could still feel the violence like a flickering flame darting along the edge of his self-control. She was a little slut. He despised her. In the circumstances, he was being wonderfully polite and civilised. Only he didn’t feel civilised. He wanted to punish her. He wanted to punish her even more when she stood there like a feckless child, who never, ever thought of the damage she might be doing. But he didn’t dare risk acting on that urge.

For eighteen endless months he had had Star on his conscience. He had worried himself sick about her. How she was living, where she was living, even whether or not she was still living. In Luc’s opinion, anyone with her capacity for emotional intensity had to be unstable. She had too much emotion, the most terrifying amount of emotion, and it had all been focused solely on him.

Eighteen months ago, in more anger than he had ever known, he had lashed out and ripped her apart with the force of his rejection. And she had taken off like a bat out of hell, leaving all her clothes behind, not to mention a letter which Luc had considered dangerously close to thoughts of self-destruction. He had had the moat dragged at the chateau, he had had frogmen in the lake day after day…

Sarrazin Bride Driven to Suicide by Unfeeling Husband. He had imagined the headlines. Over and over again, he had dreamt of her floating like the Lady of Shalott or Ophelia surrounded by lilies. He had been haunted by her! Freed of her ludicrous expectations, he should have found peace. Instead, he had got his nice quiet life back, and his freedom, but he had lived in hell!

Star studied Luc with pitying aquamarine eyes and tilted her chin. ‘You weren’t worthy of my love. You were never worthy of my love. I can see that now.’

Luc swung back to face her as if she had plunged a dagger into his strong back. Black eyes cold as charity assailed hers.

‘You’re unreachable. You’re going to turn into a man as miserable and joyless as your father,’ Star forecast with a helpless shake of her copper head. ‘You don’t even like children, do you?’

Luc stared back at her in silent derision, but the slight darkening of colour over his spectacular cheekbones, his sudden tension and the flare of hostility burning from him told her all she needed to know. Oh, yes, some day a recognised son and heir would be born to his next wife, Star reflected painfully. And Luc would naturally repeat all the cruelties of his own lonely childhood. What else did he know? That child would be banished to a distant nursery and a strict nanny. He would be taught to behave like a miniature adult and censured for every childish reaction until he learned not to cry, not to shout, not to lose control…indeed that emotions were messy, unnecessary and unmanly. At least that poor stifled child would not be Mars, Star told herself wretchedly.

‘Emilie…’ Luc reminded Star with icy bite. ‘How could you introduce Emilie to a vulture like your mother?’

Thrown into total confusion by that abrupt and confusing change of subject, Star had to struggle to recall the loan which Luc had mentioned earlier, but she could not stretch her mind to comprehend how anyone could possibly call Juno a vulture. Juno would give her last penny to anyone in need. ‘I don’t understand—’

‘Bon! Cela suffit maintenant…OK, that’s enough,’ Luc incised harshly, his darkly handsome features cold and set. ‘Lies are going to make me even angrier. In fact, lies may just prompt me to calling in the police!’

Lies? The police? The police? Star’s lashes lowered to screen her shaken eyes as she fought to concentrate her wandering thoughts. How much more did Luc expect from her? All right, so he acknowledged few human feelings and therefore could not understand what she was going through right now. But he arrived here without warning, disgustingly referred to their children as having been ‘spawned’, simply assumed that they had been fathered by a lover and then he announced that he wanted a divorce! Wasn’t that enough to be going on with?

‘I don’t tell lies,’ she stated.

‘That should make life simpler. So, you and Juno collaborated to persuade Emilie to loan your mother everything she had—’

‘No…’ Star stepped forward in aghast disconcertion at that charge.

‘Yes. Don’t you dare lie to me,’ Luc intoned in a low, vicious tone she had never heard or thought to hear from him. ‘Yesterday, Emilie’s accountant told me the whole story. Emilie cashed in her investments and gave Juno the money to open up that art gallery.’

Star froze. The pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place. Juno had borrowed from Emilie, not from a bank!

‘And now Juno’s vanished. Are you going to tell me where she is?’

‘I don’t know where she is…’ Horrified by what she was now finding out, Star spun away in an uncoordinated movement.

As she reconsidered the message which Juno had left on the answering machine, her temples tightened with tension. Now she knew why her parent had fled the country at such speed. And no wonder Juno hadn’t explained the nature of the ‘hot water’ she was in! Her mother would have known just how shocked and disgusted her daughter would be at her behaviour.

Juno had lied by omission, deliberately concealing the fact that her loan had come from Emilie. Had Star had the smallest suspicion that Emilie was considering backing the art gallery venture, she would have stepped in and stopped it happening. But how could Emilie have been so naive? Emilie was neither rich nor foolish. So why on earth had she risked her own security to loan money to a woman she hardly knew?

‘You’re not prepared to rat on Juno, are you?’ Luc condemned harshly.

‘I’m not in a position to!’ Star protested.

Luc studied her with hard, dark eyes. ‘Emilie has been left without a sou.’

‘Oh…no!’ Distress and shame filled Star to overflowing. She loved Emilie Auber very much. That her own mother should have accepted Emilie’s money and then run away sooner than deal with the fall-out when things went wrong truly appalled Star.

But she had one minor comfort. Luc would not allow Emilie to suffer. He would replace her lost funds without question or hesitation. His reputation for ruthless financial dealing would not get in the way of his soft spot for the kindly older woman. Juno would have known that too, Star reflected bitterly. Was that how her mother had justified herself when she had borrowed money which Emilie could ill afford to offer?

‘If you tell me where Juno has gone, I might begin to believe that you have nothing to do with this disgraceful business,’ Luc murmured very softly.

‘I told you…I don’t know!’ Star flung him a shimmering glance of feverish anxiety. ‘How could I have anything to do with this? How could you even think that I would have encouraged Emilie to loan money to my mother?’

‘Why not?’ Luc dealt her a grim appraisal. ‘Aside of that one visit you made with your mother in the spring, Emilie has neither seen nor heard anything from you since you left France. That doesn’t suggest any great affection on your side of the fence, does it, mon ange?’

Star braced slender hands on the scrubbed pine table and stiffened with instant resentment at that accusation. But she could not admit that she had maintained regular contact with Emilie without christening Emilie a liar for pretending otherwise to Luc.

‘I can’t believe that you think I could’ve been involved in this in any way,’ Star reasserted with determined spirit.

‘You’re not that innocent. How could you be? You’re Juno’s daughter. And living like this…’ Luc cast a speaking glance round the bare kitchen. ‘It must’ve been very tempting to think up a way of hitting back at me.’

‘I don’t think like that—’

‘Your mother does. She hates my family. Emilie may only be a cousin of my late father’s, but she is still a member of my family.’

‘Luc…I wouldn’t let anyone harm Emilie in any way!’ Star argued frantically.

‘So why did you introduce her to Juno?’

‘Why wouldn’t I have? Emilie had always wanted to meet her. I could never have dreamt Juno would ask her for a loan, or that Emilie would even consider giving her money!’

Star raised unsteady hands and pressed them against her taut face in a gesture of frustration. Why would Emilie have loaned money to Juno when she knew that Juno was hopeless with money? It didn’t make sense.

‘Do you want to know why Emilie gave your mother that money?’

Star nodded slowly.

‘Emilie thought that if the gallery got off the ground, you would move up to London and live with Juno. Emilie was hoping to see more of you.’

Every scrap of remaining colour drained from beneath Star’s skin. She twisted away on driven feet, her face stricken. She wanted to cover her ears from Luc’s derisive tone of condemnation. She also wanted to get her hands on her irresponsible, flighty parent and shake her until her teeth rattled in her pretty blonde head.

‘I hold you responsible for all of this,’ Luc delivered in cold completion.

Star’s slight shoulders bowed. ‘I honestly didn’t know about the loan—’

‘I don’t believe you. When you first saw me this evening, your guilty conscience betrayed you.’ Luc strolled fluidly towards the door. ‘Since I’m not getting any satisfaction here, I’ll go to the police.’

Star whirled round, aquamarine eyes aghast. ‘Luc…no…please don’t do that!’

Luc shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘“Please” doesn’t work with me any more. I want blood. I want Juno. If you can’t deliver her, I’m just wasting my time, and I don’t like people who waste my time.’

‘If I knew where she was, I’d tell you…I swear I would!’ Star gasped, hurrying across the expanse of worn slate floor that separated them.

‘No, you wouldn’t. You’d protect her. You’d hide her from me—’

‘No…If she got in touch…’ Star snatched in a shuddering breath, her eyes overbright with unshed tears. ‘I’d tell you. I swear I would. I wouldn’t like doing it, but what Juno’s done to Emilie hurts and angers me very much. My mother was in the wrong—’

‘The police can deal with her. I’ve got enough to hang her with.’

‘No…you can’t do that!’ Involuntarily, she stretched out her hand and pulled at his arm in an attempt to hold him back as he opened the door that led into the passageway.

Luc gazed down at her, eyes glittering black and cold as ice in warning. ‘Don’t touch me…’

Her throat closed over. Her fingers dropped jerkily from his sleeve. She trembled in shock, a mortified wave of hot colour sweeping up her throat. For an instant, she sank like a stone into a bottomless pit of remembered rejection. Their wedding night, which Luc had spent with his beautiful mistress. The unbelievable anguish of loving without return. In a split second she relived it all, aquamarine eyes darkening with pain and veiling.

‘I’ll crucify Juno in court and I’ll divorce you,’ Luc murmured with velvet-soft sibilance.

‘Do you want me to get down on my knees and beg?’ Star flung at him wildly.

Luc raised a withering aristocratic dark brow.

‘I’ll do anything—’

‘Begging doesn’t excite me.’

Startled by that husky assurance, Star lifted her head and looked up at him again. Luc gave her a dark smile, brilliant eyes shimmering beneath his lush black lashes. Heat curled low in the pit of her stomach, jolting her. She quivered, drawn like a moth to a flame.

‘But then I like my women tall and blonde and rather more sophisticated,’ Luc completed with dulcet cool.

Star flinched, stomach turning over at that lethal retaliation.

In the simmering silence the door at the foot of the dim passageway was suddenly thrust noisily wide. Rory strode in, carrying several bulging supermarket carrier bags. He came to a halt with a startled frown. ‘Sorry. When you didn’t hear me knock, I tried the door. I didn’t realise you had company.’

Disconcerted by Rory’s appearance, Star breathed in deep. ‘Rory, this is Luc…Luc Sarrazin. He’s just leaving—’

‘Like hell I will,’ Luc incised, half under his breath, still as a statue now by her side.

Not believing her ears at that intervention, Star glanced at her estranged husband in astonishment.

‘Luc…?’ The bags of groceries in Rory’s hands slid down onto the stone floor as he released his grip on them. ‘You’re…you’re Star’s husband?’

Luc ignored him. His attention was on Star. ‘Does he live here?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Rory stated curtly.

Luc turned his arrogant head back to study Rory. ‘Fiches le camp…get out of here!’

‘I’m not leaving unless Star asks me to…’ The younger man stood his ground.

‘If you stay, I’ll rearrange your face,’ Luc asserted with cool, unapologetic provocation.

‘Stop it, Luc!’ Star was aghast at Luc’s unashamed aggression.

Luc angled back his proud dark head and lounged back against the doorframe like a big powerful jungle cat ready to spring. ‘Stop what?’

‘What’s got into you?’ Star demanded in hot embarrassment.

‘This little punk got my wife pregnant and you dare to ask me that?’ Luc launched back at her, his husky accent scissoring over every syllable with raw incredulity.

‘Rory is not the father of my children!’ Star slammed back at him shakily.

Rory shot a thoroughly bemused look at both of them.

Luc had stilled again. His nostrils flared. His breath escaped in an audible hiss of reaction at that news. ‘So how many experiments did it take?’ he derided in disgust.

Star was ashen pale. She said nothing. Turning away, she closed a taut hand over Rory’s arm and walked him back outside. ‘I’m sorry about this, but it’s better if you go for now. Luc and I need to talk, sort some things,’ she explained tightly.

‘Obviously you haven’t told him about the twins yet.’

‘No…but he wants a divorce,’ she heard herself advance, because she was too ashamed to tell Rory what her mother had done to Emilie.

Rory sighed. ‘Probably the best thing in the circumstances. He seems a pretty aggressive character. I couldn’t see you ever being happy with someone like that.’

Happy? She almost laughed. What was happy? Being separated in every way from Luc had been like living in a void. It hadn’t cured her. Forcing a brittle smile, Star said, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to have a row with you about buying food for us.’

Closing the back door again, she leant against the solid wood, mustering all her strength. She had assumed that Luc had gone back into the kitchen. So as she moved back in that direction she was surprised to see that the twins’ bedroom door had been pressed more fully open.

Luc was poised several feet from the foot of the cots. Venus was curled on her side, an adorable thatch of copper curls screening her tiny face. Mars was flat on his back, silky dark hair fringing his sleep-flushed features, one anxious hand gripping the little bunny rattle which he never liked to get too far from him.

‘They’re what? Five…six months old?’ Luc queried without an ounce of emotion.

After the number of setbacks the twins had weathered, they were still quite small for their age. Star studied her children with her heart in her eyes, thanking God as she did every time she came into this room that they had both finally been able to come home to her, whole and healthy. She glanced from under her lashes at Luc. His bold dark profile was grim.

‘Would you have liked them to be yours?’ she heard herself whisper foolishly.

‘Tu plaisantes!’

You must be joking! Star reddened fiercely at that retort. What a stupid question to ask! Instead of asking it, she should just have told him the truth. Whether Luc liked it or not, Venus and Mars, fancifully christened by Juno, were his son and daughter.

Luc strode out past her. Leaving the door carefully ajar, Star followed him back into the kitchen.

‘In fact, I’m extremely grateful that they are not my children,’ Luc drawled in level continuation as he took up a commanding stance by the hearth, his lean, dark, devastating features cool as ice. ‘It would have complicated the divorce and made a clean break impossible. Considering that we have about as much in common as oil and water, joint custody would have been a serious challenge.’

Star was pale as death now. His reaction shook her to her very depths. All right, so he had never thought of her as his wife. Yet when Rory had walked in Luc had been angry, aggressive, powered, it had seemed, by some atavistic all-male territorial instinct. She had never seen that side of him before, but now she had to accept that his reaction to Rory had simply stemmed from his savage pride.

Didn’t he have any normal feelings at all? How could Luc just stand there telling her that he was relieved and grateful that her babies were supposedly nothing to do with him? In pained fascination, she searched his face, absently noting the very faint sheen of moisture on his dark golden skin, the unyielding blank darkness of his hooded gaze.

‘Luc…I—’

‘I was leaving…’ Luc studied his diminutive wife, struggling to distance himself, black fury like a thick, suffocating smoke fogging his usually ordered thoughts. Suddenly he understood why so many unfaithful wives had ended up losing their heads to Madame Guillotine during the French Revolution. Feeling the slight tremor in his hands, he dug them rawly into the pockets of his well-cut pants. Nobody will ever love you as much as I do. Such soft words, such empty promises. He was not a violent man. But he wanted to remind her who she belonged to. No, she did not belong to him, he adjusted at grim speed. He did not want her to belong to him. He had meant every word he had said.

Star moved anxious hands. ‘Could we just talk?’

‘Talk?’ Luc growled, not quite levelly, watching the way the flickering candlelight played over her porcelain-fine skin, accentuating the distinctive colour of her eyes and the full, inviting softness of her ripe mouth.

‘About Juno?’ Star moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue and watched Luc tense, his stunning dark eyes welding to her with sudden force.

‘No.’

‘No?’ Colour mantled Star’s cheekbones as the raw tension in the atmosphere increased. Her heart skipped a beat and then began to thump against her ribcage. Her mouth running dry, she tensed in dismay as she felt her breasts lift and swell, the rosy peaks tightening into mortifying prominence.

Luc’s brilliant eyes flamed over her. ‘If you spend the night with me, I’ll let you both off the hook…’

‘I b-beg your pardon?’ Star stammered dizzily.

‘I won’t put the police on Juno’s trail.’ He gazed back at her steadily, not a muscle moving in his lean, strong face. ‘One night. Tonight. That’s the price.’

Her soft full mouth fell open. She closed it again, and tried and failed to swallow. She felt as if the ground had suddenly fallen away beneath her feet. ‘You’re not serious…you can’t be!’

The silence shimmered like a heatwave between them.

Star trembled.

‘Why shouldn’t I be serious?’ Luc angled his well-shaped dark head back, a hard smile slanting his wide, sensual mouth. ‘One night only. Then tomorrow you travel down to London with me to see Emilie. Together we reassure her that she has nothing further to worry about. After that, we never see each other again in this lifetime.’

Her stomach twisted at that clarified picture. ‘But you don’t want me—’

‘Don’t I?’ Luc moved a slow, fluid step closer, dark eyes mesmerically intense as they scanned her bemused face. ‘Just one more time…’

‘You don’t want me. You never did! I’m not your type,’ Star argued, as if she was repeating a personal mantra, a fevered, disbelieving edge to her voice.

‘Except in bed,’ Luc extended without hesitation.

Star stilled in astonishment. Then she jerked in reaction to that revelation. He was finally acknowledging a fact he had refused to concede eighteen months earlier. Luc could find her desirable. The night the twins had been conceived, Luc had genuinely responded to her, not just to the anonymous invitation of a female body in his bed. The following morning, his cold silence on that point had shattered what little had remained of her pride.

Anger and regret now foamed up inside her in a bewildering surge. ‘Couldn’t you just have admitted that to me eighteen months ago?’

‘No,’ Luc drawled smoothly. ‘It would have encouraged you to believe that our marriage had a future.’

The heat still singing through Star’s blood suddenly slowed and chilled. Such cool calculation stabbed her to the heart and unnerved her.

‘But that was then and this is now,’ Luc stressed with syllabic sibilance.

Now, she repeated to herself in reminder. Now, when Luc had knocked her sideways by suggesting that they spend one last night together. Why not? With his customary cool he had already boxed her in with cruel, unfeeling boundaries to ensure that she didn’t misunderstand the exact tenor of his proposition.

He had told her he wanted a divorce. He had told her that after tomorrow they would never meet again.

Star’s throat constricted. Her wretched body might quicken at one glance from those stunning dark eyes of his, but did he really think she held herself that cheap?

‘You don’t want me enough…’ Even as that impulsive contention escaped her Star tried to bite the words back, for they revealed all too much of her own feelings.

Luc surveyed her steadily, devastating dark eyes fiercely intent. ‘How much is enough?’

She wanted him on his knees. She wanted him desperate, telling her that never in his life had he experienced such hunger for any woman. If she couldn’t get into his mind, it would be the next best thing. Hot colour warmed her cheekbones.

‘How much?’ Luc repeated huskily.

‘M-more…’ The current of excitement he generated in her as he moved closer literally strangled her vocal cords.

More? What did that mean? Familiar frustration raked through Luc. He felt like a man trying to capture a dancing shard of sunlight. He felt out of his depth, which infuriated him. He had expected her to grab that offer with both hands. She never looked before she leapt. She was as hot for him as he was for her. He saw it in her, he could feel it in her, only this time she was holding back. Star, exercising restraint? Why? What more could he offer?

‘Cash inducement?’ Luc enquired with lethal cynicism.

Her eyes widened, and then she couldn’t help it. A nervous laugh bubbled from her dry throat.

His superb bone structure snapped taut, hooded dark eyes glittering. He reached out a lean brown hand, closed it over her narrow wrist and tugged her close, so close she stopped breathing. ‘You think this is funny?’

Belatedly, Star saw that he didn’t. He thought she was laughing at him, but sheer disbelief had made her laugh. She gazed up into the night-dark depths of his eyes. The wickedly familiar scent of him washed over her. The faint tug of some citrus-based lotion overlaying warm, husky male. She wanted to bury her face in his jacket and breathe him in like an intoxicating drug.

‘Not funny…sad.’ Star struggled to retain some element of concentration even as his raw magnetism pulled at her senses on every level. ‘I think you’d prefer it if I asked for money.’

He released his breath in a stark hiss. ‘That’s rubbish—’ ‘You could call me greedy then. You could judge me, stay in control.’

‘I’m not out of control.’

‘You like paying for things…you don’t value anything that comes free,’ Star condemned shakily, fighting not to lean into him.

‘Ciel!’ Luc countered with roughened frustration and impatience. ‘Since you and your mother entered my life, everything has had a price!’

At that charge, which had its basis in actual fact, Star paled. Simultaneously from somewhere in the distance there was the most almighty screeching sound, followed by a loud crash. As she jerked back from him, Star’s eyes flew wide with dismay.

Luc swung away with a frown. ‘What was that?’

Star groaned. ‘It sounded like the scaffolding coming down.’

Loosing an impatient expletive in his own language, Luc headed for the door. Star only then recalled that he had parked his car beneath the scaffolding surrounding the tower. Pausing this time to thrust her feet into the leather toe-post sandals lying on her bedroom floor, she hurried outside after him.

When she reached Luc’s side he was poised in silence, scanning the huge heap of twisted metal framing and rotten splintered wooden panels which had come down on top of his gorgeous sports car. The car was all but buried from view on three sides.

‘Pour l’amour du ciel…’ he ground out in raw disbelief, abruptly springing back into motion to stride towards the still accessible driver’s door.

‘What are you doing?’ Star cried in panic, grabbing his sleeve to hold him back.

‘I need my mobile phone!’ Luc launched down at her.

‘Are you crazy?’ Star pointed to the single tier of scaffolding still hanging at a precarious angle above the destruction below. ‘That could fall at any minute!’

‘Oui…I’m crazy.’ Luc flung her a grim slashing glance. ‘When you last looked into your little crystal pyramid, did you put a curse on me?’

Star stiffened until her muscles were as tight as a drum skin. After that derisive response, she resisted the urge to tell him that many people believed in the value of crystal healing. ‘There’s a phone in the kitchen. You’re welcome to use it.’

She walked away, but before she disappeared from sight she stole an anxious glance back. She could see that Luc was still calculating the chance of that last section of scaffolding falling at the exact moment he retrieved his phone from his car.

‘Don’t you dare, Luc Sarrazin!’ Star screamed back against the wind, infuriated by his obstinacy, that indefinable male streak which could not bear to duck a challenge.

And in that split second, with a wrenching noise of metallic protest, the remainder of the frame leant outward and came tumbling thunderously down, forcing Luc to back off fast.

Well, that took care of that problem, Star reflected gratefully, and hurried back indoors again.

Luc followed her into the kitchen and approached the huge built-in dresser where the phone sat. ‘Who owns this Gothic horror of a dump?’ he demanded in a flat tone of freezing self-restraint. ‘I intend to sue the owner.’

‘Last I heard, Carlton was on a Caribbean island repairing boat engines for the locals. He’s poorer than a church mouse,’ Star proffered ruefully.

At that news, Luc breathed in so deep she marvelled at the capacity of his lungs. ‘That structure was in a very dangerous condition—’

‘Yes. An accident waiting to happen.’

His glorious accent was so thick it growled along her nerve-endings like rough tweed catching on the smoothest silk. He was furious, she recognised, outraged by the owner’s irresponsibility, not to mention any circumstance which could maroon him in a dilapidated dwelling at the back end of nowhere. She watched him shoot a granite-hard glance of displeasure at his homely surroundings and the strangest feelings began blossoming in Star.

At that instant, Luc was just so human in his fury and his exasperation he provoked a huge melting tide of sympathetic warmth within her. His control over his emotions was so engrained he would not allow himself to shout and storm like most other men would have done. Yet he would be feeling so much less tense and angry if he let himself go. Of course, he wouldn’t let himself go, she conceded wryly. But such infuriating events as collapsing scaffolding did not figure much in Luc’s life.

He rarely drove himself anywhere. He was a brilliant banker with immense power and influence. A fabulously wealthy but driven workaholic, who had his routine as slavishly organised for him as a prisoner locked up behind bars. His daily existence was smoothed by servants, efficient bank staff, a fleet of chauffeur-driven limos and helicopters and a private jet. In his world of gilded privilege, disaster was invariably kept at a distance, and the irritating, time-consuming repercussions dealt with by someone else.

‘I’m really sorry about this…’ Star sighed heavily.

Luc lifted a candle to enable him to see the numbers on the phone. ‘This is medieval,’ he complained with slashing incredulity. ‘Did the storm bring down the power supply?’

‘No. The lights don’t work in here. The whole place needs rewiring, but Carlton can’t afford to do repairs. However, the phone’s still working.’ That was why the original caretaker had moved out, and the only reason why Star had a rent-free roof over her head.

She watched Luc stab out a number on the phone with an imperious forefinger. He’d be calling for another car. When he walked out, she’d never see him again. Her thoughts screeched to a bone-jarring halt on that realisation. Like an addict suddenly forced to confront the threatening horrors of denial ahead of her, Star was aghast at that reality. That sense of total loss felt so terribly final she wanted to chain him to the wall, to hold onto him for just a little longer. But she didn’t need to chain him, did she? He had already offered her a time extension, a little slot, a ridiculously narrow little slot.

Why had he asked her to spend one more night with him? Was it to be his treat or her supposed punishment? My goodness, she thought headily, that one night at the chateau must’ve been something reasonably acceptable on his terms. For here was the proof she had never expected to receive. Luc was asking to repeat that night, asking the only way he knew how, asking the only way he would allow himself to ask…bargaining from a position of strength and intimidation. Stripping everything bare of emotion, foreseeing every possible future complication but, with a remarkable lack of foresight, risking those same complications. Whooshing tenderness swept over Star like a tidal wave: Luc was acting out of character.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Luc shot at her with a dark, questioning frown. ‘This phone is acting up!’

‘It’s the storm…put the receiver down and try again,’ she advised quietly.

One more night, she bargained with herself. It would be pure and utterly foolish self-indulgence. She would make no excuses for herself. It wasn’t sensible, but then loving and wanting Luc Sarrazin had never been sensible. Tomorrow she would have to face up to the divorce and the fact that they were like two different planets, forever condemned to spin in separate orbits. Just not meant to be.

Luc was now telling someone at the other end of the line that he wanted a limo to pick him up as soon as possible.

Awkwardly, barely crediting the decision she had reached and instantly terrified that if she lingered on that decision, she might decide against it again, Star cleared her throat, desperate to commit herself.

‘Tomorrow morning…’ she contradicted hoarsely, her mouth feeling as dry as a bone, her tongue too clumsy to do her bidding. ‘You won’t need the limo until tomorrow morning.’