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  Without even thinking about what she was going to do, powered by hot, deep anger alone, Tabby slapped him. The crack of her fingers against his bronzed cheek sounded preternaturally loud in the hot, still room. ‘Does that answer that question?’

  Christien was so taken aback by that physical attack that he fell back a step.

  The shock in his stunning golden eyes was patent and Tabby flushed. ‘You made me do that—’

  Lean bronzed hands snapped over her wrists like handcuffs. ‘Then I will have to make equally sure that you don’t do it again.’

  Tabby tried to pull free of his hold and failed. ‘It is your fault that I hit you!’ she condemned like a spitting wildcat in her frustration. ‘You were very rude. I’m in my own house and I have every right to be here if I want to be. If you enter my home, I expect you to mind your manners—’

  ‘Or you’ll assault me?’

  Still struggling without avail to slide her wrists free, she felt her face flame at that sardonic interruption. ‘Can’t I move to France without you getting the idea that I’ve only come here to chase you?’

  Disturbingly, his wide, sensual mouth quirked. ‘Perhaps I want to be caught, chérie.’

  ‘But I don’t want to get involved with you again—’

  ‘Non?’ Christien prompted in a husky undertone, employing his hands to draw her closer.

  ‘Non…’ Tabby told him insistently, but her heart was starting to beat very, very fast behind her ribcage.

  ‘I can be very well mannered,’ Christien murmured silkily.

  ‘Not around me, you’re not—’

  ‘You burn me up, mon ange…’ His arrogant dark head bent as he released one of her hands and raised the other to press his mouth to the centre of her small pink palm.

  The heat of that teasing caress made her shiver. Time was running backwards for her. She pressed her thighs together on the hot, liquid sensation of melting at the very heart of her. Already she felt tender and swollen and shame pierced her as sharp as an arrow. She was passionate and so was he and once that had been a source of joy and discovery to her. She had believed that they were a perfect match, but now when she felt the blood run hot in her veins it scared her and she judged it a weakness in herself. As that almost unbearable longing for him held her there, her troubled gaze lingered on his downbent dark head. ‘Don’t do this…’

  ‘Don’t do what?’ Christien husked. ‘Don’t do…this?’

  He sank his other hand into her hair and tipped her head back to skim the very tip of his tongue over the full curve of her lower lip. His breath warmed her skin and she trembled.

  ‘Or…this?’

  He delved between her readily parted lips and she jerked and moaned, only to be racked by a shudder of frustrated longing as he lifted his head again.

  ‘Tell me what you want, chérie.’

  Her hand reached up of its own seeming volition and sank into his black hair. Stretching up on tiptoe, she drew him down to her, for she wanted his mouth on hers so badly that it hurt to be denied it. With an earthy groan, he lifted her up to him and crushed her mouth under his before he strode forward and lowered her down onto the bed. The moment he pressed her down on the mattress, the frame gave and collapsed with the most enormous crash down onto the floor.

  Christien swore and snatched her back up again from the tumbled mattress. Still holding her slight body taut to his broad chest in a protective stance, he stepped back to the doorway and surveyed the disassembled bed with incredulous force.

  ‘I forgot…I still had to tighten up the screws holding the frame together,’ Tabby mumbled unevenly.

  ‘You could’ve been hurt.’ Christien set her down on her own feet again.

  ‘I’m glad it happened…it stopped us doing something stupid,’ Tabby asserted tightly.

  Firm male footsteps sounded on the staircase. ‘Tabby?’ a familiar voice called. ‘Are you OK? I saw the door open and just came on in when I heard the noise.’

  A relieved smile driving the taut tension from her generous mouth, Tabby flipped round Christien’s stilled figure and went to the head of the stairs. ‘Sean…you’re very welcome and I’m about to take shameless advantage of you. Are you any good with a screwdriver?’

  Dark eyes veiled, Christien surveyed the young blond male with his self-satisfied smile and designer stubble and experienced a powerfully disturbing desire to kick him back down the stairs again.

  ‘I brought my tool-kit with me…’ Sean confided as he passed by Christien.

  Christien was so pained that he almost winced. Who was this jerk?

  ‘Sean…er, this is Christien.’

  Neither man extended a hand. Each awarded the other a stiff but studiously casual nod.

  Tabby tried not to notice that Christien made Sean look small, skinny and in need of a good shave.

  ‘I’ll sort the bed out…no problem,’ the Englishman asserted, and started to whistle quietly.

  ‘May I talk to you downstairs?’ Christien murmured to Tabby.

  Worrying at her lower lip, Tabby led the way, her slim back rigid.

  ‘Is the whistling handyman going to be living here too?’ Christien enquired flatly.

  Tabby tensed. ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business—’

  ‘So I can just take care of him by going back up there and breaking his neck now, can I?’ Christien incised.

  Tabby paled in disbelief.

  ‘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 th
e 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 asked 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.

  ‘What do you like most about me?’ Tabby asked Christien dreamily one evening.

  ‘How do you know I like anything?’ Christien laughed out loud when she mock punched his ribs before saying with striking seriousness, ‘You never try to be something you’re not. What you see is what you get with you and I really appreciate that…’

  She was all smiles until it finally dawned on her that what he had just admitted ought to strike cold fear into her veins, because a male who prized honesty and sincerity was unlikely to be impressed by a teenager who had told him a pack of lies in an effort to seem more mature and sophisticated than she was. During those final days she was feeling very insecure because Christien had become quieter and more distant with her, making her suspect that he was getting bored with their relationship.

  ‘I think he’s going off me,’ she confided brittily to Solange on that second visit to the older woman’s villa further up the valley.

  ‘Christien has a very deep and serious nature,’ his great-aunt soothed. ‘Complex men are not easy to understand, especially when they’re young and hotheaded.’

  When just a few days later the embarrassing truth of Tabby’s true age was ‘accidentally’ exposed by Veronique, Christien hit the roof and unleashed a temper that Tabby had never realised he had. Perhaps, however, her worst moment of humiliation occurred when, without any forewarning whatsoever, Christien came down to the farmhouse determined to finally meet her relatives. Lisa wandered in topless from the pool to flirt with him and a drunken argument then broke out between her father and her stepmother. Christien was excessively polite and reserved. Agonisingly aware of the distaste he was concealing, Tabby shrank with shame on her family’s behalf.

  ‘Do I still consider myself dumped?’ she asked in desperation as Christien climbed back into his elegant car.

  ‘I went into this too fast. I need to think,’ he ground out, capturing her willing mouth for a breathless instant that blew her away and then peeling her off him again with a grim look of restraint etched on his lean, strong face. ‘Without you around.’

  ‘Don’t expect me to sit around waiting for you!’ she warned him shakily, suddenly very, very scared at the new distance she sensed in him and the tough self-discipline he was now exerting in her vicinity.

  Christien sent her a truly pained appraisal that made her squirm. ‘You sound so juvenile. I can’t believe it took someone else to point out what I should have seen for myself.’

  He went to Paris and he neither phoned nor texted her. Veronique implied that he was heading for a reunion with Eloise, who had spent most of the summer working in London. Tortured by his silence, Tabby was thrown back into the company of her friends for the first time that holiday. She did her utmost not to parade the reality that her heart was breaking. She never dreamt that the next time that she would see Christien, it would be in a hospital waiting room in the immediate aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy that left no space whatsoever for personal feelings or dialogue…

  A towel knotted round his lean hips and still damp from the shower, Christien gazed unseeingly out the tall bedroom windows that gave the vast frontage of the Château Duvernay such classical elegance.

  The mere awareness that Tabby was only a few fields away on the edge of the rolling parkland that surrounded his ancestral home was making him restless. Thinking about her unshaven caller, Sean, it was finally dawning on Christien that he had just walked out and left Tabby alone with a strange man. A strange man with the hots for her as well. Wasn’t there something weird about a guy who went visiting with a tool-kit clutched in one hand? And might not some men misinterpret Tabby’s naturally playful friendliness as a come-on? Mon Dieu, why hadn’t it immediately occurred to him that Tabby might be at risk? He had left her at the mercy of a smirking handyman who might be a real sicko! Discarding the towel, Christien began pulling on clothes.

  Dim light could be seen burning both upstairs and downstairs in the cottage. Swinging out of his car, Christien walked up the path and then paused beside a gnarled tree to check out the hole in the tr
unk. He drew out a dusty key and then with a frown returned it to its hiding place again. Strong jawline at a determined angle, he made loud and clear use of the door knocker…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEN the knocker sounded, Tabby was curled up dozing on the wicker chair that she had brought through from the sun room.

  Startled into wakefulness, she almost leapt out of her skin. Who the heck would come calling after midnight? Ought she to answer the door so late? Snatching up the bright patchwork crochet blanket she had draped over the chair, she wrapped it round herself, for she was only wearing a camisole nightdress.

  It was Christien, black hair tousled by the faint breeze, brilliant golden eyes locking to her. Thud, bang, crash went her heartbeat, while her tummy seesawed as though the floor had dropped away below her. Eyes glinting a glorious green from below a feathery fringe of tumbling hair the colour of honey, she stared out at him, soft, full mouth damp and pink.

  ‘Why have you come back?’ Tabby whispered unevenly.

  Christien did not even need to think about that. He had come back because he could not stay away. He closed the door behind him. He reached out and detached her fingers from the colourful blanket. Thick black lashes cloaking his gaze, he slid the blanket slowly down from her narrow shoulders.

  ‘Christien…?’ she queried unsteadily.

  His breath rasped in his throat as he scrutinised her lush, inviting curves. Unquenchable lust gripped him in a hold tougher than any vice. White cotton moulded her high, full breasts and the fabric was too thin to hide the rosy prominence of her nipples. He wanted to touch her, taste her, drive her insane with the same desire that burned in him. ‘If Sean had still been here with you…I think I’d have ripped the bastard limb from limb,’ he confided not quite levelly.

  Tabby whipped the blanket back up round her again but her hands were shaking. ‘I don’t sleep around…I never have and I never will. You had no reason to think he’d still be here, but even if he had been it would be none of your business—’