For Tabby, his appearance was her every dream come true and she was terrified that he would disappear while she was getting dressed. Giving her the torch, he told her he would wait in the car.
‘I don’t know your name,’ she said when she climbed into his car.
‘Naturellement…of course you do,’ he contradicted with disturbing confidence.
‘All right…I asked one of the locals who you were,’ Tabby mumbled.
‘Don’t waste your best lines on me. I’ve heard them all before and honesty is fresher.’
‘I don’t know you…I shouldn’t have got into a car with you,’ Tabby exclaimed, because she was suddenly feeling very much out of her depth in his company.
‘But I feel I know you so well already, ma belle. Every night of the past four I have watched you strip off and cavort naked in the pool down here.’
At the news that her swimming sessions had not been as private as she had believed them to be, Tabby gasped in shock. ‘I beg your pardon-?’
‘Don’t be coy. I respect nerve and enterprise in a woman. I also admire a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it,’ Christien breathed with a husky intimacy. ‘And the simple ploy was remarkably effective…here I am.’
Her aghast embarrassment fought with her recognition of his apparent respect for what he had interpreted as an adventurous campaign to attract his attention. The temptation to pose as an enterprising go-getting woman triumphed over all common sense. She did not angrily demand to know how he could possibly have seen her bathing in a pool surrounded by a wall or ask him how on earth he could have sunk low enough to spy on her. She did not contradict his outrageously self-satisfied assumption that she had been breaking her neck to get off with him and, as mistakes went, hiding behind that fake image was her first mistake with Christien.
There was no great mystery about why she ended up in Christien’s bed on their very first date either. She was so excited at dining alone with him in the incredibly opulent villa that she barely ate a mouthful but she did drink three glasses of wine. Nor did she have a prayer of resisting a guy with his seductive expertise. In fact she was a lost cause from the first kiss for nobody could kiss like Christien could.
‘Zut alors…I am crazy for you,’ Christien intoned with ragged emphasis, sweeping her off her feet in high romantic style as if she were not a healthy lump frequently scorned by her stepmother as being on the larger side of overweight. For that alone, for his simple ability to lift her without grunting with effort, she would have loved him.
‘You enchant me,’ Christien swore, so that she felt generous enough to try and hide the fact that the first time he made love to her and she lost her virginity without him noticing, it hurt. A
nd when he seemed to suspect that things hadn’t gone quite as well for her as he seemed to have expected, she pretended to go to sleep because she was so embarrassed.
So for her, it was not sex, it was never just sex, because the first night she went to sleep in his arms, she very much hoped that he would not want to do what they had just done very often. In the middle of the night, she crept out of the bed and he sat up and switched on the light. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.
‘Er…back down the hill,’ Tabby muttered, worried sick that Pippa would have reported her absence from the bedroom they shared.
‘I don’t want to let you go but…Ciel!’ Christien groaned. ‘What was I thinking of? To keep you this late was madness. How liberal are your family?’
Her father would have taken a shotgun to him without hesitation, but it would have been the opposite of cool to admit that. He was very disconcerted when she refused even to let him take her back in the car. She was even more dismayed when he insisted on walking her down the road to the very entrance of the farmhouse. ‘Can I see you tomorrow morning for breakfast?’ he asked.
‘I’ll try to make lunch-’
‘You’ll try? Was I that bad?’ In the moonlight, Christien gave her a rueful grin that had so much charismatic appeal, it physically hurt her to leave him.
When she climbed in the window of the bedroom she was sharing with Pippa, Pippa was wide awake. ‘Have you gone crazy?’ the other girl hissed furiously. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t realise that you’ve been out all night with that guy in the flash sports car?’
‘How did you find out?’
‘I just watched you snogging him from an upstairs window! I’m been going out of my head worrying about you and wondering whether I ought to tell our parents you were missing,’ Pippa censured angrily. ‘What’s got into you? Don’t ever put me in a position like that again!’
What had got into her that summer? Tabby wondered with shamefaced regret. Mercifully, it had been a recklessness that had never touched her again. Disturbed by Tabby’s unfamiliar behaviour with Christien, Pippa had moved into Jen’s room instead. Tabby had been upset by her friend’s defection, but not upset enough to turn her back on Christien. Her need for him had been all-consuming, her love total, and nothing and nobody else had mattered to her. Only living and breathing for him, she had slept through the daylight hours she’d often been away from him like a vampire in a coffin who only came into real being and secret life after nightfall.
Angry tears stung Tabby’s eyes as she stared down at the cheque that Christien had left behind him. With hands that were all fingers and thumbs she tore it up into lots of little pieces. She had not even looked at it to see how much he had been prepared to pay for the cottage. He did not want her in France, but she had already made all her arrangements. How dared Christien assume that he could buy her off and make her do things she didn’t want to do? How dared he call her easy to her face? He had betrayed her, but then he had never given her any promises of fidelity, had he? Nor, she noted, had he mentioned his staggeringly beautiful blonde Parisienne girlfriend.
She would go to Solange’s cottage and she would use it for as long as she wished. It would be a mark of her respect for a sweet woman, whom sadly she had never got to know well. Perhaps at the end of the summer she would take stock on whether or not anywhere in the vicinity of Duvernay was the best place for her to embark on a new life with her son. But as for Christien Laroche, who had already caused her so much grief, he had better steer clear of her from now on!
CHAPTER THREE
A SLIM blond male of around thirty with steady blue eyes and an attractive grin, Sean Wendell walked Tabby back to the town car park. He groaned out loud when he realised what time it was. ‘I’m going to have to rush off and leave you here…I have an appointment with a client.’
‘No problem. You’ve been a terrific help and thanks for the coffee,’ Tabby told him warmly, for her aunt’s former work colleague had proved to be a positive goldmine of local knowledge.
Regardless of the fact that he was already running late, Sean followed her across to the ancient van packed high with possessions. He continued to hover while she climbed back into the driver’s seat. ‘Look, don’t try to unload the van on your own,’ he urged. ‘I’ll come over this evening and give you a hand.’