Men who see me only as a model are bad news! And I won’t be any man’s trophy to show off! I won’t!
But even as she yanked that warning into her head she felt it wavering. Hadn’t she already accepted that Marc Derenz had no need of a trophy female—not with his wealth, his looks.
Yes, and doesn’t that just make him even worse? she shot back to herself. Thinking every woman in the world is after him?
She pressed her lips together. Well, not her! She had not needed that final warning from him in the slightest.
‘That should not have happened.’
And it wasn’t going to happen again—that was for certain! Somehow, whatever it took, she was going to get through the rest of this week, collect her money and get away—away from the wretched man.
Until then she had to keep going.
She put her mind back to the role she was supposed to be playing.
‘Four of the bedrooms don’t have balconies,’ she pointed out to Celine helpfully. ‘Do you think that rules this one out?’
Celine ignored her. It had been obvious to Tara that she’d been doing her best to do so all morning. Instead she turned to Marc.
‘What do you think, Marc, cherie?’ she posed with a little pout. ‘Does it matter if not all the bedrooms have balconies?’
‘No,’ said Marc succinctly, his indifference to the issue blatant. He glanced at his watch impatiently. ‘Look, would you not agree that it’s time for lunch?’ he demanded. He was clearly at the limit of his patience.
Tara found herself almost smiling, and welcomed the release from the self-punishing thoughts going round and round in her head. He was so visibly bored and irritated—and, whilst she could not blame him, she knew with a waspish satisfaction that this time it was not she who was drawing his ire. Besides, at least when he was being bad-tempered he wasn’t being amorous...
His ill humour, she noted with another caustic smile, seemed completely lost on the armour-plated Celine however. All through lunch—at a very expensive restaurant in Nice—Tara watched the woman determinedly making up to him, constantly touching his sleeve with her long scarlet nails, making cooing noises at him, laughing in an intimate fashion and throwing fluttering little glances at him...
All to utterly no avail.
He sat there like a block of stone, his expression getting darker and darker, until Tara wanted to laugh out loud. She herself was doing her level best to drag Celine’s attention towards her instead, chattering away brightly, waxing lyrical about the houses they’d viewed, the ones they might still view, obdurately not letting Celine blank her as the woman kept trying to do.
That her brightly banal chatter was only adding to the visible irritation on Marc’s face did not bother her. What else did he expect her to do, after all? She was here to run interference, and that was what she was doing. And, after all, the way wretched Celine was behaving, the whole situation was just ridiculous! He really needed to lighten up about it.
As the woman turned away now, to complain about something or other to a hapless passing waiter, Tara could not suppress a roll of her eyes at Celine’s endless plays for Marc’s attention. Then, abruptly, his eyes snapped to hers, catching her in mid-eye-roll.
She saw his mouth tighten and one of his laser looks come her way. She gave a minute shake of her head in resignation, a sardonic twitch of her lips, and for a moment—just the slightest moment—she thought she saw something flicker in the slate-grey depths of his eyes. Something that went beyond a warning to her not to come out of role. Something that she had never seen before. A flicker so faint she could not believe she’d seen it.
Humour.
Good grief, did the wretched man actually have a sense of humour? Somewhere buried in the recesses of his rock-like personality?
If he did she didn’t catch any more sight of it. After lunch was finally over Celine gushingly begged Marc to head for Monte C
arlo. With ill grace he complied, and Tara found herself glad of the excursion. Not only was it a lot better than looking at over-priced, over-decorated villas for sale, but she’d never seen Monte Carlo, and she looked around her with touristic scrutiny at the grandeur of the Place de Casino, her gaze lingering on the fabled casino itself.
‘It’s where fools go to lose their money,’ a sardonic voice said at her side.
She glanced at Marc, whose expression mirrored his disparaging tone of voice. ‘Now, there speaks the sober banker!’ she exclaimed lightly. ‘All the same,’ she added, ‘sometimes those fools come out millionaires.’
‘The winners win from the other gamblers who lose.’ His tone was even more crushing. ‘There is no free money in this world.’
‘Unless,’ Tara could not resist saying, ‘one marries it... That’s always been a favourite way of getting free money.’
Her barb was wasted. Celine’s attention was focussed only on the luxury shopping mall opposite the casino. Like a heat-seeking missile, she headed towards it. As Tara made to follow she caught a frown on Marc’s face. She presumed it was because he was now facing a prospect every man loathed—shopping with women.
Impulsively, she tucked her hand into his elbow. ‘Courage, mon brave!’ she murmured humorously, leaning into him.
She only meant to lighten him up, maybe even to catch a glimpse of that crack in his steel armour that she’d evoked so unexpectedly over lunch. But clearly his mood had worsened too much for that.