Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

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.