In the faint light seeping round the edges of the blinds, she picked out the dim shape of the bed and headed for it like a homing pigeon. Pushing back the duvet, she slid beneath it and wriggled across the cool expanse of the mattress until she found the hot, hard heat of him.
‘You do realise that there will be consequences if you stay, yineka mou?’ Alexei prompted thickly, one lean hand splaying across the feminine swell of her hip to press her into suggestive contact with the insistent swell of his growing erection.
Dry-mouthed and breathless, Billie snuggled into him, her heart pounding like an overwound clock. ‘I was hoping so,’ she admitted with a wanton little squirm of her hips in encouragement. ‘I mean, I am returning to France with you tomorrow.’
Alexei rolled her under his lean powerful body and kissed her breathless. He tasted of wine and sex and the urgency pulsing through him lit her up like a blazing fire inside. ‘So that we can enjoy the honeymoon we never had,’ he breathed in a voice full of erotic promise.
‘That’s not the only r-reason I’m coming to France,’ she stammered as he carried her fingers down to his hard male heat and the need in her leapt like a flame fanned into a blaze by the wind. She quivered, plunged her other hand impatiently into his luxuriant black hair and dragged his mouth back down onto hers. Her excitement licking out of her control, she trembled with hungry longing and it was long past dawn before she finally slept again.
CHAPTER TEN
OVER four weeks later, Billie awakened in the glorious illuminating light that Provence was famous for and didn’t waste any time in checking the other side of the big bed, because she knew she would be alone. A lie-in for Alexei was staying in bed past dawn and it was now after ten. Stifling a drowsy yawn, she stretched with voluptuous pleasure, a smug smile tiltin
g her mouth when the movement made her aware of all the little aches and pains of a woman enjoying an active and adventurous love life.
In that department, Alexei was incomparable, she reflected with helpless satisfaction. It also seemed to her as though every time they made love she felt closer to him. Did he still think of their intimacy as just sex? She didn’t know, hadn’t asked, and had no plans to enquire or pick holes in the happiness she had found with him. What did the words matter anyway? What really mattered was how Alexei behaved and the connection between them was very strong. With Nicky thrown into the mix and fully shared, that bond had definitely deepened.
It had been a relief that, as yet, no tell-all revelations had appeared in print following Lauren’s interviews with a journalist. But the threat of what her mother might have said still hung over Billie’s head and bothered her in uneasy moments. After all, intelligence warned her that no newspaper would have paid Lauren a lot of money for information that they had no intention of publishing. She hadn’t heard a word from the older woman, who was still in London living it up on the proceeds of her betrayal, according to Hilary.
As Billie laid out clothes after a quick shower she marvelled that she and Alexei had been staying at their rambling comfortable chateau for almost five weeks. Their days had slowly fallen into a pattern: mornings, Alexei usually worked and often she worked with him. Alexei had, on average, only left the South of France once a week for important meetings and was delegating all that he could.
Dressed in a blue sundress, Billie walked out onto the stone balcony to survey the timeless landscape of vineyards, lavender fields and distant cliffs. The views still enchanted her. Sometimes she and Alexei walked down the cobble-stoned street to have coffee and a croissant in the village square. Occasionally they dined at the quaint little restaurant built into the fortified walls that surrounded the village. And what she loved most about the area was that, aside of the attention Nicky attracted as he smiled out of his buggy, nobody took the slightest bit of notice of them. By common consent they had stayed away from the Côte D’Azur and the exclusive resorts where Alexei would be instantly recognisable and constantly approached.
An exquisite ruby-and-diamond ring in the design of a flower shone on Billie’s finger in the glorious sunlight. Alexei had given it to her on the memorable night they went clubbing in a funky old warehouse in Marseille and he’d taught her to dance the salsa.
‘What’s that for?’ she had asked when he gave her the ring.
And Alexei had laughed. ‘You’re not supposed to say that. It makes a gift sound like some sort of payment and although I have given many gifts in that line in the past you don’t come into that category. Of course I could tell you it’s because you’re great in bed, or because you’re beautiful, or because you’re the only lover I’ve ever had with hair the colour of a sunset.’ At that point in his teasing little speech, Alexei had suddenly frowned and his gaze had taken on a curious abstracted quality. ‘I saw the true attraction of your hair the first time I saw it in sunlight…and I told you,’ he had completed with sudden harsh emphasis as he frowned. ‘I told you that on the night after the funeral.’
‘You’ve finally remembered something!’ Billie had exclaimed with pleasure. ‘Do you remember how you felt that night? What you were thinking about?’
Alexei had tensed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he had confirmed, but he had not gone on to share any revelations on that score, although it had seemed to her that he was rather distant for the rest of that day and, indeed, the days that followed. Her elation that he had at last recalled some facet of that evening had gradually dwindled when he’d failed to mention it again.
Sometimes they played at being tourists, going further afield to sleepy hilltop villages where they wandered round market stalls piled high with fresh produce in dazzling colours and bought home-made bread, olives, honey and also armfuls of lavender that Billie loved to use to scent the chateau. To Alexei’s amusement, Marie, their housekeeper, never failed to point out that produce just as good, indeed most probably superior, could be bought right on the doorstep.
Billie had learned a lot more than she had thought she needed to know about the running of an organic vineyard. Alexei took a knowledgeable interest in every step of the process and was currently teaching her to differentiate between an acceptable wine and a superlative one. Only the previous year the Domaine Claudel label had won an award and Alexei was eager to build on that success. Billie was less interested in the wine than she was in Alexei’s enthusiasm in the face of a challenge.
Now she descended the stairs and frowned when she heard Nicky howling. She followed the source of his cries to the library where Alexei had abandoned his attempt to work to pull his son out of the wastepaper basket he had knocked over.
Having learned to crawl early, Nicky had rapidly become a little menace. Suddenly he couldn’t be depended on to stay where he was put any more and if there was anything dangerous within reach he seemed to home in on it. He had trailed out the contents of drawers and cupboards, shredded books and burrowed into pot plants. He was a baby on a demolition mission, set on causing the maximum possible destruction to his surroundings.
‘No, you can’t do that,’ Alexei was telling his son as he lifted him, and as the little boy snatched a pen off the desk added. ‘No, you can’t have that either.’
From the doorway, Billie watched as Nicky breathed in deep and bawled in bad temper, his lower lip jutting with baby-rage at the restrictions being put on his freedom.
‘And that’s not going to get you anywhere either,’ Alexei asserted, dropping down to lift one of the toys on the floor and hand it to his enraged son.
Nicky flung the toy away and howled even louder.
Alexei sat down and let his son claw his way upright by holding onto his jacket. Nicky jumped and his temper cleared like magic, for there was nothing he liked more at present than the ability to stand upright and bounce with energetic thoroughness.
Arms wrapping round Nicky to support him in a hug, Alexei cast languorous dark golden eyes across the room to Billie’s slender blue-clad figure and he smiled his heartbreakingly beautiful smile. ‘I thought you were never going to surface today.’
‘And whose fault is it that I’m so tired?’ Billie fired back readily before she could think better of that comment.
Alexei raised a sleek ebony brow in surprise at that question. ‘I distinctly remember being woken up in the early hours by a very demanding woman.’
Billie turned hot pink at the memory. Sometimes she just stretched out and found him in the bed and desire would roar through her like an express train. She just couldn’t quite believe that Alexei was now hers to touch and love. Proximity to him had made her greedy and sexier than she had ever thought she could be. The knowledge that he always seemed to want her had lifted her confidence. She wore lingerie that would have made her blush just months earlier; occasionally, she wore very little at all.