Why?
He already knew the answer, and it wasn’t just that, for a moment, outside in the car park, not only his body but his senses as well had responded to the feminine sensuality of her.
It was well over a decade, thirteen years ago today to be exact, since the ending of his marriage. His marriage…what a farcical black comedy of errors that had been. What a fool he had been, to fall for one of the oldest tricks in the book.
She had been taking precautions, Claire had assured him tearfully, but something had gone wrong, and now she was pregnant with his child.
His child… He had had no option but to marry her.
Thirteen years, and surely in that time he had come far enough down life’s road to know far better than to let himself be disturbed by his awareness of a woman, especially a woman like that one.
What would she have done if he had been the one to approach her, to…?
He cursed again. What in God’s name was he thinking? He didn’t want her really, of course he couldn’t want a woman like that.
Could he?
CHAPTER TWO
ONE o’clock… Livvy sighed as she heard the town clock striking the hours, acknowledging that she was no closer to sleep now than she had been when she first came to bed.
And since she couldn’t sleep, why waste time trying…? Why didn’t she give some thought to the events which had brought her here to France instead?
Everything had happened in such a rush that she had barely had time to think everything through properly, a fact which her cousin Gale had used to her advantage, she reflected wryly as she admitted the way Gale
had manoeuvred her into doing what she wanted.
Her pupils and her fellow teachers would have found it hard to believe that she had let Gale get her way so easily, but then the offer of several weeks’ holiday in such a lovely part of France had been too tempting to resist, even if she had initially had doubts about the reasons Gale had given her for wanting her to stay at the farmhouse.
It had all started three weeks ago, when Gale had rung her and said that she needed to talk to her urgently.
This on its own had surprised her. Gale was not in the habit of needing to talk to anyone, much less her ten years younger and in her eyes far less worldly cousin.
At that stage, Livvy had assumed that the ‘urgent talk’ must have something to do with her nephews, and that Gale, who despite her husband George’s having a well-paid job considered thrift not just a virtue but a positive pleasure, wanted to persuade her to give the boys some free private coaching.
Livvy had all her arguments ready. She was quite genuinely far too busy to be able to be of any help to her nephews. The fact that the long summer holidays were only three weeks away did not mean that she had time on her hands—far from it. Not only did she have to sit down and give some serious thought to whether or not she really wanted to take the job of assistant head which she had been offered, she also had to prepare the coming year’s work.
However, once Gale, in her normal self-confident, slightly bossy way had told Livvy that her Busy Lizzie needed re-potting and that she had known she had been right to warn her not to paint her kitchen that bright yellow, Livvy discovered that it wasn’t her sons whom Gale wanted to discuss, but her husband.
‘I’m worried about George,’ she announced once they were both settled in Livvy’s pretty sitting-room with their cups of coffee.
Gale had disapproved of Livvy’s choice of colour scheme for her small home. The soft pastel colours were not really suitable for a schoolteacher, Gale had told her; they did not create the right impression.
Livvy had laughed. Other members of the family often complained that Gale drove them mad with her bossiness, but Livvy liked her elder cousin and was often amused by her. Unlike other people, she refused to allow Gale to dominate her, dealing calmly and quietly with her cousin’s dominating personality.
‘There are other aspects to my life than my work,’ she had pointed out mildly, when Gale had said that a stronger, more purposeful colour scheme would have been more appropriate.
What she hadn’t gone on to say was that sometimes she needed the soft, pretty pastel comfort of her home, that sometimes, after a particularly difficult day at school, she needed to come home to a place that helped her to get back in touch with the more feminine and vulnerable side of her nature.
When she had first chosen teaching as her career, her counsellors had suggested that she might find the work too much of an emotional strain, that the work might be too stressful for someone of her rather gentle personality.
Being gentle was not the same thing as being weak, Livvy had countered. And in the years since she had qualified she had gone on to prove that her sometimes deceptively mild manner did not mean that she was incapable of exerting control and discipline.
Unlike Gale, Livvy had never felt any need to prove to others how strong-willed and dominant she was; it was enough that she know that, if necessary, she could summon up that strength from within herself.
Knowing that gave her a serenity that others often envied.
Not Gale, however. Gale, who for all her high IQ seemed to be pathetically lacking when it came to reading people’s personalities.