He continued without a beat as he lifted his suit jacket from its padded hanger and shrugged himself into it, with an ease of movement she was burningly familiar with from all his sittings for her in her studio. ‘Nevertheless, I trust we shall be able to spend sufficient time together, and that your work will permit you the flexibility required to ensure that. Have no anxieties for the moment. All can be arranged. For now, however…’ He finished his knot, crossed to the bedside to retrieve the slim gold watch, wrapping it around his wrist as casually as if it had not been an item of masterly workmanship, with a price tag of several tens of thousands of pounds. ‘I must fly to Geneva, and that is that. Already le temps presse, so I must ask your indulgence of my unseemly haste.’
He crossed towards her, buttoning his jacket as he did so, and Alexa found her hand being taken.
‘Don’t look so bemused, ma belle.’ There was amusement in his voice, and a timbre that yet again seemed to make her breath catch. ‘Tout sera bien. Tu vas voire.’
He dropped the swiftest, most fleeting kiss on her mouth. As he started to move away, letting go of her hand to head for the door of the suite, she blurted out, her incomprehension evident in her voice, ‘I don’t understand!’
He paused by the door, in the act of opening it, and glanced back at her. Amusement was still in his eyes. That and something more—something that suddenly made Alexa’s legs unable to support her.
‘But it is very simple, ma belle—now we are lovers, non?’
And with that he was gone.
Behind him, staring blindly at the closed door, Alexa felt her mind go completely blank.
CHAPTER TWO
HER mind stayed blank all the way back to her apartment in the taxi she had climbed into at the hotel. She had walked with head held rigid across the marbled foyer, convinced that every eye in the hotel must be on her, seeing what she had done—for why else would a woman be leaving a hotel in the morning, still wearing the dress of the night before? She was sure, too, that the taxi driver had glanced knowingly at her in his mirror, and for that reason she’d stared blankly out of the window, before handing him a ten-pound note for her fare and walking into her apartment block as quickly as she could. She half ran up the stairs before any other occupant could spot her and jump to exactly the same conclusion. She had never done anything like this before—never!
‘Well, of course you haven’t!’ she admonished herself as she gained the sanctuary of her bedroom and started to rid herself of the betraying dress. ‘You’ve never been seduced by the likes of Guy de Rochemont before!’
But I have now…and I will remember it all my life.
Out of nowhere, she felt weak. She sank down on the bed, the reality of what had happened hitting her. Emotion came from all over—some that sense of wondrous bemusement, the almost physical memory of the hours entwined with him, and some sheer amazement about what had happened.
Playing over and over in her mind were the words he had left her with…
‘Now we are lovers, non?’
Her expression changed. Confusion and incomprehension were in her eyes. What did he mean? What could he mean?
She found out within the hour. She had scarcely finished showering and changing her out-of-place evening gown for sensible daywear before her entryphone sounded. Heading downstairs to the entrance lobby, she discovered a delivery of flowers so huge that she could hardly carry them up to her flat. Inside, she fumbled for the note.
‘À bientôt.’
It was all it said. All it needed to say. The phone call that came from Guy de Rochemont’s PA five minutes later said the rest. The woman’s dismissive style had not changed, but this time, instead of informing Alexa as she usually did that Mr de Rochemont either would or would not attend the next scheduled sitting, Alexa was given a mobile phone number ‘as Mr de Rochemont instructed’. She was to use it instead of the London number, but only in reply to a call from its owner, and on no account must the number be made available to any other individual.
The woman finished with an admonitory flourish.
‘Please ensure you do not call me, Ms Harcourt, in relation to Mr de Rochemont’s itinerary. It will not be in my power to give you any information Mr de Rochemont has not instructed me to forward to you. Such information will be disclosed to you only on an “as necessary” basis, as Mr de Rochemont instructs.’
After the call, which Alexa had heard out in a silence that was partly due to her continuing inability to believe what she was hearing and partly because she had long since decided to ignore the woman’s pointedly unpleasant manner, Alexa resumed her task of distributing the flowers into a variety of containers—for she possessed no single vase that was capable of holding the vast bouquet.
The scent of the flowers seemed overpowering. But her mind seemed strangely blank—as if too much had happened, too fast, and she could make no sense of it at all.
I don’t know what to do, she thought. I don’t know what to do.
Then don’t do anything.
The words formed in her mind and brought a kind of relief. After all, nothing was required of her for the moment other than to place the vases around the flat. Then, knowing she was in no state of mind to go to her studio—where, anyway, no current commission awaited her other than Guy de Rochemont’s, which, whatever the extraordinarily unbelievable events of the night before, she had resigned—she settled down at the desk in her living room and worked her way through a considerable amount of domestic paperwork, from utility bills to ongoing business expenses.
Then she vacuumed the flat, cleaned the kitchen, did some laundry and finally, after a light lunch, set off to th
e shops, having first despatched by courier the dress and accessories from last evening, with a note apologising because they had not been first cleaned, to Rochemont-Lorenz.
Her fridge restocked, she decided it would be a good opportunity to go to the gym, and spent several hours there. The exercise helped occupy her mind. Stop it falling back into vivid memory or that sense of blank incomprehension that seemed to be paralysing her brain. Back home again, she stayed in all evening, reading or watching back-to-back documentaries on television, before retiring to bed.
As she slipped between cool sheets she had a sudden searing memory of the previous night. For a moment she froze as heat flushed through her body. Then, with a decisive flick of the duvet, she reached for a book on early Italian art—her current bedtime reading. Pictures of martyred medieval saints would be an effective antidote to that betraying sensual flush—and to thoughts about the man who had caused it.