‘No wonder Luke’s jealous of you.’
‘As long as Tia refuses to tell him the truth I am powerless to alter that situation.’
Tawny treated him to a shrewd appraisal. ‘She’s part of the reason you wanted a fake fiancée for the Golden Awards, isn’t she?’
‘I promised Tia that I would bring a girlfriend and I too believed it to be a sensible precaution
where Luke was concerned. Unfortunately the lady backed out at the last minute and—’
‘And you hired me instead,’ Tawny slotted in. ‘What happened to the lady who backed out?’
‘I told her that I’d met someone else when I got back to Paris.’
‘But that wasn’t true … you had already left me.’
His eyes glimmered. ‘But I still didn’t want anyone else. You had me on a chain by then. Don’t you remember that last night in London when I came to your door?’
Tawny stiffened. ‘I also recall how it ended with you telling me I was a good—’
Navarre pulled her up against him and gazed down at her in reproof. ‘Wasn’t that in response to you threatening to tell the world what I was like in bed?’
A sensual shimmer of response wafted through Tawny and she pressed closer, tucking her head into his shoulder to breathe in the deliriously addictive scent of his skin. ‘Well, now that you mention it, it might have been,’ she teased, acknowledging that she had met her match while relishing the claim she had had him on a chain by that stage. A chain of love and commitment he refused to give to a woman who was a failed thief threating to tell all to the newspapers? She didn’t blame him for that, she couldn’t blame him for walking away at that point, for one thing she did appreciate about the man she loved was his very strong moral compass.
‘When I saw you with Tia at the wedding I feared the worst,’ she confided as his arms tightened round her.
‘I was desperate to tell you the truth and relieved when you didn’t force a scene because I didn’t want to break my promise to my mother,’ he admitted grimly. ‘But I should have broken the promise and told you then. Unfortunately it took me a few weeks to appreciate that as my wife you have to have the strongest claim to my loyalty.’
‘Sorry about the wedding night that never was,’ she mumbled ruefully. ‘I felt so insecure after seeing how close you were to her. I could see that there was a connection between you and I love you so much …’
Navarre pushed up her chin and stared down at her searchingly. ‘Since when?’ he demanded and his beautiful mouth quirked. ‘Since you saw my beautiful castle in France?’
His wife dealt him a reproving look. ‘I shall treat that suggestion with the contempt it deserves! No, I fell for you long before that. Remember that breakfast in Scotland after that nasty newspaper spread which revealed that I was a maid? When you brought me my food and stood by me in front of everyone as though nothing had happened, I really loved you for it …’
‘Snap. I loved you for your dignity and cool, ma petite.’ A tender smile softened the often hard line of his shapely mouth. Long fingers stroked her spine as he crushed her to him and kissed her with a breathless hunger that made her knees weak.
For once, Tawny had a small breakfast because the conversation and what followed were too entertaining to take a rain check on. He urged her upstairs to the bed they had only shared once and they lost themselves in the passion they had both restrained for so long.
In the lazy aftermath of quenching their desire, Tawny stared at her handsome husband and said, ‘What on earth game have you been playing with me all these weeks we’ve been married?’
‘It was no game.’ Navarre laughed. ‘We had no courtship—we never dated. I was trying to go back to the beginning and do everything differently in the hope that you would start feeling for me what I felt for you.’
In dismay at that simple exclamation and touched that he had gone to that amount of idealistic effort without receiving the appreciation he had undoubtedly deserved, Tawny clamped a hand to her lips. ‘Oh, my goodness, how stupid am I that I didn’t see that?’
Navarre looked a touch superior and stretched luxuriantly against the tumbled sheets while regarding her with intense appreciation. ‘Of the two of us, I’m the romantic one. Don’t forget that reality when you next draw a cartoon in which I figure merely as a skirt-chasing Frenchman!’
Tawny smoothed a possessive hand over his spectacular abs and smiled down at him with unusual humility. ‘I won’t,’ she promised happily. ‘I love you just the way you are.’
EPILOGUE
JOIE, named for the joy she had brought her adoring parents, toddled across the floor and presented Luke Convery with a toy brick.
‘She’s cute but I wouldn’t want one of my own,’ the rock musician said with an apologetic grimace as he dropped down on his knees to place the brick where Navarre and Tawny’s daughter, with her fantastically curly black hair and pale blue eyes, wanted it placed. ‘I grew up the youngest of nine kids and I’ve never wanted that kind of hassle for myself.’
‘Kids aren’t for everyone,’ Tawny agreed, thinking of how much her mother had resented being a parent, yet Susan Baxter had proved to be a much more interested grandmother than her daughter had expected. In fact mother and daughter had become a good deal closer since Joie’s birth in London eighteen months earlier.
Tawny often spent weekends in London to meet up with her sisters and her mother before travelling down to see her grandmother. She had been married to Navarre for two years and had never been happier or more content. She and Navarre seemed to fit like two halves of a whole. Her liveliness had lightened his character and brought out his sense of humour, while his cooler reserve had quietened her down just a tiny bit. Through her cartoons, Tawny had become quite a familiar face in Parisian society, and when ‘The English Wife’ cartoons had run out of steam she had come up with a cartoon strip based on an average family, which had done even more for her career.
A peal of laughter sounded in the hall of Navarre and Tawny’s spacious London home followed by an animated burst of Italian, and Luke grinned and sprang upright. ‘Tia’s back …’