‘You think this is funny…huh?’ Christien growled with savage incredulity.
‘I-Isn’t it?’ she prompted chokily.
A split second later, his hot, hungry mouth swooped down to possess hers and killed her near-hysterical amusement at source. He was pure erotic temptation. For the first time in almost four years, electrifying excitement seized Tabby. Her head spun and air rasped in her tortured throat. The explicit intrusion of his tongue in the moist interior of her mouth sent a wave of delirious hunger currenting through her slight body. Her last grip on reality snapped: suddenly she was reaching up to him and no longer a passive partner. Her arms locked round his lean, hard frame, her hands rising to shape his broad shoulders before her fingers snaked higher and delved deep into the black silk luxuriance of his hair to hold him to her.
‘Christien?’
‘Non…’ In an abrupt movement, Christien wrenched himself back from her again. Breathing raggedly, he stared down at her, his smouldering gaze blazing gold, febrile colour accentuating the savage line of his hard cheekbones, ferocious tension written into every hard, angular line of his lean, strong face. In one powerful movement he vaulted upright, but it took every atom of will-power he possessed to step back from her. That acknowledgement both outraged and shocked him but, more than anything else, he was disconcerted by an awareness of exactly what had ripped his formidable self-discipline to shreds a moment earlier: that husky laugh of hers had snatched him back in time to that summer.
He had never forgotten that streak of bubbling, contagious joy that was so much a part of her nature, her childish habit of giggling at the most inopportune moments and in the worst of places, or her mysterious ability to lift him from his darkest moods. Loner and cynic though he was, he had basked in that warmth of hers, the extravagant, trusting ease with which she seemed to love. His hard, sensual mouth set into a tough line. Love as she had offered wasn’t worth a damn but the sex had been out of this world, he reminded himself with bitter amusement.
‘Why did you touch me?’ Tabby condemned shakily.
‘Why do you think, chérie?’ The thickened note in his sexy drawl sent a responsive shiver travelling down her taut spinal cord.
‘You shouldn’t have. That’s all in the past.’ Shaking like a leaf in a cruel wind, Tabby scrambled off the mattress and turned away from him. Her knees were wobbling and her hands were trembling. Her reddened lips stung from the devouring heat of his and more than anything else in the world she just wanted to sink back into the lean, powerful strength of him and taste him over and over again until the terrifying ache of loss he had filled her with had finally evaporated and faded like a bad memory.
And that was not how she should be thinking about a male who had once used her and discarded her again with no more care or consideration than he might have utilised had she given him her body in a casual one-night stand. In fact it was frightening to recognise the longing still pent-up inside her and the extent of her own vulnerability. Where were her pride and her intelligence?
‘How did you even know I was moving in today?’ she demanded, desperate to keep herself busy and stooping down to snatch at the mattress and manhandle it up onto its side again.
Someone who knew that she had an appointment to collect the keys from the notaire had made the mistake of passing on that news to Matilde Laroche and Christien’s working day had been interrupted by his distraught parent and her announcement. He had left his mother in the soothing hands of her doctor but his own patience had been sorely tested. Only once in his life had his late father attended one of Solange’s rustic picnic parties, so his son could not see how the overgrown meadow outside could be regarded by the older woman as being in quite the same category as sacred ground.
‘I can understand that you would want to take a look at your inheritance,’ Christien remarked with studied calm. ‘Naturally you’re curious but I can’t believe that you’re planning to live here.’
‘Why can’t you believe it?’
‘Pas possible…it’s not habitable!’ he retorted drily.
Out of the corner of her eye, Tabby studied him. His silk business suit was a trendy black pinstripe of exquisite cut that accentuated his wide shoulders, narrow hips and long powerful thighs. He looked absolutely gorgeous and, without her even realising it, her sneaky covert glance had become a full-on stare. Cheeks reddening as he elevated a questioning brow at the intensity of her appraisal, Tabby hefted one corner of the bulky mattress up onto the bottom step of the stairs again and slung him an expectant look. ‘Are you going to give me a hand with this?’
Complete disconcertion pleated his level brows.
‘Of course, it must be hard to stay fit when you’re in an office all day.’ Tabby sighed.
An utterly unexpected slashing grin banished the gravity from Christien’s lean dark face. ‘Do you really think I’m about to fall for a bait that basic?’
Riveted to the spot by the sheer charisma of that knowing smile, Tabby tried and failed to swallow. Closing his lean, shapely hands into the mattress, he hauled it up the stairs, negotiated with ease the bend that had caused her such grief and came to a halt in the room where the bed frame already stood assembled. As she reached the doorway he settled the mattress down onto the frame.
‘Where did you find the bed? On a dump?’ he enquired.
‘It’s old but it’s solid.’ However, her bed had come closer to the dump than she would ever have admitted. Virtually all of the elderly furniture and household effects in the van had come from her aunt’s
attic and garage, both of which Alison was clearing in preparation for letting her property.
‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,’ Tabby reminded Christien as she bent to rifle the cardboard box of bedding in the corner and emerged with a folded sheet.
Christien studied the sheet she was unfurling and noted that it had been carefully mended with a slightly different colour of cloth. Did people still patch linen these days? He was more shocked than he would have liked to admit by the sight of that mended sheet. He had a vague Cinderella-like image of her sitting darning by candlelight and, in defiance of that unusually colourful flight of fancy on his own part, he spread his hands in a scornful gesture. ‘Why are you wasting your energy with this? You can’t live here—’
‘You couldn’t,’ Tabby countered, tucking in the sheet at the corners with determined industry, because at least while she was attending to practicalities she was not gawping at him like a lovelorn schoolgirl. ‘You’d be lost without your luxuries, but I’ll be quite happy getting back to basics—’
‘That’s a double bed…who are you planning to share it with?’ Christien demanded without warning.
An image of Jake’s warm little body sneaking in below the covers first thing in the morning to cuddle up to her crossed Tabby’s mind and her green eyes softened and her lush mouth took on a tender curve as she thought of her son.
Raw anger flaring and tensing his hard dark features, Christien strode forward to scrutinise her with brilliant dark golden eyes. ‘If you choose to live on the Duvernay estate, there will only be one man in your bed, and that man will be me…tu comprends?’
In rampant disbelief, Tabby straightened to stare at him. ‘Are you out of your mind?’