by Heidi Rice
She gave another jaw-breaking yawn and noticed the glow of the summer dawn through the large bedroom’s shutters. She should probably go to sleep too. In two hours, three at the most, their insatiable son would want another feed.
Instead she blinked furiously to keep her tired eyes open, as she waited for Maxim to return to the bed. She had something important she wanted to ask him.
At last, satisfied that their son had finally fallen into a deep enough sleep, Maxim padded back to the bed. Climbing in beside her, he dropped a quick kiss onto her nose. ‘Go to sleep, Madame Durand.’
‘I will...but, Maxim, I’ve got another name for you first.’
They’d spoken—or rather argued—about what to call their son on and off for over three months now. Which had basically consisted of her coming up with names and Maxim vetoing them all. She loved that he was so determined to get it right, but seriously, their son would be in university before they came up with one they could agree on if they didn’t get a move on.
‘And this cannot wait until morning?’ he sighed, yawning himself, and then wrapped his arm around her shoulders to pull her against his side.
‘No.’ She snuggled into his embrace, the scent of sandalwood soap and baby’s milk that clung to his skin making the flutter of appreciation become a definite hum—and the warmth in her heart spread.
‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘What is your latest terrible suggestion?’ he said.
‘Stop it.’ She gave him a playful slap. ‘My suggestions are not terrible.’
‘Hugo? Eugene? Mortimer?’ he teased.
‘Mortimer was a joke.’
‘And the other two?’ he said, pressing his lips into her hair in one of the many absent gestures of affection he always showed her, that she had come to adore. ‘For them there is no excuse.’
‘How about Pascal?’ she blurted out.
He stilled, the easy smile dropping from his lips in the half-light. She could hear his heart thumping against her ear. And feel hers beating in time.
He frowned down at her. ‘What made you think of this name?’ he said, his tone gruff. But she could tell, from the emotion in his voice, which he never hid from her any more, that he had already guessed the connection.
‘You said once that your mother’s surname was Pascale.’
He stared at her and her heart thundered.
‘You remembered this?’ he asked, his voice raw with surprise but also rough with love.
She nodded, peering up at him. ‘Do you like it?’
He brushed a hand over her hair, then leant down to cover her lips with his, the intensity of the kiss all the answer she needed.
When he drew back his face was a picture of raw emotion. ‘Pascal Evans Durand,’ he murmured softly, his voice rich with love as he tried out the name. ‘J’adore,’ he said. ‘But not as much as I adore him... And you, Cara.’
* * *
Wrapped up in the drama of A Forbidden Night with the Housekeeper? Enter Heidi Rice’s passionate world with these other stories!
Claiming My Untouched Mistress
Contracted as His Cinderella Bride
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Keep reading for an excerpt from Her Wedding Night Negotiation by Chantelle Shaw.
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Her Wedding Night Negotiation
by Chantelle Shaw
CHAPTER ONE
MARCO DE VALLE HATED WEDDINGS. Hated all the fuss that was deemed a necessary part of the fiasco when two people publicly made promises that one or both of them probably would not keep.
He wished he could miss his half-brother’s nuptials and fly home to Capri with his young son tonight. But to please his mother—although he did not know why he bothered to try, when it had been obvious for years that he was not her favourite offspring—he had agreed to attend James’s wedding to his drippy fiancée.
Marco’s mother was only keen for him to be at the ceremony tomorrow because his presence was bound to attract media interest, and a photograph of the wedding would perhaps appear in a celebrity magazine, he thought cynically.
The wedding rehearsal should have started twenty minutes ago but James was late. Stifling his impatience, Marco leaned against a pillar in a shadowy recess at the back of the private chapel, which belonged to the Nancarrow estate, and studied the bride, who was standing at the front of the nave.
His first impression of Leah Ashbourne when he’d met her earlier in the day had been that he had never seen a woman with such pale skin or such terrible dress sense. Her white blouse was buttoned up to her throat and her navy skirt fell to several inches below her knees. She wore her reddish-brown hair in a no-nonsense braid that hung between her shoulder blades and she could have passed for a nun—or Mary Poppins.
Her personality seemed to be as unexciting as her appearance, although Marco had been intrigued by the flush of rose-pink that had spread across her cheeks as she’d mumbled a greeting when James had introduced them. It had been a long time since he’d seen a woman blush. Marco had revised his opinion of Leah as plain at that point, acknowledging that she was actually very pretty, albeit not his type. He liked sexually confident women who understood that he wasn’t interested in commitment and would never, ever offer them marriage. Once had been enough.
He glanced at his watch and cursed beneath his breath. In an hour it would be Nicky’s bedtime and Marco had wanted to spend some time with his son. He already felt guilty that he’d been called away on an urgent business trip which had meant him leaving Nicky behind at Nancarrow Hall with the nanny for the past week.
Guilt played a big part in his relationship with Nicky, he acknowledged with a deep sigh. The psychotherapist who had been working with the little boy insisted that a five-year-old did not have the emotional capacity to blame Marco for the accident in which Nicky’s mother had died. But Marco blamed himself. He had failed Nicky in the past, and he was failing him now because he could not seem to find a way to connect with his traumatised son.
Where the hell was James?
Marco saw Leah check her phone, and her shoulders slump. She looked a forlorn figure as she waited at the altar for her bridegroom, but he reminded himself it wasn’t up to him to explain that James was not the Prince Charming she clearly believed he was.
His thoughts returned to his son. He’d bought a toy sports car—a model of his own Ferrari—for Nicky, and he was looking forward to watching him open the gift. Perhaps the little boy would give one of his rare smiles.
Marco refused to waste any more time waiting for the wedding rehearsal to begin and he stepped out of the recess into the main part of the chapel.
* * *
‘Is there still no sign of the bridegroom?’ The vicar smiled sympathetically at Leah.
‘I can’t imagine what has happened to James,’ she said, checking her phone again. ‘He was going to Padstow to pick up a few last-minute things for our honeymoon, but he promised he would be back by six-thirty for the wedding rehearsal.’
There was no message from her fiancé to explain why he was delayed, but Leah remembered how James had driven at a snail’s pace along the narrow Cornish lanes on the way to Nancarrow Hall a week ago. He was certainly not a daredevil, and she reassured herself that if he’d had an accident the emergency services would have alerted his parents. It was more likely that he’d lost track of the time, which was not unusual.
James tended to daydream, and he was hopelessly disorganised. Someti
mes Leah felt more like his nanny than his partner, and since she’d arrived at Nancarrow Hall and met his parents she’d realised that they were overlyprotective of James. She suspected that he had been cossetted his whole life. But he was amiable, and easy-going, and their relationship had none of the drama and tension that Leah remembered from her childhood, when her mother had lurched from one disastrous love affair to another.
They had only been dating for six months, but she’d pushed away her doubts that their courtship had not been long enough for her to be certain she wanted to spend the rest of her life with James Fletcher. He had been in a strange mood since they had arrived at his family’s gothic mansion on the edge of Bodmin Moor, but surely it was natural that they were both experiencing pre-wedding nerves.
Leah’s conscience pricked. She knew that she should have told James about the money she had been left by her grandmother. But she’d been worried that the stipulation in Grandma Grace’s will that she must be married before she could claim her inheritance might complicate her relationship with James. She loved him. She did.
Leah refused to listen to the voice of her conscience, which warned her that she was rushing into marriage because she craved the kind of settled life that she’d never known during her chaotic childhood.
‘I have an appointment with the Bishop later this evening,’ the vicar said. ‘We will have to start the rehearsal without James. Perhaps someone can stand in for him until he gets here?’
He surveyed the group of people assembled in the private chapel. It was a small wedding with only forty guests. Thirty-nine of them were friends and family of the groom.
Leah directed a questioning look at Amy, her best friend from university and bridesmaid. Amy was an old school friend of James and it was she who had introduced him to Leah at a party. Leah had been flattered by his attention. She considered herself no more than averagely attractive and she’d assumed that good-looking, public-school-educated James was out of her league.
She had been drawn to the sense of security he represented. Once they were married they planned to move out of London and buy a little cottage with roses growing around the front door, and in time they would have two children and a dog. Other women might yearn for riches, designer clothes and dazzling jewels, but Leah’s dream was a family.
Amy gave a shrug as an awkward silence followed the vicar’s request for a stand-in bridegroom.
‘I’m sure there must be a good reason why James is late.’
Davina, the ultra-efficient wedding planner spoke in an oddly thick voice, and she looked as though she had been crying.
‘Ideally we need someone who doesn’t have a prominent role in the wedding ceremony to act as the groom.’
‘I’ll take James’s place.’
The deep voice laced with a sexy accent came from the back of the chapel.
Leah stiffened and felt a peculiar sensation, as if her stomach had swooped down to her toes. That voice could only belong to Marco De Valle, James’s Italian half-brother. Earlier in the day she had watched a tall, dark-haired man climb out of a sleek silver sports car and inexplicably her stomach had done the same swooping thing it was doing now.
When the stranger had walked into the drawing room and James had introduced him Leah had felt overwhelmed by Marco’s magnetism. His supreme self-assurance gave him a presence that made everything and everyone around him fade to grey. She had darted a glance at Marco’s face before hastily dropping her gaze, feeling as flustered and tongue-tied as a teenager who had just met her celebrity idol. Her blood had pounded in her ears as she’d mumbled a greeting.
That brief look had revealed that the half-brothers bore no resemblance to each other. James, with his blond hair and clean-cut image, was boyishly handsome. He had done some modelling work and appeared on the front covers of several glossy magazines of the kind which featured articles about stately homes and Royal Ascot.
The kind of publication that might have a photo of Marco De Valle on its front cover would be magazines about extreme sports or how to survive if you were stranded in the Amazonian jungle, Leah thought wryly. There was something untamed about him, and she sensed that he lived by his own rules and did not care a jot what others thought of him.
That feeling had been reinforced when she’d watched him from her bedroom window, striding across the moors—an imposing figure with his black coat swirling in the wind and his hair blown back from his face.
James had told her that the jagged scar on Marco’s face was the result of a terrible accident in which his wife had been killed, leaving his five-year-old son motherless. Poor Nicky. The little boy was clearly still disturbed by the tragedy, and he rarely spoke or smiled. It was obvious to Leah that, having lost his mother, he needed to be with his father as much as possible, but James had said that Marco often left Nicky at Nancarrow Hall while he went abroad.
Perhaps Marco’s absences were unavoidable, but having grown up never feeling that she was her mother’s main priority, Leah had felt her heart go out to Nicky. His big brown eyes reminded her poignantly of her little brother, who had died when he was not much older than Nicky. There was not a day when Leah did not think of Sammy, and spending time with Nicky during the past week, while James had been busy, had been bittersweet.
Her thoughts scattered now, as she watched Marco stroll down the aisle towards her, and she was dismayed when her pulse quickened in an unbidden response to him.
She noticed that his scar sliced down his cheek from just beneath his right eye to the corner of his mouth, making his top lip curl slightly and giving him a permanently cynical expression that was mirrored in his wintry grey eyes. On any other man the scar might have been regarded as a disfigurement, but it merely accentuated Marco’s raw masculinity.
‘Handsome’ did not come close to describing his chiselled features: razor-sharp cheekbones and a square, determined jaw shaded with dark stubble. Above that sullen, sexy mouth was a strong nose rising to meet heavy dark brows. His hair was the same shade of almost black, overlong and dishevelled, as though he had just left a lover’s bed after a night of passion.
Where that last thought had come from Leah had no idea, but the picture in her mind of Marco’s naked body sprawled on satin sheets did nothing to help her already shaky composure.
She had never even seen a naked man before.
Other than on a no-holds-barred television dating show which, to Leah’s mind, had been completely unromantic.
Marco moved with the silence and speed of a panther stalking its prey. Before Leah had time to collect her wits he was standing beside her. Her mouth dried as she forced herself to meet his sardonic gaze and she wondered if he heard her heart as it collided with her ribs. The jolt of awareness was unlike anything she’d ever felt before.
Not even for James. whispered her conscience, which seemed hell-bent on causing trouble.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ she told Marco stiffly. ‘I’m sure James will be here any minute now.’
‘Your confidence in my brother is admirable,’ he drawled, ‘but James is as bad at time-keeping as he is at holding down a job.’
‘It wasn’t his fault he was sacked from the art gallery.’ Leah sprang to her fiancé’s defence. ‘It was unfortunate that his alarm failed to go off and he overslept. He was only late for work a few times.’
‘Well, I’m not prepared to wait any longer for him to show up.’ Marco’s gaze narrowed on Leah’s flushed face. ‘I understand you have only known my brother for a matter of months? If you’d like my advice, it is that you should postpone the wedding until you’re certain that you are both ready for marriage.’
‘I don’t want your advice, thank you,’ she snapped with icy politeness.
His grey eyes gleamed. ‘The little mouse has a temper?’ he said softly. ‘Perhaps you are not as uninteresting as I thought when James introduced us.’
He ignored her furious gasp and turned to speak to the wedding planner.
‘Reverend Tregarth is right. We should push on with the rehearsal without James. My housekeeper is planning to serve a buffet dinner this evening to allow the kitchen staff time to start preparing the wedding food for tomorrow.’
Leah saw Davina nod meekly. Marco had an air of authority and obviously expected other people to accept his leadership. But she was puzzled that he had spoken of his housekeeper. Surely the staff were employed by James’s parents, whom she assumed were the owners of Nancarrow Hall? James had said that Marco lived mainly in Italy, where he headed De Valle Caffè—a world-famous coffee company and coffeehouse chain.
The wedding planner opened the folder she was holding, entitled Fletcher/Ashbourne Wedding 21st July. ‘We’ll start without James and I can fill him in on what he needs to know later. As all the guests are here, I’ll ask everyone to stand in their correct places while we run through the order of service.’
The vicar stood on the chancel steps as Davina directed people to their places.
‘The groom and best man will stand on the right side of the chapel. The bridesmaid and the bride’s family will be on the left side. But it might be better if the groom’s friends and relatives fill the pews on both sides of the nave,’ the wedding planner said hurriedly, realising that Leah’s side of the chapel would be empty apart from Amy. ‘And the bride and groom will stand facing the minister.’
As Leah moved into place she glanced over her shoulder, hoping to see James rushing through the doorway. She noticed a satisfied expression on his mother’s face and guessed that Olivia Fletcher would not be disappointed if James had changed his mind and called off the wedding. Olivia had more airs and graces than royalty, and had made it plain that she believed her youngest son was marrying beneath him.
