by Lynne Graham
Star flew down the stairs like the wind. Rory was in the hall, looking amazingly elegant in white jeans and a designer T-shirt with a striped cotton sweater casually knotted round his slim shoulders.
As Luc strolled through the imposing front door of his ancestral home, wondering who owned the Porsche with the British registration parked out front, he was just in time to see his wife hurl herself joyously into Rory’s arms.
‘What a brilliant surprise!’ With the ease of long friendship, Star gripped the young blond man’s arms, stretched up to kiss his cheek and then held him back from her to subject him to a long, exaggerated appraisal before sounding a low wolf-whistle of admiration. ‘Wow! Love those sexy white jeans…don’t you look like a really cool dude?’
Rory grinned. ‘I brought the Porsche Cabriolet too—’
‘Poser!’ she mocked, her aquamarine eyes dancing. ‘And to think you made me travel round in an ancient old rust-bucket because you didn’t want your workmates to know that you were a rich kid.’
‘Now, come on, Star…the Morris is a classic British car.’
‘I have definitely missed you. Why are you skiving off work and over in France?’ she demanded cheerfully.
‘I’m supposed to be checking that my parents’ villa at Cap d’Antibes is in order for the end of the month…I was worried about you and the twins,’ he admitted abruptly.
‘Didn’t I tell you you didn’t need to worry?’ Star sighed guiltily. ‘Luc and I are—’
‘Deliriously happy,’ Luc’s heavy accented drawl slotted in to spell out.
Star whirled round with a huge but surprised smile. ‘Luc, you’re home! Come and meet Rory…properly this time! He’s got to be my best friend in the world.’
From a distance of ten feet, Luc stared bleakly at the young blond man. Rory advanced half a step and then stilled again, acknowledging his host’s presence with an uneasy nod.
Star focused on Luc. It struck her that he was remarkably pale, his slashing cheekbones taut. ‘Luc, are you—?’
‘Look, I’ll call in on the way back from the Cap on Sunday.’ Rory began.
Star grimaced. ‘Oh, heck, we won’t be here, Rory. In fact—’
‘In just under ten minutes we have to leave,’ Luc advanced without the slightest shade of regret.
‘Gosh, it’s a good thing I got my packing done so quick,’ Star muttered in surprise, and some embarrassment. ‘We’re going away for a couple of weeks, Rory.’
‘Possibly even longer,’ Luc qualified.
Star glanced at him in bewilderment. ‘But, Luc…what about the bank?’
‘With a computer, I can work anywhere,’ Luc asserted with sardonic bite.
Rory glanced uncomfortably at Star. ‘Could I just say hi to the twins before I go?’
‘Of course you can!’ Star headed for the stairs. ‘I feel so awful that you can’t stay longer.’
‘Luc is a very possessive guy,’ Rory whispered on the landing. ‘He really doesn’t like me being here—’
‘Nonsense,’ Star said loyally. ‘Luc was just surprised to see you, that’s all.’
‘You seem so happy…’
‘I am. So you shouldn’t be worrying about me.’
‘I went on the pull, like you suggested. I’m going clubbing with a brunette this week,’ Rory informed her.
Star grinned approval. ‘You could never do anything like that with me because I had the twins…’
‘And you’d never agree to a babysitter,’ Rory added with a thoughtful frown.
After a brief visit with Venus and Mars, Star walked Rory back out to his Porsche.
‘I’ll call back at the end of the month. Hell, I nearly forgot…Yesterday, Juno phoned me at work in a real panic because she had left a couple of messages and you hadn’t called her back. So I gave her your mobile phone number—’
‘Well, she hasn’t called yet. Where is she?’ Star demanded.
‘Switzerland…your mother didn’t tell me that, but I checked the number after she’d rung off,’ Rory admitted.
‘Switzerland…what the heck is she doing there?’ Star groaned. ‘Did you tell her where I was?’
‘Yeah…and she got really upset. Then she just hung up again. I’m sorry.’ Recognising Star’s anxiety, Rory reached for her hand and squeezed it in consolation. ‘Do you want that Swiss phone number?’
Star nodded ruefully.
Rory wrote it down and passed it to her. Star dug the piece of paper into the back pocket of her skirt and wandered very slowly back into the chateau.
*
Preoccupied as Star had been with concern for her missing mother, she really only noticed how coolly Luc was behaving towards her once the jet had taken off.
‘I haven’t even asked where we’re going,’ she muttered guiltily.
‘Corsica…’
‘Oh, I haven’t been there…well, I haven’t been most places!’ she adjusted.
His lean, strong face empty of even a pretence of fleeting amusement, Luc rose to his feet. ‘Excuses-moi, mais…I have work to do,’ he drawled glacially.
A heart-stopping vision of French masculine elegance in an unstructured lightweight suit in palest grey, Luc strode off to vanish into the office area of the jet. Cool? Luc was acting like the beginning of a new Ice Age. Confused, Star sat on a moment or two before following him. Longing for the light-hearted mood he had been in earlier that day, she perched on the arm of the seat across the aisle from him.
‘I appreciate that I’ve been a bit of a drag since Rory visited—’
Luc kept his attention on the screen of his laptop, but his bold profile hardened.
‘I’ve been worrying about Mum,’ she confided.
For a split second a pained light flashed in Luc’s narrowed gaze. She wasn’t just a poor liar: she was a hopeless one. Having lit up with pure joy at one glimpse of Rory Martin, Star had sunk into silent misery the instant her former lover had departed in his boy-toy car. Friendship? All right, so he himself had never had time for close friends, but who did she think she was kidding? She couldn’t act for peanuts either. If swarming all over that skinny little twerp in his girly jeans was her idea of friendship, she would be very lonely in the friendship stakes in the future, Luc promised himself wrathfully.
Star cleared her throat awkwardly.
Luc still couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
‘Juno called Rory from Switzerland and I tried the number, but it was a guesthouse and she’d already moved on without leaving an address,’ Star volunteered tautly. ‘I know you think she’s a…a foolish woman at best and a schemer at worst, but I love her and naturally I’m concerned about her.’
‘Naturally,’ Luc echoed flatly. ‘But to be frank…your mother has a healthy survival instinct. If she’s in Switzerland, she must have a good reason for being there.’
‘I can’t think of any connection, except that that’s where she fell pregnant with me,’ Star confided.
Luc hadn’t known that, but he kept his attention rigidly on the screen.
‘You just want me to run along and play…don’t you?’ Star gathered tightly as the silence stretched.
‘Vraiment!’ Luc flung his arrogant dark head back and subjected her to a sizzling and derisive appraisal. ‘After the performance you put on with Rory this afternoon, what more do you expect?’
Her throat caught as she recognised his anger. ‘Performance?’
‘I have no wish to discuss it further,’ Luc ground out harshly.
Star contemplated his rigid profile and it was as if an alarm bell went off inside her head. ‘You were jealous…’ she whispered, in the tone of one making a fascinating discovery.
Luc slammed his laptop shut with such force it bounced on the desk. He sprang upright. Scorching dark eyes assailed hers in a look of rebuttal as physical as an assault. ‘Zut alors! What do you think I am? An adolescent? I found the sight of my wife being so familiar with another man very offensive! That is not jea
lousy.’
He was so much taller than she was that it took courage not to be intimidated. But Star was now angry too. Rising to her feet, she squared her slight shoulders. ‘Whatever you say…but when you’re annoyed with me, you’d better learn to face me with it. I won’t put up with the deep-freeze treatment. And by the way, if you saw anything offensive in my behaviour with Rory, it was in your own mind.’
‘You flaunted your intimacy with him,’ Luc condemned fiercely.
‘I’ve never been intimate with him…not intimate in the way you mean!’ Star returned tartly, infuriated with him. ‘And, since you’re not jealous…I wonder how it was that you imagined you saw sexual intimacy where it has never existed!’
Luc froze, shimmering dark eyes suddenly welding to her flushed face. ‘Never…?’
Turning on her heel, Star utilised the words he had used with her only a minute earlier. ‘I have no wish to discuss it further.’
A lean hand closed over her shoulder to stay her. ‘Star—’ Star pulled away. ‘No! I’m really annoyed with you. Why can’t you just admit that you have normal human emotions like everybody else? Instead you tried to put me down as if I’d done something wrong! That’s what I can’t forgive.’
Leaving silence in her wake, Star returned to the twins, happily dozing in their seats like twin angels. Well, their father is no angel, she thought furiously.
CHAPTER NINE
A HELICOPTER took them the last brief leg of the journey.
‘That’s the villa down there!’ Luc shouted above the noise of the rotors.
Star gazed down into a breathtakingly beautiful wooded gorge and saw a villa with a terracotta roof perched just above a stretch of golden sand. A ribbon of road ran down through steep, tortuous bends beneath the trees, but she could see no other houses. A private hideaway…just when she wanted crowds to prevent her lunging for Luc’s jugular vein!
Although Star had a quick temper, she usually cooled down again even quicker. But this time she just found herself getting even angrier with Luc. Luc, whom she had once worshipped rather like a god, whom she had unquestioningly accepted was in every way superior to her humble self. Cleverer, stronger, better than her in every way. But Luc had attacked her once too often with her supposed flaws and mistakes.
Descending from the helicopter, clutching Venus, Star studied the rambling, spacious villa. Backed by a grove of tall cypress and beech trees, the weathered tawny stone gleamed like gold in the glowing light of sunset. Even a sourpuss would have been forced to admit that it was an absolutely out-of-this-world setting. And when Luc showed her through the front door it just got better and better. Marble-tiled floors, stylish, comfortable furniture, ornate lamps and vases, beautiful bedrooms and bathrooms, and cots dressed with broderie anglaise bedding awaiting the twins.
‘How did you get this place at such short notice…a cancellation?’ she heard herself ask, although she had been assiduously ignoring him.
‘It’s been in the family for a while.’
Star’s face took on a jaundiced look. She should have known. Private, exclusive, possessed of every conceivable luxury. ‘Was that a Jacuzzi out front?’
‘Oui…’
‘Well, you needn’t think you’re getting me into that.’
She listened to him audibly exhale, and busied herself with Venus and Mars. She had readied them for bed before they’d left the jet and they were snug in their respective Babygros.
Luc hovered. ‘You’re not going to have to cook or anything—’
‘Oh, I know that. You wouldn’t want to be poisoned, would you?’
Ignoring that comment, Luc mentioned the maid who would be coming in twice a day, and who would also be available to stay over if they wanted to dine out.
Star put the twins in the cots and thought what truly wonderful babies they were, neither of them one bit bothered by all the different places they had had to sleep recently.
‘If you give me the chance, I’ll apologise,’ Luc drawled levelly.
‘Forget it…it would be wasted on me. I’m just sick and tired of you always criticising me—’
‘Star…I very much want this to be a special time for us,’ Luc said. ‘I accept that I spoilt things, but it’s not like you to hold spite.’
‘No, more’s the pity.’ Star surveyed him, aquamarine eyes shimmering. It annoyed her right then that he looked so absolutely gorgeous and so absolutely reasonable, as if he was trying to deal gently with a very sulky child. ‘I mean, you didn’t hang back when it came to censuring my actions, did you? So why did I? And I did hold back!’
‘If you’ve got something to say, say it…’
‘Have you a pen?’
His black brows pleating, he tugged a gold pen from his inside pocket. Star strolled into the main reception room and espied a notepad by the phone. Sitting down on a sofa, she proceeded to write.
‘What are you doing?’
‘You’re clever when you argue. I want to be sure I’m not knocked off track. I want to be sure I get everything out!’
‘I think I’ll go for a walk on the beach, and maybe by the time—’
‘By the time you get back, I’ll have cooled off?’ Star loosed a driven laugh. ‘No chance, Luc. Right, are you ready?’
‘Is this really necessary?’
‘If you want me to stay married to you beyond the next five minutes, it is very necessary,’ Star stated tightly. ‘Point one. I do not like being treated like a child. I’m a woman and a mother. I will not be patronised.’
‘D’accord…OK,’ Luc murmured with amusement brightening his eyes.
Star was determined to knock that indulgent look off his darkly handsome face. ‘Point two: that winter I fell in love with you, you encouraged me at every turn by not rejecting me. I think you got a kick out of my loving you.’
She had got her wish. His amusement had gone. ‘Vraiment—’
‘No, I’m doing the talking here, and then I’m going to bed alone and you are going to think about what I’ve said.’
Luc spread his lean hands wide in an exasperated gesture and strode over to the window.
Star breathed in deep again. ‘All that winter, you fed me confusing signals, both before and after we were married. You could have shot me down in flames when I said I loved you. If you held back the first time out of pity, it still gave you no excuse to allow me to dog your footsteps, absolutely out of my head with adoration after that day.’
Luc swung round, brilliant eyes glinting. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you.’
‘Don’t you understand what I’m trying to get you to work out for yourself?’ Star launched at him in frustration. ‘Why did you put up with me? You are not a tolerant, patient guy, and I invaded your space every chance I got. By rights, you should have loathed the sight of me!’
A dark line of colour now demarcated his hard cheekbones. He said nothing.
Star shook her bright head slowly. ‘I mean, just over a week ago I listened to you accuse me of forcing you into situations you didn’t want…like you’re such a wimpy personality, like you were just totally helpless in the designing paws of a little teenager. You, Luc Sarrazin, chairman of the Sarrazin bank, the guy with the cold, ruthless reputation who doesn’t let anyone put one over on him!’
‘I felt guilty about you…’ Luc imparted grimly. ‘Whose fault was it that as a child you ended up living with a woman who was a stranger and attending a boarding school? I assumed that my parents would have enough compassion to allow you to stay with us at Chateau Fontaine. As you have cause to know, that was a very stupid and naive assumption.’
‘What else could you have done with me? That wasn’t your fault.’
‘I could have tried to help you and your mother. I judged her very harshly on the strength of an hour’s meeting.’
‘Luc, you were only twenty, and we weren’t your responsibility. I was your father’s responsibility, and he didn’t want to be bothered with me.’
‘B
ut I was so angry at the way things turned out that I took nothing further to do with you.’
‘You were a little too young to be a father figure…’ Star was troubled and frustrated by the direction the dialogue had gone in. But she now saw that Luc had been much more disturbed by events that had effectively been out of his control than she had ever appreciated.
‘At the very least I should have visited you—’
‘If I made you feel so guilty…I’m glad you stayed away,’ Star said woodenly, realising that he had given her another slant on his past behaviour, and really not a slant she had had any desire to see. Guilt—a powerful reason to have been unusually tolerant that winter she had fallen in love with him.
‘What else is on your list?’
G for Gabrielle. She’d planned to ask him why he hadn’t simply told her that he had a woman in his life. With no clear evidence of Luc having an ongoing relationship with Gabrielle, Star had soon dismissed Emilie’s confidences about the other woman as being out of date. So it had been a much greater shock to discover on their wedding night that Gabrielle had still been very much a current interest in Luc’s life.
‘Star…you are sitting there seething,’ Luc noted drily.
‘I should’ve gagged you before I commenced attack.’ Star emitted a shaken laugh, her triangular face very pale as the point of what he had already told her began to sink in even more deeply and fill her with unbelievable pain. ‘I did intend to ask why you went to the extraordinary length of marrying me when you could have just cornered my mother and cleared up the misunderstanding…but you’ve answered that too. Guilt. Guilt covers everything you ever did, doesn’t it? Past, present and future.’
Having perceptibly relaxed as her anger visibly waned, Luc now took a hasty step closer. ‘What are you trying to say?’
Eyes shuttered, Star stood up, every movement stiff. ‘That I’ve got no plans to forever figure in your mind as that poor deprived child you thought you were rescuing from Mexico. And it’s obvious that’s all I’m ever going to be. Did you honestly think I’d want to stay around after hearing that?’
As she attempted to move past him, Luc shot out a powerful hand to prevent her. ‘You misunderstood me…’ he gritted.
