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It was something she could agree with a few hours later, as she was conducted across a marble-floored hall and up a sweeping marble staircase like something out of a nineteen-thirties Hollywood movie.
She was shown into a bedroom, its décor pale grey and with silvered furniture. She looked about her appreciatively. This was fabulous. It was a sentiment she echoed when she walked out onto the balcony that ran the length of the frontage of the villa. Her breath caught, her eyes lighting up. Verdant green lawns surrounded the brilliant white building, pierced only by a turquoise circular pool and edged by greenery up to the rocky shoreline of the Cap. Beyond, the brilliant azure of the Mediterranean confirmed the name of this coastline.
She gazed with pleasure. No wonder the rich liked being rich if it got them a place like this.
And I get to stay here!
She went back inside to help the pair of maids unpacking her clothes. They weren’t her own clothes—a stylist had selected them, on Marc Derenz’s orders, Tara assumed, as being suitable for the role she was going to play. For all that, she would definitely enjoy wearing them. Actually wearing them for herself, not for other women to buy—it would be a novelty she would make the most of.
She would make the most of everything about her time here. Starting with relishing the delicious lunch about to be served to her out on the balcony, under a shady parasol, followed by a relaxing siesta on a conveniently placed sun lounger in the warm early summer sunshine.
Where Marc Derenz was she didn’t know—presumably he’d turn up at some point and she would go on duty. Till then...
* * *
‘Don’t burn.’
The voice that woke Tara was deep and familiar, and its abrupt tone told
her instantly that concern for her well-being was not behind the statement.
Her eyes flared open, and for a moment the tall figure of the man who was going to pay her ten thousand pounds for staying in his luxury villa in the South of France loomed darkly over her.
She levered herself up on her elbows. ‘I’ve got sun cream on,’ she replied.
‘Yes, well, I don’t want you looking like a boiled lobster,’ Marc Derenz said disparagingly. ‘And it’s time for you to start work.’
She sat up straight, feeling her arms for the thin straps of her swimsuit, which she’d pushed down to avoid tan marks on her shoulders. As she did so she felt the suit dip dangerously low over her breasts. And she felt suddenly, out of nowhere, a burning consciousness of the fact that those hard, dark eyes were targeted on her, and that all that concealed her nakedness was a single piece of thin stretchy material.
Deliberately, she busied herself picking up her wrap, studiedly winding it around herself without looking at him. Whether he was looking at her still she did not care.
I’m going to have to get used to this—to the impact he has on me. And fast. I can’t go on feeling so ridiculously self-conscious. I’ve got to learn to blank him.
With that instruction firmly in mind, she finished knotting her wrap securely and looked across at him. Against the sun he seemed even taller and darker. He was wearing another of his killer business suits, pale grey this time, with a sharp silk tie and what would obviously be twenty-four-carat gold cufflinks and tiepin.
Tara made herself look and sound equally businesslike. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘What’s the next thing on the agenda, then?’
‘Your briefing,’ Marc Derenz replied succinctly.
His pose altered slightly and he nodded his head at a chair by the table, seating himself on a second chair, crossing one perfectly creased trouser leg over the other.
‘Right,’ he started in a brisk voice as she sat where he’d bade her. ‘There are some ground rules. This, Ms Mackenzie, is a job. Not a holiday.’
* * *
Marc rested his eyes on her impassively. But he was masking a distinctly less impassive emotion. Arriving here from Paris to find her sunning herself on the balcony had not impressed him. Or, to be precise, she had not impressed him with her lack of recognition that she was here to fulfil a contractual obligation. In every other respect he’d been very, very impressed...
Dieu, but she possessed a body! He’d known she did, but to see it displayed for him like that, before she’d become aware of his presence, had been a pleasure he had indulged in for longer than was prudent.
Because it didn’t matter how spectacular her figure was, let alone her face, this was—as he was now reminding her so brusquely—a job, not a holiday.
Certainly not anything else.
His thoughts cut out like a guillotine slicing down. In the days since he had hired her to keep Celine Neuberger at bay he’d had plenty of second thoughts. And third thoughts. Had he been incredibly rash to bring her here? Was he playing with matches near gunpowder?
Seeing her again now, viewing that fantastic body of hers, seeing her stunning beauty right in front of him again, and not only in the memories he’d done his best to crush, was...unsettling.
Abruptly he reminded himself that she was not a woman from his world, but a woman he’d admitted into his life briefly, under duress only, and not by free choice. That that did not mean he could now break the rules of a lifetime—rules that had served him well ever since the youthful fiasco over Marianne that had cost him so dearly. Oh, not in money—in heartache that he never wanted to feel again.
