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Tawny resisted the urge to challenge that statement. She was too well aware as a child born to a single mother that her birth had made little impact on her own father’s life. Monty Blake had paid the court-ordered minimum towards Tawny’s upkeep and that was all. He had not taken an interest in her. He had not invited her to visit him, his second wife and their family. Indeed he had deliberately excluded Tawny from family occasions. When her mother had chosen to continue her pregnancy against his wishes he had hit back by doing everything he could to ignore Tawny’s existence. Had her older half-sisters not chosen to look her up when she was a teenaged schoolgirl, Tawny would never have got to know them either. Certainly she would never have had the confidence to approach either Bee or Zara on her own behalf when their father had made her feel so very unworthy of his affection. And that hurtful feeling of not being good enough to be an acceptable daughter had dogged her all her life.
That evening, Tawny was once again ensconced in a hotel suite with only Elise for company. Navarre had chatted at length in Italian to someone on the phone while the car travelled slowly through the London traffic and as soon as they checked into the hotel he had gone out again. This time around, however, the suite Navarre had taken had two bedrooms. She was not expected to sleep on the sofa or share his bed. Their little fling was over. She reminded herself of the unjust accusation he had made before dawn that same day, relived her fury and hurt at that charge and told herself that it was only sensible to avoid further intimacy and misunderstanding. While Elise watched television Tawny worked through her emotions with the help of her sketch pad, drawing little cartoon vignettes of her rocky relationship with Navarre.
Navarre came back just after midnight, exchanging a word or two with Elise as she raised herself sleepily from the sofa, switched off the television and bid him goodnight. Left alone, he lifted Tawny’s sketch pad. The Frenchman, it said on the first page, and there he was in all his cartoon glory, leching at the stylist while pretending to admire Tawny in her evening dress. He leafed through page after page of caricatures and laughter shook him, for she had a quirky sense of humour and he could only hope that the one depicting Catrina as a man-eating piranha fish never made it into the public eye, for Sam would be mortally offended at the insult to his wife. His supreme indifference to the newspaper revelations about her background as a maid was immortalised in print as she showed him choosing to fret instead about how much fried food the English ate at breakfast time. Did she really see him as that insensitive? Admittedly he avoided getting up close and personal on an emotional front with women, for time and experience had taught him that that was unwise if he had no long-term intentions.
‘Oh, you’re back …’ Tawny emerged from her bedroom, clad in her pyjamas, which had little monkeys etched all over the trousers and a big monkey on the front of the camisole, none of which detracted in the slightest from his awareness of the firm swell of her breasts and the lush prominence of her nipples pushing against the thin clinging cotton. ‘I’m thirsty.’
He watched as she padded drowsily over to the kitchenette in one corner to run the cold tap and extract a glass from a cupboard. He was entranced by the smallness of her waist and the generous fullness of her derriere beneath the cotton: she was all woman in the curve department in spite of her slender build. His groin tightened as he remembered the feel of her hips in his hands and the hot tight grip of her beneath him. He crushed that lingering memory, fought to rise above it and concentrate instead on the divisive issues that kept his desire within acceptable boundaries.
‘Why did you take my laptop that day?’ he demanded without warning.
Tawny almost dropped the moisture-beaded glass she was holding. ‘I told you why. I thought you’d taken nude photos of my friend and refused to delete them. She told me that if I got it for her she would wipe them. I believed her—at the time I trusted her as a good friend but I realised afterwards that she was lying to me and hoping to make money out of it. She was working for a journalist who wanted information on you and your activities.’
‘I know,’ Navarre volunteered, startling her. ‘I had Julie checked out—’
‘And you didn’t think to mention that to me?’
‘I have no proof that you weren’t in it for a profit with her, ma petite.’
‘No, obviously I would think that it would be much more profitable to get pregnant with a child you don’t want so that I could be lumbered with its sole care for the next twenty years!’ Tawny sizzled back.
‘I didn’t realise that you’d once been in a foster home as well,’ Navarre remarked, carefully sidestepping her emotive comeback, believing it to be the wrong time for that conversation. ‘You didn’t mention it when I admitted my own experiences.’
‘Obviously you read every line of that newspaper article,’ Tawny snapped defensively. ‘But I was only in foster care for a few months and as soon as my grandparents found out where I was they offered to take me. When I was a toddler my mother hit a rough patch when she was drinking too much and I was put into care. But she overcame her problems so that I was able to live with her again.’
‘Clearly you respect your mother for that achievement, so why are you at odds with her now?’
At that blunt question, Tawny paled, for the newspaper article had not clarified that situation. ‘My grandfather’s will,’ she explained with a rueful jerk of a slim shoulder that betrayed her eagerness to forget that unpleasant reality. ‘My grandparents owned and lived in a cottage in a village where my grandmother was very happy. When my grandfather died he left half of it to his wife and the other half to his only child, my mother. My mother made my grandmother sell her home so that she could collect on her share.’
Navarre was frowning. ‘And you disapproved?’
‘Of course I did. My grandmother was devastated by the loss of her home so soon after she had lost her husband. It was cruel. I understood that my mother has always had a struggle to survive and had never owned her own home but I still think what she did was wrong. I tried to dissuade her from forcing Gran to sell up but she wouldn’t listen. Her boyfriend had more influence over her than I had,’ Tawny admitted unhappily. ‘As far as Mum was concerned Grandad might have been Gran’s husband but he had also been her father and she had rights too. She put her own rights first, so the house was sold and Gran, who had always been so good to us both, moved into a retirement village where—I have to admit—she’s quite happy.’
‘Your mother gave way to temptation and she has to live with that. At least your grandmother had sufficient funds left after the division of property to move somewhere she liked.’
Tawny said nothing. She had seen no sign that her mother was suffering from an uneasy conscience and, having put all that she possessed into purchasing her new apartment, Celestine’s current lifestyle was seriously underfunded. But Tawny believed that subjecting the old lady to the stress of changing to more affordable accommodation would be downright dangerous, for Celestine had already suffered one heart attack. The upheaval of another house move might well kill her.
‘I’d better get back to bed.’ But instead Tawny hovered, her gaze welded to the stunning eyes above his well-defined cheekbones, the beautiful wilful line of his passionate mouth.
‘I want to go there with you, ma petite,’ Navarre admitted in his dark, distinctively accented drawl.
As if a naked flame had burned her skin, Tawny spun on her heel and went straight back into her bedroom, closing the door with a definitive little snap behind her. She flung herself back below the duvet, tears of frustration stinging her eyes, her body switching onto all systems go at the very thought of him in the same bed again. Stupid, silly woman
that she was, she craved the chance to be with him again!
Navarre had just emerged from a long cooling shower when Tia phoned him. She wanted him to bring Tawny to a weekend party she and Luke were staging on a yacht in the Med. He rarely said no to the beautiful actress but he said it this time, knowing that it would be wiser to sever all ties with his pretend fiancée rather than draw her deeper into Tia’s glitzy world. Mixing business, pleasure and dark secrets could not work for long. He would pay Tawny for her time and draw a line under the episode: it was the safest option. He refused to consider the possibility that she might fall pregnant. If it happened he would deal with it, but he wouldn’t lose sleep worrying about it beforehand.
Navarre had left the hotel by the time Tawny was ready for breakfast the next morning. She was bored silly and not even her sketch pad could prevent her from feeling restless. ‘Where’s your boss?’ she pressed Elise.
‘He’s in business meetings all day,’ the blonde confided. ‘We’re returning home tomorrow … I can’t wait.’
‘You’ll see your boyfriend,’ Tawny gathered, reckoning that it had to be the strongest sign yet of her unimportance on Navarre’s scale that even his employees knew he was leaving the UK before she did.
But life would soon return to normal, she told herself firmly. She had had a one-night stand and she wasn’t very proud of the fact. The next day, however, she would be out job-hunting again as well as getting in touch with her agent to see if she had picked up any new illustrating commissions. She would also catch the train down to visit Celestine at the weekend. Elise got her the local papers so that she could study the jobs available and she decided to look for a waitressing position rather than applying to become a maid again. A waitress would have more customer contact. It would be livelier, more demanding, and wasn’t distraction exactly what her troubled mind needed?
No way did she need to be wondering how she would cope if she had conceived a child by Navarre! There was even less excuse for her to be wondering whether she would prefer a boy or a girl and whether the baby might look like her or take more after Navarre, with his dramatic black hair and green eyes. If she turned out to be pregnant, she had no doubt that she would have much more serious concerns. Her mother had once admitted that she had been thrilled when she first realised that she was carrying Tawny. Back then, of course, Susan Baxter had naively assumed that a child on the way would cement her relationship with her child’s father instead of which it had destroyed it. At least, Tawny reflected ruefully, she cherished no such romantic illusions where Navarre Cazier was concerned.
About ten that evening, Tawny ran a bath to soak in and emerged pink and wrinkled from her submersion, engulfed in the folds of a large hotel dressing gown. At that point and quite unexpectedly, for Elise had believed him out for the evening, Navarre strode in, clad in a dark, faultlessly tailored business suit with a heavy growth of stubble darkening his handsome features. He acknowledged Elise with barely a glance, for his attention remained on Tawny with her vibrant curls rioting untidily round her flushed face and her slender body lost in the depths of the oversized robe she wore. Hunger pierced him as sharply as a knife, a hunger he didn’t understand because it had not started at the groin. That lingering annoying sense that something was lacking, something lost, infuriated him on a day when he had more reason than most to be in an excellent mood to celebrate. He was the triumphant new owner of CCC. The deal had been agreed at Strathmore after weeks of pre-contract discussions between their lawyers and various consultants and now it was signed, sealed and delivered.
