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‘I’m already disrupted and disturbed,’ he growled.
‘Oh, go on, Luc, it might help stop you brooding about that—about what’s happened,’ Melanie said, adding in an unfortunate choice of words, ‘and give you a chance to sink your teeth back into something that excites you…’
‘Mmm, that’s very true…’ he mused wickedly, and Veronica didn’t dare look at him for fear her head would explode with the heat of her blushes, her breasts tingling at the memory of the luscious bites he had used to arouse and appease their mutual hunger. She suddenly felt his hand on her upper arm, his knuckles skimming the tender side of her breast as his fingers curled into her warm skin, tugging her inexorably around to meet his dark, taunting gaze. ‘What do you think, Veronica? Do you think you might benefit from a personal demonstration of my…exciting expertise?’
‘You see, Veronica?’ Melanie said happily. ‘Isn’t it lucky that you and Luc are down here at the same time? He’s usually a very difficult man to pin down. It couldn’t have been better if you planned for it to happen this way.’
At her words, Luc’s fingers tightened on Veronica’s soft flesh, his face hardening, throwing his bold nose into sharp relief as his eyebrows lowered over eyes that swarmed with sudden suspicion.
She could read him like a book, she realised in furious exasperation. Now he was actually wondering if it had all been some giant conspiracy on her part.
‘Oh, dear—now I’m found out I suppose I should confess that it’s not your expertise I’m after, just your money,’ she oozed, pouring fuel onto the smouldering fire.
His eyes narrowed and she smiled with lots of teeth.
‘I was going to ask for a few million, but now that I know you’re not the fabulous billionaire I thought you were, I suppose I’ll have to settle for a measly few hundred thousand. If you could make the cheque out to cash,’ she suggested sweetly, ‘I’ll bank it straight into my numbered Swiss account.’
‘Very amusing,’ he grunted as the rest of the table responded to the joke.
She rounded her widely spaced grey eyes and made a show of nibbling on her lower lip. ‘But…don’t you believe me?’
His fingers trailed down to rest in the sensitive crease of her inner elbow, lightly teasing at the nerve endings. ‘I believe you’re playing a dangerous game…and wonder if you’ve considered all the consequences…’
Of course she hadn’t, she had got carried away by the sheer exhilaration of paying him back for his unworthy suspicions. His suggestive threat made her realise that she had just done the equivalent of putting her head in the lion’s mouth and Veronica quickly withdrew it, throwing out a question to Zoe about the St Romain, which turned the conversation general and allowed her to sink back into polite silence.
A little while later she excused herself with the plea of being tired, and agreed to join Melanie for coffee late in the morning to discuss her plans for the next few days.
As she was leaving Zoe pressed on her a jar of fresh apricot jam, which she had made to an old Provence recipe with fruit harvested from the trees in the garden, to have with her breakfast.
‘Oh, are you allowed to pick the fruit?’ said Veronica, thinking of the laden branches of the greengage tree beside the cottage.
Zoe’s sun-creased face split in a rapturous smile. ‘The owners always let me do a bit in the gardens while I was here and take what little I wanted to use for myself, but now I don’t have to even think about it. Luc bought Mas de Bonnard a few months ago and is insisting on signing it over to me as a birthday present, extravagant lad that he is—not that I’ve agreed to accept it, yet…’
‘Liar.’ The extravagant boy grinned, getting lazily to his feet. ‘You’ve already got Miles doing renovations and Melanie planning to set a book here. You’re going to love being able to come and go as you please—you can spend the whole of the New Zealand winter here, if you like—and I’ll bet there’ll never be any shortage of family and friends to keep you company.’
Veronica had thought he was only standing up to be polite, or to stretch his long limbs, but instead he started to turn when she did.
‘I’ll walk down with you. I need to get something from my car,’ he said casually as she opened her mouth to reject the need for an escort.
‘Could you go round by way of the pool?’ said Melanie. ‘I meant to show Veronica where it was. No, not you, Sophie, I want you to help Ashley get the table set and the vegetables ready for dinner, and no face-pulling either of you, you know what the deal is—while I’m in this sling I can’t lift things out of the oven, or chop safely.’
Veronica barely glanced at the inviting blue waters of the big, rectangular swimming pool, walking briskly around the white-paved edge and along the winding path through the shrubbery, past a huge vegetable garden next to a big, stone cistern of water and back onto a recognisable part of the driveway, her nervousness heightened by Luc’s brief directions framed in deafening silence.
She was surprised and relieved when he turned out to have been telling the truth and peeled off towards his parked car, leaving Veronica to quicken her pace and hurry off to the cottage, entering it with a thumping heart, and the feeling that she had just dodged a bullet.
She went into the deep recess of the bathroom and splashed water on her flushed face, leaving the dewy sheen of droplets to evaporate on her skin. Outside the sun was still shining as it dropped lower in the cloudless sky, radiating heat to the baked earth, but the drawn shutters made the interior of the cottage soothingly dim, so that when she first came out of the bedroom raking her hands through her thick hair to lif
t it away from her hot scalp, she didn’t immediately see the man braced against the frame of the sliding door she had left open to the faint breeze.
She gasped as she saw the shimmer of his white clothes and his brown arms flex as he shifted stance, leaning in across the threshold.
‘Why so shocked? Surely you were expecting me. Did you really think I was going to let you off that easily?’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘YOU can’t come in!’ Veronica blurted as he straightened up to step inside.
Lucien rested the hilt of his shoulder against the door, thrusting one hand into his trouser pocket, studying the woman who was the first in a very long time to confuse and confound him. Maybe it was the freckles, he brooded. They gave her an erroneous air of innocent playfulness, which his jaded senses had found irresistibly appealing. In fact, she had slipped under his well-protected guard with unsettling ease considering that he had already been on high alert after his nasty brush with notoriety in London. But although that situation had blown up in his face and given him a literal as well as a figurative bloody nose, it hadn’t shocked him to his cynical core—unlike his passionate run-in with the not-so-innocent seductress poised front of him, her body a symphony of curves beneath her summery-thin clothes.
