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‘Yes!’ she lied brashly, without batting an eyelash.
He tilted his head, so that his hair slithered sexily against his cheek, catching on the dark fuzz of his jaw, giving her a bone-melting look of regret. ‘So I guess there’s no point in asking you to make love again?
She launched herself at him in a laughing flurry of rounded limbs.
‘Only if this time I get to use the ice cubes!’
CHAPTER NINE
‘CIAO.’ Justin acknowledged Veronica’s greeting with an engaging grin as he and Luc walked out of the Avignon Centre train station and across the road to the Porte de la République entrance to the walled city, where she had found a convenient patch of shade in which to shelter from the mid-afternoon sun.
‘I’d say it was cool to see you, but I think “Phew, what a scorcher!” would be more appropriate.’ Justin’s teeth flashed white against his tan as he switched his bulging backpack to his other shoulder. He was several inches shorter than Luc, his light brown hair streaked by the sun, his manicured stubble and casually trendy clothes making a definite style statement. ‘It was pretty sweltering in Rome and not much better in Marseilles, but at least the friend who put me up there had air-con, and we could dunk ourselves in the Med with the girls in the string bikinis whenever we began to brown around the edges.’
He was as mischievous as she remembered from their previous brief encounters. ‘You’re looking very Italian,’ she remarked with a smile.
He laughed and saluted her with a lift of his sunglasses, revealing bright blue eyes. ‘Grazie, signorina! In an Italian hotel kitchen you either assimilate or die.’ He glanced over her bright sundress, noting the accessorised drink bottle and camera, and give-away comfortable walking sandals. ‘And you’re looking very French Tourist Chic. Especially the hat. Bargain at the market, was it?’
‘Yes, it was,’ she admitted, amused by his cheek.
Passing through the towering, medieval stone walls, they turned into the bustling, tree-lined street running up towards the square where Veronica and Luc had had coffee before he had patiently followed her fascinated meanderings through the nearby Palace of the Popes. They had arrived in Avignon early, so that Luc could show her the highlights of the historic city before the heat and crowds flocking to festival events began to clog the streets, and Veronica’s head was filled with intoxicating sights, sounds and experiences.
And not only her head, she thought, with a sideways glance at Luc, looking relaxed and sinfully sexy in his jeans and dark red shirt. Her heart fluttered in her breast. You’d never know from his air of crisp vitality and fluid, loose-limbed stride that he’d spent a mostly sleepless night of energetic activity.
As she had herself. Veronica adjusted the brim of her hat to screen her glowing cheeks from her companions. Every now and then she found herself bathed in honey-coated memories of their secret tryst. The afternoon in Luc’s bed had drifted on into evening and then later that night, after she had refused to join him at the Reeds’ dinner table—afraid that she would be unable to hide her tumultuous feelings—he had come to her at the cottage, appearing like a seductive wraith out of the darkness, a bottle of champagne tucked under his arm.
‘I didn’t want to spend the night without you,’ he said simply as he offered her the champagne. ‘To celebrate our second first night together—’
This time he had made her cry, as well as laugh, with the fierce intensity of his passion, extorting the maximum pleasure from her trembling fulfilment, drinking in her sobs of need even as he sweetly satisfied them, kissing away her tears of exquisite release, not leaving her wide, single bed until dawn crept through the shutters and the village bells tolled to the fading stars.
‘How’s Ash?’ she heard Justin say to Luc in the process of catching up on family news.
‘Well, she and Ross had a tiff yesterday and aren’t talking—’
‘From what she tells me in her emails, they spend half of their lives not talking,’ interrupted Justin. ‘God, I hope she changes her mind about marrying him. Mum’s warned me we all have to be polite, but he’s so incredibly up himself!’
They stopped at the corner of the short road to the hotel where Luc had parked the car, and where he and Veronica had returned for a superb lunch at the Michelin-starred restaurant.
‘Justin says he’s famished, and would like to drop in on an Italian friend who’s working here before we leave, so since we’ve already eaten I’ve suggested that we meet him back here in a couple of hours,’ explained Luc, and Veronica agreed, remembering that he had yet to attend to his own reasons for wanting to come to Avignon. ‘We also still have to get a photograph of you dancing “sur le pont d’Avignon,”’ he teased, ignoring her protests that she could do that when she returned for her overnight stay, before she caught the TGV back to London for her flight home.
Justin handed over his backpack for Luc to lock in the boot of his car and strode jauntily off while Veronica idled up the main street, window-shopping as she waited for Luc to return from stowing the bag. When he rejoined her, Veronica was staring in shock at a very familiar face on a huge poster at a kiosk outside the city’s main Tourist Office.
‘Did you know he was here?’ she blurted when she realised Luc was staring broodingly over her shoulder at Max Foster’s dramatic image advertising his appearance in an avant-garde adaptation of Shakespeare.
He shrugged. ‘I’ve heard he comes down every year for the Avignon Festival—I believe he has a holiday place in Saint Rémy…’
‘You don’t know? I thought you two were friends—’ she said, faltering as she recalled the dubious source of her information.
His face tightened. ‘More of an acquaintance. He stayed at my country place a couple of times when he was filming in Derbyshire on one of the films I backed, but not while I was there. He’s talented, but he’s also arrogant and self-indulgent—which makes for a dangerous drunk.’ He was absently rubbing his hawkish nose as he spoke, making Veronica wonder if the tiny kink that marred its perfection had always been there, or was a recent souvenir of a certain famous fist.
His mouth had thinned, and, sensing his darkening mood, Veronica rummaged in her bag and produced her pen. ‘Would you like to improve him with a mangy moustache and a few suppurating boils?’
He sucked in a sharp breath of startled laughter. ‘I think a set of horns might be more appropriate! Or maybe he’s not the one who should be wearing the
horns,’ he muttered cryptically, turning to look at her as she dropped the pen back in her bag. ‘Most women find him wildly attractive?’ he challenged.
She kept her eyes flatteringly intent on his face as she wrinkled her brow as if trying to remember the insignificant subject under discussion.
‘Who?’
