Her words set the tone. She watched his expression. Not a flicker of expression marked Jean-Luc’s angular face—just the slightest tightening of the jaw, maybe a hardening of the ebony eyes. He knew how she felt, how she wanted things to be, how things had to be.
‘Very little has changed here,’ Jean-Luc commented, glancing around the room that looked as if it had been locked in a time warp for the past fifty years. His dark eyes came to rest on Rachel’s pale face. ‘Except maybe you.’
‘I’m older!’ she responded flatly. But not wiser, she thought despondently, aware of the agony of her thudding heart. Definitely not that.
‘And poorer, I understand.’ Jean-Luc’s glance was cool, controlled. Almost cruel in its ability to calmly survey her face.
He wondered if he would be able to keep this up—to act as if the sight of her had little or no effect on him. He was a man who supposedly thrived on challenge, but this was a bigger challenge than any he had ever attempted—except maybe the one of trying to forget her, of course.
Rachel met the uncaring gaze with a cold expression, marvelling in some far-off corner of her mind at her capacity to even begin to cope with this conversation. ‘Yes, quite poor.’ Her voice was like ice.
‘A shock, I should think,’ Jean-Luc continued. ‘Your aunt always gave such a good impression of being a wealthy woman.’
‘She was a wealthy woman,’ Rachel responded swiftly. ‘She just made some wrong choices, invested badly…’ Her voice trailed away. ‘Am I to presume, then, that you’ve come all the way here to offer your condolences?’ she asked, after a slight but telling pause. ‘You’re a little late. The funeral was early last week and, as you can undoubtedly see,’ she added, glancing at the muddled room, ‘I am still in the middle of sorting through and clearing everything out. So, if you’ll excuse me—’
‘You misunderstand, Rachel,’ Jean-Luc replied crisply, forestalling her retreat towards the door. ‘This isn’t a social call.’
‘No?’
‘Naomi gave you my card, I presume?’
Rachel had almost forgotten about it. She thrust a hand into the pocket of her jeans and retrieved it. ‘She did.’ She hesitated a moment then walked on slightly unsteady legs over to a side table, where a selection of bottles and glasses stood on a tray. She poured herself a measure of mineral water and took a healthy gulp—her mouth was so dry she could hardly talk any more.
‘Not that it meant anything to me—JSJ Corporation?’ She glanced at the card in her hand, raising arched eyebrows—trying to play it cool. ‘Another faceless conglomerate—is that who you work for?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Jean-Luc strolled over to stand beside her. ‘May I?’ he asked, and began pouring a small measure of whisky into a tumbler before Rachel could say a thing. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. JSJ has its fingers in several very large pies.’ He reeled off a handful of well-known projects that had received recent media attention in countries worldwide, and Rachel finally had to admit defeat and acknowledge with a slight nod that she had heard of at least some of them.
‘OK! OK! I get the picture. JSJ is a legitimate firm.’ She moved away—because to stand so close to Jean-Luc after all these years was torture of the worst kind—and walked over to the window to look out through the leaded panes at the car parked on the weedy, gravelled drive.
It was large and swish and very expensive. It matched this new image of Jean-Luc, the one that Rachel was having such difficulty coming to terms with—immaculate, powerful, an uncompromising presence that made heads turn and would not, or could not, be ignored.
He had clearly done very well for himself. Rachel had imagined her success in the hotel trade as being pretty impressive, considering she had started on one of the bottom rungs of the ladder as a lowly part-time receptionist and had worked her way up with determination and not a small amount of natural flair, but it was clear that her achievements were nowhere near on the same scale as this.
A chauffeur-driven car meant status, and that equalled success far beyond anything she had ever, or would ever, manage to achieve.
She spun around and said, ‘Forgive me for being dense, but I still don’t see what a company like the JSJ Corporation would find of interest here—a run-down country estate like this. Is your boss totally mad?’
‘I’m beginning to think so.’ She turned then to look at Jean-Luc. There had been something in his voice…‘The initials of the company—they obviously don’t mean a great deal to you,’ he added briskly.
‘No.’ Rachel lifted her shoulders in an uncaring shrug, turned back toward the window and closed her eyes tightly against shared memories which were bombarding her senses. ‘Why on earth should they?’
Jean-Luc, Saul, Jerome—an excessive number of names, I always thought, but, then, my mother and father did only manage to have one child.’
‘JSJ…?’ It took a moment for Rachel to realise the significance of what he was saying. ‘Your company?’ she added in disbelieving tones. No matter how hard she tried, Rachel couldn’t hide the astonishment in her voice. She looked at this new, sharp, hard Jean-Luc—so different from the man she had worshipped, loved—and tried to reconcile the differences between now and six years ago. ‘You mean you actually own…?’
Her voice trailed away in shocked disbelief as she stood and stared and tried to come to terms with the fact that Jean-Luc, the student, had transformed himself into a business magnate of quite incredible proportions.
‘Six years is a long time,’ he drawled smoothly. ‘What did you expect? That time should have stood still? That I would still be tending other people’s gardens?’
‘No, of course not!’ Rachel’s voice was hard. ‘But it’s not that long ago either…’ She made up her mind, and walked towards the door on legs that felt like jelly. ‘Would you please leave?’ She wondered if he could see the glistening of tears in her eyes from this distance, and decided that he probably couldn’t. ‘I don’t think we have a great deal to say to one another!’
‘So polite, Miss Shaw.’ Jean-Luc’s voice was deliberately heavy with mockery. ‘I see those beautiful English manners that I remember so well haven’t entirely deserted you.’
‘I don’t want to talk to you!’ Rachel’s restraint was slowly beginning to give way. ‘I don’t see what possible reason you have for coming here.’
‘This estate is deeply in debt. You are in very real danger of losing everything. That is correct, isn’t it?’ His crisp tones cut through the atmosphere which lay heavy between them.
‘How clever you are!’ Rachel retorted harshly. ‘So my financial position is common knowledge, then?’
‘No, it is not. I have just made it my business to find out what is happening here, that’s all.’
‘Oh, really! And why is that?’ Rachel asked frostily. ‘Am I supposed to feel flattered you’ve taken such an interest?’
‘Flattered?’ He made her suffer by pretending to be dense, and threw Rachel a look of puzzlement that made her want to curl up and die right in front of him, making him almost hate himself. ‘I do not think flattery enters the equation. Oh, I see,’ he added cruelly, ‘you maybe imagined that I had kept some sort of a tab on the place because of old associations?’ There was a cutting smile, the flash of even, white teeth. ‘Sentimentality.’ He arched a dark brow. ‘Never my forte.’
Rachel placed a hand to her brow. She was having trouble coping with all of this. It was bad enough that she should be losing her home, but even worse to have Jean-Luc by her side, pointing out the awful fact. ‘So…what do you want?’ she asked unsteadily, eyeing him with obvious dislike.
‘I can help.’
Rachel