In any case, she might be an outsider but her son had rather more claim than she had to the property, Tabby reminded herself doggedly. Jake’s illegitimate birth might have placed him outside their precious family circle but, regardless of that reality, her son had Laroche blood in his veins and he was entitled to a home on French soil. In addition, Solange Roussel had not left Tabby that cottage on the expectation that she would sell it straight back to Christien sight unseen. To Tabby, the very idea of immediately disposing of her inheritance seemed ungrateful and horribly disrespectful to Solange’s memory.
‘I’m not selling.’ Forcing her head up, Tabby connected with his scorching tawny gaze. That fast, a sensation of heat sprang up low in her pelvis and lit every sensitive inch of her flesh with a burning physical awareness of his masculinity that was a pure torment to bear.
‘Take a look at the cheque first,’ Christien invited, the words thick with his accent, slightly slurred, faint colour accentuating the hard angle of his bold cheekbones.
Blinking in surprise, mouth running dry, Tabby only then noted the cheque he had tossed down onto the dining table in front of the window. Her mind was a complete blank.
‘Take the cheque and I’ll take you out to lunch.’ Christien was aching for her and wondering if he would even make it out of the house without giving way to the megawatt sexual vibes filling the atmosphere.
Where had she heard that before? In her time with him, how many lunches and dinners had she never received? They had not been able to resist each other long enough to reach the restaurant. Once they had ended up in a lay-by. Another time he had done a U-turn in the middle of the road, cursing and laughing at the strength of his desire for her. During their affair, she had lost a stone in weight and had felt lucky to get the chance to rifle the villa’s fridge while he’d been asleep.
‘I’ll try to take you out to lunch…’ Christien rephrased, golden eyes a smouldering gleam below sensually lowered lashes, his vibrant smile suddenly flashing out to chase the gravity from his sculpted mouth, for he was recalling that U-turn as well.
When he smiled that stunning smile, it brought back so much remembered pain for Tabby that it hurt her to look at him. Having won her release from his spellbinding gaze, she shivered, folded her arms tight in front of herself, suddenly cold and scared inside.
‘No, thanks…please take your cheque and leave,’ she told him unevenly.
‘You don’t mean that…you don’t want that,’ Christien purred with immense confidence, all caution thrown to the winds in the face of his own hunger.
No, but she knew that she would never forgive herself if she did not resist him. He had taught her that a level of wanting that went beyond the bounds of common sense or pride was destructive. That he was being his typical arrogant self also helped. He sauntered back into her life after years away and just assumed that she would be as eager for him as she had been at seventeen. But she was, wasn’t she? And he could feel that in her too, she conceded with a sinking heart, for when had he not been able to read her like a book?
Filled with fear of her own weakness, Tabby said abruptly, ‘Is Solange’s cottage close to your home at Duvernay?’
Christien frowned. ‘Non…miles by road.’
‘Do you go there often?’
In answer, Christien growled with impatience. ‘No. I want you to sell. If it is your wish to own property in France, I will instruct an agent to find somewhere more suitable for you.’
‘You have no right to demand that I sell!’ Tabby snapped in sudden furious denial of all the frightening raw feelings that his very presence was making her relive. ‘And who are you to decide what’s suitable for me?’
‘I can’t imagine what you could want with a dwelling in the remoter depths of the Breton countryside. I doubt if it is even habitable. It has been almost half a century since the property was used as anything other than a glorified summer house!’ In a raw gesture of impatience, Christien raked long, lean brown fingers through his luxuriant black hair. ‘Why won’t you see sense? Only a Laroche belongs on the Duvernay estate!’
Paling, Tabby turned her head away, wondering why she was letting him make her feel as if she were something less than he was.
‘In any case,’ Christien murmured in scornful addition, having read a message of poverty in her faded T-shirt and worn jeans, ‘You look like the money would be a lot more use to you.’
‘How do you know that? You know nothing about me now!’ Tabby flung back fiercely, furious that he was putting her down like that. ‘What I want…what I need, anything!’
Christien dealt her a brooding appraisal, anger at her unexpected stubbornness driving him, for once she had done exactly as he wished without hesitation. ‘Au contraire, I know many things about you that I would rather not know,’ he contradicted with a harsh edge to his rich drawl. ‘That you’re a compulsive liar—’
‘No, I’m not. I just told a few fibs. You never asked me what age I was!’ Tabby argued, feverish colour mantling her cheeks as she surged to her own defence.
Christien aimed a look of raw contempt at her. ‘That you can’t even take responsibility for your own actions—’
‘Shut up!’ Tabby suddenly hurled at him, half an octave higher.
‘And you still lose your head when you are confronted with your flaws—’
‘And you think you’re so perfect?’ Tabby hissed at him, rage jumping up and down inside her.
‘No, I wasn’t perfect, ma belle,’ Christien conceded in a black velvety purr, scorching golden eyes locked to her outraged face. ‘But even when I was at my most rampant I never ran two lovers at one and the same time. Sleeping with the lout on the Harley-Davidson while I was in Paris was sordid and sluttish…and not a trifling offence I felt I could overlook!’
The silence was charged with hard, hostile vibrations.
Tabby was staring at his lean, strong face with wide eyes of appalled disbelief. ‘Say that again…I mean, I didn’t…I didn’t do what you just said I did with any lout on a Harley!’
‘En voila` une bonne…that’s a good one! The compulsive liar bites again,’ Christien derided with a curled lip.
Grim at that degrading recollection, he strode past her back into the hall.
In a daze at what he had just let drop, Tabby halted in the sitting-room doorway. ‘Did you really think I’d been unfaithful? How could you think that?’
‘If you were easy with me, why shouldn’t you be equally easy with someone else?’ Christien lifted and dropped a shoulder, smouldering animosity laced with contemptuous dismissal in his insolent appraisal. ‘And let us be honest…five days was a long time for you to go without sex, chérie.’
‘I won’t forgive you for talking to me like this—’
‘I don’t want forgiveness.’ In fact, Christien felt forgiveness of even the most minor variety might be very, very dangerous to his own interests.
Tabby Burnside was nothing but trouble. She had no morals. That that should appeal to him was not a trait within himself that he ought to encourage. She would accept the cheque. Of course she would accept the cheque. However, if there were any further negotiations required, he would leave the matter in the hands of his English solicitor. After all, he was to marry to Veronique, who was a fine woman. Beautiful, honest, trustworthy. She would make an excellent wife. Eventually he would become a father and a grandchild might well lift his mother’s spirits a little. Was that not what had prompted him to become engaged in the first place? Wild, hot sex, fights and seething attacks of emotion would never feature in his alliance with Veronique. That was good, Christien told himself.
For