Somehow she managed to get to her feet, to walk past Gilles on legs that trembled convulsively with every step. He stopped her at the door, his eyes raking her pale face without mercy.
‘Strangely enough, you do have a certain air of breeding; a beauty that speaks of cloistered walls and untouched innocence. Be thankful that I know you for what you are and do not seek to take more from you than merely your time. Were you as cool and innocent as you appear, it would be … intriguing, awakening you to love.’
‘To lust, don’t you mean?’ Lee said sharply in disgust. ‘A man like you doesn’t begin to know the meaning of the word love, Gilles.’
‘Then we should make an excellent pair, shouldn’t we?’ he murmured insultingly as he held wide the door.
In her room Lee did not undress. She sat before the window, staring out into the moon-swept gardens, her eyes blinded by the tears cascading down her face as the present ceased to exist and she was once again that sixteen-year-old, trembling on the brink of life, and love.
It had all started as a joke. Aunt Caroline had a neighbour who had a daughter several months older than Lee, and when Lee stayed with her godmother, the two girls normally spent some time together.
With the benefit of hindsight, Lee wondered if Sally too had not had a crush on Gilles, just as she had done herself, but it was far too late now to query the whys and wherefores. The truth was that she had fallen deeply and intensely in love with Gilles, seeing him as a god to be worshipped adoringly from a distance, and Sally had discovered her secret and teased her with it.
That fatal day had been particularly hot. They had been lying in the uncut grass at the end of Aunt Caroline’s long garden. Earlier Gilles had been cutting the lawn, muscles rippling under the smooth brown skin of his back, tanned in far sunnier climes than England’s. Lee had watched him with her heart in her eyes. Soon he would be going back to France, his brief stay over, and she felt as though her heart would break.
As though she had read her mind, Sally had tempted as cunningly as Eve with her apple, ‘I dare you to tell him how you feel.’
Lee had been horrified. She could think of nothing worse than that Gilles, so supercilious and unattainable, should know of her foolhardy impertinence.
‘If you won’t tell him, then I shall,’ Sally had threatened with relish.
Lee had, of course, pleaded with her not to do—a foolish action, she now realised, and at length Sally had reluctantly agreed.
As she had claimed later, with a pert toss of her head, writing a letter was not telling, because she had not actually spoken to Gilles.
She had used her artistic talent to copy Lee’s handwriting, and had signed the letter in Lee’s name, using the very notepaper which Aunt Caroline had given Lee for her birthday. With so much evidence against her, it was small wonder that she had not been able to convince Gilles of her innocence, Lee reflected soberly, but his cruelty and callous disregard of how she had felt was something she would never forget.
Lee had been in her bedroom when Gilles found her. She had blushed the colour of a summer rose when he walked in. He looked so tall and handsome in his white shirt and tapering black trousers. The dark shadow of his tanned, muscular chest beneath the thin silk had triggered off an awareness of him she had not experienced previously, tiny tendrils of fear-cum-excitement curling along her spine; the first innocent awareness of sexual magnetism, but before Gilles left her room the veil of innocence had been torn aside for ever.
His presence in her room momentarily robbed her of speech, but her heart had been in her eyes as she looked up at him.
‘Very appropriate,’ he had sneered, his eyes on her cross-legged pose on her bed, where she had been doing some studying. ‘But I regret, mademoiselle, I have not come here to satisfy your nymphomaniac desires, but to warn you of the outcome were you to express the same sentiments to a man who is not honour bound to protect you from yourself.’
‘I …’
‘Save your breath,’ he had warned her. ‘These prurient outpourings say it all.’
The letter had fluttered down from contemptuous fingers to blur in front of the green eyes that read it with growing disbelief. Some of the words, some of the desires expressed were unfamiliar to her, but those which she did understand were of such a nature as to bring a flush of shame to her cheeks.
‘Oh, but you can’t think … I didn’t write this!’ she had pleaded with him, but his face had remained coldly blank.
‘It is your handwriting, is it not?’ he had demanded imperiously. ‘I have seen it on your schoolbooks—schoolbooks! What would they say, those good nuns who educate you, if they were to read this … this lewd filth?’
‘I didn’t write it!’ Lee protested yet again, but it was no use, he wouldn’t even listen to her, and a schoolgirlish sense of honour prevented her from naming the real culprit. She felt as though she had suddenly slipped into some miry, foul pool, from whose taint she would never be clean again. The way Gilles was looking at her made her shudder with revulsion. She forgot that she had adored him, and felt only fear as she looked up into his condemning face.
‘I have heard my friends talk of girls like you,’ he had said at length, ‘girls who use their lack of years to cloak their lack of innocence!’ He spat out a word in French which she did not catch but was sure was grossly insulting, and then before she could move, reached for her across the brief intervening space and crushed her against his body, so that she was aware all at once of the vast difference between male and female, his hand going to her breast as his lips ground hers back against her teeth until she was crying with the pain, both her body and mind outraged by the assault.
‘I hope you have learned your lesson,’ he said in disgust when he let her go. ‘Although somehow I doubt it. For girls like you the pain and degradation is a vital part of the pleasure, is this not so? Be thankful I do not tell Tante Caroline of this!’
Lee had practically collapsed when he had gone. Her mouth was cut and bleeding, her flesh scorched by the intimate contact with him, and although she had not understood a half of what she had read in the letter she was supposed to have sent, nor the insults he had heaped upon her head, she had set herself the task of learning—a long and arduous process when one’s only source of knowledge was parents, the nuns, and gossip picked up from school friends whose practical knowledge was less than her own.
The incidents had had one salutary effect, though. It had killed for ever any desire for sexual experimentation; no other man was ever going to degrade her with insults such as those Gilles had hurled at her.
She came back to the present with a jerk as someone tapped faintly on her door. She frowned. If it was Gilles there was no way she could face a further attack upon her tonight.
‘Lee, it’s me.’
She sighed with relief as she heard Michael’s brisk familiar tones. Her boss quirked an eyebrow in query as she opened the door.
‘Well, have you been holding out on me, or was the announcement of the engagement as much a shock to you as it was to me?’
‘You know I’m engaged to Drew.’ She longed to be able to pour out her troubles to Michael, but his responsibility was to their employers, and his first charge was to secure the Chauvigny wine for their customers. At twenty-two she was old enough to sort out her own emotional problems, although quite how her present dilemma was to be resolved she had no idea.
‘I take it it was all a plot to get rid of the clinging vine—Louise,’ he elucidated when Lee looked blank. ‘Neat piece of thinking.’
‘Neater than you imagine,’ she told him dryly. ‘Gilles wants us to get married—strictly on a temporary basis, so that he can acquire some land from Louise’s papa, without having to acquire Louise as part of the bargain.’
‘And you being