Loe raamatut: «The Seduction Trap»

CHAPTER ONE

AN ARM, clad in softly tailored linen reached out of the black convertible. A lean, male hand, strong and tanned, traced the letters on the road sign. ‘Turaine.’ Guy savoured the name, almost reverently.

‘Yeah. It’s a lovely sign, as signs go,’ came the sarcastic tones of the woman in the driver’s seat beside him.

He grinned. ‘Heaven forbid that I should commit the sin of sentimentality,’ he said drily in his deep New Orleans drawl. ‘Hell, I’ll be leaping out and kissing the ground next!’

Giselle made a face. ‘Exactly how much ground is yours?’

‘Ours, sweetheart. What’s mine is yours, now my father’s dead. The valley—’ he gave a careless sweep of his arm, which embraced lush pastureland, walnut groves and vast chestnut forests ‘—and the village. Apart from three cottages owned by my father’s mistress. But I’ll have them within the week. Something tells me she’ll be eager to leave when I turn up.’

Bleak shadows from the past changed the colour of his eyes, deepening the dark sable to a hard ebony and giving the lie to his confident, casual tone. It had been nineteen years since he’d set foot in Turaine. He brooded over the enforced exile of himself and his mother because of his father’s obsession for another woman. And now he was thirty-five and the mother he’d protected and cared for was dead.

He’d exchanged his privileged background for poverty, supporting his bewildered mother by taking any job that came along: waiting on tables, working in kitchens and finally marrying into the gourmet food business.

At last it was time to come home. Time—almost—to mellow out and enjoy his financial success. Powerful emotions surged in his heart and he chipped away at them in case he did something stupid, like running Sound of Music-style through the meadow. If he wasn’t careful, he thought in amusement, he’d lose his reputation for being unruffled under stress.

‘Looks a bit tatty,’ observed Giselle, frowning at the village on the small hill ahead.

Guy looked closer. It did. A faint sense of foreboding took the edge off his contentment. ‘A few repairs needed, I think,’ he said, brushing away anything that might blight his homecoming.

Quite calmly he asked Giselle to drive on—over the well-remembered stone bridge where he’d fished as a child, up the winding lane which skirted the medieval walls where he’d kissed his first girl, and through the narrow arch into Turaine itself.

‘Stop here,’ he said laconically on their entering the square.

He felt amused by his own self-control. Who, seeing the languid unfolding of his long legs from the car, the deliberate pause for a minute adjustment to the designer sunglasses and the orderly smoothing of his windswept black hair, would have imagined that he felt ready to break into song with happiness?

It was a pity that no woman had ever given him this sense of joy. Not even, he had to confess, the incomparable Giselle.

With no outward or inward enthusiasm, she gracefully unfolded her long tanned legs from the convertible, crossly checking over the small square. What a dump! Maybe, she thought, the château would be more to her taste.

‘Deserted!’ she observed disdainfully. ‘Not even a bar open? No café? What kind of a French village is this?’

‘Temporarily dry, by the looks of it.’ Guy’s keen eyes noted something else: definite signs of neglect. Well, he’d pull everything together soon enough. ‘No matter. Once we’re indoors, I’ll crack open a bottle of vintage champagne to celebrate.’

A little cheered, she watched Guy saunter with French nonchalance over to a corner of the square, which she knew—since she’d been told ad nauseam—dropped directly to the River Dordogne over a hundred feet below. In that corner would be the gates to the Château Turaine, with its long drive flanked by…

Giselle frowned, halting her internal monologue in astonishment. Guy stood motionless before the massive iron gates, his elegant figure displaying all the signs of severe shock.

He had all but stopped breathing, every scrap of air seemingly punched from his lungs by the impact of the scene in front of him. ‘I don’t believe it!’ he grated, allowing the searing pain to force its way out in a raw fury. ‘No! It’s not possible…’

A red haze came over his eyes, blurring what he saw: the crazy angle of the high gates, the rusting wroughtironwork, the weed-strewn drive and the wilderness beyond. Appalled, he blinked to clear the haze, and focused in impotent rage on the avenue of lime trees, their thin, weak growth reaching feebly upwards for light.

‘Mon Dieu!’ This was a scene of neglect. Desolation! And beyond…Harshly he gulped in a rasping lungful of air. Somewhere in that mass of undergrowth stood—or did it? the Château Turaine. His house. God knew what state it would be in!

‘Damn you, Papa! And damn your scheming, conniving mistress to hell!’ he raged under his breath, inventing instant vile punishments for Estelle Davis.

The woman had dominated his father, blinded him with her beauty and caused him to abandon his wife, his heir, his responsibilities. And therefore it was almost certain that it was the powerful Estelle who was ultimately responsible for this.

Slowly he reached up to grip the barley-sugar twist bars of the gate, as if he’d rend the whole damn thing apart with his bare hands, but his tremendous strength wasn’t sufficient to undo the work of an eighteenth-century craftsman. The gates screeched a rusty complaint yet the heavy chain and the lock held firm.

Giselle’s arm came around his waist. The place was a mess. They could go back to Paris. Hurray! ‘I’m so sorry!’ she cooed.

Guy detached himself, ensuring that his aristocratic face masked every thought, every feeling. It was the way he dealt with crises and he’d coped with worse. It was just the vandalism he couldn’t stomach. ‘I think,’ he observed tightly, blocking his pain with magnificent understatement, ‘I’ll have my work cut out here.’

‘Doing what?’ Giselle wailed. Surely he didn’t intend to roll up his sleeves and start weeding?

The finely shaped mouth took on a ruthless line. ‘Restoring my home,’ he replied in a hard tone. ‘And booting Estelle Davis out of Turaine for allowing the château to get into this state.’

‘What a bore! I want to go home!’ Giselle said sulkily.

‘This is home, sweetheart. I’ve been waiting for this day, dreaming of this moment all my adult life.’ Emotion caught his words, threatening to mangle them. He paused, counted to ten and began again more steadily. ‘You must decide for yourself, but I intend to live here.’

Ignoring Giselle’s cry of protest, he moved away, drawn like a magnet to the derelict entrance of his once beautiful house. He knew that Giselle’s feelings were hurt because he found Turaine more compelling than her. But Turaine had been violated, ignored, abandoned. And he knew how that felt only too well.

He began to climb the gate. For a moment he hovered on the top, balanced precariously between the wicked spear-shaped spikes, then he’d dropped to the ground and was striding away, towards his beloved château.

Giselle felt like stamping up and down in fury. She meant nothing to him at that moment. Turaine had taken over. OK. He wanted revenge. She’d help him get it—fast. Then there would be just the two of them, and she wouldn’t have to share him with anyone or anything.

Two weeks later, Tessa Davis turned her motorbike off the main road and navigated through a series of twisting country lanes, discovering a slower pace of life entirely. The countryside slept beneath the late afternoon sun and in tiny hills a handful of people were lazily turning golden hay with pitchforks, as they must have done centuries ago.

Turaine!

Just as she was about to die of hunger! She pulled over by the sign and switched off the engine in relief. She felt shattered. Over five hundred miles since dawn, and her rear felt as numb as a lump of lead.

Removing her helmet, she flicked down the stand and slid off the bike, easing her seized-up thigh and leg muscles in her close-fitting black leathers by doing a few kneebends and wiggles till she felt more like her supple self again.

She scanned the village on the small hill. Somewhere up there her mother Estelle waited for her.

The sun glowed on the mellow stone, turning it a honeyed gold, softening the cinnamon shade of the steeply pitched roofs. To complete the picture, the wide Dordogne river followed the curve of the base of the hill, offering her a duplicate Turaine on its flat surface. Picture-book stuff. Heaven on a hill.

Excitement took over, bubbling up irrepressibly. The past could be forgotten. The future looked good. No one was around, so she flung up her arms and gave a whoop of joy.

‘It’s me, Mum!’ she yelled. ‘I’m on my way! Break out the fatted calf!’

A delighted grin lit her face. She conjured up the image of the laughing woman in the photo that her unhappy father kept by his bedside. He waited at home, ready to forgive his runaway wife after an absence of twenty years. Tessa hugged herself with happiness. Nothing could please her more.

Pleasure spilled from her jade-green eyes. Their striking colour gave her quite a shock when she caught a glimpse of them in the side mirror of the bike and she laughed at her reaction. Two weeks ago she’d been a kind of wishywashy, blue-eyed mouse, wearing spectacles which looked as if they’d been cut from the bottom of a beer glass! May heaven smile on whoever had invented coloured contact lenses! she thought.

A blissful silence washed the landscape. All she could hear was the river lapping at the grassy bank, the reedy chatter of swallows overhead and the hum of bees. And then the deep throb of a powerful car.

It drew up behind her—a head-turning Citroën convertible so sleek that it looked as if it might fly to the moon. It boasted French numberplates and the regulation hunk inside, who sported a bone-structure and designer sunglasses to die for.

Tessa watched his graceful emergence from the car: elegance oozing wealth, with the usual paraphernalia associated with money—gold watch and cuff-links, mobile phone attached to a Gucci belt and an expensive-looking tan which made him glow with smooth health.

This exotic vision tucked the sunglasses into the breast pocket of his eau-de-nil jacket, gave her road-bike the once-over and then settled a now-what-have-we-here gaze on her. Which she promptly returned with interest.

‘Evening,’ he drawled lazily.

‘Hello!’ she said, happy enough to embrace the world at that moment. ‘Bonsoir!’ she added, recklessly using up one of the five French words she knew.

Tessa leaned against her bike and pondered idly over his accent while he began the boringly obligatory male examination of her body: a studied and frank appraisal, which ranged from her expensively cut bob to the skintight leathers and neat boots and wandered slowly over the curves between.

Men! she thought scathingly, doing precisely the same to him. She found it rather pleasurable. He was something of a dish.

Their eyes met as they both finished their tours, both smiling in mocking acknowledgement of their insolence. But she hugged a secret to herself. It had been only eight months since misery had made her thin and she’d lost four stones in weight. He wouldn’t have given her the time of day back then!

But whatever her weight loss, she was still the same person. No, she amended. That wasn’t true. She was warier because of old humiliations—and one in particular. Her eyes flickered with the painful memory, attracting a more intense concentration of the stranger’s keen gaze. And as he stared deeply into her eyes she wondered if he saw beneath the recent make-over and her apparent confidence and could tell that once upon a time she’d been unloved and unhappy.

Apparently not. ‘You must be extremely hot in those leathers,’ was all he said. But the deep drawl reached into her bones like the slow ooze of warm sunshine, surprising her with its liquid sexiness.

‘Only when I get off my bike and let the heat catch up with me,’ she answered drily, thinking that it would be heavenly to take off her leather jacket. But what, she thought with a giggle, would Bedroom Voice make of her cropped cotton top and bare midriff?

And now she’d identified his accent. A Deep South drawl. An American. So much for the French numberplates, his Mediterranean colouring and the stylish clothes!

‘You seem to have met those conditions. So why don’t you remove your jacket?’ he enquired with an unnervingly warm interest in his eyes.

Her eyebrow arched to convey what she thought of complying with that idea with a wolfish male around. Too many zips. It’s not worth it. I’m only pausing for a short break and to admire the view.’

He gave a lazy grin of regret and a last, lingering appreciation of her firmly toned thighs, then dismissed her with a suddenness that left her slightly disconcerted. She felt she should go, but she needed a few moment’s rest—and something about the man intrigued her.

His languid manner had subtly changed, becoming businesslike and brisk. He’d removed an impressive-looking camera from the car and was focusing it on the slumbering village, firing off a series of shots.

A camera buff? she wondered idly. Somehow he didn’t look the type to be interested in such an amiable pursuit. This was a go-getter, a four-scalps-before-breakfast man. So…why act like a tourist?

Tessa’s curiosity got the better of her and she put her much used people-watching technique into serious operation.

Suave. Mid-thirties. Achingly handsome, with intelligent eyes. Gym-enhanced body—shoulders you could sit encyclopedias on—but which looked rather tense. His jaw showed signs of strain too, as though his teeth were tightly clenched. In concentration, perhaps? Or did he have a badly placed toffee? Her eyes danced with fun.

He—let alone the camera, she thought in amusement—was totally focused, photographing the village with an absorbed intensity. Oddly enough, what he saw didn’t please him. His tanned forehead bore the merest hint of a scowl which angled his black brows together a little. And was that potentially sultry mouth a fraction grimmer than before?

Perhaps he’d brought the wrong lens. Or perhaps he was on his last toffee!

Fascinated beyond caution, she said provokingly, ‘Smashing place, isn’t it?’ His head jerked around in surprise, as if he’d forgotten her presence. ‘Picturesque,’ she added, and drew a wilting chocolate bar from her pocket, peeling back the wrapper and nibbling at the dark chocolate with enthusiasm. ‘It would look good in a tourist brochure,’ she said encouragingly, hoping to glean some information.

‘From where I’m standing it looks in a dire state of repair,’ he replied, laconically lifting the camera for another shot.

‘So would you be if you were that old,’ she retorted cheerfully, appropriating her mother’s village and defending it loyally. ‘It’s obviously medieval—’

‘I am aware of that. I hope you’re not implying I’m a moron,’ he said in faint horror, and she shook her head in mock-solemn denial. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he went on, and the sexy mouth twitched in private amusement. ‘The medieval period is a particular interest of mine.’

‘Then aren’t you being unreasonable in expecting the village to be in pristine condition?’ she said logically. ‘Personally, I think that slightly faded look is part of its charm—’

‘Charm is all very well,’ he returned, interrupting her again, and the offending buildings were given another faintly sour once-over, ‘but it doesn’t keep the rain out. I imagine you’d be desperate to leave if you had to live through the winter in one of those houses.’

Tessa’s eyes sparkled with anticipation. It was her intention to live in one of those houses! Though maybe not through the winter. She wondered sentimentally which one belonged to her mother.

‘You’re wrong. I’d love it,’ she declared fervently, thinking of the cramped flat she shared with her father. ‘Much nicer than being stuck in a characterless modern lump of concrete.’

‘You think so?’ he murmured. ‘Look harder.’

She did. ‘I see a quaint village with eagles flying over it’

‘Black kites,’ he corrected her. ‘If you had better eyesight,’ he went on, unaware that her eyesight had been beautifully corrected and she could see for miles, ‘you’d notice that the buildings are crumbling.’

‘Oh!’ she cried, a little embarrassed that she hadn’t seen anything of the sort, especially as she’d spent five years learning restoration skills. How easily her romanticism could blind her to reality!

‘Characterless or not, something modern would be welcomed by the people up there. Probably,’ the man said sardonically, ‘with open arms and shouts of unmitigated joy.’

‘Oh, surely not!’ she protested. ‘Exchange that setting? Those fabulous views of the river, the—?’

‘The poor sanitation, unreliable water and electricity supplies and incipient damp? You bet your life they would!’

‘You’ve shattered my illusions,’ she said, deflated.

Shading her eyes, she once more studied the buildings advancing up the hill. Or were they tumbling down it? She felt a pang of worry about the state of her mother’s house.

‘We see what we wish to see—and you wanted to see only the postcard-picturesque,’ he said drily, his thick lashes fanning further down on his gilded cheekbones than was strictly fair in a man.

Tessa sighed. ‘I did. It’s still in a wonderful position above the river,’ she said wistfully, stuffing the empty chocolate wrapper in the hip pocket of her skintight leathers and finding that the man’s speculative eyes were noting with very masculine interest what a struggle it was. Hastily she grabbed at something else to say. ‘I envy the people who live with such a view.’

‘Don’t.’ Half turning, he scowled at the hillside, lost in thought.

Tessa wrapped herself in her own troubles. She ought to prepare herself for the fact that her mother might be poor and living in some dump of a building. That had never crossed her mind up to now and she fidgeted uncertainly, wondering if she could break in on the man’s deep absorption in the scene ahead, into whatever thoughts were going on in that handsome head.

Nothing ventured…‘Do you know the village very well?’ she asked, her eyes soft with anxiety.

He turned and looked at her thoughtfully. Suddenly he seemed to be pinning her in place with the intensity of his stare, frowning as though something about her reminded him of someone. ‘What’s your interest?’ he enquired guardedly.

Some inner alarm made her cautious. ‘It’s pretty,’ she replied lamely, earning herself a scornful curl of his autocratic mouth. She sought to expand her remark. ‘You can’t deny that, crumbling walls or not! All those roses clambering up walls, orange-blossom heaving over hedges, geraniums dotted about on balconies…’ She hesitated, then asked, ‘Is—is all of it run down?’ And she found herself praying for his reassurance.

‘Virtually all, I regret to say,’ he replied, bringing the worry lines to her forehead again. ‘The landlord didn’t give a damn.’

That last sentence had been said softly—and not to her. Only the faint breeze had carried his half-audible words to her sharp ears. Yet his icy anger had been unmistakable. Alarmed by his words, she wondered why he cared so much. Because he obviously did, and she struggled to understand why his eyes were so cold and his mouth had set in such deep and bitter lines.

She shivered. Something was wrong about the village. And suddenly she felt afraid of what she might find when she reached her mother’s house.

‘I must go,’ she said hoarsely.

‘So you know what happened?’

‘N-no.’

‘I think you should.’

His tone made her whole body tense. What was he trying to tell her, with those knowing, sardonic eyes? Did he know her mother? Was he trying to prepare her for something?