One Night with His Wife(14)

It was after midnight, and she was embarrassed to find the housekeeper had been patiently waiting for her to reappear. Self-conscious with such personal attention and the assurance that her humble wardrobe of clothing had already been unpacked for her, Star stiffened uneasily every time she was addressed as a married woman. Even so, it was quite a shock when the older woman opened the door of Luc’s bedroom and stood back, leaving Star little choice but to enter.

For the duration of their six-week long marriage, Luc had left her in a bedroom at the foot of the corridor. It had not occurred to Star that anything might be different this time around, but then she really hadn’t had time to consider the ramifications of returning to the chateau as Luc’s acknowledged wife. One of the bedrooms next to his, she decided, would be the most suitable choice.

However, sooner than be seen walking straight back out again, Star lingered. The vast and magnificent room was centred on the superb gilded four-poster bed which sat on a shallow dais. Luc had slept in that incredible bed since he was eight years old. And so might a medieval merchant prince have lived, with glorious brocade drapes, fabulous paintings and the very finest antique furniture.

‘Luc was never like other children,’ Emilie had once confided. ‘He was a very serious little boy.’

But what else could he have been? An only child, born to parents who had inhabited different wings of the chateau and led entirely separate lives.

Lilliane Sarrazin had died in a car crash shortly after Star had met her. Reading between the lines of Emilie’s uncritical description, Luc’s mother had been as committed to extravagance as her husband had been to saving, but had shared his essentially cold nature. Was it any wonder that Luc, with every natural instinct stifled in childhood, should be so reserved, so controlled, so inhibited at showing either affection or warmth?

And yet Star could remember times when Luc had broken through his own barriers for her benefit. He had comforted her when she was nine years old and missing her mother. He had done so again—fatally—when she was eighteen and a half…

Star’s memories slowly slid back over eighteen months to her last stay at Chateau Fontaine. Emilie, who could not bear to think badly of anybody, had worked hard to give Star the impression that Luc’s terminally ill father was really a caring man, whom she had misjudged at their only previous encounter. It had not been the wisest idea.

Shortly after her arrival with Emilie, Star had been summoned to her guardian’s sick room for a private meeting.

‘You’ve done very well out of this family.’ Roland Sarrazin regarded her with sour disapproval.

‘I really appreciate everything that you’ve done for me—’

‘Just be grateful that Luc took pity on you,’ the older man urged. ‘I had no intention of accepting you as my ward when I sent Luc to Mexico. But when he met your mother she was so drunk she could barely stand. Decency demanded that I do my duty by you.’

Devastated by that cruel, demeaning candour, Star spoke up in an angry defensive rush. ‘My mother was really dreading giving me up that day. She was terribly upset…it wasn’t normal for her to be like that!’

‘Your stepfather was a weak, pathetic wastrel. You have no idea who your father is and your mother is a drunk,’ Roland Sarrazin repeated with crushing distaste and contempt. ‘With a sordid, shameful background of that kind, how dare you raise your voice to me?’

Humiliated and distressed by that counter-attack, Star fled. She ran into the woods that surrounded the chateau to find the privacy to cry. Nine years earlier, Luc had taken her down to the riverbank there to tell her about Emilie and stress how very lonely and sad Emilie had been since losing her husband. Indeed, so successful had he been at impressing Star with those facts that she had been a lot older before she’d appreciated what a huge debt she owed to the older woman.

And, nine years later, somehow Luc knew exactly where to find Star that evening. An hour earlier she had watched his helicopter flying in, had known that soon she would be missed, but she hadn’t been able to face the prospect of sitting down to dinner with Luc and Emilie and whoever else might be staying in the vast house.

A Ferrari pulled up on the estate road that ran to within yards of the river. Fresh from a day of high-powered wheeling and dealing at the Sarrazin bank in Paris, Luc climbed out, his appearance one of effortless elegance and supreme sophistication in a beautifully cut charcoal-grey suit.

Nothing could have prepared Star for that first emotional meeting with Luc Sarrazin that winter. Luc, with the remote air of self-containment which surrounded him like an untouchable aura. As he moved with fluid grace towards her, arrows of pale sunlight broke through the overhanging canopy of trees to illuminate his stunning dark deep-set eyes. For Star, it was like being struck by lightning.

He looked so extravagantly gorgeous that he simply took her breath away.

‘My father is very ill,’ Luc drawled tautly. ‘Confined to the sick room as he now is, his temper has suffered. Unfortunately, he tends to lash out at those least able to defend themselves. I must offer you my apologies—’

‘Your father despises me…he thinks I’m the lowest of the low!’

‘That is not true,’ Luc countered with impressive conviction.

And Star sensed how very much Luc wanted her to accept that unlikely assurance and, even more crucially, how very difficult he found it to set aside his forbidding reserve and attempt to both explain and apologise for the episode in as few words as possible.

‘My mother is not a drunk!’ Star protested in driven continuance as she moved closer in open and desperate appeal for his agreement. ‘And my stepfather may have been a gambler but he was a lovely, lovely man!’

Luc studied her with a tension he could not conceal. ‘You touch my conscience. Had I been less frank with my father when I brought you back from Mexico, you might not have been deprived of your mother for so long.’

‘No, that wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know her; of course you got the wrong idea…But that was the one and only time I ever saw her drink like that…’ Star sobbed as her turbulent emotions overcame her again.

Luc reached out and put his arms round her, very, very slowly, like a newly blind man needing to feel his way with care and caution. There was still a good foot of clear space between them. Star swiftly closed that space. He was as rigid at that physical contact as a living, breathing rock.

‘I think it’s time you had the opportunity to get to know your mother again,’ Luc murmured.

Gently peeling her from him, Luc opened up the space again, but lost his ascendancy as Star flung herself back close and gazed up at him with wondering eyes of hope. ‘You actually know where Juno is?’

‘I do.’

‘But how can you?’

‘You’re eighteen. Strictly speaking, you’re no longer my father’s ward. If you want to see your mother, I will arrange it.’

‘You really mean it?’

‘I don’t make promises I can’t keep.’

And that was the moment when Star fell head over heels in love with Luc Sarrazin. The moment when she pictured how her infinitely less inhibited nature might magically mingle in a perfect match with his. The moment when Luc Sarrazin, temptingly packaged with the hidden vulnerability of his utterly miserable, loveless childhood, became nothing short of an overwhelming obsession for Star.

She only saw Luc being incredibly kind and considerate of her needs. She didn’t know that it was imperative Luc ensured that she forgave his father’s behaviour and stayed on at the chateau. Why? Roland Sarrazin enjoyed Emilie’s restful companionship. Had Star insisted on returning to London, Luc wasn’t convinced that he could depend on family loyalty to keep Emilie in France.

As a door closed softly shut behind her, Star was shot back to the present. She was bemused to find herself still standing in Luc’s huge bedroom where, on the night of the twins’ conception, she had crept round removing lightbulbs from the lamps to create a more intimate atmosphere. The memory made her cringe.

‘I thought you would’ve been in bed by now,’ Luc drawled with the most staggering lack of expression. He said it lightly, casually, as if they had been sharing a bedroom for years.

Star spun round. Her brow furrowed, her eyes bewildered as she ran that sentence back through her brain. ‘You think I’m going to sleep in here…with you?’

A very faint smile tugged at the edges of Luc’s wide, sensual mouth. ‘Why so shocked?’





CHAPTER FIVE

STAR gaped at Luc, aquamarine eyes at their widest. She could not credit that he could actually expect her to share a bedroom with him.

‘No more drama, please…’ Luc urged with soft, silken derision as he loosened his well-cut jacket and shrugged out of it to stroll in the direction of the dressing room.

‘We’d both be very uncomfortable in the same room!’ Star folded her arms together in a jerky movement. ‘I’ll use one of the rooms next door—’

‘J’insiste,’ Luc responded very, very quietly.

The sheer appalling arrogance of that assurance that he would not take no for an answer shook Star. ‘It’s quite unnecessary for us to—’