And if Luc was about to throw recriminations, Star wanted them over with as soon as possible. ‘Well?’ she said baldly, giving him the opening.
‘Coffee?’ Luc proffered smoothly.
‘Coffee makes me sick when I’m nervous!’
Luc poured himself a cup with the kind of cool that set her teeth on edge.
‘Well?’ she prompted a second time. ‘Just go on. Say it!’
Luc raised a politely enquiring brow. ‘What is it you wish me to say?’
In a whirl of sand-washed silk and frustration, Star spun away again, bangles jangling on her slender wrist in tinkling accompaniment. ‘If I hadn’t sneaked into bed with you, you wouldn’t be a father now!’
‘I knew what I was doing, mon ange.’
Star whirled round again, aquamarine eyes confused.
‘Did you notice me struggling?’ Luc enquired drily.
Her cheeks warmed.
‘Naturally not,’ Luc answered for himself. ‘I was enjoying myself far too much to call a halt, and I didn’t protect you from pregnancy. The responsibility for the conception of our children is undoubtedly all mine.’
His absolute self-command disconcerted Star just as much as what he was saying. After all, the enemy tank he had likened her to had taken surprise hostages. And possibly Luc was still in shock at that development.
‘You don’t have to take the blame,’ she began, sounding more like her usually fair self. ‘I knew—’
‘You knew nothing,’ Luc stressed with a wry twist of his sensual mouth. ‘Isn’t that the definitive point?’
Her face burned at that incontrovertible fact. She might have known about the birds and the bees the night the twins had been conceived, but the combination of boarding school and Emilie’s careful supervision had given Star little opportunity to experiment. A few over-enthusiastic clinches with teenage boys had not prepared her for the distinct but delicious shock of sharing a bed with a fully grown adult male possessed of the ability to give her the ultimate in pleasure.
Luc moved to lift the birth certificates which she had last seen in the dining room from the magnificent mantelpiece. Although only he could have been responsible for having moved them, he perused the certificates afresh with a decided hint of fascination. ‘Viviene and Maximilian…Viviene and Max Sarrazin,’ he sounded out softly.
‘Known as Venus and Mars,’ Star stressed, pausing in her restive movements round the room.
‘But my son and my daughter, who will naturally be brought up here in their family home.’ Luc was very still, the long, lean flow of his powerful body perfectly poised by the superb fireplace.
Taken aback by that confident statement, Star dropped dead and stared. ‘What are you talking about?’
His brilliant dark eyes were steady as a rock in his lean strong face. ‘I think you should sit down and have some coffee. All this frantic pacing up and down must be making you dizzy—’
‘Look, I’m not dizzy!’ Star folded her arms tight. ‘I don’t want to sit down either.’
‘And I don’t want to argue with you, but if you force the issue, you’ll find yourself on a losing streak,’ Luc warned.
Her eyes fired with quick resentful anger. ‘Will I indeed? Five minutes after finding out you’re a father, you start making outrageous statements and trying to lay down the law.’
‘And I should add that the law—French family law, at least—will come down on my side,’ Luc drawled with cool exactitude.
Goosebumps rising on her bare arms, Star went rigid. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘That a description of the home environment in which you were keeping my children in England would be very much in my favour in a French court.’
Star turned pale. ‘You’re threatening me…’
‘You’re shocked,’ Luc noted. ‘Why? Sadly, the twins are more entitled to tender treatment right now than you are, mon ange.’
‘You are threatening me…’ Shaken disbelief was splintering through Star.
‘You should know where you stand. Between a rock and a hard place,’ Luc told her helpfully, lest she be too slow to have absorbed that message. ‘No way are you removing my children from beneath this roof at the end of the summer and taking them back to England with you!’
‘You can’t—’
‘I can stop you. I would dislike the means I would have to utilise, but I would do it,’ Luc countered levelly. ‘You’ve made some unwise decisions since our children were born—’
‘Like what?’ Star slammed back at him ungrammatically, thrown into a greater panic by every word he voiced with such intimidating calm.
‘In spite of the fact that you were existing below the poverty line, you didn’t inform me of their birth nor did you ask for my financial support. Now even I am aware of the accepted authority which states that the needs of the child should always come first.’ Luc sent her a winging glance of reproof. ‘In attempting to raise our children in an undesirable environment, while also denying me my rights as a father, you failed to behave like a mature and responsible parent.’
Star’s soft lips fell open in appalled incredulity at that judgement.
Luc screened his penetrating gaze and spread his lean hands in a wry, dismissive gesture. ‘Now, I don’t believe it would be fair to judge the teenager you were at the time of their birth against that particular yardstick. But you must accept that in any custody dispute you will be compared to me, and my worst enemy couldn’t label me as either immature or irresponsible.’
It was a terrifyingly impressive conclusion. By the time Luc had finished speaking, he had succeeded in seriously scaring Star. A custody dispute in which what she could offer their children would be measured against what Luc could offer? Luc, with several centuries of solid family respectability behind him and every one of his gloomy ancestors born in wedlock. Luc, with his immense wealth and with his opinions on global financial problems sought by the highest placed politicians in Europe. Star’s blood simply ran cold.
‘I just don’t understand any of this…’ Star was fighting to keep a grip on her turbulent emotions. ‘The instant you find out that the twins are yours, you immediately start threatening to take them from me—’
‘No, that’s not either my wish or my intention. But, ironically, it is exactly what you did to me before I came downstairs again,’ Luc drawled very quietly. ‘Were you expecting me to jump for joy when you announced that you were already homesick and you talked about returning to England?’
Star reddened and looked away with extreme awkwardness. ‘No…but—well, OK, maybe it was a threat,’ she muttered in an undertone.
‘Thank you. But although you’ve finally told me that the twins are my children, you don’t appear to have the slightest grasp of how much that fact is going to impact on all our lives.’
‘But why should it change anything?’ Star demanded. ‘I’m quite happy for you to see them as much as you want—’
‘Will you please explain to me why you can’t accept that I should want my own children as much as you want them?’ Luc enquired, with what appeared to be sincere incomprehension.
Her bewilderment and fear flipped into total panic at that announcement. ‘Because you didn’t want me, didn’t want to be married, for goodness’ sake!’ Star practically shrieked back at him. ‘Why would I ever think that you would welcome being saddled with two kids from that same stupid fake marriage? I thought you’d be furious if you found out I was pregnant! I thought you’d want me to have a termination! I thought you’d be outraged with me for creating such an ongoing problem…’
‘So you made some very wild assumptions and created a really huge ongoing problem. That doesn’t make any kind of sense to me,’ Luc admitted with the strangest half-smile of evident acceptance. ‘But then not a lot of what you do makes sense to me, so it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re becoming very upset.’
Star gulped back the thickness of tears in her throat. ‘And you’re surprised?’
Luc took a slow, fluid step closer. ‘How can I be a father to two children living in a different country? I can’t agree to that. Perhaps I came on too hot and heavy, but you have ties back in England that I want you to put behind you now.’
Star blinked, her breath snarling up in her throat. Ties? What ties? What had she to put behind her? Four hours of sleep had left her brain less than agile, but Luc appeared to be firing on all four cylinders, like a Ferrari ready to roar down a race track.
‘I’m referring to Rory,’ Luc clarified without hesitation. ‘I won’t stand back and allow a casual lover to take my place with my children.’
She almost told him that she had never slept with Rory, but then angry defensiveness and pride overcame the desire to be that honest. What business was it of his? How many women had he slept with since she had last been in France? Gabrielle might be old history but that didn’t mean that Luc had become celibate. And what right did a male set on divorcing her have to dictate what she did in her own life? The right of power and influence, her intelligence warned her at that point. Luc had already said that if she tried to take the twins home he would go to court and, at the very least, prevent her from removing them from France.