Star jerked in even greater confusion as Luc suddenly reached for her fiercely clenched hands to draw her to him.
‘What are you doing?’ she gasped.
‘Once you told me that the only thing in the world you would ever want was to be my wife, and that if you couldn’t have me your life wouldn’t be a life any more…it would just be an existence, shorn of all sunlight and happiness, because inside yourself you would just want to die,’ Luc recited in his rich, dark accented drawl.
Star just froze. The words were vaguely recognisable. Her note, her goodbye note eighteen months earlier! Her lashes fluttered and then stayed deliberately down low, because at that precise moment she could not have looked Luc in the face to save her life. The cringe factor of that cruelly sharp memory of his was high, indeed sufficient to make her entire bodily surface blush.
‘And you wonder why I had the moat dragged…’ Luc murmured gently. ‘But now I’m asking you to put your money where your mouth is.’
Star blinked. ‘P-put my money where my m-mouth is?’ she stammered helplessly.
‘Yes, and live up to all those heartfelt sentiments…ah, non,’ Luc scolded softly as she suddenly attempted to wrench free of his determined hold.
‘You’re trying to send me up!’ she condemned hotly.
‘No. For the sake of our children, I’m challenging you to forget Rory and concentrate your attention back on me and our marriage,’ Luc contradicted tautly. ‘I accept that that will be a challenge for you. But I’m hoping that even if you can’t recover that original enthusiasm, some day you could be happy with me again.’
For the sake of our children? Concentrate on our marriage? Those were the only two phrases which Star absorbed from that speech. All the rest of what he said might as well have been directed at a brick wall. A heady mix of anguished pain and humiliation engulfed her like a drowning tidal wave. So that was what he was after now! Total possession of Venus and Mars, with her as a useful adjunct on the home front. Violent hurt shuddered through Star. All of a sudden Luc didn’t want a divorce any more. But she herself had played no part in his change of heart! What she had wanted and prayed for through eighteen endless months he was ready to give after spending only half an hour with their children! That was an unbelievable cruelty.
‘Are you cold?’ Luc demanded anxiously. ‘Why are you shaking?’
‘You insensitive toad!’ Star hurled rawly, her head flying up, aquamarine eyes blazing with outraged pain as she jerked free of him and stalked towards the door. ‘How dare you ask that of me after all you’ve put me through? You know, you may be the cat’s whiskers of a brain at the bank, but I don’t think you know diddly-squat about anything else in life!’
Luc reached the door first and slammed it fast, while he attempted to identify what he had said wrong. He had worked out that speech while he was playing with the twins, satisfied that it covered every potential rock on which he might run aground. He could have told her he thought she was like a butterfly, lighting on whichever male was within closest reach at any given time. He could have told her that her great love for Rory would enjoy as much longevity as her love for himself evidently had. And that when it came to loyalty in love she was horrendously unstable, and that for as long as he was her husband, he wouldn’t be trusting her out of his sight. But he had carefully avoided voicing a single superior or deflating opinion, and he really couldn’t understand why she was all wild-eyed and going over the edge screaming at him.
‘Calm down,’ Luc instructed steadily.
‘Get away from that door or I’ll throw something at you!’
Star threatened.
‘If wilful destruction gives you a juvenile thrill, go ahead,’ Luc invited.
That provocative response sent such a flame of fury hurtling through Star she shuddered again. ‘You’re worse than a revolving door—’
‘A revolving…door?’ Stunning dark eyes rested on her with galling cool. ‘Come on, don’t leave me in suspense, mon ange. In what way do I remind you of a revolving door?’
‘One minute you’re there, the next you’re not and then you’re back again…you keep changing your mind and my head’s spinning!’ Star cried in shaking condemnation. ‘I don’t think you know what you want, but the minute I start wanting you back, you push me away again—’
‘Control yourself,’ Luc commanded.
‘Control myself?’ Star echoed, a whole octave higher. ‘Gosh, that’s a good one! Control yourself, but don’t do it in bed. Do you think I want to end up a buttoned-down control freak like you are? I don’t think you even know what goes on inside your own stupid head. I think around me you’re totally controlled by your over-active male hormones! And you don’t like that, do you? That gives me a certain power, doesn’t it? And that annoys the hell out of you, Luc Sarrazin!’
She saw the sheer rage in his eyes and it went to her head like pure alcohol, because at last she had hit home and, if not hurt, had outraged him, which was probably as close as she could get to getting a rise out of Luc. In an abrupt movement, he stepped away from the door.
Assuming he was backing off, shocked rigid by the kind of verbal attack he had never dreamt of receiving from her corner, and feeling incredibly triumphant, Star sashayed out through the door. She paused then, and sent him a shimmering glance of naked incitement over one slight shoulder. ‘And it didn’t take me to be tall, blonde and sophisticated either, did it? That gets you most of all, doesn’t it?’
‘If you want to hear what I really think, keep on talking,’ Luc ground out.
Star moved out into the hall and turned back again. ‘I bet you could have swallowed me as a wife if I’d—’
‘Shut up?’ Luc slotted in rawly.
‘No, if I’d been legitimate, rich and real snobby, you’d have thought I was really special!’
‘Would your mother still have been part of the deal?’
‘You pig…how dare you insult my mother?’ she launched at him in a tempest of renewed fury.
Luc strode forward and just swept her up off her feet into his arms. ‘Now where did you find an insult in such a simple question?’ he probed, angling a razor-edged smile of grim amusement down at her confused face as he strode for the stairs.
‘Put me down, Luc—’
‘So that I can chase you all round one of the largest chateaux in the Loire? You must really think I am stupid, mon ange.’
‘I think you’re very stupid thinking that a caveman display of brute male strength is likely to silence and subdue me back into doormat mould!’
Luc said nothing, but his jawline took on an even more aggressive slant as he carted her up the stairs and across the landing.
‘I hope you put your back out doing this!’ Star goaded, wanting him to react again.
‘In spite of a temper that would grace a fishwife, you don’t weigh any more than a doll.’ Shouldering open the door of his bedroom, Luc kicked it shut again behind them, crossed the room and tumbled her down on the bed in a heap. ‘But if you get me mad enough, I’m not so buttoned down that I can’t match you!’
Righting herself into a sitting position, Star slung back her head and directed a scornful glance at the tall dark male standing over her. ‘What did you bring me up here for? An argument where the staff are less likely to hear us?’
Backing off several steps, Luc wrenched off his tie and pitched his jacket down on the floor.
That very unexpected development grabbed Star’s entire attention. ‘If you think for one moment that I have any intention of letting you—’
‘Letting me?’ Luc queried with an insolent appraisal that was so blisteringly confident it made her teeth grit. ‘You’d let me have you in a thunderstorm, with lightning hitting the ground round us and a full orchestra playing beside us.’
‘Why, you—’
‘And you wouldn’t notice the storm or the music because you would be that lost in what I can make you feel,’ Luc derided, ripping off his shirt with such impatience that several buttons went skimming in all directions. ‘And you call my hormones over-active? Even before I married you, you were eating me alive with the strength of your desire for me.’
‘I never once approached you that way!’ Star raged back at him, her cheeks red as fire.
‘Approach me? What would you need to approach me for when your eyes did your craving for you? Then I thought you didn’t realise what you were doing; now I suspect you knew all along.’
‘I was a virgin!’ Star proclaimed with embarrassed but infuriated reproach.
‘There was nothing remotely virginal about the way you looked at me.’
‘How many virgins have you tripped over?’
‘One was quite enough,’ Luc assured her wrathfully.
‘It gave you a kick being lusted after, though, didn’t it?’ Star hissed like a spitting cat. ‘I mean, you certainly did not avoid me—as you should have done if you didn’t want to encourage me.’
‘Mais c’est insensé…that’s crazy! I assumed that the more you saw of me, the more you would appreciate that I was far too old for you and far too boring to be an object of such excessive adoration!’ Luc slashed back at her.