Eyes dark as midnight glittered down like shards of ice crystal into Star’s. A pulse at the base of her slender throat beat convulsively fast and made it impossible for her to catch her breath.
‘Shock…horror,’ Luc enumerated with a sibilant softness that trickled down her sensitive spine like a hurricane warning. ‘You still wear every thought and feeling on your face, mon ange.’
While he still showed nothing, Star reflected in feverish abstraction, her attention glued to the smooth, hard planes of his lean, strong face. ‘Luc…’ she managed in a choky little voice before the tidal wave of horribly familiar guilt engulfed her and reduced her to squirming silence instead.
‘Oui, your husband,’ Luc drawled, his husky French accent dramatising every syllable with the most incredibly sexy edge.
A tide of colour washed over Star’s triangular face. She shut her eyes in dismay at that last forbidden thought about his accent and struggled to get a grip on herself.
‘Surely you expected me to track you down sooner or later?’
‘Not really, no…’ Star mumbled, eyes shooting wide again to telegraph a look of naked panic. She was trying to picture herself telling him the most unwelcome news he would probably ever hear. That he was the father of twelve-month-old twins.
Luc’s beautifully modelled wide, sensual mouth compressed into a hard line. ‘Guilt is written all over you!’ he ground out in icy disgust.
He knew. He knew about the twins! What else could he be talking about? He must have leant on poor Emilie and browbeaten her into spilling the beans. And he wasn’t wrong about the guilt. At that moment, Star was just eaten alive by that sensation, and at the same time savagely hurt. It had been one thing to imagine how Luc might react, quite another to be confronted with the brutal reality of that rejection.
CHAPTER TWO
‘ALORS!’ Luc slung the noisy scaffolding girding the castle frontage a grim appraisal. ‘Take me inside,’ he instructed in imperious command.
‘The front door doesn’t open…you’ll have to come round the back.’ Alarmingly conscious of Luc powering along beside her, impatiently curtailing his long stride to her smaller steps, Star hurried breathlessly back round to the rear of the castle.
‘I’m so s-sorry, Luc…I really am,’ she stammered truthfully in the dim passageway which led past several doors into the basement kitchen. It was her only reception area, and although daylight was only just beginning to fade she already had candles lit, because it was a dark room, and the place needed rewiring.
One step into the kitchen, Luc surveyed her with dark eyes colder than frostbite. ‘By the time I have finished taking this betrayal out of your useless little hide, you’ll understand the true meaning of what it feels like to be sorry!’
Shaken by such a level of condemnation, Star turned even paler. Did he think that she should have terminated her pregnancy? Was that what he was getting at? Had it been a betrayal of trust to give birth to children he would not have wanted her to have? Her tummy muscles knotted up. ‘Sometimes things just g-go wrong, Luc—’
‘Not in my life they don’t…not once until you came along,’ he completed with icy exactitude.
In the face of an accusation that she was aware had more than a smidgen of truth, Star braced herself with one nerveless hand on the back of the sagging armchair by the range and stared helplessly at him, registering every detail of his appearance. His superb charcoal-grey silk suit sheathed his broad shoulders and the long, powerful length of leg in the kind of fabulous fit only obtainable from extremely expensive tailoring. His luxuriant black hair had been ruffled by the wind, but the excellence of the cut had ensured that the springy dark gleaming strands just fell back into place.
Briefly engaged in sparing his humble domestic surroundings a grim, lip-curling appraisal, Luc turned his attention back to her without warning.
Flash! As Star collided with the long-lashed brilliance of his stunning dark deep-set eyes, it was like finding herself thrust into an electric storm. Heat speared through her slight frame. Feverish pink sprang up over her slanted cheekbones. She trembled, every sense awakened to painful life and sensitivity, an intense awareness of her own body engulfing her to blur every rational thought.
Silence banged thunderously in her ears, her heart thumping a frantic tattoo against her breastbone. A wanting so powerful it left her weak had seized her, dewing her skin with perspiration, stealing her ability to breathe or vocalise. What was it about him? She had asked herself that so many times. The obvious? He was fantastically good-looking. So tall, so dark and beautifully built. His maternal grandmother had been an Italian countess. That heritage was etched in his fabulous bone structure, the blue-black ebony of his hair and the golden hue of his skin.
Was that really the only reason she yearned for him with every fibre of her being and when deprived of him, felt only half alive? It had to be the only reason, she told herself frantically.
‘So you have nothing to say for yourself,’ Luc drawled.
‘I’m still in shock,’ she mumbled truthfully.
Shock. Her shock was nothing to his, Luc decided with sudden ferocity. To find her living like this in abject poverty, candles lighting a room Gothic in its lack of modern conveniences or comfort. She was dressed like a gipsy and thin as a rail. Bereft of the support of Sarrazin money for just eighteen months, she’d clearly sunk without trace. Just as he had expected; just as he had forecast. He studied her bare feet, recalled that she had almost run across the rough gravel, and the most extraordinary ache stirred inside him. Frustrated fury leapt up to engulf and crush it out. Not enough sense to come in out of the rain, Emilie had once said of Star.
Emilie…Luc’s quick intellect zoomed in on that timely reminder at supersonic speed, but his hooded gaze was nonetheless still engaged on roaming up over Star’s veiling skirt with its silky fringe. Memory unerringly supplied a vision of the slender, shapely perfection of her legs. He tensed almost imperceptibly, his appraisal rising higher, finding no escape in the pouting thrust of her small braless breasts beneath her velvet wrap top.
As she flung her head back, his lean, powerful body hardened in urgent all-male response. Her hair glowed in the dimness, bright as beaten copper in sunlight, dancing round her triangular face. Her pallor highlighted exotic eyes, alive with awakening sensuality, and a wide, soft, voluptuously pink mouth.
And this was the woman he had spent over a hundred thousand pounds trying to trace over the past eighteen months? Tiny, skinny, irredeemably different from the rest of her sex. There was nothing conventional in her mercurial changes of expression, her fluid restive movements, her jangling bracelets, her outrageous earrings shaped like cats or her ridiculous clothing. She wasn’t beautiful either. There was nothing there that he admired or looked for in a woman—nothing but the drugging, earthy sexuality that was as much a part of her as her dusty bare feet, Luc told himself with driven determination.
Star had the soul and spirit of a small wild animal, always ready to fight for survival and use whatever she had to get what she wanted. Or trade? Why else was she surveying him with that melodramatically charged look of undeniable hunger? No, there was no doubt in Luc’s mind that Star knew exactly what he was here about. To look so ashamed and desperate, she had to have been involved up to her throat in persuading his father’s elderly cousin to part with her money!
‘How could you have done such a thing to Emilie?’ Luc demanded icily.
A frown line indented Star’s smooth brow. Colliding with his glittering dark gaze, she froze as if an icy hand had touched her heart. Perspiration beaded her short upper lip. Gooseflesh sprang up on her exposed skin. The chill he emanated was that powerful.
‘Emilie…?’ Star’s frown line deepened.
‘The loan, Star.’
‘What loan…what are you talking about?’
‘Si tu continues…’ Luc swore so softly that the tiny hairs at the nape of Star’s neck rose.
It was a threat. If she kept it up, he would get angry. But, Emilie and what loan?
‘I honestly don’t know what—’
Luc slowly spread the long brown fingers of one expressive hand. The atmosphere was so charged she could almost feel it hiss warningly in her pounding eardrums. ‘So that’s the way you’re trying to play it,’ he spelt out, framing each laden word with terrifying emphasis. ‘You’re acting all ashamed because of the two little bastards you’ve managed to spawn while you were still married to me?’
The offensive words struck Star in the face like a blow. She fell back in physical retreat. ‘Bastards?’ she whispered tremulously.
‘Illegitimacy seems to run very much in your family genes, doesn’t it?’ Luc pointed out lethally. ‘Your children…you…your mother—not one of you born with anything so conventional as a church blessing.’
Registering in disbelief that Luc believed that their twin babies had been fathered by some other man, Star gazed back at him with haunted eyes of bewildered pain. ‘No…no, Luc…I—’
‘Surely you don’t think I require an explanation?’ Luc elevated a winged ebony brow, studying her with sardonic disdain. ‘I shall divorce you for adultery and will not pay alimony, I assure you.’