The Frenchman's Love-Child

myself you hadn’t noticed but I was really just trying to explain what I wasn’t old enough to understand.’

It had been almost four years since Christien had been treated to that amount of blunt honesty and his even white teeth momentarily gritted together. As a rule women wrapped up the unpalatable truth around him and never ever voiced it. ‘It wasn’t like that…’

Of course, it had been, Tabby reflected painfully. She had been besotted, out of her depth and trying to be something she was not and he had taken what all young, virile males were programmed to take: sexual conquest of a willing woman. Everything that had happened between them had been inevitable according to their sex, right down to her having fallen head over heels in love and him having got bored with her.

‘It was…and you got bored-’

His long, lean length had turned very tense. ‘I didn’t get bored…you went off with the lout on the Harley.’

‘I didn’t-’

Christien lifted her off him and dumped her down onto the mattress by his side. ‘For once in your life, tell the truth-’

Infuriated, Tabby sat up. ‘I am telling the truth!’

‘Where is the bathroom?’ Christien demanded.

‘Downstairs.’ Tabby compressed her lips, green eyes fiery. ‘I went out for a ride with Pete, and Pippa and Hilary were with his friends on their bikes. It was just a night out and nothing happened-’

‘Ciel! Don’t give me that! I saw you snogging him in the village…little slut!’ Christien suddenly shot at her with a passionate fury that took even him aback and was a far cry from the cool he preferred to show the world.

Tabby froze while Christien sprang out of bed and hauled on his jeans. She remembered that as she’d clambered off the motorbike that evening Pete had leant forward and kissed her before they’d parted. It had lasted only a second and she had not wanted to shoot him down in flames in front of his mates and hers by making a three-act tragedy out of something so small.

‘You saw that…’ she gasped in genuine horror. ‘Oh, no!’

Unimpressed, Christien sent her a sizzling look of derision. ‘Did you do it on the bike with him the same way you laid yourself across the bonnet of my car for me?’

‘Don’t be disgusting!’ Tabby launched at him in a rage of quivering mortification and then she fell still again, agile brain working fast. It was like a missing piece of jigsaw puzzle suddenly slotting into place for her. But unlike with the average jigsaw that missing piece had changed the whole picture. Taken in isolation, what Christien had seen must have looked damning. During that week, he had been away in Paris and he hadn’t been in touch and then he had seen her kissing someone else.

‘Why on earth didn’t you confront me?’ Tabby slung at the lean bronzed back heading down the stairs.

‘You think I would lower myself to that level?’ Christien shot back at her in disbelief.

Tabby almost screeched her frustration out loud and raced in his wake.

Christien emerged in shock from his brush with the primitive plumbing facilities. ‘There is no place to wash!’ he condemned with incredulity.

‘There’s a sink and a geyser that gives hot water…I want to talk about Pete-’

‘So that was his name…’ Christien snarled. ‘You tart!’

‘Stop it!’ Tabby launched at him. ‘My friends were there and so were his and it was broad daylight. I went for a spin on his bike…that’s all. That stupid little kiss you saw was all that ever happened between us!’

‘You think I am about to believe that?’

‘Why not? I didn’t kiss him back but it didn’t even last long enough for me to push him away…it was innocent. I was nuts about you-’

‘And the biggest liar in Europe!’ Christien countered with crushing effect.

She paled and then flushed beet-red with guilt for it was unanswerable. ‘But not about that,’ she persisted tautly. ‘I wouldn’t have gone with any other bloke and you should have known that. But then maybe you did and you just needed another excuse to put me out of your life.’

Christien swore in French but he had stilled too and doubt was touching him for the first time. Back then he too had believed she was too keen on him to stray. However, at the time newly aware of just how young she actually was, he had also known just how short-lived a teenage infatuation could be.

‘Then you got the ultimate excuse to stay away, didn’t you?’ In Tabby’s anguished gaze was the terrible memory of their meeting like strangers in the hospital waiting room thronged with those whose lives had been damaged by Gerry Burnside’s drunk driving and for ever shadowed by the lost lives of those who had not survived that night.

Gerry Burnside had driven round a corner on the wrong side of the road and he had crashed the four-wheel drive head-on into Henri Laroche’s Porsche. Tabby’s stepmother, Lisa, had been the only adult who had not been in her husband’s car and she had been having hysterics in the waiting room. Pippa had been shattered by the death of her mother and waiting to hear how the emergency surgery on her father had gone. Hilary and her little sister, Emma, had been huddled together, bereft of both their parents. Jen’s mother had been badly injured as well and Jen had been praying for her survival.

Christien had appeared with Veronique Giraud, his beautiful dark eyes bleak with shock and grief, and Tabby had wanted to go to him to hold him, but she had not had the nerve to reach out in that moment to the man she loved, who had lost his father through her father’s drunken, inexcusable recklessness at the wheel.

‘My father’s death…the crash…it would never have kept me from you.’ Lean strong face taut, Christien hauled her into the sheltering circle of his strong arms.

‘I wasn’t involved with Pete,’ Tabby told him again, determined to make him listen to her.

Christien knotted one hungry hand into her hair and kissed her breathless, shutting out the uneasy feelings she had stirred up. He had no desire to rehash the past. All he could think about was the next time he would be with her and the time after that and how often he would be able to fly up from Paris to be with her. Here in his great- aunt’s summer house on the Duvernay estate? Impossible! He would find her a much more suitable and far superior property elsewhere…

Somewhere in the early hours, Tabby opened her eyes and moaned with helpless pleasure beneath Christien’s expert ministrations. ‘Again…?’ she mumbled, marvelling at his stamina and luxuriating in him being so demanding too.

‘Are you too tired?’ His gorgeous accent was as effective on her as the effortless way he had managed to turn her liquid with longing even while she was still half asleep.

‘Don’t you dare stop,’ she muttered and he laughed huskily and pushed her to fever pitch before he finally, mercifully answered the great shameless tide of hunger he had roused and left her limp and dazed with an overload of satisfaction.

When Tabby wakened again, dawn had been and gone and when she stretched she discovered a dozen aches in secret places. She flipped over to survey Christien while he slept. Black lashes curled against a bronzed cheekbone, blue black stubble roughened his handsome jawline. The sheet was twisted round his hip, a muscular, long brown arm and a slice of hair-roughened chest exposed. Her chin resting on her folded arms, she suppressed a dreamy sigh. It was as if time had gone into reverse and she didn’t really want to wake up and acknowledge the older, wiser individual she was supposed to be four years on.

He was the father of her son, so it wasn’t surprising that she had never been able to forget him. In any case, it now seemed clear that only a stupid misunderstanding had separated them that summer. Such a little thing too that she could almost have screamed her frustration to the heavens: he had seen Pete kiss her and had assumed she’d been cheating on him. Of course that was Christien: the supreme pessimist and cynic always expecting the worst. Her lush mouth quirked. Oh, yes, she now understood why he would not even spare her five minutes on the day of the accident enquiry. His fierce pride would never allow him to overlook or forgive betrayal. For the first time, she also saw that the very ferocity of his rejection then had been revealing.

Last night, she had slept with him again. Over and over and over again. She was shameless, but she knew that if he woke up she still wouldn’t say no to him. He was the only guy she had ever slept with but she was literally his for the asking every time and if she still loved him-and she suspected she did-was that so bad? Especially when fate seemed to be giving them a second chance? Or was it Solange who had given them a second chance? Had the older woman guessed that when she left the cottage to Tabby it would bring Christien into contact with her again?