Public Scandal, Private Mistress

by Susan Napier

  ‘Look, it could have been custom-made for you,’ he murmured, taking ruthless advantage of her semi-hypnotised awe to slide it onto her finger, saluting her acceptance of his devilish temptation with a teasing kiss.

  Veronica didn’t even hear the little crow as the man outside got his money shot, or notice the attention he had drawn from a knot of curious passers-by.

  ‘It is rather beautiful,’ she conceded reluctantly, while at the same time giving in to the sinful desire to admire the way it flashed on her hand, delicate in design yet bold in its fiery message, timelessly elegant and enduring, a symbol of perfect love. She flexed her fingers, wallowing in a shameless moment of possessive craving. It was all only a fantasy, after all…

  ‘It’s perfect!’ he pronounced, giving the assistant a discreet nod over her down-bent head.

  Ten minutes later they were slipping out the fortified back entrance to the store, Veronica still in a pale state of trembling shock.

  ‘I thought you just wanted to pretend—you didn’t have to actually go as far as buying it,’ she said in a shaken voice, cradling her hand in a protective fist. ‘Do you know how much it cost?’

  ‘Of course I do. I have the credit-card receipt to prove it,’ he pointed out in amusement, his total lack of concern demonstrating that the rich did indeed live in a different country, she thought. ‘And I couldn’t very well hand it back with that slime-ball still lurking about—that would have wrecked the whole plan!’

  ‘It wasn’t a very well thought-out plan, then,’ she said starkly. ‘I certainly can’t keep wearing it around.’ She halted while they were still in the deserted lane and tugged off the ring—which she found extraordinarily difficult to remove, considering how easily it had slipped on—and held it out to him. ‘I’d be terrified of losing it, or having it stolen before you got a chance to take it back. Besides, you’ll need to be able to say it’s never been worn, or they might not give you a full refund,’ she added, with a little frown at the thought.

  His eyes glittered beneath his lowered lids, his mouth quirking, but he took the ring without argument and carefully placed it back in its leather box inside the black velvet jeweller’s bag. ‘Come on, we’d better make tracks before our getaway is rumbled and we get chased for words to go with the pictures.’ When he casually slid the velvet bag into the pocket of his jeans, she was horrified.

  ‘What if there are pick-pockets about? It could be gone before you know it—’

  ‘You really are a worry-wart,’ he said, setting off through a series of narrow streets that would take them to the famous St Bénézet bridge while keeping them away from the main thoroughfares. ‘Perhaps it would be safer if you kept it on,’ he suggested. ‘After all, jewellery is de rigueur here so no one would look twice at it on your hand. And if we do run back into trouble our engagement would seem more authentic if you were still flashing it—’

  ‘No, thank you!’ Veronica hurried to cut him off before he could persuade her against her better judgement. She knew it would be extremely unwise for her emotional health to allow herself to wear his ring, even as a temporary minder.

  In fact, she brooded, he was actually being quite foolish in assuming that she would simply play along with his deception without extracting some sort of price. Did the man have no sense of self-preservation? she thought crossly. How did he know she wouldn’t take the ring from him and refuse to give it back? She could justifiably claim that he had freely given it to her, and she had witnesses—and photographs—to prove it! If she was a real gold-digger, she could even say he asked her to marry him and sue him for breach of promise.

  ‘Ma petite amie’ she had heard him refer to her at the jeweller’s, but he had publicly demonstrated he had more permanent plans for his intimate friend when he had asked to see ‘anneaux d’enclenchement’ and placed that ring on a finger traditionally reserved for engagement rings. In fact, he was leaving himself wide-open to extortion if Veronica suddenly decided to insist that she considered herself well-and-truly ‘enclenched’.

  She was still fretting about the ring several days later as everyone in Mas de Bonnard geared up for Zoe’s birthday celebration. Luc hadn’t been back to Avignon and she knew there was no safe in the house.

  ‘Well, I hope you’ve at least got interim insurance on it,’ she muttered as she smoothed her short, tropical-print dress down over her hips. She had intended to go over to the house early to offer to help with the preparations for the lavish lunch Melanie was organising, but then Luc had wandered in and, as usual, had thrown her careful plans into disarray.

  He showed no sign of cooling off from their sizzling affair, she thought with a profound thrill of delight, blushing as she saw his lazy-eyed survey of approval reflected in the mirror. In fact, he seemed daily more insatiable, no longer waiting until night to inveigle her into his bed—or prowl over to tumble into hers—and increasingly less careful to guard his simmering looks in the company of others. However, Veronica stood firmly on the side of discretion, not only for the sake of protecting her pride and too-vulnerable heart, but because she didn’t want to add to the awkward cross-currents in the household as Ashley and Ross’s uneven relationship was further strained by Justin’s disruptive presence, his coolness towards Ross and natural affinity with his twin leading her fiancé to feel on the outer.

  To Veronica, the secrecy surrounding her liaison with Luc only served to intensify the acute sense of intimacy when they were together. All too aware that her holiday was drawing to a close, she was as eager as Luc to make the most of their time together, to store up the precious memories of passion that might help mitigate the pain of eventual loss. But the present joy was worth the future pain, she told herself as each day she fell a little more in love with him, and each night she gave him another piece of her heart along with the generous gift of her passion.

  Yesterday he had coolly offered her a first-class ticket from Paris to Auckland, giving her the option to cancel her train to London and flight from Heathrow without having to worry about the financial penalties, but Veronica still hadn’t been able to bring herself to make the decision to travel with him to Paris; to face the ending of their affair—there, where it all began…

  ‘Don’t look so desolate, chérie.’ Luc slid his long limbs out of her bed and back into his clothes, raking his blue-black hair from his face. ‘You’re not responsible for my decisions, or the personal risks I choose to take. There are some losses insurance never covers. I make my own choices, and I won’t go bankrupt if the worst happens…’

  The worst already had happened—unrequited love was a form of emotional bankruptcy, she thought later as they toasted Zoe’s health after she had opened her huge pile of presents, protesting she couldn’t possibly afford the excess baggage to take everything home. But many of the gifts from local friends were furnishings and housewares for her new St Romain home, and there were tears in her eyes as she handed out the hugs and thanks.

  Justin, slightly merry on the amount of wine-tasting he had been doing in the company of a local vintner and his wife, chose an unfortunate lull in the conversation as the cake was being cut to say teasingly to Luc:

  ‘Don’t we have something else to celebrate, Luc? When are you two lovebirds planning to make your announcement?’

  Veronica, standing just behind Luc, blanched as Justin’s words rang out in the silence with the clarity of the village bells.

  ‘Young idiot,’ growled Luc, steadying his stepbrother’s slightly swaying body with an overly firm hand.

  ‘What announcement? What’s he talking about?’ Melanie’s blonde head swivelled towards Luc from where she was overseeing the cutting of the cake, a look of dawning dismay in her blue eyes as she saw his annoyance.

  ‘Oops,’ Justin hiccupped and covered his remorseful mouth with his hand. ‘Didn’t mean to let the cat out of the bag. It’s just that I saw you in the jeweller’s in Avignon when that photographer was going totally ape outside.’ He gave Veronica a woe
begone look over Luc’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, I knew you must have some reason for keeping quiet—thought maybe you didn’t want your engagement to take any of the spotlight off Gran on her big day.’

  ‘Well, you’ve certainly managed to do that,’ said Luc drily, although Veronica noticed in the midst of her embarrassment that Zoe was the only family member not looking at him in consternation.

  ‘You never said anything! You could have at least told me,’ Ashley was berating her twin, while Ross smirked at the idea of someone other than himself on the receiving end of her ire.

  ‘Your engagement! Oh, no, Luc, what’s going on? What have you done?’ Melanie looked almost distraught, thought Veronica uneasily, as Miles placed a protective hand on her uninjured arm.

  She stepped forward to explain that it was all a ploy to throw off an ambush by the paparazzi, but was speared by a savagely restraining look from Luc.

  ‘Really, Mum, it’s not what you think—’ he said, and Melanie gasped and bit her lip, her eyes softening.

  ‘Luc?’ Suddenly another, soft, cultured voice hesitantly entered the conversation.

  Veronica saw a very elegant, beautifully made-up blonde in a casually tied headscarf wobble on high-heeled sandals across the uneven cobblestones on the pathway around the corner of the house, the upper part of her lovely face masked by outsized tortoiseshell sunglasses, her starkly plain black linen shift and oversized Fendi crocodile bag adding to the general air of studied fragility.

  ‘Luc! Oh, Luc—thank God you’re here!’ She zeroed in on him like a heat-seeking missile, going on tiptoes to kiss his cheek, resting an exquisitely manicured hand on his chest.

  ‘I’m so sorry if I’m barging in on your party, but I was just freaking out in your flat in London, and then I saw the news about you buying rings and I knew it was a sign I had to come down here and take charge of my life…’ She clutched his arm, a semi-hysterical sob spilling from her ultra-pale pink lips as Luc quickly drew her to one side, to the relative privacy of his family’s ranks.

  ‘Oh, Luc, I’m such a total mess—but now I’ve done what you said—I’ve finally told Andrew I want a divorce. He tried to insist that we go to a counsellor, but I told him I was pregnant and that the baby most definitely wasn’t his…’

  Veronica felt the blood drain from her head and ice sink into the very marrow of her bones as she saw Luc take Elise Malcolm in his arms as she sobbed in earnest.

  Not fragile, but desperate, she thought. The woman was on the verge of a total meltdown, and who could blame her?

  ‘Oh, Luc, I do so want our baby but now I’m scared…what kind of parents will we make? I thought you might come back to Avignon with me and help me work it out…make everything right! I know you said I was on my own, but that was just your anger talking. Please, Luc, please—don’t desert me when I need you the most!’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘PACKAGE for you, Veronica!’

  Veronica looked up from her computer screen as her assistant called from the outer office.

  ‘I’m off to my appointment in a few minutes,’ she said, getting up to check her appearance in the mirror on the wall. ‘Just check the invoice off with the order list and put it in with the other stock. I’ll have a look when I get back.’

  She was looking too pale, she thought, staring into her own haunted eyes. Even under a smooth coating of cosmetics her freckles looked more prominent on their translucent background and there were faint blue marks under her eyes that no amount of concealer could hide.

  In the last two months the faint golden tan she had acquired in France had leached away, and, although they were now well into an Auckland spring, the long hours she had been working since her return meant that her body got little exposure to the sun. She had heard that lack of sunlight contributed to depression—there was even an official phrase for it: seasonal affective disorder—so perhaps that was the reason for the continued lethargy that dragged at her spirits in spite of the fact that her business was doing much better than she had expected. Lack of fresh air and the kind of daily exercise she was used to getting in the country could also explain her inability to sleep soundly and wretched moodiness.

  Liar!

  She glared at her wan face in the mirror. She knew very well what was causing her despondency, and it had nothing to do with a lack of sunlight.

  ‘No, it’s not for Out Of The Box,’ said Carly. ‘It’s personal—for you.’

  ‘Is it from Mum?’ Her mother was always sending care-parcels of home-baking and organic produce—afraid that the big city would corrupt her into a fast-food lifestyle saturated with agri-chemicals.

  ‘No, it’s another one of those…’

  Veronica froze, her heavy heart squeezing in her chest. She should just go—her appointment was with a new client and she didn’t want to jeopardise her chance of an order by arriving late for their meeting.

  Nevertheless, five minutes later she was opening the little box and lifting out a perfectly crafted, miniature shepherd-boy out of its bed of shredded green tissue.

  ‘Oh, isn’t he cute?’ gushed Carly, who had been hovering with cheerful nosiness. Fresh out of university, she was a great worker, full of ideas and a whiz with the computer, and so eagerly interested in everything that Veronica had given up trying to preserve a businesslike distance between employer and employee. ‘Now you’ll have someone to put beside the lamb, and keep the old shepherd and his sheep company. What a pity it’s only October—I wish it was Christmas already. I’m dying to see you put the whole crèche together!’

  ‘Don’t wish the Christmas rush on us just yet,’ said Veronica croakily, her fingers smoothing over the glazed terracotta figurine. ‘We still have an awful lot of work to get through before we’re ready to ship off an avalanche of simultaneous orders…’

  She turned the figure upside down to see the distinctive maker’s mark on the base, although she didn’t really need to look. She knew it came from Sénanque, as had each of the other five santons she’d received irregularly through the post over the past eight weeks.

  She put the shepherd-boy back in its box with trembling fingers. Damn Luc! What on earth was he trying to do to her?

  All the packages had arrived bearing a UK postmark and a customs sticker with his signature, but there was never any note inside so Veronica had no way of knowing what kind of message he was sending. If it was an apology it was a wretchedly cryptic one. Maybe it was just his way of rubbing her nose in her cowardice, but she had felt that his decision to leave for Avignon with Elise Malcolm in the middle of Zoe’s party had been a fairly definitive statement of his priorities!

  She snatched up her briefcase and slid in the laptop, and the glossy brochures and order forms, in case her potential client turned out to be electronically impaired. She had initially made a rule that, for the corporate side of the business, she wasn’t going to pitch for business with companies that had less than twenty-five employees, but experience had quickly shown her the error of her ways. Many small companies valued their personal touch with their staff, and were more generous with gifts as rewards and incentives than larger organisations, and, besides, hungry small companies often mushroomed into big firms with many more clients and contacts. Sarron Holdings, according to her research, was a small but rapidly growing event-management company with contracts from a number of city councils and government organisations, as well as links with offshore promotions.

  Picking up her handbag, she shot a furtive look at her assistant’s back before tucking the new santon into the side pocket. Her personal talisman, a little piece of Luc to carry with her…

  As she shot out the door her eye was caught by the card propped up on the credenza. It had arrived the day before and she was still dithering about it—another reminder of that hedonistic, life-altering two weeks in Provence: a totally unexpected invitation to Sophie’s twelfth birthday party the following week.

  Waving to Carly, she sped out to her car, parked in one of the t
wo spaces marked with the Out Of The Box logo in front of the long, rectangular building. Fortunately, it wouldn’t take her more than fifteen minutes to get to the hotel where the meeting was to take place.

  The series of disasters that had hit her immediately after she got back from France had helped distract her from her emotional trauma. The small warehouse she had previously arranged to lease was destroyed by a fire and the owner had decided not to rebuild, and the flat she had been poised to move into fell through, when the couple with whom she was going to share decided to go their separate ways. But then her real estate agent had offered her the rental of a ‘work/life unit’, a new concept of mixed-use development in an inner-city suburb, which comprised office and lock-up warehouse space downstairs and a spacious open-plan apartment above.

  Veronica was living alone for the first time in her life…and the solitude gave her far too much time to brood on her sorrows. The only way she could bear it was to bury herself in work—hence her booming business.

  The hotel was a downtown luxury high-rise overlooking Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour, which at present was whipped up into white-caps by a passing spring squall. Veronica brushed the light rain spatters off her smart pale yellow linen suit as she entered the lift, her hopes regarding her new client rising with every floor, along with her nervous apprehension. She hadn’t realised the room number she had been given was the penthouse suite. It indicated that Sarron Holdings might have a lot more money to spend than her initial research had led her to believe and she knew it was important not to show that she was intimidated. She would need to present a cool, confident front, no matter how much she might be quaking inside. But by now, she thought bitterly, she was practised at hiding her wayward emotions.