by Lynne Graham
‘News of my successful buyout of CCC was in the evening papers so you’ve missed the boat on the business front,’ Navarre derided, winding the towel round his narrow hips with apparently calm hands. ‘What else have you got to sell?’
Tawny breathed in deep and gave him a wide sizzling smile that hurt lips still swollen from his kisses. ‘Basically the story of what you’re like in bed. You know, the usual sleaze that makes up a kiss-and-tell, how you treated me like a royal princess and put a ring on my finger for a few days, had the sex and then got bored and dumped me again.’
Still as a bronzed statue, Navarre focused contemptuous green eyes on her and ground out the reminder, ‘You signed a confidentiality agreement.’
‘I know I did, but somehow I don’t think you’ll lower yourself to the task of dragging me into a courtroom just because I tell the world that you’re a five-times-a night guy!’ Tawny slung back with deliberate vulgarity, determined to tough out the confrontation so that he would never, ever suspect how much he had hurt her.
Navarre could barely conceal his distaste.
‘You still owe me proof that that camera that recorded my supposed theft of your laptop has been wiped,’ Tawny remarked less aggressively as that recollection returned to haunt her.
His sardonic mouth curled. ‘There was no camera, no recording. That was a little white lie voiced to guarantee your good behaviour.’
‘You’re such a ruthless bastard,’ Tawny quipped shakily, fighting a red tide of rage at how easily she had been taken in. Why had she not insisted on seeing that recording the instant he’d mentioned it?
‘It got you off the theft hook,’ he reminded her without hesitation.
‘And you’ll never forget that, will you?’ But it wasn’t really a question because she already knew the answer. She would always be a thief in Navarre Cazier’s eyes and a woman he could buy for a certain price.
‘Will you change your mind about the kiss-and-tell?’ Navarre asked harshly, willing her to surrender to his demand.
‘Sorry, no … I want my five minutes of fame. Why shouldn’t I have it? Have a safe journey home,’ Tawny urged breezily.
‘Tu a un bon coup … you’re a good lay,’ he breathed with cutting cool, and seconds later the door mercifully shut on his departure.
There was no hiding from the obvious fact that making love with him again had been a serious mistake and she mentally beat herself up for that misjudgement to such an extent that she did not sleep a wink for what remained of the night. Around seven in the morning she heard Jacques arrive to collect his employer’s cases and later the sound of Navarre leaving the suite. Only when she was sure that he was gone did she finally emerge, pale and with shadowed eyes, from her room. She was shocked to find a bank draft for the sum of money he had agreed to pay her waiting on the table alongside her mobile phone. Was he making the point that, unlike her, once he had given his word he stuck to his agreements? He had ordered breakfast for eight o’clock as well and it arrived, the full works just as she liked, but the lump in her throat and the nausea in her tummy prevented her from eating anything. In the end she tucked the bank draft into her bag. Well, she couldn’t just leave it lying there, could she? In the same way she packed the clothes he had bought her into the designer luggage and departed, acknowledging that in the space of a week he had turned her inside out.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘IF Tawny doesn’t tell Cazier soon, I intend to do it for her,’ Sergios Demonides decreed, watching his sister-in-law, Tawny, play ball in the sunshine with his older children, Paris, Milo and Eleni. Tawny’s naturally slender figure made the swelling of her pregnant stomach blatantly obvious in a swimsuit.
‘We can’t interfere like that,’ his wife, Bee, told him vehemently. ‘He hurt her. She needs time to adapt to this new development—’
‘How much time? Is she planning to wait until the baby is born and then tell him that he’s a father?’ Sergios reasoned, unimpressed. ‘A man has a right to know that he has a child coming before its birth. Surely he cannot be as irresponsible as she is—’
‘She’s not irresponsible!’ Bee argued, lifting their daughter, Angeli, into her arms as the black-haired toddler clasped her mother’s knees to steady her still-clumsy toddler steps. ‘She’s just very independent. Have you any idea of how much persuasion I had to use to get her out here for a holiday?’
Outside Tawny glanced uneasily indoors to where her sister and her brother-in-law stood talking intently. She could tell that their attention was centred on her again and she flushed, wishing that Sergios would mind his own business and stop making her feel like such a nuisance. It was typical of the strong-willed Greek to regard his unmarried sister-in-law’s pregnancy as a problem that was his duty to solve.
But that was the only cloud on her horizon in the wake of the wonderful week of luxurious relaxation she had enjoyed on Sergios’s private island, Orestos. London had been cold and wintry when she flew out and she was returning there the following day, flying back to bad weather and her very ordinary job as a waitress in a restaurant. She felt well rested and more grounded after the break she had had with her sister and her lively family though. Sergios had become the guardian of his cousin’s three orphaned children and with the recent addition of their own first child to the mix—the adorable Angeli—Bee was a very busy wife and mother. She was also very happy with her life, although that was an admission that went against the grain for Tawny, who was convinced that she could never have remained as even tempered and easy going as Bee in the radius of Sergios’s domineering nature. Sergios was one of those men who knew the right way to do everything and it was always his way. And yet Bee had this magical knack of just looking at him sometimes when he was in full extrovert flood and he would suddenly shut up and smile at her as if she had waved a magic wand across his forbidding countenance.
‘I can’t bear to think of you going back to work such long hours. You should have rested more while you were here.’ Bee sighed after dinner that evening as the two women sat out on the terrace watching the sun go down.
‘The way you did?’ Tawny teased, recalling how incredibly hectic her half-sister’s schedule had been while she was carrying her first child.
‘I had Sergios for support … and my mother,’ Bee reminded her.
Bee’s disabled mother, Emilia, lived in a cottage in the grounds of their Greek home and was very much a member of their family. In comparison, Tawny’s mother was living with her divorced boyfriend and his children in the house she had purchased with her inheritance from Tawny’s grandfather. She was aghast that her daughter had fallen pregnant outside a relationship and had urged her to have a termination, an attitude that had driven yet another wedge into the already troubled relationship between mother and daughter. No, Tawny could not look for support from that quarter, and while her grandmother, Celestine, was considerably more tolerant when it came to babies, the older woman lived quite a long way from her and with the hours Tawny had to work she only saw the little Frenchwoman about once a month.
‘It’s a shame that you told Navarre that you weren’t pregnant when he phoned you a couple of months ago,’ Bee said awkwardly.
‘I honestly thought it was the truth when I told him that. That first test I did was negative!’ Tawny reminded the brunette ruefully. ‘Do you really think I should have phoned him three weeks later and told him I’d been mistaken?’
‘Yes.’ Bee stayed firm in the face of the younger woman’s look of reproach. ‘It’s Navarre’s baby too. You have to deal with it. The longer you try to ignore the situation, the more complicated it will become.’
Tawny’s eyes stung and she blinked furiously, turning her face away to conceal the turbulent emotions that seemed so much closer to the surface since she had fallen pregnant. She was fourteen weeks along now and she was changing shape rapidly with her tummy protruding, her waist thickening and her breasts almost doubling in size. Ever since she had learned that she had concei
ved she had felt horribly vulnerable and out of control of her body and her life. All too well did she remember her mother’s distressing tales of how Tawny’s father had humiliated her with his angry scornful attitude to her conception of a child he didn’t want. Tawny had cringed at the prospect of putting herself in the same position with a man who was already suspicious of her motives.
‘I know that Navarre hurt you,’ her half-sister murmured unhappily. ‘But you should still tell him.’
‘Somehow I fell for him like a ton of bricks,’ Tawny admitted abruptly, her voice shaking because it was the very first time she had openly acknowledged that unhappy truth, and Bee immediately covered her hand with hers in a gesture of quiet understanding. ‘I never thought I could feel like that about a man and he was back out of my life again before I even realised how much he had got to me. But there was nothing I could do to make things better between us—’
‘How about just keeping your temper and talking to him?’ Bee suggested. ‘That would be a good place to make a start.’
Tawny didn’t trust herself to do that either. How could she talk to a man who would almost certainly want her to go for a termination? Why should she have to justify her desire to bring her baby into the world just because it didn’t suit him? So, she decided to text him the news late that night, saving them both from the awkwardness of a direct confrontation when it was all too likely that either or both of them might say the wrong things.
‘The first test I did was wrong. I am now 14 weeks pregnant,’ she informed him and added, utilising block capitals lest he cherish any doubts, ‘It is YOURS.’
Pressing the send button before she could lose her nerve, she slept that night soothed by the conviction that she had finally bitten the bullet and done what she had to do. Bee was shocked that her sister had decided to break the news in a text but Sergios believed that even that was preferable to keeping her condition a secret.
Navarre was already at work in his imposing office in Paris when Tawny’s text came through and shock and disbelief roared through him like a hurricane-force storm. He wanted to disorder his immaculate cropped hair and shout to the heavens to release the steam building inside him as he read that text. Merde alors! She would be the death of him. How could she make such an announcement by text? How could she text ‘YOURS’ like that as if he were likely to argue the fact when she had been a virgin? He tried to phone her immediately but could not get an answer, for by then Tawny was already on board a flight to London. Within an hour Navarre had cancelled his appointments and organised a trip there as well.
Tawny stopped off at her bedsit only long enough to change for her evening shift at the restaurant and drop off her case. As she had decided that only actual starvation would persuade her to accept money from a man who had called her a good lay to her face, she had not cashed Navarre’s bank draft and had had to work extremely hard to keep on top of all her financial obligations. Luckily some weeks back she had had the good fortune to sell a set of greeting card designs, which had ensured that Celestine’s rent was covered for the immediate future. Tawny’s work as a waitress paid her own expenses and, as her agent had been enthusiastic enough to send a selection of her Frenchman cartoons to several publications, she was even moderately hopeful that her cartoons might soon give her the break she had long dreamt of achieving.
Navarre seated himself in a distant corner of the self-service restaurant where Tawny worked and nursed a cup of the most disgusting black coffee he had ever tasted. Consumed by frustration over the situation she had created by keeping him out of the loop for so long, he watched her emerge from behind the counter to clear tables. And that fast his anger rose. Her streaming torrent of hair was tied back at the nape of her neck, her slender coltish figure lithe in an overall and leggings. At first glance she looked thinner but otherwise unchanged, he decided, subjecting her to a close scrutiny and noting the fined-down line of her jaw. Only when she straightened did he see the rounded swell of her stomach briefly moulded by the fabric of her tunic.
She was expecting his baby and even though she clearly needed to engage in hard menial work to survive, he reflected with brooding resentment and disapproval, she had still not made use of that bank draft he had left in the hotel for her. He had told his bank to inform him the instant the money was drawn and the weeks had passed and he had waited and waited, much as he had waited in vain for some sleazy kiss-and-tell about their affair to be published somewhere. When nothing happened, when his lowest expectations went totally unfulfilled, it had finally dawned on him that this was payback time Tawny-style. In refusing to accept that money from him, in disdaining selling ‘their’ story as she had threatened to do, she was taking her revenge, making her point that he had got her wrong and that she didn’t need him for anything. Navarre understood blunt messages of a challenging nature, although she was the very first woman in his life to try and communicate with him on that aggressive level.
In addition, he had really not needed a shock phone call from her bossy sister Bee to tell him how not to handle her fiery half-sister. Bee Demonides had phoned him out of the blue just after his private jet landed in London and had introduced herself with aplomb. Tawny, he now appreciated, had kept secrets that he had never dreamt might exist in her background, secrets that sadly might have helped him to understand her better. Her sibling was married to one of the richest men in the world and Tawny had not breathed a word of that fact, had indeed ‘oohed’ and ‘ahhed’ over Sam Coulter’s rented castle and the Golden Awards party as if she had no comparable connections or experiences. In fact, from what he had since established from Jacques’s more wide-reaching enquiries, Tawny’s other half-sister, Zara, was married to an Italian banker, who was also pretty wealthy. So, how likely was it that Tawny had ever planned to enrich herself by stealing Navarre’s laptop to sell his secrets to the gutter press? On the other hand why did she feel the need to work in such lowly jobs when she had rich relatives who would surely have been willing to help her find more suitable employment? That was a complete mystery and only the first of several concerning Tawny Baxter, Navarre acknowledged impatiently.
Tawny was unloading a tray into a dishwasher in the kitchen when her boss approached her. ‘There’s a man waiting over by the far window for you … says he’s a friend and he’s here to tell you about a family crisis. I said that you could leave early—we’re quiet this evening. I hope it’s nothing serious.’
Tawny’s first thought was that something awful had happened to her mother and that her mother’s boyfriend, Rob, had come to tell her. Fear clenching her stomach, she grabbed her coat and bag and hurried back out into the restaurant, only to come to a shaken halt when she looked across the tables and saw Navarre seated in the far corner. His dark hair gleamed blue-black below the down lights that accentuated the stunning angles and hollows of his darkly handsome features. He threw back his head and she collided with brilliant bottle-green eyes and somehow she was moving towards him without ever recalling how she had reached that decision.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Navarre urged, striding forwards to greet her before she even got halfway to his table.
Still reeling in consternation from his sudden appearance, Tawny let him guide her outside and into the limousine pulling up at the kerb to collect them. Her hand trembled in the sudden firm hold of his, for their three months apart had felt like a lifetime and she could have done with advance warning of his visit. Thrown into his presence again without the opportunity to dress for the occasion and form a defensive shell, she felt horribly naked and unprepared. Once again, though, he had surprised her in a uniform that underlined the yawning gulf in their status.
‘I wasn’t expecting you—’
‘You thought you could chuck a text bombshell at me and I was so thick-skinned that I would simply carry on as normal?’ Navarre questioned with sardonic emphasis. ‘Even I am not that insensitive.’
Tawny reddened. ‘You took me by surprise.’
&n
bsp; ‘Just as your text took me, ma petite.’
‘Not so petite any longer,’ she quipped.
‘I noticed,’ Navarre admitted flatly, his attention dropping briefly to the tummy clearly visible when she was sitting down. ‘I’m still in shock.’
‘Even after three months I’m still in shock.’
‘Why did you tell me you weren’t pregnant?’
‘I did a test and it was negative. I think I did it too early. A few weeks later when I wasn’t feeling well I bought another test and that one was positive. I didn’t know how to tell you that I’d got it wrong—’
‘Exactement! So, instead you took the easy way out and told me nothing.’
His sarcasm cut like the sudden slash of a knife against tender skin. ‘Well, actually there was nothing easy about anything I’ve gone through since then, Navarre!’ Tawny fired back at him in a sudden surge of spitfire temper. ‘I’ve had all the worry without having anyone to turn to! I’ve had to work even though I was feeling as sick as a dog most mornings and the smell of cooking food made me worse, so working in a restaurant was not a pleasant experience. My hormones were all over the place and I’ve never felt so horribly tired in my life as I did those first weeks!’
‘If only you had accepted the bank draft I gave you. We had an agreement and you earned that money by pretending to be my fiancée,’ he reminded her grittily. ‘But I understand why you refused to touch it.’
Her glacier blue eyes widened in disconcertion. ‘You … do?’
‘That last night we were together I was offensive, inexcusably so,’ Navarre framed in a taut undertone, every word roughened by the effort it demanded of his pride to acknowledge such a fault to a woman.