A Vow of Obligation

by Lynne Graham

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Tawny confirmed, marvelling that such a selfish personality had ever contrived to win Navarre’s loyalty and tenderness. And yet, without a shadow of a doubt, Tia had. Tawny had not been mistaken over what she had thought she had seen in Navarre when he was with his mother on their wedding day. He cared for the volatile woman.

  ‘If you want to sort this out with Luke you will have to let him into the secret,’ Navarre warned his mother levelly.

  Tia told him to mind his own business with a tartness that was very maternal, but which would have been more suited to a little boy than an adult male. Gaspard was summoned to show Tia to her room. Tawny had offered but was imperiously waved away, Tia clearly not yet prepared to accept a friendly gesture from her corner. Tawny grasped that she had a possessive mother-in-law to deal with, for Tia undoubtedly resented Navarre’s loyalty to his wife.

  Tia swept out and the door closed. Navarre looked at Tawny.

  Tawny winced and said limply, ‘Wow, your mother’s quite a character.’

  ‘She’s temperamental when she gets upset. I wanted to tell you but a long time ago I swore never to tell anyone that I was her son and she held me to my promise.’

  ‘Your mother …’ Tawny shook her head very slowly. ‘I never would have guessed that in a million years.’

  Over breakfast and only after Tawny had phoned her sisters to tell them that, no, she really wasn’t concerned about silly stories in the papers, Navarre explained the intricacies of his birth, which had been buried deep and concealed behind a wall of lies to protect Tia’s star power. According to Tia’s official history she had been discovered as a fifteen year old schoolgirl in the street by a famous director. Her first film had won so many awards it had gone global and shot her to stardom. In fact the pretence that she was much younger had simply been a publicity exercise and her kid sister’s birth certificate had been used for proof when Tia was actually twenty-one years old. Soon after her discovery she had fallen pregnant by the famous director. A scandalous affair with a married man threatened to destroy her pristine reputation and her embryo career, so Navarre’s birth had taken place in secrecy. Tia had travelled to Paris with her older sister and had pretended to be her so that her baby could be registered as her sister’s child. That cover up achieved, Tia had returned to show business while paying her sister and her boyfriend to raise Navarre in a Paris flat.

  Tawny was frowning. ‘Then how come you ended up in foster care?’

  ‘I have no memory of my aunt at all. She only kept me for a couple of years. The money Tia used to buy her sister’s silence was spent on drugs and when my aunt died of an overdose I joined the care system. I had no idea I had a mother alive until I was eighteen and at university,’ Navarre extended wryly. ‘I was approached by a lawyer first, carefully sworn to silence—’

  ‘And then you met your mother. Must’ve been a shock,’ Tia remarked.

  An almost boyish expression briefly crossed his lean taut face as he looked back into the past and his handsome mouth took on a wry cast. ‘I was in complete awe of her.’

  Tawny could hardly imagine the full effect of Tia Castelli on a teenager who had been totally alone in the world all his life. Naturally his mother had walked straight into his heart when he had never had anyone of his own before. ‘She’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Tia may not be showing it right now but she does also have tremendous charm. Ever since then we’ve been meeting up at least once a month and we often talk on the phone and email. That’s one of the reasons I was so concerned that someone might have accessed my laptop,’ he confided. ‘I’ve seen her through many, many crises and have become her rock in every storm. I’m very fond of her.’

  Tawny nodded. ‘Even though she won’t own up to you in public?’

  ‘What would that mean to me at my age? I know she’s far from perfect,’ Navarre acknowledged with a dismissive lift of an ebony brow. ‘But what else does she know? She was an abused child from a very poor home.’

  Tawny was not as understanding of his mother’s flaws as he was. ‘But what did she ever do for you? You had a miserable childhood.’

  ‘But it made me strong, chérie. As for Tia, even after decades of fame she still lives in terror of losing everything she has. She did what she thought best for me at the time. She helped me find my first job, invested in my first company, undoubtedly helped me to become the success that I am today.’

  ‘That’s just the power of money you’re talking about and I doubt if it meant much to someone as rich as she must be.’ Her eyes glittered silver with moisture, the tightening of her throat muscles as she fought back tears lending her voice a hoarse edge. ‘I’m thinking of the child you were, growing up without a mother or love or anyone of your own … I can’t bear the thought of that.’

  In an abrupt movement that lacked his normal measured grace, Navarre vaulted upright and walked round the table to lift Tawny up out of her seat. ‘Je vais bien … I’m OK. But I admit that I didn’t know what love was until I met you.’

  Assuming that he had guessed how she felt about him, Tawny reddened. ‘Am I that obvious?’

  A gentle fingertip traced the silvery trail of a tear on her cheek.

  ‘There is nothing obvious about you. In fact you defied my understanding from the first moment we met and, the more I saw of you, the more desperately I wanted to know what it was about you which got to me when other women never had.’

  Her lashes flicked up on curious eyes. ‘I … got to you? In what way?’

  ‘In every way a woman can appeal to a man. First to my body, then to my brain and finally to my heart,’ Navarre specified. ‘And you dug in so deep in my heart, I was wretched without you when we were apart but far too proud to come looking for you again.’

  Tawny rested a hand on a broad shoulder to steady herself. ‘Wretched?’ she repeated doubtfully, unable to associate such a word with him.

  A rueful smile shadowed Navarre’s wide eloquent mouth. ‘I was very unhappy and unsettled for weeks on end. I thought I was infatuated with you. I tried so hard to fight it and forget about you but it didn’t work.’

  ‘Navarre …’ Tawny breathed uncertainly. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you love me?’

  ‘Obviously not doing a very good job of it. I think it was love at first sight.’ His eyes gazed down into hers full of warmth and tenderness. ‘I’ve been in love with you for months. I knew I loved you long before I married you. Why do you think I was so keen to put that wedding ring on your hand?’

  ‘The b-baby.’

  Navarre drew her back against him and splayed a possessive hand across the firm swell of her stomach. ‘I have very good intentions towards our baby but I married you because I loved you and wanted to share my life with you, n’est ce pas?’

  ‘But you said you were strongly attracted to me and that that was enough.’

  ‘I said what I had to say to get that ring on your finger for real,’ Navarre breathed, pressing his mouth to the sensitive nape of her neck and making her shiver with sudden awareness. ‘I’m a ruthless man. I would have said whatever it took to achieve that goal because I believed the end result would be worth it. I was determined that you would be mine for ever, ma petite.’

  Overjoyed by that admission, Tawny twisted round and pressed her hands to his strong cheekbones to align their mouths and kiss him with slow, sweet brevity as more questions that had to be answered bubbled up in her brain. ‘What on earth was on that laptop of yours?’

  ‘CCC buyout stuff and some very personal emails from Tia. She tells me everything.’

  ‘No wonder Luke’s jealous of you.’

  ‘As long as Tia refuses to tell him the truth I am powerless to alter that situation.’

  Tawny treated him to a shrewd appraisal. ‘She’s part of the reason you wanted a fake fiancée for the Golden Awards, isn’t she?’

  ‘I promised Tia that I would bring a girlfriend and I too believed it to be a sensible precaution
where Luke was concerned. Unfortunately the lady backed out at the last minute and—’

  ‘And you hired me instead,’ Tawny slotted in. ‘What happened to the lady who backed out?’

  ‘I told her that I’d met someone else when I got back to Paris.’

  ‘But that wasn’t true … you had already left me.’

  His eyes glimmered. ‘But I still didn’t want anyone else. You had me on a chain by then. Don’t you remember that last night in London when I came to your door?’

  Tawny stiffened. ‘I also recall how it ended with you telling me I was a good—’

  Navarre pulled her up against him and gazed down at her in reproof. ‘Wasn’t that in response to you threatening to tell the world what I was like in bed?’

  A sensual shimmer of response wafted through Tawny and she pressed closer, tucking her head into his shoulder to breathe in the deliriously addictive scent of his skin. ‘Well, now that you mention it, it might have been,’ she teased, acknowledging that she had met her match while relishing the claim she had had him on a chain by that stage. A chain of love and commitment he refused to give to a woman who was a failed thief threating to tell all to the newspapers? She didn’t blame him for that, she couldn’t blame him for walking away at that point, for one thing she did appreciate about the man she loved was his very strong moral compass.

  ‘When I saw you with Tia at the wedding I feared the worst,’ she confided as his arms tightened round her.

  ‘I was desperate to tell you the truth and relieved when you didn’t force a scene because I didn’t want to break my promise to my mother,’ he admitted grimly. ‘But I should have broken the promise and told you then. Unfortunately it took me a few weeks to appreciate that as my wife you have to have the strongest claim to my loyalty.’

  ‘Sorry about the wedding night that never was,’ she mumbled ruefully. ‘I felt so insecure after seeing how close you were to her. I could see that there was a connection between you and I love you so much …’

  Navarre pushed up her chin and stared down at her searchingly. ‘Since when?’ he demanded and his beautiful mouth quirked. ‘Since you saw my beautiful castle in France?’

  His wife dealt him a reproving look. ‘I shall treat that suggestion with the contempt it deserves! No, I fell for you long before that. Remember that breakfast in Scotland after that nasty newspaper spread which revealed that I was a maid? When you brought me my food and stood by me in front of everyone as though nothing had happened, I really loved you for it …’

  ‘Snap. I loved you for your dignity and cool, ma petite.’ A tender smile softened the often hard line of his shapely mouth. Long fingers stroked her spine as he crushed her to him and kissed her with a breathless hunger that made her knees weak.

  For once, Tawny had a small breakfast because the conversation and what followed were too entertaining to take a rain check on. He urged her upstairs to the bed they had only shared once and they lost themselves in the passion they had both restrained for so long.

  In the lazy aftermath of quenching their desire, Tawny stared at her handsome husband and said, ‘What on earth game have you been playing with me all these weeks we’ve been married?’

  ‘It was no game.’ Navarre laughed. ‘We had no courtship—we never dated. I was trying to go back to the beginning and do everything differently in the hope that you would start feeling for me what I felt for you.’

  In dismay at that simple exclamation and touched that he had gone to that amount of idealistic effort without receiving the appreciation he had undoubtedly deserved, Tawny clamped a hand to her lips. ‘Oh, my goodness, how stupid am I that I didn’t see that?’

  Navarre looked a touch superior and stretched luxuriantly against the tumbled sheets while regarding her with intense appreciation. ‘Of the two of us, I’m the romantic one. Don’t forget that reality when you next draw a cartoon in which I figure merely as a skirt-chasing Frenchman!’

  Tawny smoothed a possessive hand over his spectacular abs and smiled down at him with unusual humility. ‘I won’t,’ she promised happily. ‘I love you just the way you are.’

  EPILOGUE

  JOIE, named for the joy she had brought her adoring parents, toddled across the floor and presented Luke Convery with a toy brick.

  ‘She’s cute but I wouldn’t want one of my own,’ the rock musician said with an apologetic grimace as he dropped down on his knees to place the brick where Navarre and Tawny’s daughter, with her fantastically curly black hair and pale blue eyes, wanted it placed. ‘I grew up the youngest of nine kids and I’ve never wanted that kind of hassle for myself.’

  ‘Kids aren’t for everyone,’ Tawny agreed, thinking of how much her mother had resented being a parent, yet Susan Baxter had proved to be a much more interested grandmother than her daughter had expected. In fact mother and daughter had become a good deal closer since Joie’s birth in London eighteen months earlier.

  Tawny often spent weekends in London to meet up with her sisters and her mother before travelling down to see her grandmother. She had been married to Navarre for two years and had never been happier or more content. She and Navarre seemed to fit like two halves of a whole. Her liveliness had lightened his character and brought out his sense of humour, while his cooler reserve had quietened her down just a tiny bit. Through her cartoons, Tawny had become quite a familiar face in Parisian society, and when ‘The English Wife’ cartoons had run out of steam she had come up with a cartoon strip based on an average family, which had done even more for her career.

  A peal of laughter sounded in the hall of Navarre and Tawny’s spacious London home followed by an animated burst of Italian, and Luke grinned and sprang upright. ‘Tia’s back …’

  Tawny’s mother-in-law, swathed in a spectacular crimson dress and looking ravishingly beautiful, posed like the Hollywood star she was in the doorway, and her husband grinned and pulled her into his arms with scant concern for their audience. Within the space of thirty seconds they had vanished upstairs. Tia had just finished filming in Croatia and Luke was about to set off on tour round the USA. As they had been apart for weeks and Luke had a stopover in the city Tia had invited herself and her husband to dinner and to spend the night.

  From the moment that Tia had finally faced reality and persuaded Navarre to take care of the challenging task of telling Luke who he really was, all unease between the two couples had vanished. Luke had been very shocked, but relieved by the news that he had no reason to feel threatened by Navarre’s bond with Tia, and certainly the revelation did not seem to have dented Luke’s devotion to his demanding wife. Navarre would be Tia’s big dark secret until the day he died but that didn’t bother him and if the paparazzi were still chasing around trying to make a scandal out of his encounters with his mother, it no longer worried him or her. The people that mattered knew the truth and Navarre had no further need to keep secrets from Tawny.

  Tia was a fairly uninterested grandmother, freezing with dismay if Joie and her not always perfectly clean hands got too close to her finery. Tia’s life revolved round her latest movie, her most recent reviews and Luke, whom she uncritically adored. She had initially taken a step back from her son but that hadn’t lasted for long, Tawny thought wryly, for Tia rejoiced in a strong manly shoulder to lean on and Navarre was very good at fulfilling that role when Luke was unavailable. Tia’s marriage had become rather more stable and fortunately the passionate disputes had died down a little, so Navarre was much less in demand in that field. Tawny, who had nursed certain fears, also had to admit that Tia never interfered as a mother-in-law. She had become friendlier, but at heart Tia Castelli would always be a larger-than-life star and she didn’t really ‘do’ normal family relationships or even understand them.

  Navarre, who had flown Tia back from Europe in his private jet, appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Where have our guests gone?’ Tawny’s tall, darkly handsome husband enquired, bending down to scoop up the toddler shouting with exciteme
nt at his appearance.

  Tawny watched with amusement as Navarre’s immaculate appearance was destroyed by his daughter’s enthusiastic welcome. His black hair was ruffled, his tie yanked and he was almost strangled by the little arms tightening round his neck, but he handled his livewire child with loving amusement.

  ‘Our guests are staging their reunion … we just may find ourselves dining alone tonight,’ Tawny warned him, her easy smile illuminating her face.

  ‘That would be perfect,’ Navarre confided as he set Joie down to run to her nanny, who had appeared in the hall. ‘Merci, Antoinette.’

  ‘I don’t really want company either when you’ve been away for a couple of days,’ Navarre admitted bluntly once the door closed on their nanny’s exit with their daughter. ‘Whose idea was this set-up anyway?’

  ‘You need to ask? Tia’s, of course. You’re so possessive, Monsieur Cazier,’ Tawny teased, but when those intent green eyes looked at her like that she knew she was loved and she adored that sensation of warm acceptance.

  ‘And with you getting more beautiful every day that’s not going to change any time soon, ma petite.’

  ‘How do I know you haven’t simply become less picky since you met me?’ Tawny teased.

  ‘Because every month that I have you and Joie in my life I love you even more,’ he murmured with roughened sincerity as he drew her into his arms. ‘My life would be so empty, so bleak without you both.’

  ‘I missed you,’ she admitted in reward.

  ‘So much,’ Navarre growled, leaning in for a hungry, demanding kiss. ‘What time’s dinner?’

  ‘I thought, since our guests have made themselves scarce, we could go out … later,’ Tawny whispered encouragingly.

  ‘This is why I love you so much,’ Navarre swore with passionate admiration. ‘You’ve worked out what I want before I even speak.’