Chateau D'Armor

by Rebecca Stratton

  Jesamine realised he was making the point to impress her with the fact that he had insisted he knew Charles Louis far better than she did. From the beginning he had cast doubts on her vision of Charles Louis as the loyal lover of Louise Sutton, and she had not believed him because she preferred not to. She could have expressed the same doubts now, but somehow this time she did believe him. Why should she not? she thought a little wildly. Was not Paul himself cast in the same mould—unless appearances were deceptive?

  “The French taste for l’amour, no doubt?” she suggested rather bitterly, and Paul shrugged, his eyes sweeping over her flushed face.

  “Possible,” he agreed quietly. “Does that trouble you so deeply, ma chere?”

  She shook her head, glancing up at him as she did so, glad to see that the wolfish smile was replaced by another, more gentle expression. “It doesn’t trouble me at all,” she denied, “but it does disappoint me that he wasn’t—loyal.”

  He smiled slowly, his eyes on her mouth. “One man, one woman?” he suggested. “Is that your ideal, ma chere?”

  “I suppose so,” Jesamine admitted defensively. “It’s every woman’s ideal!”

  He nodded, pulling his mouth into a grimace as he did so. “But not that of every man, cherie, unfortunately!”

  She was not at all sure what her next move should be. It would be difficult to make a dignified withdrawal in the circumstances, but she could not stay there any longer, not with her senses responding so urgently to that curiously gentle look in his eyes. “I have to go,” she told him huskily.

  He was standing immediately in front of her and she would have to get past him to reach the door. Somehow she could not yet find the will to simply brush past him, and while she hesitated he looked down at her steadily. The soft pink dress she wore was soiled and one side of its hem had a ragged tear in it that she had not even noticed until now, but even with a smear of dust across one cheek and her hair dishevelled there was an almost fragile look about her that was appealing.

  “You think I will let you go now that you are here?” Paul asked in that deep, seductive voice she remembered from once before, and she looked up swiftly, her eyes wide and wary.

  She tried to judge what he would do if she attempted to just walk past him, and decided he would in all probability merely laugh at her, and let her go. “I’m going to my room,” she said in a small breathless voice. “Please move out of my way, Paul!”

  He said nothing, but as she stepped to one side and tried to pass him his right hand reached out and grasped her arm, pulling her close against him. She was facing him, their arms touching and his face only inches from hers, that spicy, masculine scent mingling with the warmth of his body and having the most devastating effect on her senses.

  “Not yet,” he said, barely above a whisper.

  “Paul—”

  She could feel her legs shaking like leaves and threatening to collapse under her, and she looked up only to find the expression in his eyes even more disturbing than her own imagination. She was trembling and unresisting as, wordlessly, he drew her round in front of him and slid his arms around her, drawing her still nearer until she seemed almost moulded to the firm vigour of his body, pressed closer by the pressure of his strong hands at her back.

  She lifted her mouth to him instinctively, half closing her eyes as the rugged dark features filled her vision for a moment before his searching mouth pressed deep into her own. Breathless, as if she had been running hard, she lifted her arms and put them around his neck, laying her forehead against his chest while he kissed the soft skin at the nape of her neck and beside her ear.

  Slowly she rolled her head back, shaking back her long hair and closing her eyes again in sensuous pleasure as he pressed his lips to the smooth softness of her throat, discovering a kind of delirious excitement she had never known existed until now.

  There was a warmth, a tingling awareness that her own body responded to instinctively as he held her, a growing need to love him that was shattering in its intensity. “Cherie!” She stirred, looking up at him with a glowing warmth in her eyes that lent them a darkness they did not normally have, and she smiled. “Tu es belle!” he whispered. “You are lovely, ma chere!” He pulled her close again and kissed her with an abandon that took her breath away.

  Opening her eyes, she looked at him, her heart beating so fast that she could only manage a small, breathless-sounding voice. “I know—” she began, and laughed shakily. “I know I’m being quite—idiotic,” she told him, her hands placed side by side on the breadth of his chest, “but at the moment it doesn’t seem to matter.”

  Paul laughed. A deep, satisfied sound that vibrated through her as she watched it reflected in his steel grey eyes. “Then be a complete idiote, ma chere,” he said, “and come to dinner with me!”

  “Dinner?” She looked at him a little dazedly, vaguely remembering that it must be close on dinner time already. “But aren’t we supposed to be having dinner very soon?” she asked.

  She was still held firmly in his arms and his very informal garb did not yet strike her as she looked up at him, unaware of anything at the moment but the thrill of being close to him, and Paul bent and touched her mouth lightly with his own, smiling and shaking his head. “I wish to drive you into Nantes and have dinner there, ma belle,” he told her. “Will you come with me?”

  Jesamine looked up at him in silence for a moment, brought down to earth at last by the need to make a decision. At any other time before this she would have viewed his invitation with extreme suspicion, wondering what lay behind it. Now she was anxious to accept, but only if she was sure of his reasons for asking her, and her blue eyes searched his face, a slow, anxious search that took in every familiar aspect of it.

  “I’d love to come if you really want me to,” she said in a small unsteady voice that showed her uncertainty, and he pulled her close again, smiling down at her.

  “Mais naturellement I want you to come!” he said. “Why else would I ask you, ma chere, hmm?” She did not answer and after a second or two he lifted her chin and kissed her mouth with a gentleness that was as devastating as his former passion had been. “Why do you doubt me, Jesamine?” he asked, and she shook her head.

  “Perhaps because I don’t—I can’t quite understand you,” she confessed at last in a small voice, and he laughed softly, shaking his head.

  “Then do not try, petite!” he said.

  The dizzying moment of uncaring was over, though she was reluctant to leave his arms. Only now she was too aware of the thinness of the silk robe and of the warm vigour of the body beneath it, of the intimacy of their situation, close together in the privacy of his bedroom, and she had an uneasy suspicion at the back of her mind that she was perhaps following rather too closely in the footsteps of Louise Sutton after all.

  “Paul—”

  “You will come?” He gave her no time to finish, and the familiar challenging look was in his eyes again as he looked down at her. It was a look she found hard to resist, no matter how foolish she might be and she nodded.

  “I’ll come,” she said huskily. “But I must—”

  Paul silenced her with a kiss. “You must remove the dust of ages, ma chere,” he told her with a laugh. “The rest you may leave to me!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT was while she was changing her dress that it suddenly occurred to Jesamine that by agreeing to go out to dinner with Paul she had taken a very definite step in what James would call the wrong direction. She had been so sure that she could control the situation between herself and Paul and until now she had managed to remain, if not completely unaffected, at least fairly firmly in control of her emotions.

  Finding herself so suddenly and unexpectedly in his bedroom like that had put her at a disadvantage, and Paul’s reaction had not been quite what she expected. The fact that he would take advantage of the situation the way he had was something she could have anticipated, but the invitation to have dinner with him seemed
, on reflection, an uncharacteristically impulsive gesture for someone as cool and calculating as she had thought Paul to be. It was that sudden and totally unexpected invitation that was making her wary; she could not help wondering exactly what had prompted it.

  Surveying her reflection in the mirror, she sighed. Maybe she was being an utter fool for accepting, James would surely say she was, but she had been unable to resist it, and there seemed little she either could or wanted to do about the growing intensity of her feelings for Paul. Having dinner with him was likely to undermine the last shreds of her resistance, but at the moment there was nothing she could do about that either.

  From the alcove beside the window Louise Sutton looked at her with sober blue eyes, and it was almost like looking into a mirror. Louise had loved and lost, but there was no way of knowing whether she had been heartbroken or merely resigned when her lover returned to his own country and married a French wife. Not even her letters revealed so much about her. Perhaps she had realised that one man, one woman was not possible in her case and had accepted the fact.

  Jesamine stood looking at the miniature for a second or two, as she often did, for she never failed to be fascinated by the pretty little English girl who had forged a link all those years ago between her own family and the autocratic d’Armors. She reached out suddenly and touched the small painted face gently with a fingertip.

  “Oh, Louise,” she whispered, “you certainly made things hard for me when you took a d’Armor for your lover—but for you I wouldn’t be here.”

  The sound of a door closing along the gallery somewhere snatched her back to reality and she turned from the fascination of Louise Sutton to pick up her bag from the bed. A last look in the mirror confirmed her suspicion that there really was a sombre darkness in her blue eyes that was completely at variance with the way a girl ought to feel going on a date with someone like Paul d’Armor, and she shook back her long hair in a gesture of impatience. She was an intelligent young woman and should surely be capable of enjoying an evening in the company of a man without letting herself be fooled into falling hopelessly in love with him—even if he was Paul d’Armor.

  She left her bedroom with her chin angled determinedly and almost collided with Madame d’Armor. Apologising hastily and rather breathlessly, she wondered just how Paul had explained their sudden decision to go out to dinner, and she eyed the old lady uncertainly for a moment. It was possible she might object to her grandson wining and dining her husband’s latest employee, but Jesamine thought not.

  “Paul has told me of your plans to drive into Nantes for dinner, mon enfant,” she told her, but still betrayed nothing of her own feelings in the matter.

  Jesamine laughed, a vague uneasy laugh. “They were rather more Paul’s plans than mine, madame,” she told her. “He isn’t the easiest person to refuse, as you’ll know!”

  Clothilde d’Armor studied her flushed face for a moment and Jesamine could not even guess what was going on behind those kindly eyes. Then she placed a hand on her arm and shook her head, frowning slightly. “But did you wish to refuse, enfant?” she asked.

  Jesamine, not even sure if she knew the answer herself, took a moment or two to answer. Certainly she had no real objection to going with him, except for lack of confidence in her own willpower she would have been delighted with the prospect. “I didn’t actually want to refuse,” she said. “It’s just that—” She shrugged, laughing again, that vague uneasy laugh. “Oh, of course I want to go!” she said with determined conviction. “I’ll have a marvellous time and probably get a little drunk to celebrate my first evening out in France—my first for over two months!”

  “Jesamine, ma chere—” Madame d’Armor’s slender fingers tightened suddenly on her arm and there was something in her manner that Jesamine found both puzzling and disturbing. She hesitated to go on as if, having started, she regretted her impulsiveness, and Jesamine waited patiently for her to go on. The look in her eyes suggested anxiety rather than disapproval, so it was not that she objected to the outing. “I have become—fond of you, mon enfant,” she went on after a while. “I feel for you almost as if you were—my own.”

  “Louise,” Jesamine whispered, and gently squeezed the fingers on her arm.

  During the more than two months that Jesamine had been at the chateau not one word had been said of Louise d’Armor, and it occurred to her as she looked at the old lady how much of a strain such reticence must impose on her. She must have loved Louise very much; Clothilde d’Armor was the kind of woman who would dote on an only daughter, but it was debatable whether a complete and unending silence on the subject of her life and death was in any way a comfort to her.

  “You know?” The dark eyes had a touchingly anxious look that Jesamine found affecting, and again she squeezed her fingers gently.

  “Only that she lived for a very short time, madame,” she told her.

  Madame d’Armor was nodding her understanding. “Ah oui,” she said, “la chapelle!”

  So Paul had told her about that unauthorised visit to the little chapel—it did not really surprise her. “I found the little church by accident,” she explained carefully. It was like breaking down the first staves in a barrier, and she almost held her breath for fear she trod too carelessly and the subject was closed to her again. “Madame d’Armor, if you—”

  At that moment she caught sight of Paul striding along the gallery towards them, and withdrew her hand swiftly from the old lady’s arm. It would not be beyond Paul to suspect such confidence with his grandmother and she had no desire to raise controversies here and now. She regretted that the moment was lost, for she guessed that it would not be easy to establish another such moment of rapport, but she drew back from letting Paul know that she had been close to hearing about his mother at last. She had seen too often how he reacted to any suggestion of curiosity from her on that subject.

  He was not wearing evening dress, but a dark grey suit of impeccable cut that fitted his tall lean frame to perfection. A cream shirt threw his rugged brown features into contrast, and the now familiar smell of his aftershave completely banished any connection with the heat and dust of the vineyards where he spent the greater part of his days. Seeing him so well groomed, so assertively and aggressively masculine, she felt herself trembling despite her vow to keep a firm control on the situation.

  She had changed into a pale green dress and draped a soft cream cashmere shawl around her shoulders instead of a wrap, and his grey eyes swept appraisingly over her as he placed an arm lightly about his grandmother’s shoulders. Bending his head, he kissed her brow with a gentleness that could still surprise Jesamine.

  “You will forgive us, Grand’mere, n’est-ce pas?” he begged in that deeply persuasive voice that Jesamine was all too familiar with, and Madame d’Armor turned her head and looked up at him.

  “You will be late?” she guessed, and he smiled, that slightly wolfish smile that made Jesamine’s pulses flutter warningly.

  “Mais oui, cherie, almost certainly we will be late!” Once more he looked at Jesamine and one fair brow was raised enquiringly. “N’est-ce pas, Jesamine?” he asked, as if it was she who would ultimately decide what time they returned. “You do not have—scruples that demand you return to the chateau on the stroke of midnight, like Cendrillon, do you, ma chere?”

  “No, of course I don’t!” She denied it hastily, but flushed under Madame d’Armor’s curious scrutiny. She gripped her hands tightly over the small evening purse she carried and fervently hoped that he was not going to start off the evening by trying to make her angry. “And I assure you, Paul,” she told him, “that I don’t feel in the least like Cinderella!”

  For several seconds she looked at him and his eyes glittered with laughter, so that she wondered rather despairingly if it was going to be so different after all. But then he laughed and shook his head, bending once more to kiss his grandmother’s forehead. “Tres bien,” he said, “then let us go, petite, before it grows too late!
Au revoir, Grand’mere, a tout a l’heure!”

  “Paul!” He turned back to her, his hand already under Jesamine’s elbow, ready to go, and the old lady looked at him for a second, then spoke to him in rapid and urgent French, her eyes anxious.

  He smiled, a slow warm smile that was reassuring even without words, and he left Jesamine for a moment and took his grandmother’s hand in his. He too spoke in his own tongue, his voice low and persuasive, then he raised the old lady’s hand to his lips and kissed her fingers. “Ne te fache pas, cherie,” he told her, and once more took Jesamine’s arm.

  It was getting dark as they drove out of Grosvallee and on up the steep road where she had had her first encounter with Paul, and Jesamine wondered if he too remembered the incident. She had been over the spot only the once, and could not be sure she would recognise it again, especially in the near darkness, but Paul turned suddenly and smiled at her as they approached a sharp bend with the valley falling away below.

  “What shall we do if a petite idiote in a hired auto comes around this bend on the wrong side of the road, ma chere?” he asked, then laughed as he gave his attention to the road once more.

  “Treat her a little more gallantly than you did me, I hope!” Jesamine retorted swiftly, but found it hard not to smile as she looked at the rugged profile barely discernible in the deepening darkness. It seemed their relationship had been fraught with incident from the beginning, and she wondered if it could ever be any different. “Do you realise,” she asked him, “that I’ve never been this far since?”

  “Non?” For a moment she glimpsed the white gleam of his smile and guessed his eyes were bright with that familiar and disturbing laughter. “Do you feel that you have been—neglected, ma chere?” he asked, and she hastily sought to deny any such implication.

  “Oh no, of course not!” she said. “I wasn’t complaining, I merely remarked on the fact that I haven’t been further than the village since I arrived—I’ve been too busy!”