Avoiding Mr Right

by Sophie Weston

  ‘That’s not kind. I’m not at my best at the moment.’

  Luc swung round and looked at her.

  ‘I’m not talking about how you look. I’m talking about how you feel—and what you do about it.’

  ‘I said I was sorry—’ she began stiffly.

  He interrupted. ‘Everyone at arm’s length, Christina? Or just me?’

  ‘I told you. I have had my fair share—’

  ‘Of non-average love affairs. Yes, I know that’s what you said.’ His voice was dry. ‘It sounds ideal, admirably under control. Has it occurred to you that one day you just might find you’re not in control any more?’

  ‘No,’ said Christina sharply, although it was exactly the suspicion that was beginning to grow and grow inside her newly made body. It scared her half to death.

  She looked at him. Even in swimming trunks, with his drying hair wildly untidy, even speaking in that quiet, reasonable voice, Luc Henri radiated an arrogance which was all the more powerful for being unconscious. She had never met anyone like him before. It was breathtaking.

  Christina realised suddenly that that arrogance must have grown out of his making other people do exactly what he wanted for years and years. She straightened her shoulders. Well, not me, she promised herself. Never me!

  She ran her fingers through her hair and said with assumed lightness, ‘I need to be getting back. At least, if I’m going to keep my job...’

  Luc looked at her. His eyes were black. He seemed to be hanging onto his temper by a thread.

  ‘And that’s all?’

  Christina shrugged and picked up her shoes.

  ‘I know it’s the nastiest job I’ve had for a long time but it’s all I’ve got. At least there’s only another three weeks to go.’

  Luc glanced at the sea. ‘A lot can happen in three weeks.’

  ‘I know,’ she said with feeling. ‘On present form, I just hope it doesn’t include drowning.’

  He seemed to hesitate. ‘Or meeting your employer, presumably,’ he said at last.

  Christina was surprised. She had forgotten the detestable, absent Prince. She made a face. ‘He may not turn up. Even if he does, I don’t expect the cook will have much to do with the great man. As long as he pays my wages—I don’t have to be in love with him.’

  There was an odd, charged silence. Then Luc said slowly, ‘No, you don’t, do you?’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LUC’S mood seemed to change after that. He still smiled but he seemed to have gone away somehow. Christina was chilled. She could not think what she had said to make him retreat like that.

  Unless, she thought suddenly, talking about the Prince of Kholkhastan reminded Luc that he had a job to do and that he was hardly getting on with it. She decided it would be a good thing to make it plain how little she knew about her employer before he decided to try to pump her for information.

  ‘Where is Kholkhastan?’ she asked, in pursuance of this policy.

  He frowned. ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘I’d never heard of it until I took this job.’

  He shrugged. ‘You’re not alone. It’s a small principality in the Himalayas.’

  ‘A principality? Isn’t that rather unusual?’

  ‘Say unique and you’d be nearer the mark.’ Luc sounded remote, almost bored, yet Christina detected some sort of feeling there—a feeling he was deliberately hiding from her, she was sure.

  ‘So how did it come to be?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Who knows? A combination of chance, superpower diplomacy and sheer bloody-mindedness probably.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  He looked out to sea, his eyes narrowing. ‘In the nineteenth century, the British Empire came face to face with the Russian Empire in the Himalayas. When both sides had lost enough battles, they decided to leave the remaining nations intact as a buffer between them. During the twentieth century, the others got taken over or had revolts. Kholkhastan survived. It was too small and too remote for anyone to bother to invade.’

  ‘No internal revolts either?’ asked Christina, fascinated.

  ‘The ruling family were very conscientious. The good of the people came before personal gratification. So there was nothing much to revolt against.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like the tennis-playing playboy I’ve been hearing about,’ Christina said drily.

  An odd expression crossed his face. ‘You don’t want to believe everything you hear,’ he said harshly. ‘He pays his dues.’

  She stared, her suspicions reviving. ‘Are you sure you don’t know him?’

  He seemed to shake himself. ‘You could get that out of any newspaper library. If you were interested.’

  Christina shook her head vigorously. ‘I’m not. I just want this job to be over. Then I’m away. Too many tensions.’

  The moment she said it she could have kicked herself. Not that Luc said anything, but from the way his eyes narrowed Christina suddenly found herself remembering that he could well be a journalist. The last thing the Princess and her children needed was for Christina to chat to the world’s press about the fiasco that was the Lady Elaine’s current voyage.

  Before he could demand further details, she said hurriedly, ‘It must be getting late. I should go back.’

  She scrambled to her feet. Luc looked irritated but did not try to dissuade her. He drove her back to the Lady Elaine in barbed silence.

  When they arrived he brought the limousine to a halt at the end of the quay. He turned off the engine and turned to her.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Christina swiftly before he could speak. She heaved down on the doorhandle. It was remarkably stiff.

  ‘Christina—’

  ‘It was a lovely swim,’ she interrupted, still pushing at the handle. ‘I—What is wrong with this door?’

  ‘Central locking by the driver,’ he said with complete sang-froid. His eyes laughed at her. All hint of his earlier remoteness had gone. ‘When am I going to see you again?’

  ‘What?’ Christina stopped attacking the doorhandle and stared at him. ‘Are you telling me you’ve locked me in?’

  Luc looked amused.

  ‘Entirely for your own safety,’ he said soothingly. ‘You might have fallen out at any of those hairpin bends. When?’

  Christina pushed back her hair with hands that trembled a little. ‘I don’t go out with men who turn locks on me,’ she flashed.

  He flicked a switch on the driver’s console. There was a soft click. ‘There, you’re free. When?’

  He looked into her eyes. The amusement was superficial. Underneath it, she could see, he was tough and very determined. Quite suddenly Christina stopped trembling. She was shaken by that expression—and the intensity with which she wanted to see him again, in spite of everything. ‘Dangerous seas’, she reminded herself, her mouth drying.

  He had not given her a convincing explanation of his presence in the little port. She was almost certain that he was here snooping on the Prince’s family for some gossip column. Two good reasons not to see him again. And the wild way her heart was beating made a convincing third.

  This was no time to hedge, she realised suddenly. No vague implication that she would see him when she had some free time would do. This was important. She had to state her position and hold to it. Stand your ground, she told herself.

  She took a deep breath and said quietly, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  She thought he would contradict her but he was too clever for that. Instead his mouth tilted cynically. ‘You are almost certainly right. When?’

  Christina shook her head. ‘You don’t understand. I mean—’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Luc said harshly. ‘I even agree with you. We know nothing about each other but it’s obvious we don’t have much in common. There are more reasons than I can count why it would be better if we didn’t meet again.’

  Christina was bewildered. ‘Then...’

  Luc reached out and took
her by the wrist. The words died in her throat.

  She sat there looking at him dumbly. Her pulses thundered. His thumb moved over the softness of her inner wrist in a caress as light as thistledown. He must be able to feel her blood racing under his fingertips, she thought muzzily.

  ‘Some things have nothing to do with reason,’ he said. He sounded almost angry.

  Close to, the dark eyes had flecks of amber in them. They were quite unreadable. Christina watched, mesmerised, as the handsome head descended.

  She thought confusedly, Grown men, sophisticated men don’t go kissing girls in cars as if they were schoolboys on a first date. I don’t kiss people in cars. I’m not some sex-starved adolescent. I don’t believe this.

  It was not like the other times. On the beach Luc had been quite simply bent on seduction. In Costa’s he had been angry—angry with her and, if Christina was any judge, angry with himself. He was not angry any more. Not angry but not—quite—in control either.

  He kissed her with long, slow sensuality. Practised sensuality. Christina just managed to recognise it, though her senses were whirling and her hands clung to him in spite of herself. His lips were soft, barely making contact, but her skin felt as if it had been sensitised through to her bones by his touch. She quivered as his lips travelled from her mouth to the vulnerable hollow at the base of her throat. She felt the tip of his tongue there, very gentle, utterly devastating. Her eyes closed and her head fell back with a soft moan.

  He gathered her up against his body. She went to him bonelessly, mindlessly.

  He murmured something, sounding shaken. His words were blurred against her skin but it did not sound like any language that Christina had ever heard before. In her present state that hardly surprised her. Nothing about this encounter bore any resemblance to anything that had ever happened to her before.

  She moved in his arms, arching towards him. He caught his breath. For a moment he went very still, as if she had surprised him. Christina opened dazzled eyes.

  He was looking at her mouth. His eyes had gone almost black. There was a blind, hungry look about him. In other circumstances that look would have alarmed Christina. Here, now, it charged her heart with a sort of fierce triumph.

  His eyes lifted, met hers. Oh, yes, the passion was unmistakable. Christina was shaken by the depth of that passion. And it was not anger. But it was not wholly welcome to him either, she saw. Beneath the passion there was a cynicism, a bleakness even. As she watched, his mouth tilted wryly. It looked as if he was acknowledging some private joke—a joke against the whole situation.

  Christina stared, chilled, even as her body still resonated to his touch. Was he laughing at her or himself? And which would be worse?

  ‘Reason?’ he murmured. ‘I think I forgot what it was the moment I saw you.’

  He was suddenly closer, his face so near that it made her dizzy to keep him in focus. Her suspicions seemed suddenly irrelevant. Christina closed her eyes.

  Luc’s hands were in her hair, holding her head to receive his kiss. It was not the kiss of a man who was laughing at her.

  Christina forgot that Luc was a stranger, that he had told her nothing about himself, that he had followed her and ordered her about in a way that she did not accept from anyone. She forgot that he was probably spying on the Princess.

  In fact she forgot, as if it had never been, her whole careful policy on avoiding involvement, which had carried her unscathed through six Mediterranean summers. She forgot principles, prudence and even common sense. All she knew was that something deep in her recognised Luc’s kiss—and rose up to meet it.

  For a few wild seconds, her desire answered his. His hands moved on her body in unquestionable mastery. Scarcely aware of what she was doing, Christina lifted herself towards him. Luc’s kiss grew suddenly fierce. She did not protest. She gloried in it. Arms clutched across his warm shoulders, she was as demanding as he. When his hand moved from her hip to her thigh and beyond, all the wariness which had protected her on the beach deserted her. She had no thought of denying him.

  Then he said something strangled and almost flung himself away from her. He was breathing hard. There was no private irony in his expression now, just a wild blaze of feeling. Unmistakable feeling, thought Christina, shaken. She recognized it because she shared it. As, presumably, he could see.

  She put an unsteady hand to her mouth. It was swollen.

  The flame in his eyes was dying down. He searched her face. He looked astonished.

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ he said softly, half to himself.

  Christina felt a tiny flicker of anger. He had .kissed her into a daze of delight and he was talking to himself?

  ‘I hadn’t,’ she said with a return of acidity. ‘It’s Costa’s all over again.’ She remembered what she had felt then and whipped up her anger. ‘You really think you can do any damn thing you want, don’t you? No matter where. No matter to whom.’

  Amusement lit his eyes. Luc took her hand away from her mouth and surveyed the tremulous softness of her lips.

  ‘I? I wouldn’t say I did that unaided,’ he remarked. Christina tugged at his hold. It made not the slightest difference. He barely seemed to notice.

  ‘Let me go.’

  His eyes were steeply lidded. They made him look cool, in control—almost bored by being in control. It added fuel to her anger.

  ‘I said, let me go.’

  He smiled lazily. ‘As soon as you tell me when I’m going to see you again.’

  ‘You’re not,’ she said instantly.

  It was pure instinct. She needed to defy that lazy control. She hauled at his grip on her wrist again. Without effect.

  ‘That’s plain unrealistic,’ he said with odious patience.

  Would nothing puncture that assurance?

  ‘No,’ Christina almost shouted.

  He gave a silent laugh. She twisted violently in his grip, her wrist dragging painfully. She bit back an exclamation. The only notice he took of her efforts was to carry her hand to his lips. Looking into her blue eyes all the time, he brushed his mouth across her knuckles in the lightest of kisses.

  Christina recognised a challenge when she saw one. She abandoned the attempt to retrieve her hand and tried to take a grip on herself. She did not like the appreciative amusement in his eyes at all. It had to be quenched.

  ‘I said no,’ she told him more calmly but with great firmness.

  There was a little silence. Half-nervous, half-furious, Christina tossed her hair back. ‘I said—’

  She stopped as Luc’s eyes flared. Then the sleepy lids drooped. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said softly.

  For a moment she was bewildered. She shook her head in confusion. ‘Do what?’

  ‘That,’ he murmured.

  At last he let go of her hand. Christina gave a gasp of relief. It turned into something very different as he reached out. He slid his hand under the flying softness of her hair.

  Christina’s breath stopped as if he had stabbed her. She was shaken by the sensation of his long fingers, warm and secret, against her neck under the cloak of her hair. She moistened suddenly dry lips and swallowed. She saw him watch the little reaction and wished suddenly, passionately that she did not suspect what he was and what he was doing here.

  His gaze on her mouth, he said, ‘Or that.’

  Christina felt her face flame. Suddenly she could not bear it any more. She said abruptly, ‘Who are you, Luc Henri?’

  His lids veiled his eyes at once. He went very still. His hand fell from her neck. The man of secrets was back with a vengeance, she thought. When he looked at her at last, Christina detected wariness.

  ‘It’s taken you a long time to ask that,’ he said slowly.

  This time she was not quick enough to suppress the wince. ‘So you admit it needs to be asked?’

  His mouth twisted but he looked her coolly in the eye. ‘I admit nothing.’

  ‘Not even that you haven’t been straight with me?’ she flashed.r />
  His eyes flickered. ‘It depends what you mean by straight.’

  ‘Don’t play games with me—’ Christina burst out. She could hear the naked pain in her voice and stopped at once. But it was too late.

  She was hurt and she was not skilful enough to disguise it. The pain was easy for anyone to detect, if he had any intelligence at all. And whatever else she suspected about Luc Henri she had no doubts about his intelligence.

  That cry shifted the balance of power between them radically. It forced her to admit, in spite of herself, that Luc was more than a stranger, no matter how strongly she resisted it. And that made her suddenly too involved. An unwelcome thought, brutal in its clarity, surfaced out of the warring instincts: if she was involved, she was also vulnerable.

  Luc Henri recognised it too, she saw at once. He was not chivalrous enough to pretend that he did not.

  ‘Well,’ he said on a long, marvelling breath.

  Christina writhed inwardly. His satisfaction was blatant. She would have given everything she owned to recall that involuntary cry.

  But it was too late.

  Trying to retrieve her position, she said desperately, ‘I don’t care who you are or what you’re doing. I just don’t want to be dragged into anything.’

  Luc was watching her as if she fascinated him. ‘Don’t you?’ he murmured at last.

  Christina stared, not understanding.

  ‘Care?’ he elucidated.

  ‘Oh!’

  Both hands went to her cheeks in pure distress.

  ‘Don’t hide from me,’ said that quiet voice.

  She shook her head, horribly embarrassed.

  Luc pulled her hands gently away from her hot face. ‘No, don’t. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Surely you know that, a liberated lady like you?’

  The mockery was not unkind but Christina flinched from it.

  He went on evenly, ‘Spend the night with me.’

  She froze.

  ‘Neither of us is an innocent. We both know where we’re headed.’ He sounded impatient. ‘Why drag it out? Don’t go back to the damned boat. Forget the captain. I can give you a better time than that.’