by Lynne Graham
Afterwards, the first thing she was conscious of was the silence. Luc was still holding her, every damp, hard, muscular line of him welded to her smaller, slighter frame. For a moment she luxuriated in that feeling of intimacy and closeness. Then her mind awakened again, and with a sinking heart she recognised her own weakness.
‘Star…’ Luc husked in an indolent tone of satiation. ‘It’s never been like that for me.’
She hoped it never would be again. In fact she hoped she would be a tantalising memory that infuriated him until the day he died. Mustering every scrap of self-discipline she possessed, she forced herself to pull away from him. Unexpectedly, he caught her back to him. In the half-light, dark golden eyes appraised her flushed triangular face, her lowered lashes which betrayed only a wary glimmer of aquamarine.
‘You can talk now,’ he murmured, almost teasingly. ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’ Once she would have told him she loved him. And that recollection of her old self now made her cringe.
Luc came up on one elbow, stunning dark eyes level. ‘Star—’
‘We left the candles burning in the kitchen.’ She snaked out of his hold before he could guess her intention. Stretching out a frantic seeking hand for the wrap lying on the chair by the bed, she got up, keen to make her escape.
In the kitchen, she shivered, cold as ice without him, even colder when she looked into the future. Yet her body still thrummed and ached from the glorious possession of his. How dared he make it even better than she had remembered? How dared he tell her that that was the best sex he had ever had? He didn’t have a sensitive bone in his entire body. But then what did that matter now?
She felt anguish beckoning like an old friend, but she turned away from it, older and wiser now. Making a meal of misery wouldn’t change anything. She forced herself to put away the groceries which Rory had brought. The prosaic task dragged her down from the heights, gave her the chance to get a grip on her turbulent emotions.
It was past time that she faced up to the truth she had spent such an impossibly long time evading. Their marriage had been a fake! She had known that from the outset but had stubbornly refused to accept the fact. Luc had never wanted to marry her; Luc had simply felt that he had to marry her, Star acknowledged painfully.
That winter his father had been dying, Star had enjoyed a long-awaited and very emotional reunion with her mother. Only one awkward fact had shadowed that reconciliation: Juno hated the Sarrazin family and had been desperate to persuade Star to leave France. But Star had been head over heels in love with Luc…and quite incapable of choosing to remove herself from his immediate radius.
On an unannounced visit to the chateau, her mother had been genuinely appalled to walk into a room and find Star in Luc’s arms. Accusing Luc of taking inexcusable advantage of her teenage daughter’s naivety, Juno had threatened to create a major scandal. Determined to protect his sick father from the distress of such sordid publicity, Luc had insisted that they get married. It was ironic that Juno had been even more outraged by their marriage.
But Star had entered their marriage of convenience with a hidden agenda the size of a jumbo jet. She had honestly thought that if she prayed hard enough, tried hard enough, she could make Luc love her! Every scrap of misery she had suffered since, she decided, she had brought on herself.
Fortunately, she didn’t love Luc any more, she told herself fiercely. He was her first love. It was understandable that she would never be totally indifferent to him. But here, tonight, she promised herself that she would say goodbye to that humiliating past and move on. When the dawn came in tomorrow, there would be no looking back.
Having got her flailing emotions back under control, Star drifted back to the bedroom and lodged uncertainly in the doorway, striving for a cool stance. In the moonlight, Luc was lying in a relaxed sprawl on his side, his skin vibrant gold against the pale bedding. He looked like an incredibly gorgeous oil painting. Her heart gave a treacherous lurch. She waited for him to lift his handsome dark head and say something. When he didn’t, she moved slowly closer. She couldn’t believe it. He had gone to sleep! But then when had Luc last slept? She swallowed a rueful laugh, bitterly amused by her own intense disappointment. He followed a relentless schedule. He would have had to make time for a trip to England. To do so he might well have worked through most of last night. And now, tension released by a rousing bout of entirely uncommitted sex, he had given way to exhaustion and fallen asleep. How touchingly, uncharacteristically human! It shocked her that she was really tempted to wake him up again.
Refusing to give way to that degrading desire, Star sat in the kitchen by the light of one candle. She didn’t trust herself to get back into bed with him. She didn’t even trust herself asleep in bed with him. Around Luc she did things she would not have dreamt of doing with any other man. Of course this time it was only the lure of his sexual magnetism, his heartbreaking good-looks, his lithe, beautifully built body. In other words, sex—and he was very, very good at sex; that was the only reason she was still tempted…
*
The limousine arrived at eight the next morning. The chauffeur delivered a garment bag and a small case to the door and then retreated back to the car.
By then Luc was already up, although Star had yet to see him. Minutes earlier she had heard the shower running in the bathroom, and had marvelled at Luc’s staying power under that freezing cold gush. Her own record was three minutes, and she always boiled the kettle for hot water to wash her hair. She put the garment bag and the case into the bedroom and went back into the kitchen to wait.
She had already fed the twins and dressed them in their best outfits: Venus in a pink velour top and leggings, Mars in navy dungarees with a checked shirt. They looked cute. At least, Star thought they did. Hopefully, at some stage, a vague memory of the twins looking cute and cuddly would slightly soften the blow of paternity coming Luc’s way. When the divorce proceedings began she would have to get a solicitor. She would then tell her solicitor to tell Luc’s solicitor that Luc was the father of her twins.
Star could see no reason to confront Luc with the fact that he was a father face to face. Luc was going to be furious. Luc was going to feel trapped and resentful. Luc liked everything to go to plan. Only he hadn’t planned on succumbing to her the night she’d sneaked into his bed, and she hadn’t planned as far as him actually succumbing, so she hadn’t taken any precautions against pregnancy. Why should she put herself through a humiliating scene like that? Nothing she could do or say would make the fact of the twins’ existence any more palatable to him, she reasoned painfully. It would be much easier all round if he received the news from a third party.
Just then, she heard Luc’s steps in the passageway. Her tension level shot so high she felt light-headed. She fixed a really bright and friendly smile to her face. Luc strode through the door as immaculate and elegant as if he had just strolled out of the Sarrazin bank in Paris. Charcoal-grey suit, burgundy silk tie, pale silk shirt. He looked spectacular, and very, very intimidating.
‘You should have wakened me earlier,’ he drawled smoothly.
Encountering brilliant dark eyes as cool as ice, Star hung on gutsily to her smile. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’ Luc glanced at his watch. ‘If you’re ready, we should leave now for London.’
The horrible silence stretched. But he wasn’t touched by it. Or by her discomfiture. She could see that. Inside himself, Luc was already so far from her he might as well have been back in France. There wasn’t a hint of warmth or intimacy. There was nothing. It was as if last night had never happened. And Star, who had believed herself prepared for whatever he might choose to throw at her the morning after, just could not cope with that complete denial.
‘Do you think I’m going to cling to you now or something?’ she heard herself demand rawly.
Luc froze, but on the way to freezing he winced.
Hot-cheeked with fury and pain, Star stepped for
ward. ‘I’m over you!’ she launched at him.
‘We haven’t got time for a scene,’ Luc murmured deflatingly.
Star trembled, and her hands squeezed into defensive fists. ‘Saying how I feel is not creating a scene!’
Luc elevated an aristocratic brow. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that I might not be interested in how you feel?’
The angry colour drained from her skin, her expressive eyes shaken.
As Star spun away, Luc gritted his even white teeth. That sunny smile she had greeted him with had filled him with volcanic rage. The Star he remembered would have been selfconscious, shy. Not this one. Involuntarily, he recalled the wild sweetness of her response the night he had consummated their marriage. His body reacted with a surge of fierce arousal, infuriating him.
As a punishment, he made himself focus on the shabby playpen and its tiny occupants. Both babies were watching him with surprisingly intent expressions. The littlest one, with the explosion of copper curls, the colour of which jarred horribly with her pink outfit, gave him a big, gummy winsome smile. That smile was so hopeful and appealing that in spite of the mood he was in he very nearly smiled back. Focusing on the little boy, with his solemn dark brown eyes and slightly anxious air, Luc was astonished to find himself thinking that they were remarkably attractive babies. He looked swiftly away again, but not before he had reminded himself that those children were now his responsibility as well. Who else was there to support them?
Star turned back, determined to stand her ground, no matter how much his attitude upset her. ‘We had a good time in bed last night. It was just sex. I know that,’ she told him fiercely. ‘But it was my way of saying goodbye to you. I will not be treated like some sleazy one-night stand.’
Luc surveyed her with dark, deep eyes and remained maddeningly silent.
Star squared her slight shoulders. ‘Believe it or not, I’m really happy now that we’re getting a divorce. I have someone in my life who cares about me and now I’ll be free to enjoy that relationship. He has a heart, and an imagination…and he talks as well.’
Luc’s narrowed gaze chilled her to the bone. The atmosphere seemed to have dropped in temperature to the level of a polar freeze. ‘Are you finished?’
Star compressed her lips and spun away, wondering why she had bothered to try and get through to him. ‘I’ll get the twins’ car seats—’
Luc frowned. ‘You’re planning to bring them with us?’
Star spun back in bewilderment. ‘What else would I do with them?’
It was clear that it had not occurred to Luc to wonder what else she might do with the twins. But then in his world young children were invariably in the convenient care of a nanny.
‘You just didn’t think, did you?’ she said witheringly. ‘Where I go, Venus and Mars have to go too.’
Luc stilled, his ebony brows drawing together. ‘Venus…and Mars?’
‘Juno christened them in their incubators.’ Star hated the defensive edge she heard in her own voice. ‘I know their names sound a little fanciful, and I may have put Viviene and Max on their birth certificates, but Venus and Mars are names which gave them good luck when they really needed it.’
‘Venus and Mars,’ Luc repeated with a sardonically curled lip.
Cheeks warm with angry colour, Star scooted past him to fetch the car seats from the twins’ bedroom. As she emerged, Luc lifted them from her hands with easy strength. ‘I’ll take these outside.’
*
As the limousine drove towards London, Star worked hard at not looking in Luc’s direction. But she remained agonisingly conscious of his all-pervasive presence. Their relationship, it seemed, had turned full circle. Once again, Luc was taking her to Emilie Auber and then planning to walk out of her life again. Her mind roamed back to their first fateful meeting eleven years earlier…
Her stepfather, Philippe Roussel, had died when she was nine. In his will he had named Roland Sarrazin as her guardian. Since Philippe hadn’t had contact with the Sarrazins since his own childhood, he could only have chosen Luc’s father in the hope that the wealthy banker might feel obligated to offer his widow and her child financial help.
By then, Juno and Star had been living on the breadline in Mexico. Philippe had been charming, but hopelessly addicted to gambling. Only after his death had Juno shamefacedly admitted that she had fallen pregnant with Star before she’d met Philippe, and that he had not been Star’s real father.
Roland Sarrazin had sent Luc to Mexico to track them down. At the time, Juno had been feeling a failure as a mother.
‘I had no job, no money, no proper home for you, and you were missing out on your education. I thought that the Sarrazins would take care of you until I got my life sorted out. Then I would bring you back to live with me,’ Juno had shared painfully years later, when mother and daughter had finally been reconciled after their long separation. ‘How could I ever have dreamt that it would be nine years before I saw you again?’
Juno was still very bitter about that. Roland Sarrazin had applied to a French court to gain full custody of her daughter.
Luc had only been twenty then, but he had had an authority and a maturity far beyond his years. Star had waited outside their shabby one-room apartment while Luc talked to her mother. Within a couple of hours of that meeting Star had found herself accompanying Luc on a flight back to France.
Luc hadn’t had a clue how to talk to a child, but he had made a real effort to be kind and reassuring. He had also appeared to believe that she was coming to live with his family, and he had described Chateau Fontaine, their fabulous seventeenth-century home in the Loire valley.
But on their arrival there his father’s air of frigid disapproval had frightened and confused Star. Apart from commenting that she was a astonishingly plain little girl, Luc’s beautiful mother, Lilliane, had displayed no more interest in her than she might have done in a stray cat.
‘My parents are very busy people.’ Luc had hunkered down to Star’s level to explain when she’d looked up at him with big hurt eyes welling with tears.
‘They don’t w-want me,’ she had sobbed helplessly. ‘Why did you bring me here?’
‘My father is your legal guardian.’
‘What about my mum?’
‘Right now your mother can’t look after you the way you need to be looked after, and she wants you to catch up with your schooling.’
The following day, Luc had flown her over to Emilie in London. She had been greeted with open arms and homemade lemonade and biscuits.
Of course, how could Luc have explained that his father had been outraged at being landed with responsibility for her? A formidably correct man, with immense pride in his own respectability, Roland Sarrazin had had a pronounced horror of scandal. Years earlier, Philippe Roussel had disgraced his own family. The circumstances in which Star and her mother had been living, not to mention the discovery that Star was not Philippe’s child, had convinced Roland Sarrazin that to protect himself from any further embarrassment he should ensure that Star’s mother, Juno, was kept out of her daughter’s life.
Emerging from the memory of that cold-blooded and entirely selfish decision, Star glanced at Luc. He had a desk in his limo: that really said it all. He was using a laptop computer while simultaneously talking on the phone. They had shared not a word of conversation since the journey began. The twins, initially eager to attract Luc’s attention, had finally given up on him and dozed off.
Star found herself watching the way stray shards of dimmed sunlight flickered through the tinted windows, glinting over the springy luxuriance of his black hair, shadowing a hard cheekbone and accentuating the lush length of lashes longer than her own. One lean brown shapely hand rested on the edge of the desk. Dear heaven, even his hands were beautiful, she thought, suddenly stricken to the heart and sucking in a steadying breath so deep it left her dizzy.
A phone buzzed. Luc lifted his arrogant dark head, a slight frown line etched between his winged brow
s as he recognised that the phone ringing was not, in fact, his. Star dug into her capacious bag to produce the mobile which Rory had given her for her recent birthday, thinking how unfortunate it was that she had never got the chance to give her mother the number of her mobile phone.
‘Star, where are you?’ Rory demanded anxiously. ‘I drove up and saw that car buried under the scaffolding. I was afraid that you’d been hurt!’
‘Oh, no, I’m fine…really I am, Rory.’ Star smiled with determination, grateful for anything capable of distracting her from Luc’s intense visual appeal. Just like the night they had shared, such reactions belonged in the past now, she reminded herself doggedly. It was Rory she should be concentrating on. Rory, who was steady and caring. Rory, who would probably never seek a mistress who resembled a supermodel…
‘Luc’s taking me to visit Emilie. I was sort of rushed out the door and I forgot to call you.’ Star faltered on that last enervating recollection of Gabrielle Joly.
‘When will you be home?’ Rory prompted.
‘Soon…’ Looking up to meet Luc’s eyes, which were as cold and dark as the river Styx, reputed to lead into the underworld, Star swallowed with difficulty. ‘Look, I’ll call you when I get back. I’ll make a meal,’ she proffered on the spur of the moment.
The boyfriend was history, Luc decided without hesitation. A relationship in which neither fidelity nor loyalty appeared to figure was very bad news for Star. And if she couldn’t work that out for herself, it was obviously his job to do it for her. What Star needed was a fresh start. For that reason, he would make his own generous financial support conditional on Rory’s exit from her life. A case of being cruel to be kind. For her own good, and that of her children, Star would have to learn to like a quieter, more conventional lifestyle, he reflected with grim satisfaction.