The Frenchman's Love-Child. LYNNE GRAHAM
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children and, as an adult, he had become even richer.
Blessed with the Laroche talent for making money and sensational entrepreneurial skills, Christien had dropped out of university at the age of twenty. Within nine months, he had made his first million in business. Five years on from there, sole owner of an international airline that was breaking all profit records, and suffering from a certain amount of burn-out from working a seven-day week, Christien had been getting bored. That summer, he had been ripe for something a little different and Tabby had more than satisfied him in that department.
Tabby had played no games and she had come to him on his terms. He had had her on the first date. Six weeks of the wildest sex he had ever experienced had followed. He had been obsessed with her. Her strange insistence on not staying the night in his bed and keeping their entanglement a secret from her family and their friends had added an illicit thrill to their every encounter. What he would never, ever forget, however, was that after only six weeks of explosive sexual fulfilment he had been ready to propose marriage so that he could have access to that fabulous body of hers at all hours of the day.
Marriage! Christien still shuddered at that degrading recollection. His meteoric IQ rating had not done him much good while the urge to indulge his powerful libido had overruled every other restraint. The shattering discovery that he had been making love to a schoolgirl had blown him away. A schoolgirl of seventeen, who was a compulsive liar!
While Veronique had been agonising over how best he might protect himself from the threat of a horrendous scandal, Christien had still been so lost in lust that he had decided that he could cope with a teenage wife whom he would teach to tell the truth and keep in bed most of the time anyway. But, the next day, he had seen his potential child bride behaving like a slut with a spotty youth on a motorbike and, all rage, disbelief and disgust aside, he had immediately broken free of his obsession…
‘If that Burnside girl sets foot on Laroche soil, it will dishonour your father’s memory!’ Matilde Laroche protested.
Drawn from his brooding recollections with a vengeance, Christien almost winced at the tearful note in his mother’s overwrought exclamation. ‘There is no question of that happening,’ he asserted with soothing conviction. ‘She will receive an offer to sell the property back to the estate and she will naturally accept the money.’
‘This matter is so unpleasant for you to deal with,’ Veronique remarked in a sympathetic and discreet murmur at his side. ‘Allow me to take care of it for you.’
‘As always you are generous, but in this case there is no need.’ Christien surveyed the beautiful, elegant brunette he planned to marry with open appreciation.
Veronique Giraud was everything a Laroche wife should be. He had known her all his life and their backgrounds were similar. A corporate lawyer, she was an excellent hostess as well as being tolerant of her future mother-in-law’s emotional fragility. But neither love nor lust featured in Christien’s relationship with his fiancée. Both of them considered mutual respect and honesty of greater importance. Although Veronique was naturally willing to give him children, she had little enthusiasm for physical intimacy and had already made it clear that she would prefer him to satisfy his needs with a mistress.
Christien was quite content with that arrangement. Indeed the knowledge that even marriage would not deprive him of that valuable male freedom to essentially do as he liked, when he liked, had very much increased his willingness to embrace the matrimonial bond.
In little more than a month, he would be over in London on business. He would pay Tabby Burnside a visit and offer to buy the cottage back from her. No doubt she would feel flattered by his personal attention. He wondered what she looked like some years on…faded? At only twenty-one? He almost shrugged. What did it matter to him? But he also smiled.
A house in France, Tabby reflected dreamily, a place of their own in the sun…
‘Of course, you’ll sell the old lady’s cottage for the best price you can get,’ Alison Davies assumed on her niece’s behalf. ‘It’ll fetch a healthy sum.’
Fresh, clean country air in exchange for the city traffic fumes that she was convinced had made her toddler son prone to asthma, Tabby thought happily.
‘You and Jake will have something to put away for a rainy day.’ Her aunt, a slender brunette with sensible grey eyes, nodded with approval at that idea.
Lost in her own thoughts, Tabby was still mulling over the extraordinary fact that Solange Roussel had left her a French property. It was fate, it had to be. Of that latter reality, Tabby was convinced. Her son had French blood in his veins and now, by an immense stroke of good fortune and when she least expected it, she had inherited a home for them both on French soil. Of course that was meant to be! Who could possibly doubt it? She looked into the small back garden where Jake was playing. He was an enchanting child with mischievous brown eyes, skin with a warm olive tone and a shock of silky dark curls. His asthma was only mild at present, but who could say how much worse it might get if they remained in London?
The same day that the letter from the French notaire had arrived to inform her of her inheritance, Tabby had begun planning a new life for herself and her child in France. After all, the timing could not have been more perfect: Tabby had been desperate to come up with an acceptable excuse for moving out of her aunt’s comfortable town house. Alison Davies was only ten years older than her niece. When, in the wake of her father’s death, Tabby had been left penniless and pregnant into the bargain, Alison had offered her niece a home. Tabby was very aware of how great a debt of gratitude she owed to the other woman.
But, just a week earlier, Tabby had overheard a heated exchange between Alison and her boyfriend, Edward, which had left her squirming with guilty discomfiture. Edward was going to take a year out from work to travel. Tabby had already known that and she had also been aware that her aunt had decided not to accompany him. What Tabby had not realised, until she accidentally heard the couple arguing, was that Alison Davies might be denying herself her heart’s desire sooner than ask her niece to find somewhere else to live.
‘You don’t need to use up your precious savings! Thanks to your parents you own this house and you could rent it out for a small fortune while we were abroad. That would cover all your expenses,’ Edward had been pointing out forcefully in the kitchen when Tabby, having returned from her evening job, had been fumbling for her key outside the back door.
‘We’ve been over this before,’ Alison had been protesting unhappily. ‘I just can’t ask Tabby to move out so that I can offer this place to strangers. She can’t afford decent accommodation—’
‘And whose fault is that? She got pregnant at seventeen and now she’s paying for her foolish mistake!’ Edward had slammed back angrily. ‘Does that mean we have to pay for it too? Isn’t it bad enough that we’re rarely alone together and that when we are you’re always babysitting her kid?’
Tabby was still terribly hurt and mortified by the memory of that biting censure. But she regarded it as justifiable criticism. She felt that she ought to have seen for herself that she had overstayed her welcome in her aunt’s home. She was appalled that Alison should have been prepared to make such a sacrifice on her behalf, for her aunt had already been very generous to her. Indeed, all that Tabby could now think about was moving out as soon as was humanly possible. Only then would Alison feel free to do as she liked with her own life and her own home. At the same time, however, she did not want the other woman to suspect that she might have overheard that revealing dialogue.
‘I’m afraid I still can’t stop wondering why some elderly French lady should have remembered you in her will,’ Alison Davies confided with a bemused shake of her head.
Dragged out of her own preoccupied thoughts by the raising of that topic yet again, Tabby screened her expressive green eyes and looped a stray strand of caramel-blonde hair back behind one small ear. Some things were too personal and private to share even with her aunt. ‘Solange and I got on very well—’
‘But you only met a couple of times…’
‘You’ve