CHAPTER ONE

      AN ARM, clad in softly tailored linen reached out of the black convertible. A lean, male hand, strong and tanned, traced the letters on the road sign. ‘Turaine.’ Guy savoured the name, almost reverently.

      ‘Yeah. It’s a lovely sign, as signs go,’ came the sarcastic tones of the woman in the driver’s seat beside him.

      He grinned. ‘Heaven forbid that I should commit the sin of sentimentality,’ he said drily in his deep New Orleans drawl. ‘Hell, I’ll be leaping out and kissing the ground next!’

      Giselle made a face. ‘Exactly how much ground is yours?’

      ‘Ours, sweetheart. What’s mine is yours, now my father’s dead. The valley—’ he gave a careless sweep of his arm, which embraced lush pastureland, walnut groves and vast chestnut forests ‘—and the village. Apart from three cottages owned by my father’s mistress. But I’ll have them within the week. Something tells me she’ll be eager to leave when I turn up.’

      Bleak shadows from the past changed the colour of his eyes, deepening the dark sable to a hard ebony and giving the lie to his confident, casual tone. It had been nineteen years since he’d set foot in Turaine. He brooded over the enforced exile of himself and his mother because of his father’s obsession for another woman. And now he was thirty-five and the mother he’d protected and cared for was dead.

      He’d exchanged his privileged background for poverty, supporting his bewildered mother by taking any job that came along: waiting on tables, working in kitchens and finally marrying into the gourmet food business.

      At last it was time to come home. Time—almost—to mellow out and enjoy his financial success. Powerful emotions surged in his heart and he chipped away at them in case he did something stupid, like running Sound of Music-style through the meadow. If he wasn’t careful, he thought in amusement, he’d lose his reputation for being unruffled under stress.

      ‘Looks a bit tatty,’ observed Giselle, frowning at the village on the small hill ahead.

      Guy looked closer. It did. A faint sense of foreboding took the edge off his contentment. ‘A few repairs needed, I think,’ he said, brushing away anything that might blight his homecoming.

      Quite calmly he asked Giselle to drive on—over the well-remembered stone bridge where he’d fished as a child, up the winding lane which skirted the medieval walls where he’d kissed his first girl, and through the narrow arch into Turaine itself.

      ‘Stop here,’ he said laconically on their entering the square.

      He felt amused by his own self-control. Who, seeing the languid unfolding of his long legs from the car, the deliberate pause for a minute adjustment to the designer sunglasses and the orderly smoothing of his windswept black hair, would have imagined that he felt ready to break into song with happiness?

      It was a pity that no woman had ever given him this sense of joy. Not even, he had to confess, the incomparable Giselle.

      With no outward or inward enthusiasm, she gracefully unfolded her long tanned legs from the convertible, crossly checking over the small square. What a dump! Maybe, she thought, the château would be more to her taste.

      ‘Deserted!’