was jumping like a stranded fish in response to it.
‘Oh, it will.’
He stopped in front of her, his eyes—those beautiful hypnotic eyes—pinning her to the floor even as her head spun faster.
‘Your business is in a mess, baby—a bloated, unstable, debt-ridden mess. House of Duvernay?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘More like house of straw!’
‘And you’re the wolf, are you? Come to huff and puff?’ she sneered, her gaze colliding with his.
It was the wrong thing to say—not least because there was more than a hint of the wolf about his intense, hostile focus and the restrained power of body. For a moment, she held her breath. But then he smiled—only it felt more as if he was baring his teeth.
‘I won’t need to.’ He studied her face. ‘I won’t need to do anything except sit back and watch while everything you love and care about slips through your fingers.’
The air was vibrating between them. ‘You’re a monster,’ she whispered, inching backwards. ‘A cold-blooded barbarian. What kind of man would say something like that?’
He shrugged, his expression somewhere between a challenge and a taunt. ‘The kind that believes in karma.’
Margot was struggling to speak. She wanted to deny his claims. Prove him wrong. But the trouble was that she knew that he was right.
The business was a mess.
Her brother Yves might have resented his glamorous parents, but he had been more like Colette and Emile than he’d cared to admit, and five years after his death she was still trying to clear up the consequences of his impulsive and imprudent management style. Only nothing she did seemed to work.
Her heart began to beat faster. How could it? She didn’t have her great-grandfather’s vision, or her grandfather’s ruthless determination and drive. Nor was she full of Yves’s flamboyant self-assurance. In fact, if anything, the opposite was true. She’d found the responsibility of ensuring that the family legacy stayed intact increasingly overwhelming and as her self-doubts grew the profits continued to shrink. Finally—reluctantly—she’d decided to put up the chateau as security.
Her pulse began to beat faster.
Even just thinking about it made her feel physically sick. Not only had the chateau belonged to her family for sixteen generations, in less than two months it was supposed to be the setting for her brother Louis’s wedding.
It had been a last-ditch attempt to reassure the bank. Only it hadn’t worked. Max was right. The business was failing.
She shivered.
Or rather she had failed, and soon the whole world would know the truth that she had so desperately tried to hide.
Watching her in silence, Max breathed out slowly.
He’d waited nearly ten years for this. Ten long years of working so hard that he would often fall asleep eating his evening meal. Unlike Margot, he’d had to start at the bottom. His jaw tightened. His job at Duvernay should have opened doors to him throughout the industry but, thanks to her family, that ladder had become a snake with a venomous bite.
After being more or less banished from France, it had taken him years to claw back his reputation. Years spent working punishingly long hours at vineyards in Hungary, and studying at night school until finally he had got a break and a job on an estate in California.
But every backbreaking second had been worth it for this, and although the shares had been expensive he would have paid double for this moment of reckoning.
His chest tightened. Finally he’d proved the Duvernays wrong!
He was their equal—for he was here, in their precious boardroom, not as some low-paid employee but as a shareholder.
He wanted to savour it. But although Margot looked suitably stunned—crushed, in fact, by his words—strangely, he was finding it not nearly as satisfying as he’d imagined he would.
Confused, and unprepared for this unexpected development, he stared at her in silence. And then immediately wished he hadn’t, for with the light behind her, the delicate fabric of her white dress was almost transparent, and the silhouetted outline of her figure was clearly visible. It was almost as if she was naked.
A beat of desire pulsed through his veins.
Not that he needed a reminder. Margot’s body was imprinted in his brain. He could picture her now, as he’d seen her so many times in those snatched afternoons spent in the tiny bedroom of his estate cottage. Lying in his arms, the curve of her belly and breasts gleaming in the shafts of fading sunlight, a pulse beating frantically at the base of her throat. Each time, he’d felt as though he was dreaming. He’d been completely in her thrall—overwhelmed not just by desire but by an emotion he had, until meeting her, always dismissed as at best illusory and at worst treacherous.
At first he’d tried to deny his feelings, had avoided her, and then, when avoiding her had become untenable, had been offhand almost to the point of being brusque, willing her to brand him rude and unapproachable if it meant hanging on to some small remnant of self-control.
But it had been so hard, for his body had been on fire, his brain in turmoil, all five senses on permanent high alert. He’d wanted her so badly, and for a time he’d believed that she wanted him in the same way. Insistently. Relentlessly.
Unconditionally.
And so he’d proposed—wanting, needing to make permanent that passion, that sense of belonging to someone, and of her belonging to him. He’d had no words for how he’d felt. It had defied description. All he had known was that he had a place in her life, her world. He had believed that unquestioningly. Only of course he’d been wrong.
Margot had wanted him, but her desire had been rooted in the transitory and finite nature of an affair—and more specifically in the illicit thrill of ‘dating’ her older brother’s employee.
He felt anger spark inside him, and his eyes cut across the room to the line of portraits of Duvernays past and present.
Of course proposing to her had been his second mistake. His first had been to believe that his rapport with Yves was real, that it meant something. He had been lured not so much by the family’s wealth and glamour, but by their sense of contra mundum, and the chance to be admitted into their world had been irresistibly potent to someone with his past.
With hindsight, though, he could see that his presence had always been subject to the grace and favour of the Duvernay family. They might have tolerated him, but he had never really belonged—just as Margot had never really belonged to him.
He felt his heart start to beat faster.
As a suitor, he’d always known that he was an underdog, a wild card—but, stupid and naive fool that he’d been, he’d actually respected her for seeing beyond his bank account and his background. Admired her for choosing him, for taking that risk. Now, though, he knew that the risk had been all his.
His hands trembled and he felt a rush of irritation at his naivety. No wonder he wasn’t really feeling this moment. He might have created a business to rival theirs,
