the lion’s mouth and Veronica quickly withdrew it, throwing out a question to Zoe about the St Romain, which turned the conversation general and allowed her to sink back into polite silence.
A little while later she excused herself with the plea of being tired, and agreed to join Melanie for coffee late in the morning to discuss her plans for the next few days.
As she was leaving Zoe pressed on her a jar of fresh apricot jam, which she had made to an old Provence recipe with fruit harvested from the trees in the garden, to have with her breakfast.
‘Oh, are you allowed to pick the fruit?’ said Veronica, thinking of the laden branches of the greengage tree beside the cottage.
Zoe’s sun-creased face split in a rapturous smile. ‘The owners always let me do a bit in the gardens while I was here and take what little I wanted to use for myself, but now I don’t have to even think about it. Luc bought Mas de Bonnard a few months ago and is insisting on signing it over to me as a birthday present, extravagant lad that he is—not that I’ve agreed to accept it, yet …’
‘Liar.’ The extravagant boy grinned, getting lazily to his feet. ‘You’ve already got Miles doing renovations and Melanie planning to set a book here. You’re going to love being able to come and go as you please—you can spend the whole of the New Zealand winter here, if you like—and I’ll bet there’ll never be any shortage of family and friends to keep you company.’
Veronica had thought he was only standing up to be polite, or to stretch his long limbs, but instead he started to turn when she did.
‘I’ll walk down with you. I need to get something from my car,’ he said casually as she opened her mouth to reject the need for an escort.
‘Could you go round by way of the pool?’ said Melanie.
‘I meant to show Veronica where it was. No, not you, Sophie, I want you to help Ashley get the table set and the vegetables ready for dinner, and no face-pulling either of you, you know what the deal is—while I’m in this sling I can’t lift things out of the oven, or chop safely.’
Veronica barely glanced at the inviting blue waters of the big, rectangular swimming pool, walking briskly around the white-paved edge and along the winding path through the shrubbery, past a huge vegetable garden next to a big, stone cistern of water and back onto a recognisable part of the driveway, her nervousness heightened by Luc’s brief directions framed in deafening silence.
She was surprised and relieved when he turned out to have been telling the truth and peeled off towards his parked car, leaving Veronica to quicken her pace and hurry off to the cottage, entering it with a thumping heart, and the feeling that she had just dodged a bullet.
She went into the deep recess of the bathroom and splashed water on her flushed face, leaving the dewy sheen of droplets to evaporate on her skin. Outside the sun was still shining as it dropped lower in the cloudless sky, radiating heat to the baked earth, but the drawn shutters made the interior of the cottage soothingly dim, so that when she first came out of the bedroom raking her hands through her thick hair to lift it away from her hot scalp, she didn’t immediately see the man braced against the frame of the sliding door she had left open to the faint breeze.
She gasped as she saw the shimmer of his white clothes and his brown arms flex as he shifted stance, leaning in across the threshold.
‘Why so shocked? Surely you were expecting me. Did you really think I was going to let you off that easily?’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘YOU can’t come in!’ Veronica blurted as he straightened up to step inside.
Lucien rested the hilt of his shoulder against the door, thrusting one hand into his trouser pocket, studying the woman who was the first in a very long time to confuse and confound him. Maybe it was the freckles, he brooded. They gave her an erroneous air of innocent playfulness, which his jaded senses had found irresistibly appealing. In fact, she had slipped under his well-protected guard with unsettling ease considering that he had already been on high alert after his nasty brush with notoriety in London. But although that situation had blown up in his face and given him a literal as well as a figurative bloody nose, it hadn’t shocked him to his cynical core—unlike his passionate run-in with the not-so-innocent seductress poised front of him, her body a symphony of curves beneath her summery-thin clothes.
He had the advantage of knowing exactly what she looked like without them … a life model for one of the great painters of sensuous female nudes.
Not Rubens, but Renoir, he decided, his imagination winging back to his Paris apartment to view his impressionistic memory of her reclining against the disordered pillows, her smooth skin rosy with a delicious warmth, her opulent breasts firm with excitement, their soft pink tips peaking with pleasure as he played with them, her lush hips and rounded limbs gilded by the light of the lamp, welcoming the weight of his big body as he wrestled her into eager submission and thrust into her tight, sultry heat.
He felt the hot stirring in his groin with a savage amusement, embracing the surge of predatory lust that powered his male desire to hunt, capture and dominate and refocused his wandering thoughts on his most immediate goal.
‘Why can’t I?’ he challenged, content for the moment to indulge her naïve belief that she was in control, for the sheer anticipated pleasure of proving otherwise. ‘You left your door wide-open, so you must have been expecting me to follow you …’
Veronica’s fingers contracted against her scalp in instinctive rejection of the Freudian possibility that she had wanted him to invade her private space.
‘I left it open for the breeze—’
‘And whatever the breeze blows in,’ he pointed out, his lazy smile belied by his watchful intent. ‘It’s not as if I’m a stranger. As you can see, I’m just the boy from next door.’
His darkening eyes swept over her and Veronica was suddenly made aware of her upraised arms and unconsciously provocative pose. She wrenched her hands down from her head, wincing as they took with them several tangled strands of hair.
‘Or is that the problem?’ he guessed wryly, boosting himself off the door and sauntering inside in brazen defiance of her expressed command. ‘You’re embarrassed to admit that you had a wild sex romp with the boy next door.’
‘You sound like a cheap tabloid newspaper headline,’ she snapped, instinctively jabbing at the place she thought he would be most vulnerable.
‘I’ve just had a crash course,’ he said with a grim smile.
‘And believe me, the tabloids are anything but cheap when they’re shelling out for sleaze.’
‘Well, thankfully that’s outside my experience.’
‘And what’s inside your experience? Picking up anonymous foreigners in bars for—well, what would you prefer to call it … a “torrid night of passion”?’
Veronica clenched her hands at her sides. Did he really think she was that shamefully indiscriminate? ‘I—you—’
‘Yes, you and I,’ he cut through her faltering attempt to fend off his barrage, ‘burning up the sheets together. And now you seem to want to act as if we never met. What frightens you more, Veronica—the fact that I’m a real person and not some
