at her mother and Josien held her gaze but only for a moment before she looked away, her hands folded tightly in her lap. Luc looked stern. Hans was eyeing Josien curiously. With a heavy, deliberate tread Hans rose from his chair, crossed to the table and picked up the posy. ‘My mother used to like violets too,’ he said in his big gruff voice as he thrust them into Josien’s hand. ‘Pretty little things.’
Gabrielle didn’t stick around to see the result. With the fear of rejection rising up inside her like a tidal wave, she fled.
Luc caught up with Gabrielle towards the bottom of the stairs leading down into the formal knot garden. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he said.
‘No.’ She glanced at him warily.
‘You left your bag on the table,’ he said next. ‘I didn’t know if you meant to or not. I left it there.’
She hadn’t meant to. But there was no going back for it now. ‘I’ll get it later.’ When Josien had gone. What had Simone suggested by way of civilised discussion again? Gabrielle couldn’t remember. Her brain was too busy trying to deny the raw sexual appeal of the man striding alongside her.
Yesterday Luc had been wearing working attire—a suit befitting the head of the House of Duvalier. Today his clothes ran to casual. A blue shirt with a boldly embossed stripe running through it—it was shaped to accentuate the breadth of his shoulders and had tiny tortoiseshell buttons all the way down the front. The size of those buttons was more in keeping with the size of a woman’s fingers than a man’s and made Gabrielle’s fingers dance with wanting to free them from their buttonholes. She ordered those wayward fingers still and dragged her gaze away from his chest and those buttons and concentrated on the rest of him.
Big mistake.
Luc’s trousers and work-roughened boots were more suited to the fields than to the boardroom, but they didn’t look out of place on him, not one little bit. All they did was give his inherent sexuality a dangerously earthy edge.
Luc could do mindless, earthy abandon just as easily as Gabrielle could. She knew it for a fact.
‘How do you like living in Australia?’ he asked her as they started walking through the formal French garden with its neatly clipped hedges. It was a question any acquaintance might ask her, new or old. A civilised question. A question that took her thoughts in a different direction altogether from the place they’d been headed.
Thank goodness.
‘I like it fine,’ she said and summoned a smile. ‘Australia’s a beautiful country. There’s opportunity there. Less of a class system.’ Her smile turned rueful. ‘I wasn’t the housekeeper’s daughter once I reached Australia, I was the sophisticated French girl with the Australian father and a brother who’d just bought a beat-up old winery and renamed it Angels Landing. I could be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. I could be me. It was very liberating.’
‘I can imagine,’ murmured Luc with a swift white smile. ‘Did you run wild?’
‘Oddly enough, no.’ Gabrielle swung her arm as they walked, setting her sandals to swinging like a lazy pendulum. ‘Once there was nothing to rebel against I stopped rebelling.’
‘I bet Rafe was relieved.’
‘Maybe,’ said Gabrielle. ‘And maybe he always knew that as soon as I’d broken free of this place I would find my way.’
‘You sound as if you hated it here,’ said Luc.
‘I didn’t.’ Gabrielle shook her head and looked around her at the chateau and the grounds surrounding it. ‘I don’t. How can you hate something so beautiful? No, it was my place in the grand scheme of things here that I hated. It wasn’t that I necessarily wanted to own Caverness, you understand.’ She didn’t want Luc to think that. ‘I just didn’t want Caverness to own me.’
‘I understand.’ Luc’s eyes had darkened. ‘How do you feel about coming back here?’
‘Conflicted,’ said Gabrielle with brutal honesty. ‘Part of me feels like I’ve come home. The rest of me’s desperate to get away. I know there’s no place for me here, Luc. Not in Josien’s mind and probably not in yours or Simone’s either, although you’re both being very kind.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Luc. ‘There’s room for you here, Gabrielle. Always.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Gabrielle, if ever you need my help with anything, ask,’ Luc said carefully. ‘You’ll get it.’
‘Why?’
‘You were driven from your home because of me.’
‘The way I remember it,’ said Gabrielle with a swift sideways glance for his stern profile, ‘there were two of us in that grotto that night. Besides, I may have lost one home but I soon found another and found myself in the process. I know I fought against leaving here initially, Luc.’ Gabrielle winced at the memory of the scene she’d caused—the pleading and the tears, the utter desolation that had enveloped her and that everyone, Luc included, had been witness to. ‘But it helped me to grow up.’ Grow up strong.
‘And your estrangement from your mother?’
‘Would probably have happened anyway,’ said Gabrielle with a shrug. ‘Lose the guilt, Luc. It doesn’t suit you.’
Luc’s eyes flashed fire. ‘Careful, Gabrielle.’
‘Much better,’ she murmured. ‘All that buttoned-down fire. That’s very you.’
All that buttoned-down fire came roaring to the surface as Luc caught her by the arm and drew her into the secluded shadow of the chateau walls. He stood there, glaring at her in silence as he let the awareness between them build. And build. ‘Why do you do that?’ he said at last. ‘You push and you push and then you push me some more. I warn you, but you never seem to listen.’
‘I’m listening now,’ she said through suddenly dry lips, and took a step backwards only to come up against solid stone wall. ‘I’m listening very intently.’
‘Good, because I’m choosing my words carefully. Do you remember how it was when I lost control with you, Gabrielle? Do you? Is that what you want from me?’
‘No.’
Yes, said a little voice that would not be silenced.
‘No,’ she said more firmly. ‘I want us to be civil with one another. That’s all.’
‘Civil,’ he said mirthlessly. ‘Around you?’
‘Yes.’
‘God help me.’
‘You could at least try,’ she said darkly. ‘You can’t even greet me properly.’
‘Have you ever stopped to wonder why?’ he grated.
She hadn’t. All she’d seen was the lack of what he bestowed on others so naturally.
‘Just remember, this was your idea, not
