The Parisian Playboy. HELEN BROOKS

cloth jacket as his voice, but as they crossed the pavement and he opened the taxi door for her he continued, ‘I will send the taxi back for you, Miss Stanton. Is that acceptable? And, please, take time to refresh yourself.’

      Refresh herself! As Holly slid into the taxi she had to bite back the desire to laugh out loud. She would be rushing around like a whirling dervish!

      She barely noticed the taxi pull away as she began a mental list of all her clothes, desperately trying to pull an outfit worthy of Lemaires from her limited wardrobe. She’d heard of Lemaires before, of course—it was one of the very ‘in’ places and frequented by clientele who never had to look at the prices on the menu—but never in her wildest dreams had she imagined she’d set foot on such hallowed ground, and certainly not without at least a few hours’ grace to rush out and buy something fabulous.

      ‘…and take it from there?’

      ‘I’m sorry?’ Too late she had become aware Jacques Querruel had been speaking and she’d been miles away.

      She turned to him quickly and saw he was frowning. ‘I am sorry to interrupt your thoughts, Miss Stanton,’ he said icily, ‘but I was just outlining the way I saw the evening progressing. I suggested we could enjoy a cocktail or two as I explain my proposal, which you could think over whilst we eat, and then we will take it from there.’

      Touchy, touchy. Holly got the impression it wasn’t often Jacques Querruel didn’t have a woman’s full and undivided attention. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said quickly, becoming acutely aware of the close confines of the taxi for the first time as her anxiety about the clothes was put to one side for a few minutes.

      He wasn’t touching her—in fact there was at least six inches of space between them—but never had she been so fiercely conscious of another human being’s body. She could feel the heat which had begun in the core of her spread to her throat and face as she met the amber eyes, and then, as his gaze became curiously intent, she forced herself to break the piercing hold and turned her head to look out of the window.

      ‘It’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?’ she murmured quietly, managing a tone which was just offhand enough to appear genuine.

      He didn’t reply for a moment, but now her senses were open the subtle and delicious smell of him teased her nerves before he said softly, ‘Indeed it is. Too beautiful to waste in the city streets. It is a night for breathing in the aroma of a thousand flowers as the sky slowly turns to silver. A night for watching the moonlight shimmering on a mother-of-pearl lake, and hearing the call of the wild swans as they marshal their newly fledged little ones to sleep.’

      She was surprised into looking at him again, and he answered her quizzical gaze with a slow smile. ‘My château.’ He replied to the unspoken question very quietly. ‘It is very lovely on a night like this.’

      There were enough panic buttons going off in Holly’s head to deafen the whole of London. ‘Is it?’ She smiled brightly. ‘Lucky you.’

      ‘You have been to France, Miss Stanton?’

      She shook her head. She hadn’t been anywhere but she wasn’t about to tell him that. No doubt he was used to being in company where the merits of Switzerland or Monaco or the Caribbean were discussed with a wealth of experience.

      ‘It is a very diverse country,’ he said quietly. ‘I have an apartment in Paris, close to my offices, but my real home is my château, thirty miles south of the city. It is a place of peace, a place for recharging the batteries.’

      Funny, but she couldn’t quite equate Jacques Querruel with peace and quiet. She kept her voice from betraying anything of what she was thinking as she said, ‘You spend a lot of time there?’

      ‘Not as much as I would like,’ he said a touch ruefully. ‘Part of this is my own fault, of course. I do not find it easy to delegate, Miss Stanton.’

      Now, that she could believe without any trouble at all! Her face must have spoken for itself because he smiled drily. ‘I think we will change the subject.’

      During the rest of the twenty-minute ride to her bedsit Holly was on tenterhooks. Not that Jacques was anything but coolly polite and amusing, and seemingly at ease. He sat one leg crossed casually over the other, his whole body suggesting a relaxed composure that Holly envied with all her heart. He didn’t seem to be aware of the atmosphere within the car, which was strange, she thought, when she wouldn’t have been surprised if the air had started to crackle with electricity. But then she obviously registered on him with as much force as a bowl of cold rice pudding.

      The street in which her bedsit was located was not the best in the world, and as they drew up outside the terraced three-storey house that was identical to a hundred others she saw Mrs Gibson’s cats had been having a field-day with the dustbins again and most of their contents were scattered all over the minute paved front garden and the pavement.

      Holly liked Mrs Gibson, who occupied the basement bedsit and had bright orange hair despite being eighty years old if a day, and she didn’t even mind the three cats, who had a disconcerting habit of vomiting up their trophies from the dustbins at the most inopportune moments, but she could have done without them today. Of course, they had gathered en masse on the crumbling steps to the front door. It was that sort of day.

      The big ginger tom had just begun to lead the way in a Mexican wave of retching as Holly leapt out of the taxi, and she positioned herself straight in front of the car window as she said briskly, ‘You really needn’t send the taxi back, Mr. Querruel. I can ring for one myself once I’m ready.’

      ‘I wouldn’t hear of it.’ He had leant forward slightly as he spoke, his attention directed somewhere behind Holly’s left shoulder, and now he said a little bemusedly, ‘There is an elderly lady with a tea cosy on her head waving to you.’

      It figured. Holly glanced behind her, waving back to Mrs Gibson before she said, ‘That’s Mrs Gibson. She is a friend of mine,’ her tone defiant. ‘I’ll see you in a little while, then.’

      ‘I will look forward to it.’ The answer was polite but distracted. One of the cats had just gone for a gold medal in the realm of projectile vomiting, breaking all previous records, and Mrs Gibson was doing a kind of soft-shoe shuffle as she tried to prevent all three felines diving into the hall. Jacques looked fascinated.

      As the taxi drew away Holly turned round, her tone resigned as she said, ‘I’ll get a bucket of water and some disinfectant and clear all this up, Mrs Gibson.’

      ‘Would you, Holly? There’s a dear. Mr Bateman, the silly old fool, has gone and put kippers in the dustbins again. I told him Tigger would have the lids off before you could blink, but would he listen? The man’s an idiot.’

      ‘Mrs Gibson, why are you wearing a tea cosy on your head?’ Holly asked matter-of-factly.

      ‘Am I, dear? Well, there’s a thing!’ Mrs Gibson blinked at her as she removed the offending article from her sparse bright hair and then giggled like a schoolgirl. ‘I’ve been wondering where this was for a few days. I must have put it on the coat stand instead of my woolly hat when I washed them both. I wonder what I’ve done with the hat, because it isn’t on the teapot.’

      ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Holly said, smiling into the pert little face which was as wrinkled and lined as a pink prune. ‘It’ll turn up.’

      By the time Holly had cleared up after the cats and weighed down the dustbins with two bricks apiece, kept specially for the purpose but rarely used by anyone but herself, she’d lost ten minutes of valuable time.

      She dashed up to her bedsit on the first floor, stripping off her clothes and flinging on her robe before hurtling along to the bathroom at the end of her landing. A quick two-minute shower in cold water—the water heater was playing up again—ensured a bracing if teeth-chattering pick-me-up, and then she was back to the bedsit, pulling off her shower cap and standing in front of her wardrobe as she surveyed her sum total of clothes.

      She had one or two really