His Mistress Proposal?. Trish Wylie

for an exhibition of Ash’s work,’ he said to Lucien, with an ingratiating smile that suggested he was well aware of the potential value of such contacts to himself.

      ‘Perhaps.’ Lucien’s voice was pleasant but noncommittal and Veronica, acutely attuned to every nuance of his tone, sensed his instinctive dislike of the other man.

      Ashley flushed.

      ‘Luc’s got billions, he could afford to sponsor me himself, if he wasn’t such a philistine,’ she said, with a careless toss of her head.

      ‘No, he hasn’t, he’s only a millionaire,’ piped up Sophie. ‘I looked it up on the web. A billion is a thousand million and Luc only has—’

      ‘Sophie!’ her mother said sharply. ‘It’s rude to talk how much money people have right in front of them.’

      ‘That’s right, you should be like everyone else and do it sneakily, behind my back,’ grinned Lucien, giving Sophie a wink and making Melanie pinken.

      ‘Ashley said it first,’ the little girl was emboldened to say, ‘and she made a mistake, so I had to say something. Anyway, that’s what Luc does … he talks to people all the time about how much money they have and how much of his money they need to make their things work. That’s not rude, that’s just business.’

      ‘She means I’m a venture capitalist,’ said Lucien, catching the flicker of Veronica’s dark lashes. ‘I invest in other people’s ideas.’

      He made it sound as simple as putting money in the bank, but Veronica knew that if he was making millions he was either incredibly astute or fantastically lucky … or a combination of both.

      ‘That’s a very high-risk field, isn’t it?’ she felt compelled to ask, wondering if a controversial investment gone wrong was the reason he was ducking the press.

      He shrugged. ‘No risk, no gain—surely you subscribe to that philosophy yourself …’ It was a statement, not a question, the sensuality sheathed in his slow smile hinting of things that had nothing to do with finance.

      Veronica chose to ignore the sly suggestions. ‘What kind of ideas do you invest in?’

      ‘Whatever happens to interest me at the time. I’m a maverick.’ His shoulder brushed her arm as he stretched across the table to snag the bottle that Ross had left at his elbow and offer to top up her almost-empty glass.

      ‘Oh, I don’t know that I should—’ she said weakly, denying the temptation offered by the deliciously chilled nectar. She hadn’t been drunk last night, but she had certainly been uninhibited. She didn’t dare risk the reappearance of the wild, wanton woman she thought that she had left in Paris.

      ‘Go on, say yes, you know you want it,’ Lucien said silkily, tilting the bottle and emptying it into her glass. ‘Don’t deny yourself pleasure just because you think it might be bad for you. Sometimes bad is very, very good.’

      His words shivered over her, something warm and heavy coiling and uncoiling in her stomach. She was beginning to realise that she had made a silly mistake in not instantly acknowledging she’d spent the evening in his company, and laughing it off to the Reeds as just one of those crazy things. That would have been the mature, sophisticated thing to do. Instead, by hiding it, she had made it into something more important than it was, an intimate secret between the two of them, compounding her embarrassment if it ever came out—and handing Luc a licence to torment her for his own amusement.

      ‘Yes, you’d better have something to wash down the you-know-what,’ Sophie reminded her. ‘Didn’t you say you had something for Veronica, Gran?’ she urged.

      ‘Ah, yes, the Mas de Bonnard rite of passage,’ intoned Miles, lifting a little covered pottery dish painted in the bright colours of Provence and passing it along the table to his mother-in-law.

      ‘Fred and I used to come here on holiday every winter for years,’ said Zoe reminiscently as she cradled the dish. ‘We loved it so much we were even talking about buying Mas de Bonnard and retiring here to run a B&B—we ran a motel, you see, and Fred was a cook. He died just before his sixty-fifth birthday, but I knew he wouldn’t want me to stop coming, so I’ve been making it a kind of pilgrimage ever since. We have lots of friends here amongst the locals over the years, which is why we know where to go for the best of everything and dear Fred did love his marinated snails …’

      There was evidently no escaping her initiation, and Veronica was the cynosure of all eyes as she took up a toothpick and dutifully paid her tribute to Fred, chewing her way through the small, chilled delicacy, relieved to discover that all she could taste was the spicy marinade, the boiled snail having a texture similar to squid. Out of sheer bravado, because she sensed Lucien thought she wouldn’t, she even ate a second, but hastily waved away his sly offer to fetch her a plate.

      ‘Now you’re one of us,’ said Sophie, with satisfaction. ‘I bet Karen wouldn’t have done it. She’d have squealed and claimed it was too yucky.’ She obviously remembered how fastidious her former nanny had been about food.

      ‘Or complained about the number of calories,’ smiled Veronica.

      That brought the conversation around to Karen’s foray into modelling and from Melanie’s comments it was obvious that, far from giving her sister a choice, Karen had freely offered Veronica’s services before she had ever arrived in England. It was Melanie who had been dubious about encroaching on Veronica’s holiday and Karen who had earnestly assured her that it was no problem, for Veronica considered it in the nature of a working vacation anyway, and the free accommodation ample compensation for her time.

      Veronica saw little point in revealing how Karen had twisted the facts to suit herself. Even if she wanted to turn tail and run at the daunting prospect of seeing Lucien each day, she knew she was well and truly trapped by her own sense of responsibility.

      It was the same strong sense of duty that had kept her hostage on her parents’ farm when she had envisaged a very different future for herself.

      ‘How convenient for Karen,’ Lucien was commenting. ‘You know, you’ll probably have to look for a new assistant soon anyway, if she’s really been bitten by the modelling bug and not just doing it for a bit of fun.’

      ‘I know, but I don’t even want to have to think about it just yet,’ said Melanie. ‘Karen’s always fitted in so well … but I knew there’d come a time when she’d get restless and want to move on, and the job is changing, too. There’s less personal and more office work involved now, which I know isn’t really her thing …’

      But a certain inflection in Lucien’s voice along with the aptness of his observation had brought Veronica’s head around. ‘Do you know Karen?’

      His eyelids drooped, thick black lashes veiling his gaze. ‘We’ve met a few times when she’s been in London with Melanie.’ And before another question could form in her mind, let alone her tongue, he added, ‘If you’re here on a working holiday, what is it exactly that you do, Veronica?’

      ‘I thought you were some kind of accountant for your parents,’ said Ashley languidly, making it sound like a sinecure. ‘Except—didn’t Karen say you weren’t actually qualified?’

      ‘I’m not a chartered accountant, if that’s what you mean,’ said Veronica evenly. ‘I left school to help Mum and Dad sell fresh produce from their organic farm, and took accounting courses by correspondence so I could handle their bookkeeping. Gradually I started doing the books for other friends and neighbours with rural small businesses as well.’ Because her parents hadn’t been able to afford to pay her, she had had to invent ways to earn herself some money and contribute to the household expenses, inadvertently providing herself with the means and incentive to finally assert her independence.

      She had loved school and longed to go on to university, but at the time her parents had been struggling, so she had quietly put her dreams of an independent career on hold and stayed home on the farm. As their first-born it was