His Mistress Proposal?. Trish Wylie

to his expectant face as recognition of his true perfidiousness hit her like a blow.

      ‘And you’re very fluent in English all of a sudden,’ she said acidly. ‘You don’t even appear to have any accent.’

      ‘I’m a certified genius,’ was his sardonic reply. ‘I learn fast.’ From his taunting grin she knew he didn’t expect her to believe him, his teeth lethally white against his tan. He spoke English like a native—a man who was aware of every subtlety and nuance of the language.

      ‘You’re no more French than I am!’ she spluttered, desperately trying to remember what betraying words she might have whispered to him in the throes of ecstasy, secure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t understand a word.

      ‘I never said I was.’ He shrugged.

      ‘You never said you weren’t, either,’ she said bitterly.

      His mouth twisted. ‘I thought that was the deal: don’t ask, don’t tell … because you certainly made no attempt to question who or what I was. But now I think it’s because you already knew who I was before you even walked into that bar. That was no chance meeting between us, was it, Veronica?’

      Her grey eyes slid evasively away from his darkly accusing gaze as she remembered spying on him from her apartment window.

      ‘It wasn’t like that—’

      ‘Oh, what was it like?’ he pressed.

      She shuddered at the thought of trying to explain, and attempted to fall back on her simmering grievance. ‘There was no need for you to pretend you didn’t speak a word of English,’ she said weakly.

      ‘Like you claimed you didn’t understand French,’ he shot back.

      She blinked. ‘That’s because I don’t—’

      ‘Then how do you explain your choice of reading material?’ He bent over and plucked out the tabloid newspaper sticking up from her canvas carry-bag, which was leaning against the leg of the table by her sandalled feet. ‘Or are you going to claim you just bought it for the pretty pictures?’ he added with a sneering emphasis.

      ‘I haven’t read it—it’s not mine,’ she said quickly, unwilling to admit to the foolish impulse that made her pick it up—the desire for some sort of continuing connection with him, however tenuous. ‘Someone left it on the train,’ she muttered. ‘I meant to throw it away, I just forgot about it …’

      ‘That’s convenient—there’s a rubbish bin over there by the corner,’ he pointed out. ‘I’ll dump it in there right now, shall I, and save you the bother of doing it later?’ And under her startled gaze he jumped up and suited his actions to his words, stuffing the paper well down into the depths of the bin, and walking back towards her, dusting off his hands with an air of grim satisfaction.

      He had just made certain that whatever in the paper that he so savagely objected to was now beyond the means of her finding out, she realised, watching him in wide-eyed wariness as he straddled his chair again, waving away the waiter who approached to ask for his order.

      He rested his darkly stubbled chin on his folded arms. ‘Now, what were we talking about? Oh, yes, our mutual charade last night. Did you rifle through my things, by the way, before you left?’

      She stiffened. ‘Why would I? I’m not a thief!’

      He straightened, shedding his air of mocking insolence. ‘What else was I supposed to think when I woke up to find you’d done a moonlight flit? And here I thought that Kiwis were a flightless bird.’

      ‘It was morning—there wasn’t any moon.’ She wasn’t going to tell him that it was inexperience and embarrassment that had caused her to panic. ‘I—I had things to do.’

      ‘And people to call?’ he suggested. He tilted his head, a shaft of sunlight through the branches of the plane tree turning his eyes to polished bronze.

      ‘One or two,’ she admitted, puzzled by his sudden tension. She had rung her parents for a quick check-in before the next leg of her trip, carefully avoiding any mention of illness, and had texted her sister without much hope of an informative reply.

      ‘Including your employer, perhaps?’ Lucien murmured, to her added bewilderment. ‘In London …?’

      Veronica’s dark brown eyebrows snapped together. ‘I don’t have one as such; I’m self-employed. And I told you, I’m from New Zealand—’

      ‘You’re freelance?’ he cut her off, with a disparaging look down his hawkish nose that raised her hackles.

      ‘I prefer to call myself an independent businesswoman,’ she told him.

      His face hardened. ‘Well, whatever you call yourself, my advice is to stop throwing yourself into my path because I don’t like being harassed, and French privacy laws happen to be quite strict in that respect. You might find yourself being tossed out of the country on your plush white bottom. I think your opening line in this conversation was rather ironic considering the way you’ve been carrying on!’

      Her mouth fell open. ‘You think I’m following you?’ she said, her deep voice rich with scorn. She started to laugh, then stopped when she realised from his tight-lipped expression that he was actually serious. ‘That’s crazy! How on earth could I have followed you, when I was the one who got here first?’ she pointed out triumphantly.

      ‘Only because I had one or two things to pick up in Avignon before I left,’ he countered. ‘Did you think I didn’t notice you lurking around while I was renting my car? What did you do? Go back and bribe the girl on the desk to tell you where I said I was going so you could take the same road?’

      Veronica gasped. ‘I wasn’t lurking,’ she said. ‘I was picking up my own rental. I didn’t even realise you’d seen me,’ she added stiffly, not realising it could be interpreted as a guilty admission.

      ‘Oh, come on. There aren’t that many towering redheads around that you didn’t stand out like a beacon—’

      ‘Then I obviously wasn’t lurking, was I?’ she snapped. ‘And my hair isn’t red.’ Being a strapping, six-foot tall female had made the teasing bad enough at high school, without accepting the added stigma of being a ‘ginger’.

      His eyes followed the movement. ‘It certainly burns bright under the Provence sun. Why do you think all those famous painters came down here to produce their masterpieces? Because of the special quality of the light, and the way it affects the human perception of colour.’

      ‘Is that why you’ve come here? You’re a painter?’ she said. A volatile artistic temperament might go a long way to explaining, if not excusing, his behaviour. Maybe that tabloid he had been so furious about had given a rotten review of his work.

      He stood up. ‘Nice try, Veronica,’ he said cynically. ‘Those big, bemused eyes are a convincing touch, but it’s a little late to feign innocence.’

      He bent, angling his torso across the narrow table and bracing his hands flat on the crumb-strewn cloth on either side of her unconsciously bunched fists, and thrusting his face close enough for her to feel the heat of his menacing purr.

      ‘This is your first and last warning, Veronica—stay well away from me and everything that’s mine or I’ll make you rue the day you ever came to France.’ He jerked slightly, as if to leave, but then settled back, one hand moving up to cup her jaw, firmly tilting her pale, freckled face to his. ‘And by the way, just off the record, between the two of us—’ he rocked forward on his toes and kissed her square on her stunned mouth, taking his own, sweet time over it before he pulled back to conclude ‘—thanks for the memories. You were great last night, a real handful in more ways than one—the best lay I’ve had in a long, long time …’

      And he walked down to the kerb, jumped into his car and was gone in a rumbling roar of exhaust fumes before she could recover sufficiently