Claiming His Runaway Bride / High-Stakes Passion. Yvonne Lindsay

lips as she pulled on one of the T-shirts. Yes, this felt right, and if she could get into the garden maybe she’d remember more.

      Leaving her discarded clothing on the floor, Belinda slipped on a pair of rubber-soled flat shoes from the shoe rack and headed for the French doors across the bedroom. She flung them open, stepping out onto the private deck, and inhaled the herbaceous scents on the air.

      Stairs led off the deck from the right-hand side, down into the impeccably landscaped gardens. As she danced down them, she cast her eyes around, waiting for that same spark of recognition that had struck when she’d found the gardening wear, but it continued to elude her.

      The grounds were extensive and the sun was low in the sky when she found the herb garden. Crushed-shell pathways, edged with old bricks, formed a complex Celtic knot pattern, with lush foliage of a variety of herbs—their scents rich in the evening air—filling the spaces in between. At its central point a sundial was mounted, casting long shadows into the boxed rosemary nearby.

      Rosemary—for remembrance. She’d have laughed out loud if the irony hadn’t been so painful. Yet of all the places she’d explored in the garden this was the one area she felt most at home. Absently Belinda snapped off a sprig of rosemary and, rubbing it between her fingers, brought the fragrant herb to her nose and inhaled deeply.

      Suddenly she knew. This was her garden. She’d planned and painstakingly directed the position of each plant in its place. The parsley she’d planted herself—she remembered that much—laughing at the time at something her sisters had said about how each time they’d planted parsley they’d fallen pregnant. The hope she’d felt that the old wives’ tale would come true for her struck her square at her centre, and she staggered to the bench seat positioned to make the most of the final rays of the sun.

      She remembered. Oh, God, she remembered the garden. It had taken months to get it to this state, but what of the rest? What of the time she must have spent here with Luc, of their growing relationship and their plans for a future together—their love?

      The pounding behind her eyes changed in tempo, sharpening to a vicious stab that made her flinch. As her eyes uncontrollably slid closed and Belinda began to lose her grip on consciousness, a question echoed in her head: was this the pain of remembrance or the pain of regret?

      Three

      Luc threw his Mont Blanc pen on his desk with scant regard to the limited-edition, eighteen-karat-gold masterpiece. He pushed his chair back from the desk. Damned if he could think straight today, and he knew whose fault that was.

      Belinda.

      A fierce sense of possession swirled deep inside him. He’d had to force himself to walk away from her earlier, to give her space, when all he’d wanted to do was imprint himself back into her mind, her body. He could have done it. She’d welcomed his kiss, participated fully in the duel of senses. But some perverse sense of honour embedded in his psyche insisted she come to him again willingly.

      He pushed himself up and out of his chair and crossed his expansive office to the window overlooking the gardens. His first thought on seeing the young woman in tattered jeans and a T-shirt was that they had a trespasser on the property, but the quickening inside him told him exactly who it was. He’d had the same visceral reaction the first time he’d laid eyes on her and decided she’d be his. He smiled.

      Expanding the existing kitchen garden had been the impetus to orchestrate her arrival at Tautara Estate. He’d done his research and known she would never be able to resist the opportunity to create an herb garden to rival any other in the country. Didier, the chef he’d unabashedly poached from a Côte D’Azur five-star hotel, had long bemoaned the lack of an extensive array of fresh herbs to use in his sumptuous cuisine and had theatrically fallen to the ground to kiss Belinda’s feet once the garden had been planted.

      Her lengthy stay at Tautara, punctuated by trips back to Auckland to act as hostess for her father’s enumerable functions, had set the scene for his successful campaign. She had been away often enough to miss him—enough to realise she loved him and belonged here, at his side. It had taken time, but he’d achieved his goal.

      But then Luc Tanner was the kind of man who always got what he wanted and he’d wanted Belinda with a gut-deep need that surpassed anything he’d known before. He thought back to the first time he’d seen Belinda, at a boutique hoteliers’ function hosted by her father.

      Rather than approach her directly, Luc had gone instead to her father, Baxter Wallace, who’d laughed in Luc’s face at his request for an introduction to his precious youngest daughter and turned him down flat. Undeterred, Luc had bided his time, always watching from afar, knowing, eventually, he would succeed in his quest. And the time came, as it always did.

      When, several months later, Baxter was fleeced to the tune of several hundreds of thousands of dollars in a credit-card scam targeting boutique hotels and chains, his bank had happily entered into extensive loans to rectify the situation. But by the time Baxter’s wife had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, requiring expensive treatment overseas not covered by their insurance company, the banks had already capped their financial well. So to whom had a desperate Baxter turned?

      Luc Tanner.

      No one else had the resources, or the motivation, to help. And much as it had obviously galled Baxter Wallace to turn to the one man he’d spurned, he’d succumbed in the end.

      They’d come to an agreement, one that had suited them both. One that now hung on whether or not Belinda regained her memory.

      Luc’s eyes narrowed as he saw Belinda drop to the surface of a bench seat in the garden, one hand pressed to her head. Something was very wrong. He propelled himself toward the door, calling to Manu, his majordomo, for assistance even as she slid to the ground.

      Manu reached her first. Luc’s hand ached from his grip on the head of his walking cane and he silently and vehemently cursed the disability that had prevented him from being at his wife’s side when she needed him.

      “What do you think? Is she okay?” Luc asked, as the one man he trusted above all others checked Belinda’s vital signs.

      “She’s coming round, it’s just a faint, I reckon.”

      Luc clumsily dropped to his knees, ignoring the shaft of pain that speared through his hip, and brushed the hair from Belinda’s face just as her eyes fluttered open.

      “Luc?” Her voice was weak, her eyes unfocused.

      “You fainted. Manu’s checking you over to make sure you haven’t hurt yourself. Don’t worry. I trust him with my life.”

      “She looks fine, Luc. No sign of any bumps on her head. No grazes anywhere.”

      “How do you feel?” Luc wrapped his arm around Belinda’s shoulders as she struggled to sit up.

      “I…I don’t know what happened. One minute I was okay, with a bit of a headache, the next it was excruciating pain. Then you guys were here.”

      “And now? The headache. Has it gone?” As soon as he had her back inside the house he would call her neurologist. He didn’t like the sound of this headache. Not if it had the capacity to render her unconscious.

      “It’s going away. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

      Her pale face belied her words. Between them, the two men helped Belinda to her feet. Luc felt frustrated that he had to defer to Manu’s unencumbered strength in this situation. Before the accident he would simply have lifted Belinda into his arms and carried her to their suite, but now even such a responsibility was denied him. They walked slowly to the lower entry to the house where an elevator door stood open and waiting. It was a short ride to the next level, where they made their way to Luc and Belinda’s private suite.

      “I’ll arrange for your evening meal to be sent through to you,” Manu said as he left them at the door to their rooms.

      “Thank you—” Luc clasped his seneschal’s hand