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‘Not to mention the father-to-be,’ exclaimed Ginny wearily, wondering, as she had innumerable times before, how her brash, rash friend always managed to end up in a muddle, even now, when she had matured beyond all recognition and had her life mapped out before her with the man she so passionately loved. ‘Libby, you keep saying you intend making your peace with the Grants once you and Jean-Claude are married, but now that your uncle’s here——’
‘No! Now’s completely the wrong time!’
‘Libby, don’t you think it’s time you sat down and had a serious rethink about all this—at least about contacting Jean-Claude and telling him about the baby?’
‘We’ve been through all that,’ protested Libby edgily. ‘Ginny, don’t even think about telling Michael anything. I just couldn’t handle it right now.’
‘Libby, love, I shan’t tell him a thing,’ exclaimed Ginny. ‘You know I wouldn’t—but just what am I supposed to say to him?’
‘Just stall him!’ the American girl begged, a note of panic entering her tone. ‘Tell him I’m in Paris on business—you never know, he might even swallow it, once he’s finished laughing…I don’t know,’ she sighed, sounding suddenly very unsure of herself. ‘Just tell him you don’t know when I’ll be back.’
‘Don’t worry—I’ll come up with something,’ said Ginny, that uncharacteristic note of vulnerability in Libby’s voice making her inject a confidence she was far from feeling into her words. ‘You’re not to worry.’
‘I can’t help it with Michael around—I’m just not up to facing the Grants yet,’ sighed Libby, then unexpectedly gave one of her irrepressible chuckles. ‘You know, if I didn’t know you so well, I’d say Michael would be a great choice for you to loosen up with and get rid of those sexual hang-ups you claim you don’t have.’
‘Libby!’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not recommending it,’ laughed Libby. ‘He’s far too dangerous for you—you’d probably end up in love with him.’
‘So, the man actually has a few lovable points,’ teased Ginny, relieved to hear Libby’s laughter, despite its cause.
Oh, he’s lovable, all right,’ sighed Libby. ‘And I was one of his greatest fans until a while back—not that I ever saw as much of him as I’d have liked. Being so much nearer my age, he never went in for breathing down my neck the way the rest of the family did…or so I kidded myself. It was Michael’s spying on me and reporting back to Grandpa and David that resulted in my not getting control of my own money once I reached twenty-one.’
Ginny felt a twinge of guilt as she found herself thinking that Libby, at twenty-one, was the last person to whom anyone in his right mind would have handed over control of a considerable fortune.
‘Ginny, I know what you’re thinking,’ said Libby, ‘and you’re right, but it was the low-down way he went about it that blew him as far as I was concerned. Even m my wildest days, I always had a few decent friends—and not all of them stuck away on the other side of the Atlantic. Michael picked one as his victim and seduced her into telling him all she knew about me—then he dropped her like a hot potato.’
‘Charming!’ exclaimed Ginny, wrinkling her nose in disgust. ‘Luckily I’m far too sexually repressed for that sort of ploy to work on me,’ she added teasingly, while inwardly squirming at the memory of her initial reaction to him—there had been nothing in the least repressed about that. ‘Anyway, we’re probably making far too much of this—for all we know, this is just a flying visit.’
‘You’re right,’ agreed Libby. ‘Luckily Jeanne has said it’s OK for me to stay at her place as long as I like. See if you can find out how long he reckons on being around—I’ll give you a call tomorrow.’
‘What if he answers the phone?’
‘So I’ll speak to him—and tell him how sorry I am to have missed him. Meanwhile, watch yourself—the way that guy wields charm, repression doesn’t get a look-in!’
Charm? What charm? During the past few hours the man had displayed about as much charm as a rattlesnake, Ginny fumed to herself, as she carried a tray of coffee out on to the terrace after dinner.
It was one of those evenings of balmy perfection, the sort that, no matter how many times she experienced it, she knew she would never grow to take for granted. Sitting on the terrace, listening to the innumerable sounds that filled the silence of the night as they drank their coffee, was a ritual she and Libby had fallen into of late. But tonight there was an oppressive charge in the air that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the man now taking a seat beside her.
He was so impossibly good-looking, she thought with a twinge of exasperation, so much so that she kept finding herself watching him with slightly detached disbelief instead of preparing herself for the moment when he would pounce. And pounce he most certainly would, she warned herself nervously, because, apart from the anger that had briefly flashed across his features when she had first told him, he had taken the news of Libby’s phone call, and the lack of any mention of her return, with barely a comment. But over dinner his cloak of restrained urbanity had begun slipping, to an extent that he had begun reminding her of her aunt Irene in the manner he had of looking down his decidedly patrician nose at her as he delivered his carefully chosen barbs.
‘Let’s see if I have this right,’ he murmured ominously, as they drank their coffee. ‘You’re my gardener,’ he stated, giving slight, but none the less calculated emphasis to the possessive pronoun.
Ginny felt her heart plummet as she wondered if he was aware that he was paying the top rate for both a gardener and a housekeeper.
‘And you also keep house for me,’ he continued.
Ginny remained silent, battling against rising to the deliberate edge of offensiveness in his tone as she waited for her worst fears to be confirmed.
‘But then, I’ve been paying you pretty well for both these jobs,’ he murmured silkily. ‘I don’t have any beef about the housekeeping—your excellent cooking’s worth every cent of that. It’s the keeping up the grounds——’
‘Keeping up the grounds?’ exploded Ginny as she lost the battle with herself. ‘Either your memory doesn’t serve you in the least well, Mr Grant, or you know nothing about gardens. This place was a wilderness when I took it on! Nobody had touched the place since your last gardener retired.’
‘He’d only been gone a couple of months when you started,’ he retorted. ‘Hardly enough time for the place to deteriorate into the wilderness you’re claiming it was.’
Ginny took a gulp of her drink, simply to prevent herself retaliating. If what he said was true, the garden had been neglected for several months before her predecessor had retired, not that she saw anything to be gained by pointing that out to him.
‘And, even though I am technically your employer, you don’t have to call me Mr Grant—Michael will do.’
‘And you may call me Ginny,’ she retorted, incensed by his patronising tone.
‘I hadn’t intended calling you anything else,’ he informed her with a hint of a chuckle. ‘Tell me, Ginny, what brought you to France?’
‘Several things, really,’ she parried, unsettled by the sheer unexpectedness of the question and the mishmash of unpleasant memories it evoked. ‘I felt like a change of scenery.’ And that, she supposed grimly, was one way of putting it; except that with a married boss who couldn’t keep his hands to himself and an aunt who had literally shown her the door once her problems at work had become the subject of speculative gossip, a change of scenery had become a vital necessity. Libby’s coinciding cry for help had been one she had responded to by cashing in her savings and taking off for France without a moment’s hesitation.
‘What—you decided you’d like to try gardening here instead of back home in England?’
‘No, I…Yes.’ She broke off, furious with herself for having become so visibly flustered. ‘I wasn’t doing gardening in England…but it’s what I’ve always wanted to do.’ It would have been safer to lie, she thought exasperatedly, and it would have given her a bit of practice for all the lies she would have to start coming up with in the very near future.
‘So, you decided you’d cut your teeth on my property, did you?’ he enquired with chilling softness.
‘Of course I didn’t,’ she exclaimed, reliving all the misgivings she had felt when Libby had airily informed her that, apart from billing the villa accounts for the services of a housekeeper to augment their income, they would also claim for a gardener. ‘I did an introductory gardening and landscaping course——’
‘Introductory?’
‘I had hoped to go on to do the full course, but wasn’t able to.’ And probably never would, since her savings towards that course had been what she and Libby had lived on at first. ‘But I haven’t had any complaints about my work yet—unless, that is, you intend making one now.’
‘If I find anything to complain about, you’ll hear me loud and clear,’ he replied, draining his cup and rising.
Ginny watched in mounting disbelief as his tall figure strode to the terrace steps—surely he didn’t intend checking out her work here and now—in the dark!
‘I’d almost forgotten what made me fall in love with this place,’ he announced as he gazed around him.
Ginny gave a start of surprise, remembering how she too had fallen in love at her first sight of the villa, and her inability to accept the idea of such a place not being lived in to the hilt, but instead being merely one of several rarely used retreats owned by a family to whom money was plainly not a consideration.
‘One of the reasons I decided to come here was to see for myself what sort of shape the place is in and what, if anything, needs doing to it,’ he said as he returned to the table.
‘But it’s perfect,’ protested Ginny before she could bite back the words.
‘Even perfection starts fraying at the edges if it’s not properly maintained,’ he mocked, pouring them both more coffee—the first time he had lifted so much as a finger since his arrival, Ginny noted caustically. ‘And those agents of mine don’t exactly break their backs earning their fees.’ He sat down. ‘So, tell me about yourself, Ginny,’ he said conversationally. ‘I’m interested in your connection with my niece.’
‘We went to school together in England,’ she replied, striving to remain calm in the face of his aptitude for making even the most harmless of statements sound faintly derogatory.
‘Oh, the English stepmother—she didn’t last any longer than the rest of them,’ he muttered almost to himself. ‘Libby could only have been a kid then.’
‘We were both twelve.’
‘That must be one hell of a friendship the two of you struck up, to have survived that long,’ he observed sceptically. ‘She couldn’t have been in England more than five minutes.’
‘We were at school together for almost a year,’ corrected Ginny, trying in vain to mask her growing resentment. ‘And not only did we write to one another, we also managed to meet once or twice over the years. Of all her ex-stepmothers, Jane’s the one Libby is closest to and still sees whenever she can.’
‘From what I’ve heard, it was always handy for Libby to have England to escape to from whatever mess she got herself into in the States,’ he stated, his heavy-lidded eyes coolly watchful. ‘Though it seems she’s now traded in England for France…Or will she end up running back to England from here this time, instead of from the States?’
‘I suppose it’s never occurred to you that it might be her family she’s always running from?’ exploded Ginny, and instantly regretted her outburst. ‘Look, I’m sorry—I had no right to say that,’ she apologised, certain she had, but even more certain that if she didn’t get her temper in hand she would end up giving something away.
‘No, you hadn’t,’ he agreed, his eyes blazing. ‘So Libby’s still running, is she? If that’s the case, I think it’s time we cut the pussy-footing and got on to what it is you and she are up to here!’
‘Up to?’ croaked Ginny. ‘We’re not up to anything! And you misunderstood me—I didn’t mean to imply Libby was actually running from you now!’
‘So what’s she doing?’
‘How do you mean, exactly?’
He flashed her a look of irritation. ‘A couple of years back, Libby got herself involved with a playboy French aristocrat—a guy with about as much idea of responsibility as she has—and later followed him to France. He disappeared off the scene several months ago and she’s been living down here ever since—and no one’s heard a word from her.’
‘I’ve heard from her!’ retorted Ginny, astounded by how much he seemed to know. But if only he knew the rest of it; how, accepting they both had irresponsible pasts to live down, Jean-Claude and Libby had agreed to his parents’ conditions to giving their marriage their blessing—a year’s total separation, during which time Jean-Claude proved himself in the family business and neither came within a hair’s breadth of scandal. ‘I’ve heard from her,’ repeated Ginny, the words losing their edge of indignation as she struggled to shake free from those thoughts. ‘She wrote and asked me to join her here.’
‘That’s not the story you were giving me a few moments ago.’
‘I wasn’t giving you a story a few moments ago,’ she protested, his tone re-igniting her indignation. ‘My wanting a change of scenery happened to coincide with Libby writing to me.’
‘How very convenient,’ he drawled. ‘You housekeep and tend the gardens—but what does my niece do to while away the hours? We’re talking here about a girl who isn’t happy unless she’s surrounded by a freeloading mob of lunatics; a girl who, twice in her life, has had to be rescued by this terrible family of hers from dubious, if not downright dangerous, communes in which she got herself involved!’
‘I know about that,’ said Ginny uneasily, remembering Libby’s own retrospective horror and shame when she had confided those episodes to her only a few months ago. ‘And she’s only too aware of what you saved her from…You see, Libby’s changed; she’s——’
‘If she’s changed so much,’ he cut in savagely, ‘how come she takes off the moment I arrive?’
‘She hasn’t taken off,’ protested Ginny wretchedly, wondering how much of this she could take. ‘She had already gone when you arrived!’
‘So why did you feel obliged to call her and warn her I was here?’
‘For heaven’s sake, she rang me! groaned Ginny. ‘Simply to say she didn’t know how long she’d be staying on in Paris.’
‘Oh yeah?’ he drawled, imbuing the words with every bit as much scepticism as his niece did whenever she used them.
‘Perhaps it won’t surprise you to hear that, even had she not intended staying in Paris—which she had—she probably would have once I told her you were here,’ retorted Ginny, as her wits at last began collecting themselves. ‘I got the impression that you weren’t exactly her favourite person.’
‘And I guess I can’t exactly be yours either,’ he murmured, flashing her an unexpected smile. ‘I shouldn’t be taking out my feelings over family problems on an innocent bystander—especially not one who’s served me up such a delightful meal.’
Ginny gave him a wary look, dazzled by the smile, yet not entirely convinced there hadn’t been a measure of sarcasm in his softly spoken words.
‘And now that we’re on the subject, I have a proposition to put to you.’ He gave a throaty chuckle as Ginny’s eyes widened in consternation. ‘I know they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,’ he laughed, ‘but that’s not the sort of proposition I had in mind.’
Ginny maintained a mortified silence, wondering how on earth she could be expected to feed this man a string of lies when she was so easily caught off her guard.
‘I keep you on as housekeeper and gardener—and you help me mend my bridges with Libby. You see, she’s probably not aware that about a year ago I took over the European side of the family business—my base is now Paris.’
Libby was most certainly not aware that there was a member of the Grant family on the same continent, let alone a few hundred miles up the road from here, thought Ginny, her heart plummeting.
‘Now that I’m settled in Paris, I’ve decided to combine a vacation with a look at our banking connections in the south. No doubt I’ll have to make the odd trip or two back to Paris, but, for the next month, I’ll be based here.’
‘You…’ began Ginny, and had to clear her throat when she discovered her mouth was bone-dry. ‘You’ll be staying here for a month?’
‘That’s what I said,’ he replied, the heavily lashed midnight blue of his eyes drilling through her. ‘Does the idea disturb you, Ginny?’
‘What a strange thing to say!’ she blustered, but what should have been a careless laugh came out as a strangled croak.
‘Right,’ he stated briskly. ‘I’ll let the agents know I’m here and they can arrange for extra staff for laundry and housework—I don’t intend overworking you. As I see it, the only extra work for you will be cooking for three instead of two once Libby gets back.’
‘Fine,’ managed Ginny, so limp with shock that she was astounded she had actually got the word out. Right now she had to accept she was in no fit state to absorb any of this, she warned herself. ‘Would you like me to make fresh coffee?’ she offered, her mind beginning to ease into the blank state that had become its refuge during the years of mental warfare with her aunt.
‘No, this is fine,’ he said, producing a smile that penetrated her blankness and forcefully revived the memory of her initial reaction to his stunning looks. ‘But I wouldn’t mind a cognac—you will join me, won’t you?’ he asked, rising.
Thrown by her reaction to what, after all, had only been a smile, she decided she would join him, despite the fact that she rarely drank spirits…A cognac might be just what her strung-out nerves needed.
But after her first few sips of the fierily velvet spirit she found herself wondering if it wasn’t over-stimulating her awareness as she began feeling she was hearing the odd note of mockery creeping into the tone of his desultory, though studiously polite conversation. Though it might have nothing to do with the cognac, she reasoned uncertainly, because even in the best of circumstances he wasn’t the sort of man in whose company she would ever have felt in the least relaxed. And it wasn’t simply his scarcely credible looks, it was everything else about him—from the almost arrogant ease oozing from his every pore to the careless expensiveness of every stitch he wore—that made him the sort of person who left her feeling gauche and vaguely inadequate.
‘I’m sure that drive from Paris must have been tiring,’ exclaimed Ginny, rising also and reaching over to collect the coffee-cups. ‘I’m sure I’d have—’ She let out a gasp of horror as she knocked a heavy crystal glass off the table. ‘Oh, heavens!’ she groaned, sinking to her knees and attempting to pick up pieces of the shattered glass. ‘I’m so sorry!’
‘For God’s sake, what do you think you’re doing?’ he exclaimed impatiently, striding over and hauling her to her feet. ‘You’ll cut yourself!’
‘I really am sorry,’ she muttered dazedly.
‘So you broke a glass—it’s no big deal.’
But a glass, judging by the weight and feel of it, that probably cost a small fortune, she fretted, her head beginning to swim. ‘I’ll replace it—I promise.’
‘I’m not too sure about that,’ he said, something in his tone drawing Ginny’s eyes to his. She had thought for an instant he had been about to laugh, but there was no trace of laughter in either his expression or his tone as he continued. ‘You see, that was one of a set, made exclusively for my great-great-grandfather—I guess they could be described as priceless.’
Ginny felt herself slump weakly against the table.
‘So…I don’t think you’ll be replacing it in any hurry.’
This time when she looked up at him, she actually caught a glimpse of amusement on his face, before it instantly disappeared—or had she imagined it?
‘I…This isn’t your idea of a joke, is it?’ she asked uncertainly.
‘Of course it is,’ he groaned exasperatedly. ‘But it riled me the way you were carrying on as though the darned glass really had been priceless.’
‘You have an extremely warped sense of humour,’ she retorted with as much dignity as she could muster.
‘You know something, Ginny?’ he drawled. ‘I’ve a feeling I’m really going to enjoy my stay here—what with my warped humour and——’ He broke off, frowning as he leaned forward and peered down into her face.
‘What is it?’ she exclaimed, alarmed.
‘Just indulging my warped humour,’ he murmured, taking her by the shoulders and drawing her closer to him. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I didn’t make the wrong proposition to you earlier,’ he added huskily, lowerng his head towards hers.
Her entire body stiffened as his lips touched, then gently stirred against hers. Her first thought was to wonder where, exactly, she should attack him; her second was that it might not be such a good idea to attack any part of someone of his build. And then there was the fact that he wasn’t using the slightest force as his mouth played in soft invitation against hers and that all she had to do was step back to escape. But at some point during those thoughts, her own lips had parted in a manner that could only be described as inviting, and her arms had somehow become entwined around his neck. And it was then, and only then, that his arms encircled her, drawing her body fully against the muscled leanness of his. It wasn’t until a hint of demand entered his kiss that she began fighting—not the man, but the sensuous softness slinking insidiously throughout her entire being.
