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The Count responded to the hard edge in her voice with a stare of almost hypnotic intensity before swinging around to address his colleagues. ‘Gentlemen, forgive me. We will reconvene this meeting tomorrow morning at nine.’
Round one to her, Kate thought, relaxing minutely. She waited in silence until the room cleared, lifting her chin in resolute defiance as the men walked past her, gazing with naked interest at the woman who presumed to interrupt the schedule of the Count de Villeneuve.
‘Won’t you sit down?’ the Count invited as the door finally closed on the last of them.
Kate glanced at the two easy chairs facing each other across a fireplace carved from a single block of Carrara marble and then back again to the confident individual standing in front of her. The Count’s suggestion would immediately put her at the receiving end of his legendary hospitality rather than on the opposing side of what might well turn into a legal dispute between them. ‘I prefer to stand, if you don’t mind.’
‘As you wish.’
As if sensing her unease, the Count remained where he was…too far away to touch, but close enough for her to detect the scent of warm clean man overlaid with the aroma of citrus fruits and spice.
‘Kate, se passe? Have you forgotten me?’
Kate’s face flared red as she met his amused gaze. How could she forget? Instinctively her gaze slipped to his lips.
‘Is it all coming back to you now?’ he murmured with what she suspected was more than a hint of satisfaction.
The heat teasing her senses was proof enough…but that same delicious sensation served as a warning too. ‘I haven’t come here to reminisce,’ she said firmly. ‘My only concern is for the present—’
‘Mine, too,’ he assured her smoothly. Turning on his heel, he strode away from her across the peach-veined marble floor to where an intricately inlaid cherry wood desk stood in front of a tall arched window. ‘Won’t you come and sit down?’ he invited, holding out a chair opposite to his own comfortably padded leather swivel seat.
His gaze was like a silken lasso drawing her across the room, Kate thought, fighting the urge to move.
‘Come,’ he urged gently, as if dealing with a highly bred mare. ‘Come and tell me what’s on your mind, Kate. Whatever your problem, I’m sure I can find a solution for you.’
His containment was driving her crazy, she realised, consciously steadying her breathing. His inflexible control had always brought out the worst in her. But, even as she told herself that she had changed beyond recognition in the years since they had last met, she found herself thrusting one hand on to the swell of her hip and speaking to him in the same furious tone she had once adopted as a self-willed teenager.
‘Talking won’t solve this problem, I’m afraid.’
‘May I ask what would satisfy you?’ he enquired, the gleam in his eyes betraying not only his recognition, but his enjoyment of her lapse.
The answer that sprang unbidden into Kate’s mind made her eyes widen with alarm. Guy de Villeneuve was in his late thirties and occupied the front cover of Time magazine with almost monotonous regularity. Kate, for all her commercial success, was just brushing twenty-six and had a life devoted to work, where there was no time for romance, let alone the type of relationship her over-active imagination had just conjured up.
‘Now you’re here it won’t hurt you to relax,’ he continued reasonably. ‘Can you come away from the door? I don’t bite.’
It was impossible to read his face…but it had been more than ten years, Kate reminded herself. She was out of practice. But if he thought he could make her nervous…make her forget the reason for her visit… She started walking towards him with her head held high and her dancer’s carriage almost concealing the slight limp that was the legacy of the accident that had almost killed her.
‘It would be a start if you could explain why La Petite Maison has been so badly neglected,’ she agreed frostily.
Now it was the Count’s turn to grow still as he watched her progress towards him. ‘Ah, that,’ he murmured distractedly.
‘Yes, that,’ Kate agreed. ‘Well?’ she pressed. ‘How do you explain it? I have been paying money into the Villeneuve estate office for almost six months now. Money I imagined would more than cover any necessary maintenance on the cottage until I was in a position to come over here and take charge for myself.’
‘Oh, par pitie, Kate!’ His elegant gesture silenced her. ‘It was understood by all the tenants that as soon as I had restored the estate to its original purpose the holiday cottages would have to go.’
‘Well, I wasn’t informed,’ Kate said as she settled into the chair he was holding out for her. ‘Under the circumstances, don’t you think your behaviour has been a little high-handed?’
As he took the seat facing her the Count’s powerful shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘I apologise for the oversight. When Madame Broadbent passed on I received no word regarding her intentions for La Petite Maison. I had no reason to believe that she left the cottage to you. Without the benefit of formal communication I drew the only assumption possible—’
‘Which was?’ Kate cut in. What was wrong with her pulse? She always remained calm when difficulties in business cropped up—that was her strength, she reminded herself forcefully. And La Petite Maison certainly represented a difficulty, if only because she had allowed her many other interests to take precedence.
The letters from Aunt Alice’s solicitor had coincided with the closure of a deal that would see her Internet travel service open at several sites in Japan…she had barely scanned the documents from France.
‘I concluded that Madame Broadbent’s heirs merely wished to keep the cottage in good repair— Please, let me finish,’ the Count insisted quietly when Kate’s agitation threatened to become vocal. ‘As that was not in line with my own plans, I instructed my estate manager to return all monies paid. On top of that there would have been a generous capital payment in line with the sums I have released to regain full title to all the other properties. Some banking hiccup—’
‘You can stop right there,’ Kate insisted, pushing a slender hand through her barely contained hair and dragging the rest of it down from the clip in the process. ‘I don’t want your money, but I do want everything I paid into the Villeneuve estate office to be spent on the cottage.’
‘I can’t do that—’
‘Can’t, or won’t?’ she demanded tensely.
The Count missed a beat, but his eyes had grown dangerously warm as he leaned over the desk to gaze at her. ‘Ah, Kate,’ he drawled. ‘You always were too impetuous—’
‘That isn’t an answer,’ she warned, trying not to notice the attractive way his eyes crinkled at the corners and the dense sweep of ebony lashes that framed the molten steel gaze. His scrutiny was bad enough when she wanted to talk business, but the effect it was having on her senses was nothing short of catastrophic. ‘If you refuse to do anything about the cottage,’ she said, ‘just return the money and I’ll sort it out myself.’
‘All right,’ he agreed, surprising her with his sudden capitulation. ‘I’ll have all the money repaid into your bank account tomorrow morning.’ But, just as Kate felt some of her tension seep away, he added starkly, ‘But the cottage reverts to me. You will accept my offer.’
‘Blackmail?’ she said as she got to her feet.
The Count’s fist slammed down on his desk. ‘T’exagere!’ Gathering himself quickly, he stood up, his dark, brooding expression an unmistakable mark of reproof. ‘I prefer to call it an amicable arrangement,’ he said in a low voice.
‘It’s a very one-sided arrangement,’ Kate observed, with remarkable composure considering she was confronting a gaze grown more dangerous than she could ever remember, ‘and hardly amicable since I don’t want any part of it.’
‘Perhaps when you hear what I have to say you might change your mind.’
Kate’s heart was thundering out of control, but still she managed evenly, ‘I doubt it.’
‘So you won’t even listen to my offer?’
As he stood towering over her, waiting for her reply, Kate drew herself up, but even when she was at full stretch he was still a good head taller…and there was a glint in his eyes that suggested he was actually entertained by her stand. Now she was mad. ‘Don’t patronise me, Guy. I’m a grown woman with my own business to run.’
‘And I thought you’d forgotten how to say my name,’ he growled softly.
His voice was as dark and deliciously beguiling as bitter chocolate, Kate realised as she struggled to keep her mind focused on the purpose of her visit.
Perhaps it was the timbre of his speech, or maybe the pitch, but something primitive was strumming her senses with a persistent and unmistakable beat. And if past experience had left her with the misleading notion that she was immune to machismo, Guy, Count de Villeneuve had just proved her wrong. And he knew it, she realised as their glances clashed.
‘Don’t change the subject,’ Kate warned, rallying fast. ‘You know what I’m here for and it isn’t a trip down memory lane.’
In a few electric moments their eyes met and held. Then, raising his eyebrows the merest fraction, he said, ‘I think we should both calmly put our cards on the table.’
‘I won’t change my mind.’
‘As you please, Kate,’ the Count said as he dropped on to his chair. ‘But whatever you’ve got to say, make it brief. I’ve got a great many things to do.’ He tossed her a look that was suddenly a good deal less tolerant, and she noticed how one of his hands seemed to want to mash the end of a bone-handled paperknife. The unconscious gesture was so much at odds with his strong watchful face that Kate was forced to wonder if she was as disturbing to him as he was to her. One thing was clear: he would soon lose patience with her again. It seemed that even Guy de Villeneuve’s fabled courtesy had its limitations—
‘Well?’ he pressed. ‘Do you intend to join me any time soon? Or would you prefer just to stand there and stare?’
The roughness in his voice was even more seductive than the charm, Kate realised as she moved to perch on the very edge of the chair. Smoothing her delicate aquamarine-tinted muslin skirt around her bare tanned legs, she watched him select a folder from the neat pile in front of him. But her gaze, like her thoughts, soon began to wander.
Ten years before she had been a gawky teenager with a helpless crush on a French aristocrat. Today she sat before the same man, close enough to see the silver wings that time had laced through his thick, wavy black hair—sat before him as a successful woman in her own right, thanks to the runaway success of her Internet travel business. But how did that help when her heart was beating so fast she could hardly breathe? Awe and desire had once consumed her adolescent dreams. It was a real shock to discover that the Count could still provoke those same complex feelings—only now it was worse, far worse, she acknowledged. Now she wasn’t an innocent young girl, but a successful working woman with all the appetites that went with the dynamic territory she inhabited. And there had been no time to assuage those appetites during the crazy rollercoaster ride to the top—or any real temptation before this moment, she realised as she drank in the athletic figure beneath the impeccably cut suit.
‘Ready, Kate?’
She snapped back to attention instantly, irritated by the lapse. She had come to level a complaint against this man, not sum up his potential as a lover! As her fingers strayed to check the fastenings on her casual blouse, she cursed the fact that she hadn’t thought to change into one of her Armani suits. Infuriated by the state of the cottage she had reacted without thinking, jumping into her rented Jeep to beard the lion in his den. But an outfit that had been perfectly acceptable in the balmy French countryside had suddenly become an embarrassment to her when she was locked in confrontation with a man like Guy de Villeneuve. It was far too revealing, for one thing, and had obviously sent out the wrong signals. The Count’s responses so far suggested that he found her capricious and provocative, rather than lucid and determined.
Kate’s mind blanked as a pair of perceptive grey eyes levelled a gaze of remorseless enquiry upon her face and a very seductive mouth began to curve in the suspicion of a smile. Then with mercurial speed his glance switched to her naked shoulders and began drifting over the sun-kissed flesh to where a swell of ivory showed with each breath she took. And the flimsy skirt was practically transparent, she remembered, hastily wrapping it around her legs.
The low voice reached her across the desk even though his attention appeared to have returned to the documents in front of him. ‘Careful…it would be a shame to crush such a lovely skirt.’ The compliment might have sounded innocent enough to anyone who didn’t know the Count, but Kate remembered him well enough to realise that his senses were so keenly tuned he missed nothing—nothing at all. And that was a real concern as she had just eased position in response to a rogue shaft of sensation.
‘C’est très jolie,’ he murmured before glancing up. ‘Very you.’
The comment puzzled Kate for a moment. Then she realised that, just as she had her own childhood memories, the Count would always think of her as the little girl who visited his family estate to holiday at her aunt’s cottage. The casual two-piece she was wearing now was very similar in style to the clothes Aunt Alice used to have waiting for her, outfits laid out neatly on the high French bed that had been Kate’s for the duration of her stay. The brightly coloured garments have given her such pleasure—such escape from her rigid existence at home. It had always felt as if she was stepping into a different world when she put them on, as if she could be someone else altogether—at least for the summer. She hadn’t even made the connection when she had purchased the traditional blouse and skirt at the open-air market on her first day back in France. She realised now that it had been a major part of the fantasy she had hoped to recreate—the fantasy the compelling individual in front of her seemed intent on demolishing.
‘I haven’t got all day, Kate,’ he prompted.
Yes, she thought irritably. The indulgent note in his voice was unmistakable. He did think of her as that little girl. She had brought it upon herself. All those years of carving a niche for herself in one of the most competitive business arenas had been erased in a moment by market stall clothes.
‘Kate?’ His voice had grown sharper. ‘I’m sorry, Kate, but I really must insist—’
His tone of voice left her in no doubt that they had almost passed the point where she had any credibility left. Guy de Villeneuve’s switch from sexual predator to time-starved tycoon was effortless and Kate knew she would have to match his mood or capitulate.
‘I’m not selling the cottage back to you,’ she said at last. ‘I’m going to live in it.’
The Count’s face betrayed no emotion whatever as he reached for a folder from a pile stacked in front of him.
‘Well?’ Kate pressed. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’
‘There are a few things I think I need to explain to you about La Petite Maison,’ he said as he slipped some documents from the folder and laid them out on the desk.
‘I disagree,’ Kate said firmly. ‘It all seems pretty clear to me. The cottage used to belong to my aunt, Madame Broadbent. And now it belongs to me.’
‘I am aware that the cottage you refer to was included in the estate of Madame Broadbent,’ the Count agreed evenly. ‘But until today—’
‘You had no idea—’
‘To whom she had bequeathed it,’ he murmured as he scanned the papers. After checking them briefly he pushed them across the desk to her.
‘Before I look at these,’ Kate said, fixing him with a determined stare, ‘I would like to know what has happened to the money I have been paying into your estate office. You can’t tell me there isn’t a record—’ She stopped. Something in his expression warned her that this was not the moment to jump on her high horse.
‘I am aware of every payment received for La Petite Maison,’ the Count assured her. ‘But those transactions show nothing more than a company name.’ Picking out a couple more sheets, he passed them over to her.
Kate’s stomach contracted. Even Guy de Villeneuve could not be expected to know that Freedom Holidays was her company. But that didn’t excuse the state of the cottage. As she felt his gaze resting on her she pretended interest in the invoice… But his sexual aura was lapping around her senses, clouding her mind with erotic images that had nothing to do with the purpose of her visit.
‘But if all these payments are in order,’ she began huskily, ‘how do you explain the neglect at the cottage?’ She tossed the invoices back across the desk to avoid looking at him.
‘Ancient covenants govern La Petite Maison just the same as they do all the other cottages on the estate. Also it is leasehold. Accordingly, I don’t need to explain my actions. The fact that I choose to—’
‘You choose to?’ Kate flared, even though her logical mind told her he was acting honourably.
‘Certainement,’ he confirmed.
‘So, no one has any rights except you?’ Her emotional self took another battering as he answered her heated question with just a slight lift of his shoulders.
‘Who else did you imagine owned the land on which all the estate cottages stand, Kate?’
‘You—’ She found herself flailing about mentally, wondering why on earth she hadn’t confronted this obvious fact before. Why had she chosen to ignore the reality of Guy de Villeneuve as a neighbour? And now it seemed as landlord too!
‘That is correct,’ he said, making a bridge of his fingers on which to rest his chin.
She knew he was waiting to see what her response would be now she knew he held all the cards. Well, that look might have weakened other women— ‘I have found no record of my aunt ever making a payment for ground rent,’ she said, confronting the gaze he was levelling at her with an unwavering stare. ‘And I have checked through every one of her documents thoroughly—’
‘All except the deeds for the cottage, I presume,’ he observed, keeping his eyes trained on her face.
As she watched them darken from silver-grey to steel and then grow blacker still she raced to gather her wits while she still had some left. ‘Well, yes,’ she admitted. ‘I left that to my solicitor. And he said…’ Her voice tailed away.
Mr Jones had been at pains to explain that property law pertaining to ancient estates in France could be quite a minefield. He had asked her to make an appointment so that they could have a proper discussion regarding his many concerns. But she had been too busy to meet him—too busy making plans for this, her new venture.
As if scenting victory, the Count had grown very still like a jungle cat about to pounce. ‘It was remiss of your solicitor not to mention—’
‘No,’ Kate admitted reluctantly. ‘I am the one to blame. My solicitor wanted to go through everything with me in detail. I just haven’t had time—’
‘Ah,’ the Count said as if to imply that she might have done better to slow down and prioritise. ‘Is there something else?’ he added shrewdly.
‘Yes,’ Kate said, feeling she was on to something. ‘You still haven’t explained why there are no records of Aunt Alice ever making payment for a lease—’
‘Madame Broadbent was never asked for money,’ the Count revealed quietly. ‘As one of my mother’s closest friends it would have been highly inappropriate to exact any form of payment from her.’
‘You seemed to have no trouble accepting mine,’ Kate said, feeling unaccountably stung by this revelation.
‘All your payments will be returned with interest.’
‘But I don’t want them returned. I want the money spent on the cottage,’ she insisted again.
‘C’est impossible,’ he said with finality. ‘There will no longer be any independent cottages on my estate.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Unfolding his impressive frame, the Count got to his feet. ‘You will find my offer more than generous,’ he said in a voice that suggested their meeting was over. ‘I can assure you that everyone else has been more than satisfied—’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Oui, vraiment.’ His voice was clipped and dry, but abruptly his steely gaze softened. ‘Come on, Katie,’ he urged. ‘What do you need a second home in France for if you are so busy—?’
‘My name is Kate!’ Kate flared, horrified to hear the break in her voice.
‘Kate,’ he amended easily. ‘But, however you like to be called, you still haven’t answered my question.’
From cool and collected businesswoman, Kate suddenly found herself plunged into an emotional maelstrom she couldn’t contain. ‘Well, here’s one for you,’ she said hotly as she sprang up to confront him. ‘Are you trying to tell me that everyone—absolutely everyone else has accepted this deal?’ The way she stressed the last word turned it into an accusation.
