Susan Napier - His Mistress Proposal? - Public Scandal, Private Mistress / His Mistress, His Terms / The Secret Mistress Arrangement

VERONICA sighed with contentment as she sat at her table under a spreading plane tree in the tiny village square and sipped her cup of coffee, enjoying the faint breeze that feathered warmly around her bare neck and riffled the end of her pony-tail.

Karen had said the Reeds wouldn’t expect her to arrive at their villa, Mas de Bonnard, on the outskirts of the little village of St Romain-de-Vaucluse, until mid-afternoon. As a direct drive, it was only about forty minutes north-east of Avignon, so she had decided to take it slowly, avoiding the larger roads and towns and following the meandering scenic route that Melanie had recommended as being the one they preferred as the prettiest. She had even suggested this very café as worthy of a stop.

Veronica cut another sliver from her glistening pastry and popped it into her mouth, savouring the intense burst of apricot on her tongue.

A sleek silver convertible with red upholstery slid into the cobbled square, following the lone street that passed through the village. As it drew level and slowed almost to a stop for a scamper of children chasing a small dog, the driver lazily took a survey of his surroundings. His eyes were masked by wraparound sunglasses, but Veronica saw his glossy black head jerk in a rapid double take. His jaw visibly dropped, then tightened with a snap and the car braked to an abrupt halt. A long arm was slung across the top of the empty passenger seat as the driver twisted to look over his shoulder and backed sharply in to park parallel with the kerb, springing out of the car without bothering to open the door.

In a few ground-eating strides he was standing in front of her, his black shadow stamping his presence on the sun-dappled tablecloth.

‘Well, isn’t this a cosy little reunion!’

Coffee slopped into her saucer as she flinched at the sarcastic drawl. She looked up into Lucien’s blazing brown eyes, his wraparound sunglasses pushed up on top of his head unmasking his hard expression, his hands planted on his hips, legs astride, male aggression oozing from every gorgeous pore.

Her brain went into panic mode as every female cell in her body rioted with delight at his proximity.

‘What are you doing here? Are you following me?’ she blurted, half in hope, half in horror.

There was a brief pause, as if he was taken aback by the response. The shock on his face when he had seen her from the car had been completely spontaneous, she acknowledged wretchedly, her hands clenching as she fought to control her humiliation.

‘Are you going to stab me with that if I don’t give you the answer you want?’ he asked warily, and she lowered her eyes to see that she was gripping the knife she had used to cut her pastry, holding it defensively in front of her body. She hastily let it clatter back onto the plate. She could always scream if he tried anything violent. They were in a public place, after all.

Unlike last night.

The last time she had spoken to this man they had both been naked in his bed, making hot, passionate love!

She blushed, and the predatory light that had been banked in his eyes flared into renewed life.

He hooked out a chair from the adjacent table with a swipe of his foot and spun it around to sit astride, folding his arms along the top. Through the thin vertical slats of the back of the chair she could see that the sides of his olive shirt hung open revealing a white singlet, the circular discs of his flat brown nipples clearly visible against the thin fabric.

‘Lost for words, Veronica?’ he asked with an insolent smile. ‘You had plenty to say last night … c’est vrai ?’

The taunt jerked her flustered eyes back 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.