The Frenchman's Love-Child

CHAPTER SIX

TRANSFIXED by that charge, Tabby stared at him with wide startled green eyes, her dismay unconcealed. ‘Er…you think there’s a chance of that?’

‘I didn’t take any risks but I do know that accidents happen and you sounded as though you were crying on the phone.’ Dark colour now delineating the hard angles of his superb cheekbones, Christien shrugged back his broad shoulders in a dismissive gesture as he read her expressive face. ‘Mais non…I can see that that isn’t the “something serious” you referred to.’

‘No…er, it wasn’t.’

Black brows drew together over his clear dark golden eyes. ‘You’re ill?’ he breathed in a roughened undertone.

‘Healthy as a horse.’

‘Then we’ve got nothing at all to worry about, mon ange.’ Thrusting the door shut in his wake and without skipping a beat, Christien curved his hands round her slight, taut shoulders and pulled her to him.

Tabby snatched in a short, sharp gasp of air. ‘Christien-’

‘Don’t cry wolf with me. I was really concerned.’ But there was no true anger in his accented drawl for when she was that close he believed that he could have forgiven her anything short of cold-blooded murder.

‘I know, but-’

Moulding her slight body to him, he vented a husky groan of very male satisfaction as the surging peaks of her full breasts met the hard, muscular wall of his chest. His hands curved round her bottom to bring her into closer contact with the rigid thrust of his erection.

‘Zut alors…being with you is all I’ve thought about since you phoned!’ Christien dragged in a deep shuddering breath because all he wanted to do at that instant was sate the savage ache of his desire: push her back against the wall, lift her, sink into her over and over again. No more finesse than an animal, he acknowledged in shock at himself.

Weak with the same overwhelming hunger, Tabby trembled, awash with wild, mindless response to him on a half-dozen different levels. Fighting for the self-control to pull back from his lean, powerful body, she pushed her face into his neck, but the unique scent of his bronzed skin, of him was the headiest of aphrodisiacs. Her heart thumping like crazy, she rubbed against him, instinctively seeking relief from the throbbing sensitivity of her nipples.

Swearing barely audibly, Christien knotted long fingers into her hair to tip her head back. Smouldering dark golden eyes blazed down into hers and she stretched up to him as though he had thrown a switch somewhere inside her. He crushed her mouth under his, delved deep with his tongue in an explicit rhythm that made her knees buckle and damp heat pool between her thighs.

‘I need to be inside you…’ Christien growled and, backing to the sofa, he brought her down on top of him.

When she tensed and made a whimper of sound that just might have been the beginning of an objection, he was too clever to employ reason. Instead he pushed the camisole up out of his path and negotiated the hazard of the stretchy inner lining supporting her breasts. When the plump rosy-tipped mounds tumbled free, he groaned in raw male approbation of their bounty. Cupping the creamy swells, he used his tongue on her stiff, sensitised nipples and she gasped in tormented delight beneath his skilful ministrations.

‘We can’t…’ Tabby mumbled in despair, fighting her own unbearable craving with all her might.

Christien hushed her and a sob caught in her throat as he stroked a tantalising finger across the taut wet triangle of fabric stretched between her thighs. ‘I love your body, I love the way you respond to me-’

‘I…have to talk to you-’

‘I’ll be much more receptive in an hour’s time when I’ve recovered from nine days of deprivation,’ Christien promised huskily.

Already he had her so excited she couldn’t get oxygen into her lungs. He was touching her and she was lost in the ever-building flow of sweet, seductive sensation. Clutching his shoulders for support, she let her head fall back, helpless while he toyed with her.

‘Tell me how much you missed me, ma belle,’ he urged against her lush, reddened mouth, but she was way beyond speech. Her whole being was concentrated on the wicked joy of what he was doing to her.

At a fever pitch of desire, she was quivering all over. Heart racing, she gyrated against his expert hand, crazy with hunger as the throbbing ache at the heart of her drove her on with shameless eagerness. Knotting one hand into her tumbling hair, he plunged his tongue into her readily opened mouth, once, twice with explicit, erotic force…and it was enough to push her over the edge into a shattering release that wrenched a cry of ecstasy from her.

Only as the wild tremors of her climax and the mist of mindless pleasure receded did Tabby become aware of her mortal body again. He held her close, murmuring soothing, incomprehensible things in French as if he knew that, both emotionally and physically, he had turned her inside out. He tipped her back from him, smoothing her tangled hair back from her brow.

He sent her a slashing smile that made her heart lurch. ‘Although you couldn’t tell me that I was missed, you can certainly show me,’ he murmured with wicked appreciation.

Tabby reddened to the roots of her hair. He was still fully clothed. She had been so out of it that the pleasure had been hers alone. In a clumsy movement, her face burning with shame and embarrassment at how out of control she had been, she scrambled off his lap and pulled her camisole down from her bare breasts. While she stood there trembling from shock at what had happened to her in his arms, lean bronzed hands smoothed down her rucked skirt and then enclosed her clenched fingers.

Slowly, Christien turned her back round to face him. ‘Your passion gives me a hell of a kick. Don’t you know how rare it is? I don’t want a woman who worries about creasing her clothes or wrecking her hair-’

‘Basically, you’re happiest with a trollop!’ Tabby framed in a wobbly voice, and then she literally fled to the bathroom before she let herself down even more and burst into tears.

Even there she got no privacy. Christien opened the door a crack. ‘We’ll go out to dinner and lust over each other throughout at least five courses…will that make you feel better?’

A hairbrush gripped between her fingers, Tabby looked at her shameful reflection in the mirror and knew that nothing was likely to make her feel better. ‘We can’t go out…I have to tell you something…and you’re going to hate me.’

Silence fell and grew thick and heavy outside the bathroom door.

‘Is there another guy involved?’ Christien enquired roughly.

‘No.’

‘No problem…there’s nothing else I can’t handle. I’m very shock-proof,’ Christien asserted with complete confidence. ‘Do we have to sit through a five-course dinner? I’m hungry but I’m infinitely hungrier…and needier for you.’

Her throat thickened. ‘I’ll be out in a minute. Open one of those bottles of wine.’

‘You want me to wait upstairs?’ A ragged laugh sounded from Christien. ‘If I sound desperate, it’s because I am. I’m in agony!’

‘Just stay downstairs,’ Tabby instructed unsteadily.

She shut her eyes tight, forcing back the tears that would have released her tension. She was convinced that no woman had ever made a bigger mess of a relationship. She loved him. She had never stopped loving him. She loved just about everything about him: his sense of humour, his forceful personality, the passion and energy that he brought into every aspect of his life, even that volatile streak of possessiveness that was so contrary to his cool façade. But he didn’t love her. He lusted after her like mad and that was the height of her power over him.

When he’d arrived, she should have kept him at arm’s length, maintained a formal distance that would have been more conducive to the confession that she had to make. What she had just done, what she had just allowed him to do to her, had been very unwise and wrong. But then in her own defence she still had no very clear idea of how she had ended up on that sofa with Christien. Any more than there was anything new in her shell-shocked reaction to her own behaviour with him. When Christien touched her, everything but him blurred out of focus and importance. However, this one time, Tabby thought painfully, just this one time she should have had enough gumption to stay in control for her son’s sake.

‘What’s worrying you?’ Emanating megawatt self-assurance and calm, Christien passed her a glass of wine when she came out of the bathroom, narrowed dark golden eyes intent on her troubled face.

‘What’s worrying me goes back nearly four years,’ Tabby informed him tightly, tipping the wine to her dry lips but barely able to bring herself to swallow.

‘You’ve just come back into my life. It would seem more sensible to leave the past where it belongs for now,’ Christien drawled.

‘I’m afraid that this is a piece of the past that’s not going to go away and roll back up at a more convenient time,’ Tabby mumbled and, feeling her knees going weak under her, she sank down on a sofa and stared into her wineglass. ‘That summer, do you remember me telling you that I was taking the contraceptive pill?’

Disconcerted by that question, Christien frowned. ‘Oui…’

Tabby was embarrassed and she refused to look at him. ‘It was the doctor’s idea that I start taking it because I was having problems with my skin…acne. Well, I was given a three-month supply but I lost a packet somewhere, which meant that I ran out of them while I was still in France.’

‘Ran out of them…?’ Christien queried in bewilderment.

Tabby cringed, for it was hard to admit just how naive she had been in those days. ‘I didn’t think it mattered too much if I had to miss a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I had this really stupid idea that the pills had a sort of cumulative effect after they’d been taken for a while.’

‘Are you saying…?’ Christien breathed in a seriously strained undertone. ‘Are you saying that even though you were no longer taking the pills you believed that you would still be protected from pregnancy?’

As Christien’s tone rose in volume, Tabby flinched. ‘Don’t shout at me…I know it was stupid, but back then I didn’t know anything about stuff like that. When I was put on that course of pills, I didn’t need to be interested in the small print because it never occurred to me that I would be relying on them as birth control…I didn’t know you were about to come into my life!’

‘I don’t believe this. Why the hell didn’t you ask me to take precautions?’ Christien raked at her with incredulous bite.

‘Well…’

His stubborn jawline clenched. ‘I thought you’d be challenged to answer that-’

‘No, just embarrassed. You’d told me that you disliked condoms-’

‘Zut alors!’ Christien exclaimed.

‘And I didn’t want to annoy you and I persuaded myself that there was no real risk.’ Tabby loosed a sad, shamefaced sigh. ‘I was seventeen and I couldn’t imagine falling pregnant. I thought it couldn’t happen to me and, of course, it did.’

That simple admission lay there like a stone thrown into a deceptively tranquil pond. A pond that was about to start churning up beneath the surface. Pale below his olive skin, Christien stared at her from the other side of the room, magnificent golden eyes shimmering with the ferocity of his tension.

Tabby fixed her discomfited gaze back on her wineglass and then she set it down in an abrupt movement.

‘I found out that I was going to have a baby soon after I went back to England…I had morning sickness like…morning, afternoon and evening too,’ she recalled in a small, flat voice. ‘To cut the wretched long story short, he-’

‘He?’

‘Our son was born three weeks before the inquest into the car crash was held.’ Tabby pleated her trembling hands together to keep them steady. ‘I intended to tell you then-’

‘Bon Dieu…why that late in the day? Why didn’t I hear that I was to be a father months before that?’ Christien shot at her rawly.

‘You changed your mobile phone number. I tried to call the villa in the Dordogne but, by that stage, you had sold it and I had no other address or means of contacting you-’

‘That’s not much of an excuse. You could have made more effort.’

‘I didn’t have your resources to conduct an all-out search and I had other problems!’ Tabby’s temper was sparking in her own defence. ‘In his will, my father left everything he possessed to my stepmother and when she realised I was pregnant she threw me out of the house in literally what I stood up in. I had just started art college and I had to sleep on a friend’s floor until my mother’s sister, Alison, took me in.’

‘I am certain that she could have advised you on the best way to locate me…such as through the name of my airline.’ Majoring in heavy sarcasm as he pointed that out, Christien was not yielding an inch.

‘I think you’re overlooking the fact that you dumped me like a hot potato after that car accident and never spoke to me again-’

‘The crash had nothing to do with it. I saw you with that idiot on the Harley-’

‘But I didn’t know how it was with you, did I? I wasn’t inside your secretive head with you!’ Tabby scanned him with strained eyes that demanded his understanding. ‘I wasn’t aware that you believed I was seeing someone else. All I knew was that you wanted nothing more to do with me after the death of your father and mine. So you had better believe that I wasn’t in any great hurry just then to track you down with the news that I was pregnant…because, believe it or not, I have my pride too!’

Christien was very pale. He raked a not quite steady hand through his luxuriant black hair, his dark eyes brooding and bitter. ‘Why don’t you just get to the point? So, you gave my son up for adoption!’

Tabby registered that she should have guessed that he would assume that she had put their baby up for adoption. After all, he had seen no sign of a child in her life when he’d visited her in London the previous month or when she’d stayed in the cottage over that first weekend. ‘No, I didn’t do that. I couldn’t give him up. He’s upstairs fast asleep…’

Black brows pleating, Christien gazed back at her, what she had just revealed too shattering for him to accept. ‘Comment?’

‘I called him Jake Christien and your name is on his birth certificate. I planned to tell you about him when I attended the accident enquiry.’ Tabby couldn’t keep the bitter hurt out of her voice. ‘But you wouldn’t have anything to do with me-’

‘What are you trying to say?’ Christien was not focusing on what to him was an irrelevance. ‘You are saying that you have our son…that there is a little boy here in this house? I don’t believe you-’

‘The day you visited me in London, he was at nursery school, and I left him in England with Alison when I made my first trip here.’ Tabby rose to her feet as she appreciated that she might as well have been talking to a brick wall for all the listening that Christien seemed able to do.

‘Right now, he is upstairs?’ Christien questioned fiercely.

Tabby halted at the foot of the staircase and whispered, ‘How…how do you feel about that?’

‘That I can’t believe that this is real because, if I start believing it, I might get so angry I lose my head with you.’ Dark golden eyes glittering, Christien stared at her with deadly seriousness. ‘I can’t believe it’s real because you slept with me last week without saying a word-’

A deep dark blush flamed over her face. ‘I didn’t mean to-’

He dealt her a derisive glance. ‘I want to see him-’

‘He’s asleep…OK.’ Intimidated by the anger flaring in his expectant gaze, she went upstairs and crossed the landing to push the door of Jake’s room wider open.

Behind her, Christien stilled like a guy turned to stone. A night-light illuminated the bed. Jake seemed to be having a restive night for his little face was flushed, his black curls tousled, the sheet in a tangle round his waist. With strong, determined hands, Christien set Tabby out of his path and entered the room. Her heart leapt into her mouth as she wondered what he planned to do. For long, endless moments, he stared down at Jake and then at the long row of toy cars parked with military exactitude along the skirting board. He released a long, low, shuddering breath and then very slowly began to back out again.

The silence on the landing was so intense that it screamed.

Tabby hurried back downstairs.

Christien drew level with her again and looked at her, searing dark eyes hard with condemnation. ‘You’re the equivalent of a kidnapper who never asked for a ransom.’

Tabby blanched.

‘Once again you lied to me, but this time the consequences were much worse,’ he continued with harsh clarity. ‘This time, an innocent child has suffered-’

‘Jake has not suffered-’

‘Of course, he has! He has had no father!’ Christien slung back without hesitation. ‘Don’t try to tell me that that hasn’t made a difference to my child’s life. Don’t try to make some sexist point arguing that a mother figure is more important-’

Caught unprepared by the cutting force of his attack, Tabby was pale as milk. ‘I wasn’t going to-’

‘Zut alors…just as well!’ Christien snarled. ‘Not unless you want to hear how outraged I am at the knowledge that a stupid schoolgirl has been attempting to raise my son!’

‘Don’t you call me stupid.’ Tabby’s temper flared. ‘I might not be a real brainbox like you, but there’s nothing wrong with my brain-’

‘Isn’t there?’ Christien incised at the speed of a rapier. ‘You’ve already told me that, until your aunt offered you a bed, you were sleeping on a floor while you were pregnant. Had you contacted me, you would have been living in luxury. So not contacting me was an act of inexcusable stupidity!’

‘Listening to you right now, not contacting you strikes me as having been a very clever decision. Being a filthy rich, smug four-letter-word doesn’t make you any more acceptable!’ Tabby shot back at him.

‘Except in the parent stakes. Strive to focus on the main issue, chérie. Four years ago, it was your responsibility to protect our unborn child by taking no risks with your own health. Since when was sleeping on floors recommended for pregnant women?’

Compressing her lips, Tabby turned her head away.

‘But in the present, our primary concern must simply be Jake…not how I feel about your lies or how you feel about me. This is about Jake and his rights.’ Christien lifted a forceful brown hand to stress his point. ‘And his most basic right was his father’s care, which you chose to deny him.’

Tabby knotted her trembling hands tightly together. Her palms were damp, her eyes felt scratchy and her throat was so tight it was hurting. No matter how hard she attempted to make herself she could not hold Christien’s outraged dark golden gaze. It was as if he had got her by the throat and stolen every excuse she might have employed before she even got the chance to think any up. Jake and his rights. No, she had to admit that her son’s right to know his father had only occurred to her in more recent times when she had had to face the fact that Jake would soon be reaching an age when he would be asking awkward questions.

‘The way you felt about me, I didn’t think you’d want to know about him.’ Tabby knew she sounded accusing, but she could not help it for she did not think it was fair for him to refuse to acknowledge that his treatment of her had naturally influenced her expectations and her opinion of him.

‘That decision was not yours to make-’

‘OK…I went to the accident enquiry determined to tell you that you were the father of my son but you couldn’t even give me five minutes of your time-’

As Tabby made that reminder the angular lines of Christien’s fabulous bone structure hardened into prominence below his olive skin, but he stood his ground. ‘That is not the point-’

‘Excuse me, that is exactly the point!’ Tabby argued fiercely, recalling the terrible feeling of humiliation she had experienced that day and stiffening in sick remembrance. ‘I was ready, willing and eager to tell you about Jake. I think you need to remember what a louse you were to me that day-’

‘I did and I said nothing-’

‘And nothing was precisely what you deserved and got for treating me like the dirt beneath your feet!’ Tabby hurled furiously. ‘I practically begged you to speak to me in private in spite of the fact that your awful snobby relatives and friends were all lined up with you and shooting me looks of loathing as if I, rather than my father, had been the cause of that ghastly accident!’

Christien was rigid and pale with rage. ‘Ciel! That day I was too busy grieving for my father to concern myself with the behaviour of other people-’

‘You didn’t give a damn! I was eighteen and I was alone in a foreign country and I was grieving too.’ Tabby was shaking, raw with pain and the need to justify her own actions and defend herself. ‘But you talk now and you behaved then as if you had cornered the grief market. You lost a father. Well, at least you were able to look back on your memories of him with respect and affection. I was denied even that because my dad got drunk and destroyed a lot of other lives as well as his own!’

Christien spread two lean hands in a movement of angry rebuttal. ‘I did not even notice how others were behaving. If you think that grief was all that lay behind my distance with you that day-’

‘Don’t you shout at me!’ Tabby interrupted wrathfully.

Hauling in a furious breath, Christien then froze in bewilderment at the strange noise he could hear emanating down from the floor above. Tabby was quicker to recognise and react to her son’s frightened howl and she raced for the stairs in automatic maternal pilot. She found Jake sitting bolt upright in bed, tears running down his pale, scared face.

‘The car…the car ran me over!’ her son sobbed, letting her work out for herself what had caused the nightmare that had wakened him from his sleep.

Tabby tugged his small, trembling body into her arms. ‘It was just a dream, Jake…just a dream. The car didn’t run you over. You’re safe. You’re all right. You got a fright but you weren’t hurt,’ she told him with a note of soothing and determined cheer in her quiet intonation.

But the consequence that she had feared from the minute she ran to her son’s bedside was already happening. Although Jake had stopped crying as soon as she’d put her arms round him, he was now struggling for breath and wheezing. Worse, because he was not yet fully awake and still recovering from the effects of his nightmare, he was all the more distressed by his physical difficulties.