Everything You Want: Everything For You Trilogy 2 (2 page)

At least he has no idea where I am. The only reason he’d even care is to finish punishing me: the upstart who dared invade his boardroom to demand he remember his advertising contract with CaidCo and his debt of loyalty to its former CEO, Harry Caid. I am the woman who escaped his designs.

In the hallway I brace myself against the wall. Today I’ll force something into my stomach for sure. It will reassure Madame I’m fine and she will return to her family for the weekend. It will take away the light-headedness I’m feeling, too, with all these mad hallucinations I’m having. I sway as I catch the faint scent of Clive Christian No.1 over the aroma of Madame’s coffee. Now I know I’ve finally gone insane.

I clutch at the kitchen door frame to steady myself, dying of this pain in my heart for which there is no cure. I wish I could get over this. Get over him. I must try harder. I hear Madame at the stove, pots and cups clattering. My head throbs from all the crying I did into the early hours but I plaster on a fake smile before I swing through the door.

I halt and sway as Jack turns Arctic blue eyes to capture mine.

He floors me.

“You’re dressed then,” he says. He sounds as normal as if he’s just left me sleeping in bed a moment ago – naked. The remnants of some torrid dream spin through my head and my mouth opens but nothing comes out. My heart races; my breath pitches, shallow and fast.

He nods towards the table and chairs. “You’d better sit before you fall over.” He grins and turns back to the coffee on the stove, looking very pleased with himself and very much at home.

Witless, I do as I am told, letting my straw hat drop from my fingers to the floor beside me. It’s clear I have no mind of my own. The painful crack in my cold, traitorous heart mends the instant he’s near, like some pain-numbing balm has been smeared all over it and it’s been wrapped in a fleecy blanket to keep it warm. I steel myself for the moment I wake and am all alone and in torment again.

The mirage places a cup of coffee in front of me and goes searching in the fridge for milk. I can’t believe what I see before my eyes.

Cream cotton knee-length shorts hang off his lean hips; he has leather flip-flops on his bare feet but wears nothing more. The half-naked sight is arresting. Stirring to my deprived senses. His short, black hair is so glossy and beautiful, it looks almost wet. I want to touch it to see if it’s real. When he turns, my jaw hangs open at the ripped golden chest and trail of dark hair arrowing down below the low-slung waistband of his shorts. I know now where it leads and this is too vivid even for my lurid imagination.

“What are you doing?” I blurt out, expecting the apparition to dissolve in an instant and be replaced by Madame’s rather more homely frame.

He sits solidly at the table opposite me with a gesture that states, isn’t it obvious? “I’m making coffee.” He pours milk into mine exactly the way I like it. “Drink up.” He laughs at my incredulity. “You look like you’re in need of something strong and hot.”

He’s being cruelly ironic. “You can’t be here.” I’m not sure if I’m telling myself or him. I stand up again, leaning against the table, using my locked elbows to support my limp frame. I’m not sure my shaking legs will hold me upright unaided.

“Sit down. I can. I am.”

His words remind me of our last meeting at Belvedere and his fury at me for allowing myself to get caught out in a compromising manner. He was livid. I remember Amanda’s opportunistic hands all over him which he made no attempt to shrug off, rubbing my nose in the fact that he wants her and not me.

I raise myself to vertical by force of will alone. “I’m not sitting. And you’re not sitting either.” I snatch up his cup of coffee, stomp over and fling the contents into the sink. It’s symbolic and tragic. I’m so pathetic around Jack. “Get out!”

I’ve spent the last four devastating days mourning his loss, craving him here beside me. Now he is, I’m wishing he would just disappear again and allow me to mend and heal. This crazy carousel is torture and I can’t take much more of it whirling me around. Trying to fix a broken heart, trying to come to terms with the fact that Jack has used me, that he doesn’t want me the way I want him, fuels my anger. He’s here to finish shattering my brittle fragments. I want to haul him bodily from the room, shove him through the back door but I know I won’t be able to lay hands on his bare skin. One touch and I’ll be gone. That’s how weak and pitiful I am around him.

I can’t breathe. Each time I inhale I get a blast of hot, still, French summer air, Clive Christian, strong coffee and Jack Keogh. The mixture is too potent, infinitely too heady, to ignore. The room spins.

Jack jumps up and presses me back into the chair. “Breathe in and out, slowly.” He hunkers down in front of me, his large hands resting carelessly on my bare thighs. The heat from his palms sears my flesh which doesn’t aid my recovery one tiny bit. I clamp my knees together.

His eyes travel the swell of my breasts down to where my cut-off t-shirt exposes an expanse of bare midriff. He stares at my navel and the now hollow curve of my abdomen exposed above the prominent hipbone-hugging band of my shorts and frowns.

I get a full, close-up on him too. His hair really is damp. He’s newly shaved. The dampness I thought I’d imagined in my bathroom? He wouldn’t have? Would he? While I slept next door, fitful and naked, having kicked off the skimpy sheet which covered me. I recall the mere shadow of some erotic dream. Was that kiss, that touch – being carried up to bed – only in my imagination?

“You used my bathroom.” I gasp the only accusation I dare voice as I recover, remembering how casually he broke into my apartment in Notting Hill, just a week ago.

His
so what?
expression reminds me he’s shared a lot more of mine than a bathroom. I stifle a groan. The night before I left Belvedere he made me orgasm so many times I had to beg him to spare my ravaged body a repeat performance. I bury my face in my hands unable to look at him.

“I needed to clean up. I jumped the first available commercial flight to Paris late last night, hired a car and drove through the night to get here.”

I push my chair away with the backs of my knees as I stand. It screeches its discontent against the terracotta flagstones. His hands slide down my thighs as I move swiftly out of reach so he can’t touch me again. “Well that’s too bad.” How the hell did he even know where to find me? “Get out of my house, Jack.”

He pushes to his feet and looks down at me. When he steps forward, I take step back. He halts. “My house.” He pauses, waiting for my challenge to his ridiculous claim of ownership.

He absolutely gets it. At least I can defend what’s mine. “This was Harry’s property. He left everything he owned to me in his will so it’s mine and you can get the hell out of it.” It’s the one and only place I can come to forget him.

His voice gentles. It always does when we talk about my former guardian and his friend and mentor, Harry Caid. “Not long ago Harry needed to urgently raise some capital. He wouldn’t accept a straight out loan so we agreed a transaction over his French chateau and the farmland at Lassec. He was planning to buy it back again from me before –”

He had a heart attack and died. “I don’t believe you. He loved this house. He would never sell it.” I’m too stunned to argue on.

“It wasn’t meant to be permanent. Not much more than a gentleman’s agreement to help Harry out. We trusted each other, but I have signed papers if you’d like to see them. I insisted on that for his protection and those of the tenants.”

I can tell by his tone it’s true. I’ve never checked out the minute details of my inheritance with the lawyers, beyond the fact everything came to me. It’s been too recent and too painful to deal with the cold, hard facts of Harry’s passing, without any of that. I just assumed Lassec was now mine, like CaidCo was. Jack obviously chose not to tell me. Until now.

As I turn to walk out of the kitchen, Jack catches me by the arm and swirls me back round to face him. I’m too shocked to fight. I lost my parents. I lost Harry. I lost Jack. I may even have lost my mind. Slowly I’m losing everything I am. Jack won’t be finished with me until I’ve lost everything.

“Where are you going?” he murmurs.

“I’m getting the hell out of
your
house.”

“You’re going nowhere.” He sounds adamant. “Someone needs to take care of you. I only have to look at you to see you haven’t been taking care of yourself.”

“You plan on keeping me prisoner then?” I raise my eyebrows to show him I’ve got him. “Because that’s the only way I’m staying anywhere near you.” There’s not a damn thing he can do to stop me. Just like last time.

“If I have to.” He manages to make it sound like he means it.

“Just because we’re in France, doesn’t mean they don’t have laws!” I spit.

He smiles salaciously. “Crime of passion,” he says as if that ancient and defunct French defence is still a valid enough excuse to cover anything he chooses to do to me.

The irony that modern civil courts prefer temporary insanity or provocation, isn’t lost on me. Except it’s me who has the excuse to commit crime. He’s already knifed me through my shattered heart. What else can he do to me now? I yank my arm from his grip and continue to stomp away. He follows me into the living room.

“Where are you going now? You know I’m not going to let you leave again.”

I don’t even turn around but keep on walking. “To get dressed.”

“You’re already dressed.” He sounds confused. Now he thinks I’m crazy too.

“Not enough to be around you, I’m not.” My clothes barely cover the essentials. I’m only too conscious of the fact I’m not even wearing underwear. My nipples have tightened in a simple, involuntary response to being near him and they’re poking through the thin white cotton of my t-shirt. I couldn’t signal my physical attraction any better if I was waving a red flag in his face.

And it seems I cannot even think about that particular colour around Jack without my face turning the same shade.

He snorts. I ignore him and keep on marching. I take the stairs two at a time while he stands at the bottom. I’m quite aware of him staring up at me as I move and wish the shorts weren’t quite so cut-off. Despite not eating, I’ve filled out since I bought these clothes. I hold my hands behind me to cover myself only to hear him chuckling softly. He thinks he’s got me exactly where he wants me.

As soon as I get to the bedroom I slam the door and stand behind it breathing hard. I wait for the thumping of my heart to subside before I dare move again. It isn’t that I’m scared he’ll force his way in. I’m certain he’s stayed down below. It’s more that I need to barricade myself against the shock of seeing him here. How did he find me? No-one knew I was here. Why won’t he allow me to mend in peace? It isn’t fair. What did I ever do to warrant all this misery?

I’ve suffered abject damnation over the past four days. My heart is battered and bruised but I’d finally accepted I must go forward without Jack in my life.

His arrival has derailed me.

For a week I’ve relived all the suffering I endured when I was eighteen and this time it has been ten times worse. I’d started to allow myself to believe in him. Poor, foolish idiot that I am.
La petite folle
.

Crazy, because I have accepted that I’ve never actually fallen out of love with him. That alone was momentous enough to show me I had to go.

Yet I know the score. He still intends to punish me and have his fun at the same time. Then he means to return to Amanda. This is probably all her rotten idea in the first place. How she’ll laugh at the sad little details when he shares them before they make love. I’m only surprised she hasn’t come along to witness my complete annihilation first hand.

Has she?

I ran from Jack on Monday and I must run again. He isn’t mine. He doesn’t even want to be. He just wants to make me suffer for my temerity and no-one gets between Jack Keogh and his prey. My desperate retreat, my sanctuary, has always been Harry’s chateau, in Brittany. It’s the place I first learned to live again after the desolation of losing my parents. Once more I sought it out by instinct. But even that is gone now because it’s not Harry’s place any longer. It’s not mine. My memories now belong to Jack. Lassec is his. Where is my refuge now?

I rip off my scrap of a t-shirt and my shorts and stand stark naked wondering what on earth I can put on that will protect me from him. There is no suit of armour strong enough to withstand an enemy like this.

I mindlessly pull on an ankle-length, figure-skimming summer dress from the wardrobe. It’s neon lime-green, has shoe-string straps and is nowhere near sturdy enough to offer me protection but it’s too hot already to wear anything more durable. It’s the closest thing to self-inflicted purdah, I can manage. I slather on copious dollops of lip gloss as an act of defiance because he hates it.

I slip senselessly down the old back servant stairs and out into the yard. As I start walking up the dirt track towards the farm I feel the Sirocco. He’s behind me. His footsteps gain on me but I just can’t walk any faster.

He plops my straw hat on my head, slowing his pace to fall into step beside me. “You need to cover up in this sun. Have you got sunscreen on?”

“Have you?” I snap back without breaking my stride. He’s found a burnt orange coloured t-shirt and put it on and I’m grateful for that at least.