The Seduction Trap (16 page)

Tessa felt a helpless little lurch of her heart. Mr Wonderful again. ‘What time-scale are you talking about?’ she asked, wandering around the hall, trying to make her own assessment. ‘Three years for the village. Five for the house.’

‘Five!’ She whirled around, an ache filling her throat. ‘Guy, how can you bear it? That’s terrible-’

‘That’s authentic seventeenth-century wallpaper,’ he said quickly, suddenly turning away from her and pointing at the fungus-laden wall. ‘I’m hoping to duplicate it. The panelling’s mostly rotten, but some can be saved. The pipes froze and burst last year and flooded

the whole interior. That’s when most of the damage occurred. We’ll go to the west wing. It’s not so bad. The salon. We’ll talk there.’

She understood his reason for cutting her sympathy short. It must hurt like hell to see the damage and to know that it would be years before it could be put right. The only way he could cope with it was to forget it for the time being. But what a strain!

He lit seven candles wedged in a branched candlestick and led the way through dark and gloomy corridors. Tessa kept close behind him, a little intimidated by the devastation. ‘I thought my mother’s cottages were bad enough,’ she said in a low voice. ‘But their condition pales into insignificance beside this.’

‘Sheer vandalism, isn’t it?’ he agreed, his mouth tight with anger.

And she had to agree silently. His father had been negligent. But had her mother really persuaded her lover to abandon everything but the pursuit of pleasure? Or had it been the other way round? She had to know. It was agonising, being torn this way and that.

They walked into a sunny room whose floor-to-ceiling windows were intact and which looked out onto an ornate turn-of-the-century conservatory. Or it had been a conservatory, once. A banana tree had pushed its way through the glass lights and was thrusting its massive paddle-shaped leaves up to the peerless blue sky.

Tessa sat where Guy directed, perching on the edge of a chaise Tongue while he disappeared to the cellar, taking the candlestick with him. Feeling a little subdued by the sadness surrounding the house, she waited for Guy to return. Her mind seemed incapable of matching facts. Guy was ruthless and vindictive. He manipulated people, managing to hide his feelings and ooze charm at will. Yet he adored Turaine with a deep and abiding passion,

and the villagers evidently adored him-though they would, wouldn’t they? He did seem to have a core of decency in that he acted like a gentleman and with honour. He baffled her. And the more he baffled her, the more fascinated she became. When he returned, she accepted a glass of beautifully chilled Chablis and waited nervously for him to make his move.

‘I WANT you to see what I’m planning because I think you’ll understand my motives more clearly,’ said Guy, bringing over a folder which he placed on the elegant table in front of her. ‘Here,’ he went on, showing her a series of sketches, ‘is a group of cottages by the river. This is how they look now, and what I plan to do with them. I need to make the village viable again. Half the inhabitants of Turaine have left. I want to encourage people back.’

‘By providing stylish restorations?’ she asked, frowning over the faintly arty looking adaptations. But they were attractive-keeping the character of each ramshackle stone cottage but adding an arch here, an iron balcony there ... ‘Partly. The idea is to attract hi-tech hermits.’ He grinned at her surprised face. ‘The village will be reborn. Everyone here is in favour of the plan. Not one dissenter. The Internet global network makes it possible for the revolution in home-working to take off in a big way.

‘I for one will be working from home in future; I don’t need to be in London or New York, Paris or New Orleans, battling my way through traffic or suffering jet lag. And I’ve already had enquiries from people I know who are tired of the rat race, who want to bring their families to somewhere safe, somewhere on a human scale, where food comes out of the ground instead of some vast warehouse where it’s been blasted with some gas to keep it from rotting.’

‘It’s a stunning concept,’ she said in awe, poring over the designs. If he could attract enough new blood into the village he’d be bringing prosperity to the region, with a spin-off in services. ‘You’re not worried that the highfliers will take over and alter the nature of Turaine?’

‘No. The existing villagers will have a powerful say in what happens. And I’ll step in if I feel unhappy about the way things are going. We want to create a sense of identity and community and to stop young people from moving away. I think we can offer the best of both worlds: the pursuit of world-wide business without the attendant stresses-a small, intimate community in the country with all the attendant benefits.’ He shut the book. ‘I’m glad you like the idea.’

‘I think it’s admirable,’ she said honestly.

‘And what do you think about your mother knowingly causing the destruction of this house because she wanted to obliterate it before I inherited?’ he asked bluntly.

She flinched. ‘Is that what you’re claiming? I only have your word that she did,’ she replied uneasily, her eyes narrowed over the wafer-thin rim of her glass. Her mother couldn’t be that vindictive, could she? Her heart thumped with fear.

‘You know the attitude of the villagers,’ he reminded her. ‘Think, Tessa. Could a whole village be wrong?’

‘It’s possible,’ she said defiantly, willing them to be unfairly prejudiced about her mother.

‘Everything I’ve told you is true. I couldn’t lie about something so painful,’ he said, very quiet and intense suddenly. ‘I think you know that.’

Her teeth snagged at her lip. Intuition told her to believe him, but her intuition wasn’t always reliable. ‘If it were true,’ she said slowly, ‘I’d feel terribly upset. It seems an extreme thing to do.’

‘Your mother is extreme.’

She looked around the room in a hunted way, as if the de Turaines in the portraits were silently accusing her. She noticed that the silk drapes had rotted and were hanging in tatters, and that part of the ornate plaster ceiling had collapsed. It was a crime to neglect something of such beauty and it made her feel distressed so she could imagine what it must do to Guy.

‘But to do this deliberately? It seems so spiteful!’ she argued. And winced at his curt nod. Uncomfortable, she said, ‘If what you claim is true then she must have had a reason. A hatred of you. What had you done to her?’

He grimaced. ‘Plenty. I made her life hell. Let down her tyres, dumped half a pig’s carcass on her lap, threw a bucket of slops over her...’

Tessa gasped, recoiling in horror. ‘You did all that? If you treated me like that I’d fight you too!’

‘Even as far as letting a beautiful chateau and an entire village go to rack and ruin?’ he asked grimly.

‘No. That would mean hurting others. But you behaved

dreadfully-’

‘I was sixteen,’ he reminded her tightly. ‘My passions were raw and I had no hold on them.’

They were still raw, she thought. But he held them in check-for the moment. What would happen, though, if he was pushed beyond the limits?

‘I was watching my mother shrink with shame every day,’ he went on. ‘I had to do something to drive Estelle away.’

‘But you drove her’ deeper into your father’s arms,’ she said with sudden perception.

He looked at her in surprise. ‘That’s right. Estelle was tougher and cleverer than I thought. I think it became an obsession with her, to make Papa forget not only his wife and son but Turaine itself, to make everyone who’d condemned and ignored her suffer.’

‘This isn’t fair. She can’t answer for herself.’ Tessa prayed that Guy was exaggerating, that there was a reasonable explanation for the deterioration of Turaine.

‘She will, one day,’ he muttered with determination. ‘And answer for her vindictive behaviour. She swore that I’d wish I’d never crossed her. This was her legacy to me: a father dead before his time from a hectic life of travel and parties, and seven hundred years of history dangerously close to destruction. Do you understand why I am bitter, Tessa?’

‘If-,

‘It’s true. I swear on my mother’s life.’

Tessa’s eyes were huge with dismay. He didn’t know for certain what had happened. He was biased. He’d listened to tales from the villagers who’d had an axe to grind about her mother. No one could be that malevolent. It would break her heart to discover that her mother wasn’t the beautiful woman described so graphically by her father.

‘You have to understand that I am terribly sympathetic to your cause but I have loyalty to my mother. And I must give her a chance to explain. I hate the situation,’ she confessed. ‘When will it end, Guy?’

‘You tell me. It’s in your hands. I want the cottages.’ She couldn’t look at him. Her heavy lashes dropped to conceal the guilt in her eyes. Somehow she had to straighten up this mess-but at the same time she must keep the right to own the cottages, which her mother had given to her. ‘I think a line should be drawn, right now. I don’t like people to hurt one another.’ She thought of what she intended and blushed. ‘I abhor selfishness,’ she said, stumbling on. ‘But...’ She was going to hurt him. She meant to be selfish. Suddenly she couldn’t bear it.

‘Yes, Tessa?’ he prompted softly. ‘You were about to defend your mother, I think,’ he said, when she looked at him blankly. ‘Only to say that it seems when people are in love they tend to exclude everyone and everything else,’ she said huskily, transfixed by Guy’s utter stillness.

‘For as long as my father excluded my mother and me?’ he asked quietly.

‘Perhaps. I don’t know. Can you hate my mother for making your father happy? Maybe she couldn’t stand the disapproval here and hated living in the village. If your father had loved her, he’d have gone along with her wish to be anywhere but Turaine, wouldn’t he?’

He frowned. ‘And if she’d loved him she’d never have asked him to.’

‘You can be so crazy about someone that you don’t think of the consequences,’ she mumbled, her head lowered. ‘You act without thinking.’

‘Ah. Someone hurt you.’ His voice caressed her and she felt her barriers melting. ‘Your father?’

She shook her head. After a short silence, she said, ‘A man. He humiliated me.’

‘The man you loved.’

She grimaced. ‘I was overweight, plain and miserable and I thought I loved him for five long years, but I suppose it was only a crush. He hardly noticed me. I was a joke to him. He thought it would be hysterical to lead me on and see how far I’d go.’

‘And you obliged?’

‘Mmm.’

Guy let out a low, harsh expletive. Startled, Tessa jumped, the wine from her glass spilling over her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said contritely, leaping to his feet, handkerchief at the ready. And then he thought better of it, sinking back into the vast armchair again, watching her intently as she took out her own hanky and wiped her wet hand and one or two splashes on the green top. ‘I think you’re far too vulnerable to stay here,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll get hurt.’

The threat unnerved her and made her feel sad. Astonishingly, she realised she’d wanted them to go on talking all evening, without touching on the controversial sale. Her soft mouth quivered, but his mouth

tightened and he scowled at her. She was being stupid again. Angry with herself, she said coolly, ‘So make your offer.’ She sounded shaky. With a sigh, he reached out and put his hand on hers, frowning at the way it trembled, and when his gaze met hers it was as if he’d set her alight. The atmosphere had somehow become electric between them, filling the room with high tension. And she didn’t know why, or how, but he’d weakened her resolve; she knew that. Either by teasing out her hurtful past, or by sitting there, quietly simmering with some inner tension, his chest rising and falling faster and faster, as if his heart pounded at the same impossible rate as hers. Even though she realised that this was his calculated method of persuasion, her heart foolishly wanted her to be generous, and it took all her determination not to blurt out that he could have all three cottages. Fortunately her sense of loyalty to her mother meant that was impossible. His lashes lay dark and achingly appealing on his fine cheekbones. Slowly he began to stroke every inch of her hand, as if it fascinated him: the grazed knuckles, the faint marks around her cuticles where no amount of scrubbing could remove the evidence of mortar, the short, work-friendly nails. Then his fingers stilled, leaving her skin feeling as if it danced. ‘Make your offer,’ she croaked, not sure whether she wanted to hit him or kiss him.

He looked at her then, long and hard and with such a yearning that her breath caught harshly in her throat. ‘I thought I was doing just that.’

His voice was almost inaudible. When she scanned his face, she saw that it was tense to the point of rigidity and his hand now gripped hers tightly. He wanted something. So badly that it was taking every ounce of control for him to hide that desire from her.

Me, she thought, and blinked open her eyes wide at the ridiculous notion that had leapt into her mind. Down! she ordered her hopelessly incompetent intuition. He wants those cottages, not you!

‘You...’ She reached for her glass of wine, needing something to clear her throat. ‘You haven’t mentioned a price,’ she said huskily.

His mouth twisted and a darkness came into his eyes. ‘The price is probably unacceptable to both of us.’ She didn’t understand. It sounded as if he was talking about something else entirely. Did he mean that if she stayed he’d be uncomfortable with her around? And that she’d never be accepted in the village?