The Seduction Trap

AN ARM, clad in softly tailored linen reached out of the black convertible. A lean, male hand, strong and tanned, traced the letters on the road sign. ‘Turaine.’ Guy savoured the name, almost reverently.

‘Yeah. It’s a lovely sign, as signs go,’ came the sarcastic tones of the woman in the driver’s seat beside him. He grinned. ‘Heaven forbid that I should commit the sin of sentimentality,’ he said drily in his deep New Orleans drawl. ‘Hell, I’ll be leaping out and kissing the ground next!’ Giselle made a face. ‘Exactly how much ground is yours?’

‘Ours, sweetheart. What’s mine is yours, now my father’s dead. The valley-’ he gave a careless sweep of his arm, which embraced lush pastureland, walnut groves and vast chestnut forests

‘-and the village. Apart from three cottages owned by my father’s mistress. But I’ll have them within the week. Something tells me she’ll be eager to leave when I turn up.’ Bleak shadows from the past changed the colour of his eyes, deepening the dark sable to a hard ebony and giving the lie to his confident, casual tone. It had been nineteen years since he’d set foot in Turaine. He brooded over the enforced exile of himself and his mother because of his father’s obsession for another woman. And now he was thirty-five and the mother he’d protected and cared for was dead. He’d exchanged his privileged background for poverty, supporting his bewildered mother by taking any job that came along: waiting on tables, working in kitchens and finally marrying into the gourmet food business. At last it was time to come home. Time-almost-to mellow out and enjoy his financial success. Powerful emotions surged in his heart and he chipped away at them in case he did something stupid, like running Sound of Music-style through the meadow. If he wasn’t careful, he thought in amusement, he’d lose his reputation for being unruffled under stress. ‘Looks a bit tatty,’ observed Giselle, frowning at the village on the small hill ahead.

Guy looked closer. It did. A faint sense of foreboding, took the edge off his contentment. ‘A few repairs needed, I think,’ he said, brushing away anything that might blight his homecoming.

Quite calmly he asked Giselle to drive on-over the well-remembered stone bridge where he’d fished as a child, up the winding lane which skirted the medieval walls where he’d kissed his first girl, and through the narrow arch into Turaine itself.

‘Stop here,’ he said laconically on their entering the square. He felt amused by his own self-control. Who, seeing the languid unfolding of his long legs from the car, the deliberate pause for a minute adjustment to the designer sunglasses and the orderly smoothing of his windswept black hair, would have imagined that he felt ready to break into song with happiness? It was a pity that no woman had ever given him this sense of joy. Not even, he had to confess, the incomparable Giselle. With no outward or inward enthusiasm, she gracefully unfolded her long tanned legs from the convertible, crossly checking over the small square. What a dump! Maybe, she thought, the chateau would be more to her taste.

‘Deserted!’ she observed disdainfully. ‘Not even a bar open? No cafe? What kind of a French village is this?’

‘Temporarily dry, by the looks of it.’ Guy’s keen eyes noted something else: definite signs of neglect. Well, he’d pull everything together soon enough. ‘No matter. Once we’re indoors, I’ll crack open a bottle of vintage champagne to celebrate.’

A little cheered, she watched Guy saunter with French nonchalance over to a corner of the square, which she knew-since she’d been told ad nauseam-dropped directly to the River Dordogne over a hundred feet below. In that corner would be the gates to the Chateau Turaine, with its long drive flanked by...

Giselle frowned, halting her internal monologue in astonishment. Guy stood motionless before the massive iron gates, his elegant figure displaying all the signs of severe shock.

He had all but stopped breathing, every scrap of air seemingly punched from his lungs by the impact of the scene in front of him. ‘I don’t believe it!’ he grated, allowing the searing pain to force its way out in a raw fury. ‘No! It’s not possible...’ A red haze came over his eyes, blurring what he saw: the crazy angle of the high gates, the rusting wrought-ironwork, the weed-strewn drive and the wilderness beyond. Appalled, he blinked to clear the haze, and focused in impotent rage on the avenue of lime trees, their thin, weak growth reaching feebly upwards for light.

‘Mon Dieu!’ This was a scene of neglect. Desolation! And beyond ... Harshly he gulped in a rasping lungful of air. Somewhere in that mass of undergrowth stood or did it? the Chateau Turaine. His house. God knew what state it would be in!

‘Damn you, Papa! And damn your scheming, conniving mistress to hell!’ he raged under his breath, inventing instant vile punishments for Estelle Davis.

The woman had dominated his father, blinded him with her beauty and caused him to abandon his wife, his heir, his responsibilities. And therefore it was almost certain that it was the powerful Estelle who was ultimately responsible for this. Slowly he reached up to grip the barley-sugar twist bars of the gate, as if he’d rend the whole damn thing apart with his bare hands, but his tremendous strength wasn’t sufficient to undo the work of an eighteenth-century craftsman. The gates screeched a rusty complaint yet the heavy chain and the lock held firm.

Giselle’s arm came around his waist. The place was a mess. They could go back to Paris. Hurray! ‘I’m so sorry!’ she cooed. Guy detached himself, ensuring that his aristocratic face masked every thought, every feeling. It was the way he dealt with crises and he’d coped with worse. It was just the vandalism he couldn’t stomach. ‘I think,’ he observed tightly, blocking his pain with magnificent understatement, ‘I’ll have my work cut out here.’

‘Doing what?’ Giselle wailed. Surely he didn’t intend to roll up his sleeves and start weeding?

The finely shaped mouth took on a ruthless line. ‘Restoring my home,’ he replied in a hard tone. ‘And booting Estelle Davis out of Turaine for allowing the chateau to get into this state.’

‘What a bore! I want to go home!’ Giselle said sulkily. ‘This is home, sweetheart. I’ve been waiting for this day, dreaming of this moment all my adult life.’ Emotion caught his words, threatening to mangle them. He paused, counted to ten and began again more steadily. ‘You must decide for yourself, but I intend to live here.’

Ignoring Giselle’s cry of protest, he moved away, drawn like a magnet to the derelict entrance of his once beautiful house. He knew that Giselle’s feelings were hurt because he found Turaine more compelling than her. But Turaine had been violated, ignored, abandoned. And he knew how that felt only too well.

He began to climb the gate. For a moment he hovered on the top, balanced precariously between the wicked spear-shaped spikes, then he’d dropped to the ground and was striding away, towards his beloved chateau.

Giselle felt like stamping up and down in fury. She meant nothing to him at that moment. Turaine had taken over. OK. He wanted revenge. She’d help him get it fast. Then there would be just the two of them, and she wouldn’t have to share him with anyone or anything.

Two weeks later, Tessa Davis turned her motorbike off the main road and navigated through a series of twisting country lanes, discovering a slower pace of life entirely. The countryside slept beneath the late afternoon sun and in tiny hills a handful of people were lazily turning golden hay with pitchforks, as they must have done centuries ago. Turaine!

Just as she was about to die of hunger! She pulled over by the sign and switched off the engine in relief. She felt shattered. Over five hundred miles since dawn, and her rear felt as numb as a lump of lead.

Removing her helmet, she flicked down the stand and slid off the bike, easing her seized-up thigh and leg muscles in her close-fitting black leathers by doing a few knee-bends and wiggles till she felt more like her supple self again. She scanned the village on the small hill. Somewhere up there her mother Estelle waited for her.

The sun glowed on the mellow stone, turning it a honeyed gold, softening the cinnamon shade of the steeply pitched roofs. To complete the picture, the wide Dordogne river followed the curve of the base of the hill, offering her a duplicate Turaine on its flat surface. Picture-book stuff. Heaven on a hill.

Excitement took over, bubbling up irrepressibly. The past could be forgotten. The future looked good. No one was around, so she flung up her arms and gave a whoop of joy. ‘It’s me, Mum!’ she yelled. ‘I’m on my way! Break out the fatted calf!’

A delighted grin lit her face. She conjured up the image of the
laughing woman in the photo that her unhappy father kept by his bedside. He waited at home, ready to forgive his runaway wife after an absence of twenty years. Tessa hugged herself with happiness. Nothing could please her more. Pleasure spilled from her jade-green eyes. Their striking colour gave her quite a shock when she caught a glimpse of them in the side mirror of the bike and she laughed at her reaction. Two weeks ago she’d been a kind of wishy-washy, blue-eyed mouse, wearing spectacles which looked as if they’d been cut from the bottom of a beer glass! May heaven smile on whoever had invented coloured contact lenses! she thought. A blissful silence washed the landscape. All she could hear was the river lapping at the grassy bank, the reedy chatter of swallows overhead and the hum of bees. And then the deep throb of a powerful car.

It drew up behind her-a head-turning Citroen convertible so sleek that it looked as if it might fly to the moon. It boasted French numberplates and the regulation hunk inside, who sported a bone-structure and designer sunglasses to die for. Tessa watched his graceful emergence from the car: elegance oozing wealth, with the usual paraphernalia associated with money-gold watch and cuff-links, mobile phone attached to a Gucci belt and an expensive-looking tan which made him glow with smooth health.

This exotic vision tucked the sunglasses into the breast pocket of his eau-de-nil jacket, gave her road-bike the once-over and then settled a now-what-have-we-here gaze on her. Which she promptly returned with interest. ‘Evening,’ he drawled lazily.

‘Hello!’ she said, happy enough to embrace the world at that moment. ‘Bonsoir!’ she added, recklessly using up one of the five French words she knew.

Tessa leaned against her bike and pondered idly over his accent while he began the boringly obligatory male examination of her body: a studied and frank appraisal, which ranged from her expensively cut bob to the skintight leathers and neat boots and wandered slowly over the curves between. Men! she thought scathingly, doing precisely the same to him. She found it rather pleasurable. He was something of a dish. Their eyes met as they both finished their tours, both smiling in mocking acknowledgement of their insolence. But she hugged a secret to herself. It had been only eight months since misery had made her thin and she’d lost four stones in weight. He wouldn’t have given her the time of day back then! But whatever her weight loss, she was still the same person. No, she amended. That wasn’t true. She was warier because of old humiliations-and one in particular. Her eyes flickered with the painful memory, attracting a more intense concentration of the stranger’s keen gaze. And as he stared deeply into her eyes she wondered if he saw beneath the recent makeover and her apparent confidence and could tell that once upon a time she’d been unloved and unhappy.

Apparently not. ‘You must be extremely hot in those leathers,’ was all he said. But the deep drawl reached into her bones like the slow ooze of warm sunshine, surprising her with its liquid sexiness.

‘Only when I get off my bike and let the heat catch up with me,’ she answered drily, thinking that it would be heavenly to take off her leather jacket. But what, she thought with a giggle, would Bedroom Voice make of her cropped cotton top and bare midriff?