A Very French Affair: Bought for the Frenchman's Pleasure / Breaking the Boss's Rules / Her Secret Husband

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked bravely, and steeled herself.

He looked at her for a long moment. She could almost see the cogs whirring in that sharp brain. And then, as if having come to a decision, he strolled nonchalantly towards her. His face was unbearably cold, but the look in his eyes was full of desirous intent. His demeanour spelt absolute danger. Sorcha instinctively grabbed onto the wall beside her as he came close. She looked up helplessly. Ensnared.

And suddenly she thought of something.

Without passing it through the filter in her brain, she found herself blurting out, ‘Look, I know why you’re reacting like this. I know what happened with your mother…’

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#u96210df4-c053-5fd1-be0c-16231f16d7ef)

HE STOPPED dead in front of her, and immediately she knew she’d made one of the biggest errors of her life. He froze. His face became a mask of non-reaction, his eyes glittering jewel-hard shards of icy grey. He spoke after what felt like aeons, and his words dripped with disdain and disgust.

‘What do you know?’

It was a question but Sorcha wasn’t foolish enough to open her mouth again.

‘Maud told you. It can only have been her. What did she tell you?’

This person before her was someone Sorcha had never seen. Even at his most dismissive, judging…this cold creature hadn’t existed. A thousand miles gaped between this man and the man who’d taken her for lunch, the man who had kissed her.

He moved closer, and Sorcha tried to move back but the wall was in her way. She wanted to apologise, wanted to tell him that he was scaring her.

‘Did Maud tell you that my mother was addicted to opium since she was a child growing up in Vietnam?’

Sorcha, horribly mesmerized by his nearness and eyes, just shook her head.

‘Did Maud tell you that she lived her whole life in a drug-fuelled haze?’

Again she shook her head, horror spreading through her. He came even closer. She could feel his body now, his chest moving up and down against hers, and to her utter self-loathing she could feel herself respond, her nipples tightening.

‘Did she tell you that she only came out of it long enough to have me and my older half-brother? To make two unhappy marriages?’

Sorcha couldn’t do anything. He was so close now that she could feel his breath. His head came close and a hand was cupping her jaw, angling her head up to his. Please, she wanted to beg. Stop.

‘Did she tell you that at the age of seventeen I found her dead body? Bloated and almost unrecognisable from an overdose?’

An ache clogged Sorcha’s throat, and her eyes stung. With his hand cupping her jaw she couldn’t move her head. She opened her mouth to try and say something, to reach him, and he took advantage, driving his mouth down on hers, full of pent-up aggression and anger.

Sorcha’s hand had come up to his, to try and take it away, but in her shock she left it there. His words were swirling in her head, but all she could feel was him, wrapping his arms around her again, his tongue dancing erotically with hers. He was relentless, a master of her senses, and she could do nothing but succumb even as she felt a tear trickle out from under one eyelid and down her cheek.

After a long, long moment Romain pulled back with a jerky, violent movement and looked down at her. He shook with reaction—to what he’d just revealed, to what he’d found on Sorcha’s person, and most of all to the way she was making him feel. To the way she held his body in her spell. He could see wetness on her cheek, where a lone tear had left its mark, but instead of inciting concern, he welcomed the hardness that settled in every bone. She was looking up at him with those big eyes. Lips trembling, plump from his kiss. And he would have her. Even though it went against every moral principle he’d held dear. Even though he’d hate himself. Because he couldn’t not.

‘You asked what I’m going to do, Sorcha…well, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to take your delectable body when I’m good and ready. And I’m going to sate myself with you, burn myself free of this desire I feel.’

Sorcha swallowed painfully, her head and insides in absolute chaotic turmoil. ‘But…you mean…you’re not going to send me home?’

He shook his head and a cruel smile touched his mouth. ‘No way. At this stage that would cost me money…’ He trailed a finger down her cheek and around her jaw. ‘And cost me my sanity. You’re going to finish the job…as my mistress…’

Long after he had left the room, with nothing more than a curt reminder to be ready to leave for the set at five in the morning, Sorcha sat on the bed in a daze. With a weird, bizarre calmness that she knew was shock, she was thinking of all the advances she’d had from men over the years.

She’d inevitably found their attentions unwelcome, jarring, and very unsexy. As a result, she was vastly inexperienced when it came to men and sex. She had an ongoing fear that somehow she was cold, or frigid. More than one man had hurled those words at her. But, any man who’d tried to touch her with any kind of intimacy had left her feeling cold. And yet Romain was making her feel anything but frigid. Even when subjecting her to his ice-cold disdain.

Why, oh why, did it have to be him? She lay back, rolled over, and curled up into a foetal position. She could never be intimate with someone who was judging her so harshly, even though she knew she couldn’t blame him for this latest development. She had chosen to protect Lucy, and he’d had all the ammunition ready and lined up for just such a situation. And mentioning his mother? She squeezed her eyes shut, the pain of his words still sinking in like knives. She concentrated her breathing and forced her mind away from it, from the sympathy that still gripped her.

In turmoil, she thought of his autocratic assurance that he would make her his mistress. She knew that he wouldn’t have to do much. He’d pretty much established that just by looking at her she turned to jelly and was his. It was pathetic.

She couldn’t stop her mind going back…Eight years ago something had happened to her. And even to this day she wasn’t sure what. How could she explain that to someone who was the least likely to believe her explanation of how she’d ended up in that awful spiral of events? She’d always expected that the moment she decided to let someone be totally intimate with her would be the moment she revealed herself fully. She’d never done that with anyone. Not even Katie or her brother—and they were the only people she trusted in the world.

How could she sleep with someone…with him…when she didn’t even know for sure if she was a virgin? She grimaced painfully. She was sure on an intellectual level that she was. But on some other level, deep down, enough doubt that had been placed in her mind to question herself…and that was a torture she only wanted to share with someone gentle enough, sensitive enough to handle it. She knew well how awful it would sound if she tried to explain, as though. As though—

She couldn’t even go there with herself.

She buried her face in the bed, as if to block her predicament out completely. She wasn’t successful.

Sorcha moved from behind a leafy palm and stepped into the glittering white of the inner courtyard. It was dusk. A shimmering pool in the middle offered up reflections of the surrounding intricately carved walls. A bird of paradise flew through in a quicksilver flash of colour. Lotus flowers sat on the water like flowering jewels. And there, on the other side of this oasis of beauty, stood her lover, waiting for her. She walked slowly, as if in a dream, felt the silk of her long dress moving like liquid satin against her legs. She reached him. A stunning portrait of handsome perfection in a black tuxedo. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

Simon’s voice rang out. ‘That’s great, Sorcha and Zane. We’ll do it one more time, and then it’s Dominic’s turn.’

Sorcha smiled at Zane as he let her go. It was a brittle smile, and hid the aching hurt in her throat and chest. It had taken Lucy a lot longer today to do her make-up, after her sleepless night, and it hadn’t been helped by the girl’s monosyllabic bad mood. Sorcha couldn’t feel bad as she was the one who had acted on a reflex, taken the drugs from her and decided to protect her.

She had refused to acknowledge or look to where she knew Romain stood behind a monitor, watching proceedings as they were filmed. Except just now, walking over to Zane, trying desperately to act her heart out, she’d found a lean, autocratic face coming into her mind’s eye, superimposing itself onto Zane’s features. And it was actually only six-thirty a.m. They were pretending it was dusk. There was a whole lot of day left to get through.

By midday, Romain was pacing like a caged tiger. Seeing Sorcha at the crack of dawn in a dress that was breathtakingly indecent was testing his control to the limit. Along with the fact that she hadn’t acknowledged him once, and skittered away if he came near her. Right now she was seated on the corner of the set. She was a picture of contradictions that made his head swim. And the inarticulate rage from yesterday was still close under the surface.

The long, flowing silver-grey dress clung precariously to the soft swells of her breasts. A diamond clipped just under her bosom was the only feature, and the dress fell from there to the floor in a swirling symphony of silk. What had made his trousers feel tight all morning was the fact that it had an artful thigh-high slit. So when she walked one long, lithe and luscious leg peeped out in all its lissome glory.

His decision, his announcement to her that he would take her as his mistress, was making it hard for him to rein in the desire. He cursed himself again for not just taking her last night. Why had he left her alone?

Uncomfortably, he knew why. Because too much had happened, too quickly. He’d reeled with the shock of coming face to face with her duplicity, with the hard evidence…the image of that white powder still made his stomach contract. Reeled at the fact that all along she had been playing him, with what he’d revealed about his mother, and reeled at how, even after all this, he could still want her. Even more. It burned him up inside.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. With her hair piled high, exposing a long graceful neck, she looked like a teenager playing dress-up. Her shoes were off, her legs were crossed, one small bare foot peeping out from under the folds of silk. Her brow was creased over her glasses in concentration as she read her book.

Who was she trying to kid?

After lunch, Sorcha waited for them to get the next set-up ready. She was congratulating herself on having managed to avoid Romain all morning, but every time she saw where they’d had lunch the previous day, on the other side of the courtyard, she felt ill. Clammy and sweaty.

She heard Dominic call for her impatiently. He had it in for her today, and she could only imagine that Lucy must have told him what she’d done. She prayed that he wouldn’t make an issue of it. She should have guessed that things wouldn’t be going her way…

Hours later everyone was crabby: a mixture of the dense, heavy heat and the jet lag which some were still suffering from. Dominic had become so unbearable that Sorcha felt compelled to go over to him and say something—anything, to get him to lay off. She’d even seen Romain raise a brow at one stage, when he’d been sharp to the point of rudeness. When she confronted him he turned on her, making her blanch, and real fear struck her. It was only then that she realised they were cut off from everyone else, behind a huge plant.

He gripped her arm at the elbow, drawing her further into seclusion, and Sorcha bit back a retort.

‘How dare you play almighty God with Lucy? It’s none of your business what—’

Sorcha refused to let the fear rise, to be bullied, and she rallied back. ‘It is my business when it’s offered to me, Dominic. And what are you doing, giving her that kind of stuff anyway? She’s barely out of her teens.’

He smirked, and it was ugly. ‘Yet she pleasures me every night like an adult.’

Sorcha felt bile rise, and tried to wrestle her arm away—but his wiry strength was too much.