Accidental Heiress (10 page)

He kissed her deeply. It was a scorching kiss, and the heat of it reached all the way through
the brambles and thistles that had grown around her broken heart. A searing kiss that made her feel.

Yes,
she thought, maybe the wind
could
seduce people and incite feral thoughts and untamed dreams about the awakening of love. But she knew better. Most of the time it whispered promises it never intended to keep.

It whispered secrets: secrets kept, secrets that should be told. But the past was like the sudden spray of dried-leaf confetti that had danced away on the breeze down by the river; the future was the strong arms holding her, keeping her warm as they floated above the earth and all its problems.

As the balloon made its approach, preparing to land, she watched as the wind whipped the water across the Rhone, brewing whitecaps that resembled waves on the Mediterranean. This was only a small, imaginary ocean and she could see the shore on the other side. She wondered as she sat there shivering, if that might be a good omen. It was funny how when she stopped focusing on herself—her own problems, the little voices that had always chattered in the back of her mind, insisting she wasn't
good enough because she was stupid, a screw-up—those voices quieted when she focused outward rather than inward.

They'd also been nearly nonexistent since she'd been with Henri.

But as the balloon basket landed with a thud, the fickle wind changed directions and blew her hair into her eyes.

Suddenly the voices of doubt were back. What seemed so clear moments ago now made her feel restless and anxious.

 

Another packet of letters arrived via courier on Sunday, but as with the bundle of letters that had preceded the visit to St. Mary's, the letter that accompanied this bunch came with a note from Colbert, instructing Margeaux to visit the convent before reading the letters.

The following day, they found themselves at Saint James Convent, located about ten miles west of the orphanage. Their appointment was with Sister Jeanne, and she was waiting for them when they arrived.

Henri was surprised to discover that the woman was younger than he'd expected. In
fact, she was probably not much older than he and Margeaux.

Interesting.

She had a pretty face, and a calm, quiet manner. He wondered why she'd chosen this life. He wasn't judging, just curious at how someone could be so sure of what they wanted. Or so sure that they
didn't
want a life's mate—not an earthly one, anyway.

Henri understood the part about not being compelled to settle down with a mate. He'd gone his entire adult life running from just such a commitment. But now that Margeaux was back in his life, he was also beginning to feel a tug in the other direction, that sense of free-falling through time and space and into love.

In many ways, it was the opposite of what he'd felt for Sydney—or maybe it was more apt to say what he
hadn't
felt for her. The emotions that Margeaux evoked were at once compelling and overwhelming.

While he enjoyed the comfort and ease they naturally slipped into, he craved her like the body thirsted for orange juice when it needed vitamin C or hungered for bread when it needed nourishment.

She nourished his soul.

As Sister Jeanne shepherded them around the convent, Henri found his mind wandering to thoughts of how much he wanted to hold Margeaux's hand or taste her lips, both of which he refrained from doing in this holy house in front of women who had pledged the vow of chastity.

When their gazes snagged as they trailed along with Sister Jeanne, he could tell that Margeaux was thinking the same thing.

 

When they paused in the chapel, Margeaux sniffed the air. There it was again. That phantom scent she thought she'd smelled as they entered the convent. But as they'd gotten engrossed in conversation, the aroma had faded and she'd forgotten about it.

Until now, when she was sensing it again.

“Do you smell orange blossoms?” she whispered to Henri.

He shook his head.

It must have been a note in Sister Jeanne's cologne. Did nuns indulge in cologne?

Perhaps it was her soap.

Or maybe flowers adorning the chapel. But
when she glanced around, she didn't see any bouquets decorating the place.

When they exited the chapel, a black sedan that was parked across the street caught her eye. In many ways, it was just an ordinary, unremarkable car, but the dent in the driver's-side door set it apart. Now she was sure it was the same car she'd seen parked across the street from St. Mary's and then again yesterday near the market as they'd walked around Avignon.

Today, a man was slumped down in the front seat. He had a cap pulled down over his forehead and sunglasses, so it was impossible to get a good look at him. What she got instead was an uneasy feeling. She'd had to circumvent enough reporters in her younger, wilder days, it was almost as if she'd built up a sixth sense for them.

But why here? Why now? Visiting a convent and the tourist magnet of Avignon was hardly newsworthy.

Still, when another nun came to tell Sister Jeanne there was an important phone call she needed to tend to, she left Margeaux and Henri alone to enjoy the courtyard as they waited.

“Henri, over the past couple of days, have you noticed that car over there before?”

She turned to point at it, but by that time it was gone. It had evaporated in the same manner as the phantom scent of orange blossoms, leaving her wondering if both had been figments of her imagination.

Until Henri said, “Are you talking about the beat-up black four door that was over there a moment ago?”

He'd seen it, too.

She pointed at the empty space. “Yes that's the one.”

“I noticed that same car yesterday, downtown. Strange that he's here again today.”

A few moments later, Sister Jeanne came back.

“I'm terribly sorry you had to wait,” she said. “Let's go into the living room and have some tea. I have a lot to tell you about your mother and the time she spent here. And I'm sure you'll have a lot of questions.”

H
er mother had intended to become a nun?

The revelation had floored Margeaux. She was surprised but not flabbergasted by her father's secrets. However, even though Margeaux was only sixteen years old when her mother died—and not necessarily privy to adult aspects of her mother's life—she thought she knew her mother pretty well.

How could it be that her mother also had an entire secret past she'd kept from her daughter all those years? One Margeaux knew nothing about until now? Especially given that,
Margeaux soon learned,
she
was at the center of the secret.

Over tea, Sister Jeanne had outlined that Margeaux's mother, Bernadette Loraine, had been a novice at Saint James and had intended to take the vow until she was lured away by love.

It sort of sounded like the
Sound of Music,
except the man who tempted her was not a widowed captain with seven singing children. No, there had only been one child when her seventeen-year-old mother left, and that child would be named Margeaux Simone Broussard.

Her mother had been pregnant when she ran away with Margeaux's father to start a new life. Considering her parents' meager upbringing and her father's rise to political success, the two had done well for themselves.

Margeaux didn't understand why her father would be so ashamed of his past. The last packet of letters hadn't addressed it. She could only assume that his obsession with perfect appearances made him ashamed of the fact that he'd lured a seventeen-year-old girl away from a convent, and he'd gotten her pregnant in the process. Those in high-ranking public
office had committed far worse infractions and kept their careers intact, but on the return trip to St. Michel, Margeaux had reviewed the letters and reflected on her visits to the convent and orphanage. She'd come to one conclusion about her father.

He was a perfectionist.

He wanted nothing less than the perfect life for his wife and daughter. Perhaps by wiping the slate clean of past infractions, he thought he could accomplish just that.

In the letters, he never went into the hows and whys, he'd simply narrated a story about the past and left her to draw her own conclusions. He also told her that the information was hers to do with as she pleased. Since both he and her mother were no longer living, she could use her best judgment as to who would know about their family history.

It was a conclusion to the past that seemed to edge right up to where Margeaux's installment of Broussard history began. Her father never knew she was pregnant. However, given her father's illegitimate birth, her parents' conceiving a child out of wedlock and then Margeaux's
own teen pregnancy—history seemed to keep repeating itself.

Would the cycle of unwed pregnancy end if she confessed her miscarriage to Henri?

Or would it simply open old wounds neither of them could do anything about?

She walked into her father's study with the last letter in the stack she'd opened during the convent visit, settled herself on the couch and reread it:

For a long time, she sat and stared at her father's fine handwriting. Her dyslexia made the letters and words appear to jump around on the page, but she'd read this letter so often that she was more or less reading from memory.

Even though her father wasn't physically here to experience this with her, really, it felt like the first time she had ever connected with
him. The first time that each of them understood where the other was coming from. She wondered how he would have reacted if he had known about her battle with dyslexia. But in the end, she decided it was better to enjoy the knowledge that her father accepted that they were simply different people. Even so, he had still respected her for who she was, even though she was not like him.

That in itself relieved a mountain of guilt and sadness.

 

Henri and Margeaux had been home two days when he received a phone call from Pascal Moreau, Colbert Broussard's attorney.

Pascal invited Henri to join him for lunch in a private room in the University Club to discuss what Pascal deemed “urgent business.”

They made small talk over a lunch of lamb chops and herbed green beans—a little heavier than Henri was used to for the noon meal, since he usually grabbed lunch on the fly. After being away for two weeks and having mountains of catch-up work to do, he really should have had a quick sandwich at his desk today. But according to Pascal, the issue could not wait.

Once the server had cleared the lunch dishes and brought the coffee, Pascal pulled out an official-looking file and opened it on the table.

“This is an addendum to Colbert Broussard's last will and testaments,” he said. “If you'll remember, in the initial reading of the will, Colbert said that if you completed the task he asked of you there would be something in it for you.”

Task?
Was the man serious? Spending two weeks in Avignon was no
task.
It was heaven.

“Look,” he said, pushing back from the table. “I don't want any part of Colbert's estate. It should all go to his daughter.”

Pascal looked perplexed. “I'm afraid this particular…err…gift is nontransferable.”

“Then give it to charity,” Henri insisted. “I will not accept anything from him for simply accompanying his daughter on the fact-finding mission he sent her on, even one as worthwhile as the trip turned out to be. Thank you for lunch. I need to get back to work.”

Henri stood. The trip was
worthwhile
to both Margeaux and him. It helped him realize how he'd never stopped loving her, and suddenly,
sitting there alone with her father's attorney, he realized that if he didn't want to lose her all over again, he'd better make sure she knew darn good and well how he felt.

As soon as he got out of there, he'd call her and ask to see her that night.

“Please sit down, Mr. Lejardin,” Pascal said. “I'm afraid this is something completely different than what you're thinking.”

Henri lowered himself into the chair. “What is it?”

“There's a letter.” Pascal held up an envelope. It was the same ivory linen stationery that Colbert had used for the letters he had written to Margeaux.

While they were in Avignon, she had offered to let him read them, but he'd declined.

She'd shared a little bit about their contents, about her father living at St. Mary's and her mother being a novice at Saint James. And, of course, Sister Jeanne had provided some of the information.

However, instinct had warned him that what the letters contained that hadn't been spoken aloud was intensely personal and when Mar
geaux wanted him to know the rest, she would share it.

For now, Henri was giving her time to come to terms with everything that had been unveiled.

Pascal pushed the envelope across the table to him. Henri picked it up tentatively, held the crisp weightiness of the fine stationery in his hand, looked at the florid penmanship that spelled out his name—Henri Lejardin—across the front.

Tentatively he broke the seal that held the flap in place.

Henri was astounded and elated to have secured Colbert's nod. That evening, he read the letter aloud to Margeaux. She was the only person who would understand the magnitude of how much this meant to him.

“Your father…I just can't believe he could go from barely speaking to me to
this.
This is the Crown Council. I certainly never expected it this soon, and without his official endorsement, who knows when I would have had another shot at it.”

“You'll make a wonderful Councilman,” she said.

He shook his head. “I need to slow down. I don't have it in the bag. This is simply the beginning. Now they have to do their due diligence and make sure—”

She put a finger to his lip. “
Shhhh
…tonight
we celebrate. Come with me down to the wine cellar and help me pick out something to celebrate your imminent victory.”

She grabbed his hand and led him to the door just inside the kitchen. Everything seemed electric—a sultry note in her voice, the earthy smell of the air as she opened the wine cellar door, the feel of her hand in his. They descended the dim, narrow passageway that led to the dank, dark room below. Henri glimpsed the way their bare hands were laced together—skin on skin—the contrast of his big, rough hand on her smooth flesh. There was something agonizingly intimate and familiar about it.

His mind raced back to a night long ago. Colbert was entertaining…some head of state from a country Henri couldn't recall at the moment. Margeaux had led him down to the cellar because they were going to sneak a bottle of her father's wine out and drink it down by the lake.

But once they were down there and they'd flipped the switch to turn on the light, the bulb blew with a quick pop and hiss.

Margeaux had giggled and the sound of her
laugh had echoed in the small, earthen cavern, only to be snuffed out as Henri pressed his lips over hers and then claimed her body, backing her up against a far wall, making love to her as muted sounds of the party played like a radio off in the distance.

The memory made Henri suck in a deep breath to quell the rush of need that flooded his body. His fingertips twitched against Margeaux's skin as the wave of desire overtook him. In the dark cellar, they were teenagers again—young and wild and free.

“Don't turn on the light,” he said. His voice sounded husky and hungry. And he was ravenous for her.

With the hand that was holding hers, he drew her into him without a word. His lips instinctively found their way to hers. He knew those lips—even in the dark. He smelled the scent of her that intoxicated him, and another surge of need coursed through him.

She did things to him—wonderful, stupefying, mind-blowing things that turned him inside out with need. Margeaux Broussard had had that affect on him since the first day they both were old enough to understand that a man
and a woman could be oh, so much more than friends.

He loved these lips. He's kissed them in his dreams over the years she was away—now that he had her here again, the thought of losing her again was almost too much to bear.

She tasted of the cinnamon gum she favored and another, honeyed sweetness that was hers alone. It was a familiar taste, a timeless taste, because her lips belonged to him.

She was the yearning he'd felt, the scent he'd desired, the taste he'd craved in his soul of souls.

Groaning with need, his hands roamed her body with a greed he'd never experienced—not even years ago when they were so familiar, so comfortable with each other.

She was hot and greedy, too. Her hands traveled over his body, tracing his face, his shoulders, his arms, as if memorizing the shape of him.

They kissed in the shadows, shutting out Crown Councils and orphanages and convents—putting on hold the past and the future to live in the very heady present.

The now.

He wanted her. Now.

Their ragged breaths were the only sound in this dark, sheltered world. Dim light filtering down from the top of the stairs was the only illumination. He kissed her with his eyes open, seeing only her in his mind's eye.

He tugged her sweater over her head, driven by the need to feel the intimacy of her breasts in his palms.

She unbuttoned his shirt and he shrugged out of it, pulling her close as he let it fall to the floor. He wrapped his arms around her tighter, unable to get close enough to her, relishing the warmth of skin on skin. He kissed her lips, her neck, her collarbone, her breasts, sinking to his knees as he worked his way down to the waistband of her jeans.