By Request Collection April-June 2016. Оливия Гейтс

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       CHAPTER TWELVE

      IN THE heat of the moment, Shari hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the chambre à coucher to which she was being transported. But there came a time when her eyes opened wide.

      The room was still a yellow fantasia, but the empty space above the fireplace was now occupied by an exquisite rococo painting of some gentlemen with ladies—fully clothed—in voluminous dresses, lounging under the spreading boughs of a tree.

      She studied it thoughtfully. She felt pretty sure she’d seen it somewhere before. It was too far away for her to take a squiz at the artist’s name, but she thought she’d wait until she was alone before investigating.

      An expedition to the boudoir revealed that all evidence of any female occupation prior to her own had been obliterated. Her perfume bottle now graced the dressing table, and her clothes, meagre as they were, were hanging in the wardrobe. Her shampoo bottles imbued the bathroom with a personality she could feel at home with.

      Returning to Luc’s arms, she snuggled against his chest. His bristly jaw brushed her forehead. ‘I love that picture.’

      ‘Mmm.’ His voice was a contented growl. ‘Me too.’

      She spun a whorl of chest hair around her finger. ‘Since you’ve got a maid to leap to your every command, I’m thinking now I might stay the whole week.’

      He sighed. ‘Suppose I hire a chef? Then you will stay even longer.’ When she failed to reply, he gazed down at her. ‘Be my lover …’

      Well. This came pretty close to sounding like a commitment, of sorts. Her heart shivered with joyful doubt and excitement. ‘You do know I’m about to get really enormous?’

      ‘Every man in Paris will envy me.’

      She wrinkled her nose. ‘Are you sure? Wait till I tell Neil.’ Then meeting his amused, tender gaze, she said, ‘This isn’t just because I’m pregnant and you’ve been harbouring some weird sicko fantasy about pregnant women?’

      He laughed heartily, then tenderly tweaked her hair. ‘It’s because you are you.’ His eyes grew serious. ‘Beautiful, unique you.’

      He kissed her then, with such passionate ardour she believed him. Believed every word.

      And knew she was in love. All at once Paris was heaven. The sun came out, the trees glowed greenly and the flowers in the gardens all opened their beauteous faces. She strolled along the banks of the Seine with her lover, argued with him, teased and drank coffee with him in cafés on the Left Bank. She visited Notre Dame de Paris with him and was awed.

      She prevailed on him to take her to all the tourist hangouts, and he obliged without protest, regaling her with a dizzying lunch at the top of the Eiffel Tower, hours and hours of pictures in galleries all over Paris, and dinners in restaurants where the waiters could run up steep flights of stairs balancing steaming trays aloft on one hand.

      It was too early to share her news with the world, so she was cagey even with Emilie and Neil. ‘I’ve decided to stay on for a week or two,’ she told them in her email. ‘Luc has come to my rescue and he’s letting me stay at his place for some of the time.’

      At his place. Not with him. She hoped they got the distinction, though, red-eyed and sleepless from attending to the latest set of twins all night through, they were hardly likely to notice anything.

      She included a few pics of Disneyland, some of them strolling in Montmartre, and one rare one she just couldn’t resist of Luc laughing while getting drenched in a downpour of rain.

      When the possibilities of varying her limited wardrobe reached saturation point, Luc took her to a boutique in the Rue Cambon, near the Ritz, that blessed venue, and some others in the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré. She tried on dozens of things, and he wanted to buy her most of them, but she accepted one lovely pale green dress to wear for daytime occasions and two for evening—one a simple, stunning black, the other a pale silvery cream.

      She would never have been able to afford them herself, though she kept a tally of the cost so she could pay him back when her first truly massive royalty cheque arrived, just supposing one ever did. And she allowed the generous guy to give her some pearls and matching earrings as an outright gift.

      She insisted on buying herself the shoes though, and, with the weather warming, trawled the Galleries Lafayette for some cooler things for casual wear. She couldn’t imagine how large she might be in a few months’ time, but there was the rest of spring and СКАЧАТЬ