Exposed: Misbehaving with the Magnate Read Online Free PDF Page B

things.’
    Gabrielle didn’t stick around to see the result. With the fear of rejection rising up inside her like a tidal wave, she fled.
     
    Luc caught up with Gabrielle towards the bottom of the stairs leading down into the formal knot garden. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he said.
    ‘No.’ She glanced at him warily.
    ‘You left your bag on the table,’ he said next. ‘I didn’t know if you meant to or not. I left it there.’
    She hadn’t meant to. But there was no going back for it now. ‘I’ll get it later.’ When Josien had gone. What had Simone suggested by way of civilised discussion again? Gabrielle couldn’t remember. Her brain was too busy trying to deny the raw sexual appeal of the man striding alongside her.
    Yesterday Luc had been wearing working attire—a suit befitting the head of the House of Duvalier. Today his clothes ran to casual. A blue shirt with a boldly embossed stripe running through it—it was shaped to accentuate the breadth of his shoulders and had tiny tortoiseshell buttons all the way down the front. The size of those buttons was more in keeping with the size of a woman’s fingers than a man’s and made Gabrielle’s fingers dance with wanting to free them from their buttonholes. She ordered those wayward fingers still and dragged her gaze away from his chest and those buttons and concentrated on the rest of him.
    Big mistake.
    Luc’s trousers and work-roughened boots were more suited to the fields than to the boardroom, but they didn’t look out of place on him, not one little bit. All they did was give his inherent sexuality a dangerously earthy edge.
    Luc could do mindless, earthy abandon just as easily as Gabrielle could. She knew it for a fact.
    ‘How do you like living in Australia?’ he asked her as they started walking through the formal French garden with its neatly clipped hedges. It was a question any acquaintance might ask her, new or old. A civilised question. A question that took her thoughts in a different direction altogether from the place they’d been headed.
    Thank goodness.
    ‘I like it fine,’ she said and summoned a smile. ‘Australia’s a beautiful country. There’s opportunity there. Less of a class system.’ Her smile turned rueful. ‘I wasn’t the housekeeper’s daughter once I reached Australia, I was the sophisticated French girl with the Australian father and a brother who’d just bought a beat-up old winery and renamed it Angels Landing. I could be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. I could be me. It was very liberating.’
    ‘I can imagine,’ murmured Luc with a swift white smile. ‘Did you run wild?’
    ‘Oddly enough, no.’ Gabrielle swung her arm as they walked, setting her sandals to swinging like a lazy pendulum. ‘Once there was nothing to rebel against I stopped rebelling.’
    ‘I bet Rafe was relieved.’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Gabrielle. ‘And maybe he alwaysknew that as soon as I’d broken free of this place I would find my way.’
    ‘You sound as if you hated it here,’ said Luc.
    ‘I didn’t.’ Gabrielle shook her head and looked around her at the chateau and the grounds surrounding it. ‘I don’t. How can you hate something so beautiful? No, it was my place in the grand scheme of things here that I hated. It wasn’t that I necessarily wanted to own Caverness, you understand.’ She didn’t want Luc to think that. ‘I just didn’t want Caverness to own me.’
    ‘I understand.’ Luc’s eyes had darkened. ‘How do you feel about coming back here?’
    ‘Conflicted,’ said Gabrielle with brutal honesty. ‘Part of me feels like I’ve come home. The rest of me’s desperate to get away. I know there’s no place for me here, Luc. Not in Josien’s mind and probably not in yours or Simone’s either, although you’re both being very kind.’
    ‘You’re wrong,’ said Luc. ‘There’s room for you here, Gabrielle. Always.’
    ‘We’ll see.’
    ‘Gabrielle, if ever you need my help with anything, ask