Read Online Exposed: Misbehaving with the Magnate by Kelly Hunter - Free Book Online Page A

that remark, let her turn the handle and turn her head and glance at him through eyes that told him that there was something else going on here. Something he didn’t understand. But he let her go, let her take refuge in humour. If she wouldn’t confide in him there was nothing else he could do.
    ‘Goodnight, Gabrielle,’ he murmured wryly. ‘Sweet dreams, and just for the record…I’m not ready to risk kissing you goodnight at all.’
     
    Luc waited until he heard Simone’s voice and Gabrielle’s answering murmur before heading for the main hall and the powder room, scanning the tops of the sideboards and flower stands along the way for something, anything, that would have caused Gabrielle to become upset. He stood at the bottom of the grand staircase, and looked around again, puzzled. There was nothing here, nothing he could see that would have caused such a reaction from Gabrielle. Household trinkets. Vases. A painting of an ancestor or ten. That was all. He looked towards the top of the staircase thoughtfully. Had she gone upstairs?
    Had someone else come down?
    The only other two people staying in the chateau were Hans and Josien and they’d both retired for the evening long ago. Hadn’t they?
    He stood there, listening for the sound of Gabrielle’s car engine starting, listening to the crunch of car tyres on loose courtyard gravel as she manoeuvred the vehicle carefully through the archway and accelerated down the drive. The kitchen door thudded shut and the sound of rapid footsteps on floorboards met his ears as he stood there in the hallway, in the half-light of a nearby lamp. That would be Simone.
    No footsteps sounded overhead. No sound came from upstairs at all…except…He heard it then, a creak, slow and careful, and following on from it the soft metal click that went with the closing of a door.
     
    Gabrielle fretted her way through the following day. The memory of Luc’s most recent kiss tugged at her senses and the thought of his offer of dinner, not to mention his offer to let her use the caves of Caverness for a wine tasting for the Angels Landing reds, echoed through her brain. She needed to pay attention to such things. It was important to know where she was heading with regards to Luc for he was a force no sensible woman ignored, but Luc wasn’t the only man on her mind today. Rafe had been on her mind too. Rafe, and everything else that went with Josien’s declaration that Harrison wasn’t his father. For the first time in her life, Gabrielle dreaded the thought of phoning her brother. Her stomach churned whenever she passed by the phone, eating away at her, making her feel ill. She hadn’t asked for this secret. She wished to hell she didn’t have to keep it. Rafe was her rock, the one constant in her life, and she hated to think that by keeping this information from him, she was betraying him.
    But she hated the thought of damaging the relationship Rafe had with Harrison more.
    Gabrielle cursed and slammed the door hard on thoughts of fathers who weren’t fathers and the things she now knew that Rafael did not.
    Poisonous words designed to destroy a relationship between father and son.
    Weight-ridden words designed to build a chasm between sister and brother.
    Cruel, loveless words from a mother who did not deserve the title.
    Words she was not inclined to share with anyone. Not with Luc when he’d asked her what was wrong, and definitely not with Rafael. No, better to forget she’d ever heard those particular words and speak to Rafe of other matters altogether. Matters that would bring their own ghosts of the past along for the ride, and for once in her life she did not dread their reappearance. There were worse ghosts to fear and always had been.
    She just hadn’t known of them.
    Who? Who could be Rafe’s father? Not Phillipe Duvalier. Heaven help all of them and especially Rafe and Simone, but, please God, not him. There had been a slight partiality for Rafe on Phillipe’s