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The whole of the previous week had been taken up with marriage-orientated activity. Accompanied by one of Bastien’s personal assistants, a fluent French-speaker, she had undergone an interview at the local mairie—the mayor’s office, where the ceremony would take place. A whole heap of personal documents had been certified and presented on her behalf to fulfil the legal requirements, and forty-eight hours later, following a meeting with a lawyer at the chateau to protect her interests, she had signed a pre-nuptial agreement. Bastien had made liberal provision for her in the event of a divorce, offering a far more generous settlement than she thought necessary.
‘Look on it as compensation,’ Bastien had advised her on the phone, when she had protested the size of that settlement. ‘You didn’t want to marry me, but you’re doing it.’
It wouldn’t be a real marriage, she told herself soothingly as she clasped the diamond pendant round her throat. And wasn’t that just as well? Bastien had been away for seven days and she had missed him almost from the moment of his departure. How was that possible? How could she miss the male she had believed she hated, who had persuaded her into a morally indefensible sexual relationship?
Lilah walked to the window and breathed in slow and deep, struggling to calm herself. She had not become attached to Bastien, and she had not fallen for him. She was just wildly attracted to him. She had also begun to understand him better as she’d come to appreciate his tough childhood and the experiences which had made him the hard, aggressive character that he was.
She wasn’t excusing anything he had done, was she? No—she remained fully aware of Bastien’s every flaw, and was therefore completely safe from getting attached to him, she assured herself soothingly.
A knock sounded on the bedroom door. It was time for her to leave. Manos smiled at her as she emerged from the room, rich fabric gliding in silken folds round her legs. Bastien had had a whole rack of designer wedding gowns sent to her and she had been taken aback, having assumed that they would be bypassing all such frills.
‘No, this should look like a normal wedding,’ Bastien had decreed.
Yet how could it look or feel normal when neither of them had any family members present?
Lilah felt absurdly guilty that she was about to get married without her father’s knowledge.
Bastien was waiting in the hall. Clad in a superbly tailored pale grey suit, he looked breathtakingly handsome. When she met his long-lashed dark golden eyes her heart thudded and her pulses quickened, and she could feel heat rushing into her cheeks.
‘You look fantastic,’ he husked, closing a hand over hers as she reached the bottom step.
‘When did you get back?’
‘At dawn. I slept during the flight,’ he shared, just as Stefan presented Lilah with a small bunch of flowers and she thanked him warmly.
They came to a halt in the stone front doorway as a photographer stepped forward to capture them on film.
‘I wasn’t expecting him,’ Lilah admitted out of the corner of her mouth.
‘This is not a moment we can easily recapture,’ Bastien declared.
‘But who’s going to be interested?’ she whispered helplessly.
‘Our child will be interested in our wedding day,’ Bastien countered.
‘But...’ Her lips clamped shut on a rush of denial as the photographer asked her to relax and smile.
She was convinced that there wasn’t going to be a pregnancy, or a child, but she could see that Bastien had already decided otherwise.
A limousine whisked them to the mairie, a sleepy creamy stone building sited behind the war memorial in a small village. It was a civil ceremony, conducted by a middle-aged female official. Lilah held her breath as Bastien slid a gold ring on to her finger and she performed the same office for him, albeit more clumsily, all fingers and thumbs in her extreme self-consciousness as she thought about what the gesture actually meant: Bastien was her husband now.
When they emerged back into the sunshine the photographer was waiting, and she laughed and smiled, suddenly grateful that the unsettling ceremony was over and she could forget about it.
She was climbing back into the limo when a sports car shot to a sudden halt at the other side of the road and a woman called, ‘Bastien?’
