But Cara couldn’t hear Marcel, all she could hear was the blood pounding in her ears. She didn’t care what Durand thought of her, what anyone thought of her, so why did his disgust cut through her composure to the wounded girl who had been called names so many times before? And why was his forceful fury only making the sensations racing over her skin more volatile, more electric, more uncontrollable?
‘I’m not a whore, I’m his wife,’ she said, her voice breaking on the words. ‘You certainly have no more right to the vines than I do.’
‘You think not?’ Durand stepped closer, close enough for her to feel the heat of his anger pumping off him, and see the tension in his jaw, the brittle fury in the vivid brown of his eyes. But there was something else in the dark depths that was even more disturbing. Something hot and vibrant that she could feel deep in her abdomen.
‘I have every right to these vines. I nurtured them and fed them, protected them from frost and fire and blight, picking off the insects until my fingers bled,’ he said, the forceful words as compelling as the passion sparking between them. A passion she did not want to acknowledge but couldn’t deny
. ‘I worked these fields for hours, when I wasn’t even old enough to see over the top of the vines,’ he murmured. ‘And I promised myself then, some day they would be mine.’
Durand’s origins were sketchy. She’d heard the stories whispered about him in the media, that his mother had come from a poor family and no one knew who his father was. That he had started out very young working in the fields, had little formal schooling and had worked his way up from nothing, eventually earning enough to buy his first stake, then expanded and grown his business. But no one had ever suspected he came from Burgundy, and certainly not from around here, or someone surely would have mentioned it before now.
‘Are you saying you worked for Pierre and he didn’t pay you?’ Cara asked, her voice shaking. Was he lying to her? She could imagine he would be ruthless enough to do just that, but something about the tone of his voice, as if he were admitting something he was ashamed of, suggested the opposite. ‘I don’t... I don’t believe you.’
It couldn’t be true.
Pierre had been a complex man, perhaps more complex than she had realised, but he wasn’t a monster. Was he?
‘Oui, he paid me,’ Durand snarled. ‘The money he insisted I owed him for being born. And I did the work willingly until I realised that all he had ever wanted from me was free labour. That he never had any intention of acknow—’ He stopped short and something slashed across his features, something more than fury. Something that looked suspiciously like betrayal and hurt, as well as anger.
Cara recognised that emotion because she had endured the same feelings of confusion and inadequacy as a child, on the day her father had left her at the children’s centre in Westminster and told her he couldn’t look after her any more.
It was the last time she had ever seen him.
As she absorbed the echo of that shattering emotion now, tightening her ribs and making her heart thunder, she thought of the confusing statement he’d made—why would Pierre believe Durand owed him money for being born...?
Then she noticed the golden halo around the dark brown of Durand’s irises for the first time.
‘You were his son,’ she murmured, the truth suddenly so obvious she didn’t know why she hadn’t figured it out as soon as Durand had stepped inside her home.
Or rather his home.
Had he lived and worked here as a child? And never been acknowledged by Pierre?
The wave of compassion towards this hard, indomitable man was so fierce it nearly knocked her off her feet. Because suddenly she understood exactly why the vines meant so much to him. Why he wanted them so badly. And why he hated Pierre—or wanted to hate Pierre—as much as she had once wanted to hate her own father. For abandoning her.
But as the wave of compassion flowed through her, the wave of desire surged too, that shocking feeling of connection breaking down the barriers she’d been trying and failing to construct ever since his gaze had raked over her at the graveside.
CHAPTER THREE
WHAT THE HELL did she just say?
‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle a dit, là?’
Maxim was so shocked at the woman’s whispered statement his English deserted him—and momentarily so did his fury at his father’s vindictive attempt to deny him even from beyond the grave. He had said too much, far too much, but even so she couldn’t possibly have figured out the truth so easily when no one else had ever suspected his link to Pierre de la Mare.
‘You were...’ She stumbled over the words but her blue eyes were so filled with sympathy he stiffened. ‘You are Pierre’s son. Your eyes, the shading...they’re just like his.’
It wasn’t a question this time, any more than it had been the first time she’d said it.
‘What stupidity is this?’ he said, instinctively denying it.
But his voice sounded rough with shock as the humiliation that had consumed him as a boy—when he’d discovered what a fool he’d been to believe even for a second that a man of Pierre de la Mare’s breeding and wealth would ever have claimed a bastard like him—threatened to engulf him again.
He didn’t want her pity. And he had no intention of claiming the legacy; all he wanted was the vines. Vines he’d sweated and laboured over for years, believing his father loved him, or at least respected him, when all he’d ever been to Pierre de la Mare was a mistake.
‘Even if you are mine, as your mother claims, do you really think I’d want a whore’s brat to carry the de la Mare name? However good he is with the vines.’
The words his father had spoken to him the day he’d turned fifteen rang in his head. That was the day he’d finally got up the courage to tell Pierre de la Mare he knew they were father and son. The day he’d told his father how proud he was to carry on that legacy. The day his father had laughed in his face and told him he had no right to any legacy because Maxim would never be more than a field hand, a labourer, a bastard.