Page 52 of A Forbidden Night With The Housekeeper

Cara x

His fingers shook, making the paper tremble.

She had run. He leapt out of his chair, the fear turning to terror—and the unbearable pain of longing. He forced his mind to engage. If she’d taken one of the estate’s cars it would have a GPS tracker. He stormed out of the château towards the garage, praying each step of the way that she had not managed to get to the station already.

He couldn’t lose her. Not again. Not like this. What had he done?

Cara took the turning into the short lane through the woods that led to La Maison de la Lune. She’d been driving aimlessly for over an hour, trying to get her thoughts in order before she went home. Not home, she thought miserably.

Back to Château Durand to talk to Maxim about the divorce.

He would have received her letter by now. She’d left her phone at home precisely so he couldn’t contact her. But she would have to go back soon. She didn’t want him to worry unnecessarily.

She wasn’t even sure how she had ended up here. She knew Maxim would have knocked down La Maison last September when she’d run away from him, but even so she hoped that just being in this place, where everything had begun, might help her get some perspective on her pain—and her grief—at the end of their marriage.

Despite everything, she was still struggling to accept that everything she’d believed about her and Maxim’s relationship—the intimacy she had believed had been growing between them—had been wrong.

The car took the short bend in the road through the woods but, as she steeled herself for the empty plot that awaited her, she spotted a shape through the trees that had her heart—her bruised and battered heart—bouncing into her throat.

The house—the house she had once loved so dearly—still stood. The shutters were closed, the door boarded up, the flowers she’d planted in the boxes on the windowsills wilted. But the structure itself—the stone walls, the wooden gables, the red slates of the roof—were all still there, just as she’d left them that morning, when she’d run away from Maxim—and, she now realised, feelings that even then had terrified her.

She drove into the yard in the SUV she’d borrowed and braked, then rubbed her tired eyes. Was she dreaming, imagining this?

Why would Maxim not have destroyed the house? He’d been so determined to do it all those months ago—she now knew because of the cruel way his father had treated him and his mother—and, after discovering the full extent of Pierre’s cruelty, she didn’t blame him.

So why was it still here, whole and solid and, from the way the yard had been brushed free of autumn leaves, also cared for in the months since her departure?

She got out of the car, walked to the door and laid her cheek against the worn wood. After all the months she’d lived here with Pierre, all she could remember about her life inside these walls was that one forbidden night with Maxim. The hunger, the panic, the joy and then the pain. But most of all the tenderness that she’d failed to acknowledge then, but couldn’t help but acknowledge now.

The tears that she’d shed during the night returned. God, it hurt to know that even though he’d rejected her, she loved him still. And she knew she always would—that was why she’d asked him for a divorce. She couldn’t go on living with him, sleeping with him, knowing that he would never be able to love her back.

She heard the purr of an engine, getting louder, cutting through the chirping cheerfulness of a goldfinch’s song. As she turned Maxim’s car drove into the yard. The squeal of brakes was followed by the slam of the car door as he jumped out.

‘Cara...you’re here...you didn’t run?’ he said. His eyes were wild, as wild as they had been yesterday in the moments before he had told her he didn’t love her, when he’d saved her from falling.

She wiped the tears off her cheeks. ‘Of course not,’ she said, shocked when he ran across the yard towards her. ‘I just needed some space.’

Suddenly she was in his arms and he was hugging her so tightly her heart was hammering against her ribs like a jackhammer.

‘Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte jamais,’ he murmured against her hair, his tone urgent, desperate.

Don’t leave me, don’t ever leave me.

‘Maxim?’ She pulled back, her heart swelling in her chest and clattering against her ribs. ‘I wouldn’t have run away. Not again. Not now.’

He sunk to his knees, clasped her thighs, pressing his head into the mound of her belly. ‘I thought... I thought you had left me.’

She sunk her fingers into his hair, drew his face up, and saw something in his eyes that had her swollen heart bursting in her chest. She glanced back at the house—the first home she had known. But that home had meant nothing until she had welcomed him into it.

‘Maxim, why didn’t you destroy La Maison?’

‘Because I couldn’t,’ he said, his expression stark, naked with the longing he had never allowed her to see, until this moment. ‘After you left it was the only thing I had that reminded me of you.’ He swore softly and dropped his head. ‘My revenge against him seemed unimportant once I had lost you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose you again. I can’t.’

Her heart did a giddy leap, despite the hopelessness in his voice.

Had she been wrong to give up so easily, to believe what he’d told her instead of following her own instincts, her own emotions?

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