Veronique Giraud was everything a Laroche wife should be. He had known her all his life and their backgrounds were similar. A corporate lawyer, she was an excellent hostess as well as being tolerant of her future mother-in-law’s emotional fragility. But neither love nor lust featured in Christien’s relationship with his fiancée. Both of them considered mutual respect and honesty of greater importance. Although Veronique was naturally willing to give him children, she had little enthusiasm for physical intimacy and had already made it clear that she would prefer him to satisfy his needs with a mistress.

Christien was quite content with that arrangement. Indeed the knowledge that even marriage would not deprive him of that valuable male freedom to essentially do as he liked, when he liked, had very much increased his willingness to embrace the matrimonial bond.

In little more than a month, he would be over in London on business. He would pay Tabby Burnside a visit and offer to buy the cottage back from her. No doubt she would feel flattered by his personal attention. He wondered what she looked like some years on…faded? At only twenty-one? He almost shrugged. What did it matter to him? But he also smiled.

A house in France, Tabby reflected dreamily, a place of their own in the sun…

‘Of course, you’ll sell the old lady’s cottage for the best price you can get,’ Alison Davies assumed on her niece’s behalf. ‘It’ll fetch a healthy sum.’

Fresh, clean country air in exchange for the city traffic fumes that she was convinced had made her toddler son prone to asthma, Tabby thought happily.

‘You and Jake will have something to put away for a rainy day.’ Her aunt, a slender brunette with sensible grey eyes, nodded with approval at that idea.

Lost in her own thoughts, Tabby was still mulling over the extraordinary fact that Solange Roussel had left her a French property. It was fate, it had to be.