The French Count's Pregnant Bride. Catherine SpencerЧитать онлайн книгу.

      Yesterday, when the chambermaid had shown her to her room, Diana had considered it barely acceptable. At little more than twelve feet square, with its old, mismatched furnishings, it was, without question, the least sophisticated space she’d ever occupied, and certainly not one in which she planned to spend much time. Now, leaning against the closed door, she surveyed the narrow, iron-framed bed, hand-painted night table, carved armoire and three-drawer chest, with fond gratitude for the haven they represented.

      Even the age-spotted mirror hanging above the old-fashioned washstand held a certain charm. Its most grievous sin lay in distorting her reflection on its wavy surface so that one half of her face looked as if it didn’t quite belong to the other. Unlike Comte Anton de Valois, who possessed an unnerving talent for seeing clear through to her brain and detecting every nuance of hesitation, every carefully phrased falsehood.

      She doubted he’d swallowed her excuse that hunger had left her light-headed, but it had been the best she could come up with on short notice, most especially since she really had been thrown for a loop at learning that Henri was a Molyneux.

      “You are alone?” he’d inquired, when she’d shown up last night and requested a room.

      She’d nodded and murmured assent, so captivated by everything she saw that it simply hadn’t occurred to her to ask his full name. It had been enough that everyone called him Henri.

      Bathing her in a welcoming smile, he’d pushed an old-fashioned ledger across the counter for her to sign. “Then you’re in luck. It so happens a single room just became available.”

      L’Auberge d’Olivier was a picturesque building with the date, 1712, stamped above the open front door. Its thick plaster walls were painted a soft creamy-yellow. Flowers tumbled from baskets perched on the sills of its sparkling, deep-set windows. Outside, under a huge plane tree, candles flickered on wrought-iron tables where old men hunched over glasses of dark wine and smoked pungent cigarettes.

      Charmed, she’d seen it as a fortuitous start to her search. Because Bellevue-sur-Lac was so small, she’d thought it would be easy to unearth clues that would lead her to her birth mother. Had spent this entire day combing the narrow streets, convinced success was around the next corner. Behind the protection of her sunglasses, she’d scrutinized every woman she came across, searching for a physical resemblance, a visceral intuition, that would tell her she’d found the right one. But the very smallness of the village turned out to be a serious drawback.

      “How do you plan to tackle this harebrained scheme of yours?” Carol had asked, just before she’d dropped her off at SeaTac airport.

      “Very discreetly,” Diana had replied smugly. “I’ll be so smooth and subtle, no one will even notice me, let alone guess what I’m after.”

      In fact, she’d been an object of suspicious curiosity everywhere she went. Although they’d been polite enough, people had closed ranks against her, not trusting a lone American wandering the area, and she’d come back to the inn that evening, no farther ahead than she had been when she’d left there that morning.

      Was she really so naive that she’d expected all she had to do was show up, and her mother would instinctively know her? So foolish as to think that, in the unlikely event such a miracle occurred, a woman who’d kept her baby’s birth a secret for over twenty-eight years would willingly reveal it now?

      “You’re rushing into this, Diana,” Carol had warned. “You need to take a step back and consider the pitfalls, the most obvious being that you’re the world’s worst liar. What makes you think you can pull off such a monumental deception?”

      She should have listened to her friend. Perhaps then, she wouldn’t have made a spectacle of herself with a man smart enough to recognize something fishy when it was staring him in the face.

      And so accustomed to having his own way that he wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.

      What had he threatened, before she fled to the sanctuary of her room? Be down here by the time the bouillabaisse is ready, or I’m coming up to get you, or words to that effect?

      That he meant it was enough to have her changed into fresh clothes and on her way downstairs again in record time. If there was to be a confrontation, better it take place in public, than here in a room that was barely large enough for one. He was too pushy, too sure of himself—and, she admitted reluctantly, altogether too attractive for her to deal with him at close quarters.

      She needed to keep her wits about her because, just when she’d been ready to concede defeat and admit Carol had been right all along, the one lead she’d hoped to find had fallen almost literally into her lap. Henri Molyneux, her host, might very well be the key to the mystery of who her birth mother was, and whether or not he knew it, Anton de Valois was going to help Diana unlock it.

      Falling under his charming spell would undermine her resolve and might very well turn out to be a fatal mistake, because he struck her as a man of many layers; a classic example of the old saying that still waters run deep.

      She must resist him at all costs.