Ménage Material [La Belle sans la Bete Ménages] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (2 page)

Two months into her contract, he’d asked her out. Four months after their first date, he’d proposed. And Devvy, existing on cloud nine ever since he’d deigned to ask her out for a coffee, had nearly wept at the idea of actually being married to the man.

She should have realized there’d be a catch.

No man with looks like Sebastien could settle for someone like her, not unless he wanted something. In this instance, it had to be her brain, and the many cosmetics formulas she’d developed over the years.

He probably thought he could marry the non-entity and have a decent woman in his bed outside of his wife’s knowledge. It was a very Gallic attitude. Almost par for the course.

Just not Devvy’s course.

While he’d probably prefer it if she were unenlightened as to his extra-marital activities, she knew something was wrong. No amount of regrets, of wishing she hadn’t been so damned foolhardy as to leap into this life with Sebastien—a life that had taken her away from everything and everyone she’d ever known, as crappy as it had been—would change a damned thing.

Oh, she could settle. Endure the shame of having a husband who needed a lover to see to his needs, because his ugly duckling of a wife couldn’t satisfy him.

Or, she could fight…. Retaliate.

With her eyes focused on the solution in her glass beaker, for a moment, she allowed herself to think of fighting. And winning. Of having the courage to face her husband, of making him admit to her she wasn’t enough to please him.

Then, her shoulders slumped.

Devvy was about as confrontational as a Koala bear. In fact, they had a bit more gumption than she did. She was a geek. She loved her science, her work. Before Sebastien, she’d lived for it. Now, it was only one aspect of her days. Sebastien had filled every other part. Such a pathetic admission shamed her but she couldn’t help it.

He was a force to be reckoned with and under his protection, Devvy knew she’d flourished. In their two years of marriage, her experiments had consisted of success after success. In his environs, she bloomed. Until now, he had made her happy. How could any woman not be affected by that? Happiness was more addictive than sugar. Except now, it was starting to taste like saccharine, bitter.

The glass-stirring rod tinkled and sang as it scraped against the beaker in her hand. She made the stirring motion absentmindedly. Her eyes switched focus from the anti-acne solution to the herb garden upon which her lab faced. Fronds of lavender, pungent leaves of basil, and rampant sticks of mint as well as dozens of other plants perfumed the air, but behind the window, her nose had to rely upon sensory memory to remember the rich scents of her garden. There was a calm to be found from Mother Nature’s treasures, but no amount of sniffing could make Devvy feel calm at the moment.

Two years, she’d been married to Sebastien. Two years in which he’d actively encouraged her to work from home, where she was happiest. Reproducing a small but highly advanced laboratory on their land, she’d taken the gift as a compliment. The amount of money he’d spent on ensuring her happiness…it could only have been a present for a woman who was loved.

But now, she wondered if it was to keep her out of the way. Tucked up at home, he could do what he wanted at the office. Maybe he was having an affair with his assistant, Adéle. With Devvy at home all day, he could fuck his personal assistant to his heart’s content on company time, and without his wife being any the wiser. He could take solace in the curvy beauty that was his aide, try to imprint Adéle’s looks on his retinas so he could pretend it was her when he deigned to take Devvy to bed.

The thought had her choking back tears and she slammed her hand down, shattering the beaker containing the plant extracts she was preparing. The astringents sloshed over the counter as the glass exploded into hundreds of tiny shards, some shrapnel digging itself deep into her palm. Even the pain of the cuts, combined with the sting as the witch-hazel and tea tree solution went to work on cleaning the wounds, didn’t bring a halt to her train of thoughts.

“I’m not the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” she told herself, pushing the discomfort of the cuts to the back of her mind. “I’m no Marilyn Monroe but I don’t need to be hidden away like some kind of goddamn savage.” Her lower lip trembled at the very idea. “I don’t deserve this. I
don’t.

“He doesn’t touch me, hardly talks to me. He’s so goddamned uptight all the time…!” She sucked in a breath. “It could be work,” she muttered to herself and to the labs’ walls. They were used to her one-to-four conversation. “You don’t get where he is without a lot of stress and tension invading his life. Just because we haven’t slept together in…” She groaned as she did the math. “
Four weeks
? That isn’t possible. The last time was after we went to Marie de Haviland’s god-awful soirée…” With her hand still weeping blood and giving her floor a crimson, polka-dot makeover, she strode over to her wall calendar and looked back over the few occasions they’d had to go out. Sebastien hated high-society events more than she did. And that was saying something.

“Oh God, it’s worse than I thought,” she mumbled. “
Five
! Five weeks!”

Eyes flooding with tears, she fluttered her lashes in an attempt to hold them back. She managed. Barely. Sucking in some harsh breaths, she forced herself to be calm, and then, when her breathing was back on track, moved to the sink where she methodically cleansed the small cuts on her hand.

The only reason she’d started thinking about Sebastien being with another woman was because this morning, she’d been—as much as she hated the goddamn word, it described her to a T—horny. Being horny was not a state she was accustomed to. Sebastien liked sex.

A lot.

A lot, lot.

There were days they’d make love in the morning, before he had to leave for work. Sometimes, he’d take her in the shower after breakfast. He came home for lunch at least three times a week—something else he’d ceased to do over the last two months—but when he did come home, he’d usually take her then. Before dinner,
after
dinner, after he finished his work in the study…any spare time at all was used by them sharing mutual orgasms on whatever piece of furniture happened to be close to hand!

How could he go from being, well,
rampant
to
nada
? Zilch?

After a minimum of once a day—and just once was unusual—for the last two years, she’d never had to wait so long before, and her body was going nuts. Shit, she was more accustomed to being sore down there than needy! Going five weeks without made her feel like a nun.

Okay, teeny-weeny exaggeration there, but how could her sex-loving husband suddenly be okay to go without? Unless someone else was giving him what she wasn’t…

And that, ladies and gentleman, was why she was upset. Another woman seemed to be the most likely, if heart-wrenching, story.

She hissed as a shard of glass stubbornly clung to torn flesh. It ripped her thoughts away from her husband and back to the pain in her hand.

The monotonous act freed her mind from the emotional tidal wave battering her, letting her focus on the physical discomfort. By the time she’d finished digging out the shards of glass from her hand and then bandaging it, her alarm clock beeped, making her jump. She almost slammed her hand on the counter, back onto the shards she’d just pulled out of her palm, but she remembered just in the nick of time.

Usually in her lab, she was totally focused on her work. The only way she would remember the strict dining hours their housekeeper insisted on, was to have an alarm clock warn her twenty minutes beforehand. The sound of the alarm was always accompanied by her jumping in shock. One time, she’d actually fallen off her stool. Her butt had had bruises for a week.

She left her work where it was on the counter. That morning, in an attempt to clear her mind and to figure out what was wrong with her husband, she’d started a new recipe for the anti-acne soap she’d been working on for the last four months. The last clinical trial of the previous version had worked in ninety-four percent of the people tested, but it had caused some dry skin in too large a number of the women using the product.

The conundrum had allowed her to focus and it was here, at her worktop, where she’d realized her husband had to be having an affair. Somebody else had to be giving him what he’d needed for so long, because he sure as shit wasn’t getting it from her!

And now, she had to go and face him. Sit opposite him as they dined on food that could have come from an award-winning restaurant. She’d have to stop herself from choking on each bite that passed her lips…as well as maintain the low level of chitchat she knew Sebastien was used to hearing from her.

Dazed, wooden, and heartsore, she trudged out of her lab, locked the door and crossed the lusciously green lawn toward the home she shared with her husband.

Italian Renaissance and rococo architecture made love as they adorned the two-hundred-year-old mansion. The twelve-bedroom behemoth, tucked away in the heart of the sixth arrondissement, was a history lover’s wet dream. In Paris, yet, in its own acreage of land in the space-poor city, Sebastien and Devvy lived in the metropolis yet out of it. It really was the best of both worlds.

As she crossed the lawns and ran up the three steps onto the terrace dotted with pruned teardrop-shaped bushes and lined with creamy stone balustrades as old as the house and survivors of the French Revolution, Devvy looked in each of the first floor’s ten sets of double-fronted windows, for which the house was named
Les Fenêtres
or The Windows.

She searched in vain for sight or sound of her husband, but saw no one glancing through the sparkling glass onto the garden, which was unusual for this time of day. In the evenings, after the stresses of the working day, he stood in his office, a glass of red wine in his hand, leaning against the wall as he looked out onto the gardens at twilight. It was his favorite pastime.

She wondered if the woman doing the nasty with her husband knew
that!
Although it wasn’t like Sebastien would need her to be aware of anything other than his sexual preferences. All a lover had to know was how to please her wealthy partner, not what made him happy after work.

Stomach churning at the thought, she entered the house through the portico, a small porch that sat bang in the middle of the property’s back façade, and which let her into the main hallway. The light and airy space smelled of fresh air and recently picked flowers. There was nothing more than a round, gleaming walnut table in the center of the vestibule, loaded with a heavy vase filled with late-blooming hyacinths. Doors lined the circular room, apart from the east wall, which had a large arterial staircase. It split, after twenty steps or so, and led to the two different wings of the house.

Bastien and Devvy slept in the west wing. The guests, the few they’d ever had, went in the east.

She scurried up the stairs, passing doorways leading to elegantly appointed suites and priceless paintings and artifacts that adorned the corridor of their private wing. Hurrying into the bedroom they shared—for the moment, at least—Devvy pulled up short when she came across Bastien seated on the bed.

Their suite was a masculine haven. She hadn’t liked to change anything, not wanting to spoil the look Bastien had obviously chosen for himself. He’d lived in the house for ten years before she’d moved in, and she’d altered very little in her time spent in the mansion. It was a masculine abode and she’d left it that way, only changing the rooms he gave her as an office and salon. But she spent little time there, preferring her lab or Bastien’s study, which had a large open fire in winter and the best air conditioning in summer. As well as the man himself.

Devvy didn’t care how many Manet’s or Pissarro’s they had lining the walls, her husband was the prettiest thing to look upon in the entire house. And she was a California girl. Being a geek didn’t make her blind. She’d seen some hunks on her native soil, but not a one compared to Bastien.

Creams, beiges and blacks were the soothing shades of the bedroom, but they obviously weren’t soothing Sebastien. His hand was at his nape and he was massaging his neck with a grimace twisting his handsome features.

“Would you like me to massage your shoulders?” Devvy’s voice was hesitant, her new uncertainty about her importance in his life throbbing through every word.

Sebastien’s taut smile was his first answer. He was usually very aware of her changes in mood, but in his pain, she could tell he hadn’t sensed anything wrong with her.

She wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.

“Please,
ma belle
,” he whispered, the grimace twisted again, gentling with his appreciation as she stepped toward him.

“How long have you had it?” Devvy asked, knowing from experience he had one of the migraines he suffered from time to time. They were debilitating. Sometimes, he couldn’t even leave the bedroom, and woe betide anyone who dared to open the curtains.

“Since last evening.”

As she climbed onto the bed and knelt behind him, she tutted under her breath. “You should have told me,” Devvy chided. “I could have rubbed your neck last night.”

When she’d first learned of his migraines, she’d taken an online course in massage to ease his suffering during times like these. For her, it was a win-win situation. She got to help him and touch him at the same time. And she loved touching him. His skin was supple and like silk underneath her fingertips. A massage was a mutually pleasurable experience and where he was concerned, Devvy was a glutton.