Seduction on the Cards by Kris Pearson Read Free Book Online Page A

interview.  
    Alex and Gaston were obviously the best of friends. Gaston was besotted with his wife Felice and his little daughters Camille and Georgine. He and Felice were enthralled with every kind of food and now ran a business which combined Gaston’s culinary expertise with Felice’s viticultural background. 
    Kerri discovered Alexandre’s agile mind and fierce ambition were behind a company called Beaufort Technologies that produced specialized medical items.
    “Do you know,” Gaston enquired, “that he started this when he was only sixteen?”
    Alexandre waved the praise away.
    “Not the company, but the first of the clever machines,” Gaston continued. “We had a friend at school who needed regular medication. It was imperative he remembered to take it, because if he did not the consequences were terrible for him.”
    “Poor Henri,” Alex recalled.
    “So Alex took apart a cell-phone. This was a very early model, remember—and somehow made it send Henri messages at the right times. And Henri had to signal back that he had taken the meds. And when he showed his doctor—boom!—great interest.”
    “It was just something I could do,” Alexandre said, shrugging his beautiful shoulders.
    “Clever,” Kerri agreed, annoyed to find she admired the man with the wandering hands.
    So he wasn’t just a financial whiz? He was a practical inventor who really had worked for his money, and now used it to do good? 
    “Is all your equipment medical?”
    “Not all of it, but allied, I suppose. You might say ‘physical status monitoring’. Some of the devices keep people safe when they’re doing hazardous jobs.”
    “Fighting dangerous fires. Cleaning up chemicals,” Gaston inserted. “With Beaufort you can know a person’s heart is beating safely and their breathing is good.”
    “I’ll strap one on you, my friend, and see how your body performs while you’re cooking with truffles,” Alex teased.
    “Deep breathing. Strong heartbeat,” Gaston chuckled. He turned to Kerri. “And the truffles are superb here in New Zealand. Good enough to offend my countrymen.”
    Kerri nodded. “I think it’s quite a young industry,” she said. “My paper did a story about it earlier this year. They’ve been planting oaks and hazelnuts and infecting the roots with the Perigord black truffle spores somehow. Production is slowly creeping up, and the prices are astronomical. I heard three thousand dollars a kilo.”
    “Excellent to have them fresh at a different time of the year,” Gaston confirmed, offering more wine around the table and not looking in the least surprised by the price she’d mentioned. “So—you’re here for how long, Alex?” 
    “Until Monday morning. Then to Noumea again.”
    “You should take Sylvie out on Sunday. Lunch on the harbor? Some sunshine?”
    “She’s available?”
    “For you—of course.”
    “Perhaps. We’ll see.”
    Kerri felt a slight territorial bristle at the thought of Alex and another woman, and then derided herself for having such a reaction. She certainly didn’t want him herself. Why would she? He might be wealthy and good-looking, but he was still a high-handed, arrogant, serious workaholic. Yes, that summed him up nicely. So why was she perversely pleased he wasn’t showing too much enthusiasm for this Sylvie who was apparently all-too-available if he snapped his fingers? 
    She took a deep breath and had the satisfaction of knowing his eyes were attracted, yet again, to her far-too-exposed breasts. She leaned forward to push the pepper mill out into the centre of the table. That’d give the rat another good look at what he couldn’t have!
    “And so we come to my special dessert,” Gaston said with a twinkle. “I made chocolate marquise, but this evening another inspiration arrived when I met Kerri. Talk to each other while I make some little preparations.” 
    He stacked the plates from their previous course and carried them to the industrial-sized