Luc fell silent too, and when my eyes came open he was watching me. Not crowding me, but standing close enough that I was very much aware of him.
He asked me, “If you could…if you were capable of having a relationship, would you want one with me?”
“Yes.”
“You like me.”
“Yes.”
“Good. So your plan was that we should spend time with each other, and then you would leave me?”
“Yes.”
Luc gave a nod, and remarkably I saw the curve of his smile.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s a terrible plan.” He came closer. “No, really, you need to revise it. I’ll help you.” He kissed me—just lightly, but there in the dark of the cavern-like passage his touch left me buried in feelings.
I still tried to argue, “I can’t change.”
He rested his forehead on mine. “You don’t have to. Simple math. You only have to change the value of one variable to affect the outcome of the whole equation.”
My efforts to focus on logic were hampered by feeling his hands at the small of my back. “And you’re trying to tell me that you’re that one variable?”
“Well, of all the men you’ve known before, were any of them me?”
His logic made me smile a little. “No.”
“Then I’m the variable.” Lowering his mouth to mine, he set about convincing me, and did a thorough job of it. I wanted to believe.
He said, “You never need to change for me.” His breath was warm against my cheek. My hair. My neck. “You understand? You never need to change.”
It seemed he somehow needed a reply, but since I didn’t have the focus or the energy to form a proper sentence, I just answered with, “OK.”
I felt him smile against my skin and he pressed closer to my body in the darkness and I really didn’t notice much beyond that till his mobile rang to tell us it was time to pick up Noah.
We had lunch at a café somewhere—I didn’t notice much about that, either—and we took our time in getting back, so when they dropped me at the front of the Maison des Marronniers the lights in some of the château’s front windows had already been switched on against the fall of twilight.
Luc got out and came around to get the door for me, and bent to kiss me one more time with warmth, and touched my arm the way that people sometimes did when they were being reassuring. Then he turned his head and gave a nod to someone on the terrace and in English said, “Good evening.”
Which alone should have prepared me.
But it still surprised me when I turned and saw my cousin standing on the top step.
She returned my hug as tightly as I gave it, and explained when I asked why she hadn’t told me she was coming, “Well, I wanted to surprise you. I appear to have succeeded.”
She was watching Luc’s car trundle off around the circle of the drive.
“Now what, exactly, Sara darling,” Jacqui asked, “was that?”
* * *
I saved myself from what I knew would probably have been a very long and disapproving lecture by distracting Jacqui with the pages I’d transcribed of Mary’s diary.
After supper, Jacqui brought the pages from my workroom to the salon, poured a glass of wine, and curled into the sofa near the fireplace. “This,” she said to me, “is fabulous.”
I felt a swell of pride. “You think he’ll like it, then?”
“Who?”
“Alistair. Who else?”
She finished with another page and laid it facedown on the growing pile beside her. “Yes, of course he’ll like it. This is really so much better than the mundane sort of stuff he was expecting. I mean, honestly. This reads just like a—”
“—thriller. Yes, you’ve said.”
My words seemed to intrigue Claudine, who came in from the dining room to join us, switching on another table lamp as she passed by to take her own seat at the sofa’s other end. She’d brought a glass of wine with her as well, and set it down now as she touched the stack of pages overturned between herself and Jacqui. “May I?”
“Have you not read it yet? Then yes, please do,” my cousin said. “It’s fascinating.”
While the two of them were reading, I let my thoughts drift backward happily to Luc and what he’d said to me this afternoon, and how he’d held me. How he’d kissed me.
“Ooo,” said Jacqui. “I’ve got chills.”
I roused myself. “From which part?”
“Mr. Stevens.”
“Has he just begun to travel with them?”
“Yes.”
“Then wait,” I told her. “It gets better.”
For another several minutes I heard nothing but the clinking noises from the kitchen as Denise washed dishes. I’d have helped her, but the times when I had offered she had firmly told me no, then made me coffee so I’d sit and keep her company, and since I hadn’t seen my cousin in nearly a fortnight I decided I had better keep her company instead.
Claudine said, “Your diarist—Mary? She seems quite intrigued by this Mr. MacPherson.”
My cousin said, “I’m quite intrigued by this Mr. MacPherson.” She grinned. “The allure of the Scotsman, and all that.”
Claudine pointed out Mr. Thomson was also a Scot. “But she doesn’t describe him in such detailed language. I can’t picture Thomson at all in my mind, but I know ‘Mr. M—’ has fine hands and blue eyes and blond hair with some red in it.”