“Since I have perfected being a rebel, let me tell you that Paris is three and a half hours away. We can tell your mother we’re going on a tour of Haute-Marne, leave early, see your father for lunch, and be back by night. No one would know.”
She turned to eye him. Their faces were close. “That’s a ridiculous idea.”
“I agree. No one goes to Paris for lunch.”
“I for sure can’t do an overnight. My mother is already freaked out you and I are going to sleep together, and I’ll get pregnant and wreck my life.”
His jaw dropped ever so slightly. He seemed shocked to hear that. Then he recovered, and smiled. “You are not at risk from me,” he said.
“Or you from me.”
“Thank God,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I’ve been seeing you look like you want to have your way with me.”
“Hardly,” she said. Even though she blushed because a tiny bit of it was true. She leaned forward to reach for more baguette and hoped he didn’t notice.
“Let’s go,” said Aubin, “even if you text your father and he doesn’t respond. We’ll have a short time but a great time.”
“Deal,” she said, knowing it was the riskiest thing she’d ever done. After kissing Aubin, that is.
Guillaume took Marlow to Neufchâteau to buy plaster, primer, and white paint to cover the mustard yellow and pea green walls. She never would have gotten all of that back by moped.
He put the supplies in the trunk of his Porsche, listening with great attention to her stories of improving Maison Perdue.
“It’s been great to be outside, working with my hands, instead of in front of a computer.”
“But you haven’t seen much of the region. This is sad.”
“I have a few weeks to do that yet.”
“Not too far from here is Vittel,” he said, holding the passenger door open for her.
“Like the water?”
“Oui.There is a spa. I could take you, if you like. The restaurant is very good, too.”
“What? No, no, that’s too much.”
He gazed at her. “It’s really not.” Then he came around the driver’s side and got in.
Truth was, she knew it wasn’t too much for him. But she needed a bit of clarity.
“I might be out on a limb here,” she said, turning to face him. “But I feel like … you might like me.”
He eyed her briefly, then focused on turning on the ignition. “I do.”
“I don’t get it. You must have women chasing you. You’re lovely, successful in business, you own amaison de champagne, for God’s sake. They’ve got to be tripping over themselves.”
He pursed his lips and shrugged a little—that French gesture for “perhaps”—as he pulled onto the road. “The material things don’t matter. I already have those—which makes it easy not to care about them. I don’t believe in fate, really, I believe in the practical world—and I do have women I see, on occasion, when we can fit it in. It’s easy because we are busy, we know what we like, we don’t have children. But I have been thinking that Iwouldlike someone to be with more regularly than that. And then, there you were. In the square.”
He tapped his signet ring on the gear shift. The muscles in his forearm moved.
“You barely know me.”
“I know enough to be interested. You are, how you say, refreshing. You are real. And my instincts are good.”
“I’m flattered,” she said. Never in a million years had she thought someone like him would be interested in her.
“Ah,” he said, voice velvety and low, “there is a but.”
