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‘Is there a lot to do around here?’

The grin curved his lips and her eyes darkened, intensified as she watched him. It was dangerous ground. He needed to back away.

He couldn’t.

‘I think you should take a tour of our little town and its environs.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘SO THIS IS the Canal du Midi?’

‘This is the Canal du Midi in style,’ Louis corrected, pouring her another wine as their sleek boat cruised leisurely along.

This day was driving him slowly mad.

Or, more to the point, Alex was.

Despite all his words of caution to himself, his constant reminders that their engagement was one of convenience and not choice, he found himself sucked into the charade that the press were lapping up everywhere they went. And showing Alex around his town, the place in which he had grown up, and seeing her obvious pleasure at some of the sights that had so captivated him as a child wasn’t making the task any easier. Her freely given smiles, the way she charmed everyone he introduced to her, her uninhibited laughter.

He’d watched her. And he’d wanted her.

The small canal boat ride had been her idea. He’d loved it as a kid but his tastes had run to more refined, elegant super-yachts in the last few decades. Sitting here with Alex, he couldn’t help but wonder why.

They’d moored to take a stroll to a canal-side patisserie for an impromptu lunch of baguette and some local produce. Right now she was taking long gulps from a bottle of ice-cold water, the long line of her neck making him think of anything other than the history lesson about seventeenth-century canals that he was meant to be giving her.

Worse, Alex was apparently oblivious as she screwed the top back on her water and set it down to look around them.

‘Why are there so many felled trees around this area?’

‘They’re diseased, they needed to be felled,’ he said ruefully.

She looked aghast and it felt better than it should. Seeing her care about some of things that he cared about, as though they were in perfect sync.

But they weren’t. It was all pretence. So why was that so hard to remember?

‘All of them? Why?’

‘They were plane trees, planted back in the early nineteenth century to strengthen the banks and to help prevent evaporation, since they grow rapidly and they furnish quick shade.’

‘So they’ve been here around two hundred years? Why on earth would you cut them down now?’

‘No choice.’ He hunched his shoulders. ‘Over the last decade or so it’s become clear that many of them were diseased, possibly from a fungus brought to France in contaminated World War II ammunition boxes used by US troops. Plus boat users often lash ropes around the trees to moor their boats and as they moved up and down the canal it no doubt helped the disease to spread.’

‘So they’re taking out this whole section and replanting.’ Alex pulled a face. ‘So many trees.’

‘More than you think, since it isn’t just this section. So far over twenty thousand trees have been felled along the two-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre canal length but there’s a real chance that all forty-two thousand of them will ultimately need to go.’

Her cry was typically heart-on-sleeve Alex. And he loved her for her passion.

‘That’s awful. All of them?’

‘If something is diseased and corrupting, then doesn’t it make sense to eradicate it completely? Before you can start again?’

He hadn’t intended it, yet it seemed to spill off his tongue. She peered at him tentatively.

‘Are we still talking about the trees here?’

‘What else?’ he stalled, trying to gain himself time to think.

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