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He had just made certain that whatever in the paper that he so savagely objected to was now beyond the means of her finding out, she realised, watching him in wide-eyed wariness as he straddled his chair again, waving away the waiter who approached to ask for his order.
He rested his darkly stubbled chin on his folded arms. ‘Now, what were we talking about? Oh, yes, our mutual charade last night. Did you rifle through my things, by the way, before you left?’
She stiffened. ‘Why would I? I’m not a thief!’
He straightened, shedding his air of mocking insolence. ‘What else was I supposed to think when I woke up to find you’d done a moonlight flit? And here I thought that Kiwis were a flightless bird.’
‘It was morning—there wasn’t any moon.’ She wasn’t going to tell him that it was inexperience and embarrassment that had caused her to panic. ‘I—I had things to do.’
‘And people to call?’ he suggested. He tilted his head, a shaft of sunlight through the branches of the plane tree turning his eyes to polished bronze.
‘One or two,’ she admitted, puzzled by his sudden tension. She had rung her parents for a quick check-in before the next leg of her trip, carefully avoiding any mention of illness, and had texted her sister without much hope of an informative reply.
‘Including your employer, perhaps?’ Lucien murmured, to her added bewilderment. ‘In London…?’
Veronica’s dark brown eyebrows snapped together. ‘I don’t have one as such; I’m self-employed. And
I told you, I’m from New Zealand—’
‘You’re freelance?’ he cut her off, with a disparaging look down his hawkish nose that raised her hackles.
‘I prefer to call myself an independent businesswoman,’ she told him.
His face hardened. ‘Well, whatever you call yourself, my advice is to stop throwing yourself into my path because I don’t like being harassed, and French privacy laws happen to be quite strict in that respect. You might find yourself being tossed out of the country on your plush white bottom. I think your opening line in this conversation was rather ironic considering the way you’ve been carrying on!’
Her mouth fell open. ‘You think I’m following you?’ she said, her deep voice rich with scorn. She started to laugh, then stopped when she realised from his tight-lipped expression that he was actually serious. ‘That’s crazy! How on earth could I have followed you, when I was the one who got here first?’ she pointed out triumphantly.
‘Only because I had one or two things to pick up in Avignon before I left,’ he countered. ‘Did you think I didn’t notice you lurking around while I was renting my car? What did you do? Go back and bribe the girl on the desk to tell you where I said I was going so you could take the same road?’
Veronica gasped. ‘I wasn’t lurking,’ she said. ‘I was picking up my own rental. I didn’t even realise you’d seen me,’ she added stiffly, not realising it could be interpreted as a guilty admission.
‘Oh, come on. There aren’t that many towering redheads around that you didn’t stand out like a beacon—’
‘Then I obviously wasn’t lurking, was I?’ she snapped. ‘And my hair isn’t red.’ Being a strapping, six-foot tall female had made the teasing bad enough at high school, without accepting the added stigma of being a ‘ginger’.
His eyes followed the movement. ‘It certainly burns bright under the Provence sun. Why do you think all those famous painters came down here to produce their masterpieces? Because of the special quality of the light, and the way it affects the human perception of colour.’
‘Is that why you’ve come here? You’re a painter?’ she said. A volatile artistic temperament might go a long way to explaining, if not excusing, his behaviour. Maybe that tabloid he had been so furious about had given a rotten review of his work.
He stood up. ‘Nice try, Veronica,’ he said cynically. ‘Those big, bemused eyes are a convincing touch, but it’s a little late to feign innocence.’
He bent, angling his torso across the narrow table and bracing his hands flat on the crumb-strewn cloth on either side of her unconsciously bunched fists, and thrusting his face close enough for her to feel the heat of his menacing purr.
‘This is your first and last warning, Veronica—stay well away from me and everything that’s mine or I’ll make you rue the day you ever came to France.’ He jerked slightly, as if to leave, but then settled back, one hand moving up to cup her jaw, firmly tilting her pale, freckled face to his. ‘And by the way, just off the record, between the two of us—’ he rocked forward on his toes and kissed her square on her stunned mouth, taking his own, sweet time over it before he pulled back to conclude ‘—thanks for the memories. You were great last night, a real handful in more ways than one—the best lay I’ve had in a long, long time…’
And he walked down to the kerb, jumped into his car and was gone in a rumbling roar of exhaust fumes before she could recover sufficiently to throw her empty coffee-cup at his arrogant head. Her hand went to her bare throat and she realised that in the turmoil of their exchange she had never thought to ask about her pendant. Perhaps she should have accused him of being the thief!
Hours later as Veronica did another careful circuit of the narrow roads on the outskirts of St Romain-de-Vaucluse she was still festering over his insolence and inventing the clever comebacks that had escaped her at the time.
Thanks for the memories? The best lay. They ranked alongside the ‘plush bottom’ remark for sheer, face-slapping gall.
If she ever saw him again, she decided, she would slap his face.
She lifted her foot off the accelerator, slowing down as she approached the intersection of two roads leading out of the village in different directions where, according to Karen’s roughly sketched map, Mas de Bonnard was supposedly located.
She recognised the main route by which she had first entered the village and, not wanting to go further out in the wrong direction, she did a U-turn, and came back to park on a rough grass verge beside a large, open acreage of vines stretching away in parallel rows from the roadside with nary a sign of a fence or hedge marking out the edges of the property, very unlike the farms and vineyards of home. She sighed and rested her elbow on the open driver’s window while she sipped at her lukewarm bottle of water, looking towards the church steeple and clock-tower she could see rising above the tops of the venerable plane trees that lined the narrow main street, and had made it such a challenge for her to negotiate. It seemed to still be siesta-time, for there were few people moving about. Heat lay like a blanket over the countryside, the cream and brown houses of plaster and stone in the historic village looking as if they had grown up out of the rocky land itself. It was an idyllic scene, incredibly peaceful—if you discounted the ceaseless chorus of the cicadas, loudly quacking away in the trees like a flock of miniature ducks.
As if to contradict her, the bell-tower chimed the half-hour and two teenagers on motor scooters buzzed past the corner shouting catcalls to each other.
