by Donna Ball
“She has beautiful French eyes,” Ash replied evenly, “and a lovely French smile. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all.”
Alyssa, who had been happily jumping off a small step a few feet away, chose that moment to run up to them, and wrap her arms around Sara’s legs in a brief hug. The tension in Sara’s face vanished into tenderness as she bent down and scooped Alyssa up before she could scamper away again. She swung the little girl through the air until she giggled and squealed with delight, and then carried her over to a rusty iron bench where she set Alyssa on her lap and began to retie her shoes.
In a moment, Ash came and sat beside them.
“You’re going to ruin that suit,” Sara said, without looking up.
Alyssa wriggled out of Sara’s lap and climbed onto his, and surprised him by kissing his cheek. “Why are you so sad, petit-papa ?” she asked in French.
He slipped an arm around her and replied gently, in the same language, “I’m sad because I have to tell Aunt Sara something she doesn’t want to hear.”
“And then she will be sad also?”
Ash looked at Sara, who almost seemed to understand what they were saying. “Yes. I’m afraid so.”
Alyssa patted his cheek solemnly. “Don’t make Tante Sara sad.”
Ash smiled at her and set her on the ground. “Go, play, chérie. But stay close.”
When she was out of earshot, Sara said, “What?”
His gaze followed Alyssa across the lawn. “I have to request a posthumous DNA test.” He set his jaw, took a breath, and looked at her. “If I don’t, the court will.”
Sara lost a little color around her lips, and her eyes tightened. “You don’t mean . . . exhumation?”
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
She brought her hand to her throat, as though to massage away an ache, and then let it flutter to her lap. She, too, focused her eyes across the lawn where Alyssa played. Her voice was small, and distant. “I was going to have him cremated. But he told me once he was raised Catholic. A very badly lapsed Catholic, he said. Still . . . I thought a Christian burial was what he would want.”
Ash reached for her hand, and covered it with his own. She did not pull away. He thought perhaps because she was in shock.
He said quietly, “Leave this alone, Sara. Let everything go back to the way it was. Alyssa’s trust will take care of her. I can handle Michele. There’s no reason to do this. Just let it go.”
“I can’t.” Her voice was thick, and when she pulled her hand from his it was to wipe the corner of her eye.
“Why not?” he insisted, growing frustrated.
“Because,” she said. She swallowed hard, and drew in a breath, and seemed to compose herself. “Because Daniel accompanied his parents’ bodies back to France in October of 2002 and he stayed until November 2003. When was Alyssa born?”
Ash said, without looking at her, “June 2004.”
“Daniel was in France when Alyssa was conceived, Ash, and you knew that all along.”
Ash said stiffly, “Daniel was in Europe in 2003. I have no way of knowing where he was when Alyssa was conceived.”
Sara nodded slowly, but without satisfaction or accusation, as though she had expected nothing more of him. “Every princess deserves a castle,” she said softly.
She lifted her chin, set her jaw. “Do it.”
“Good Christ, Sara.” His tone was fierce, but then he looked at her, and he saw the firm and quiet resolution in her eyes, and he didn’t know what to say. He could not, in recent history, remember when that had ever happened to him before. So he simply repeated, softly, “Christ.”
“Tante Sara!” called Alyssa, waving to them. “Voici! Voici les petits oiseaux!”
She had uncovered a collection of cracked concrete statues, a mother duck and ducklings. Sara called, “That’s great, Alyssa!” And to Ash, “What do I say?”
“Très belle.”
“Très belle!” she repeated. “Très belle, Alyssa!”
They watched her until she grew tired of chattering to the ducks and moved on to another game. Ash’s frustration eased, almost without his having realized it, and so did Sara’s sorrow.
Sara said, after a time, “You can’t send her back to that boarding school.”
“No, I suppose not.” He frowned a little, watching Alyssa as she returned to her game of jumping off the steps. “I don’t know what else can be done on this short notice. I could take her back to London with me, look for something there, I suppose. Mrs. Harrison could probably find a nurse for the short term. But it will take a while to get her documents in order.”
Sara said, “Leave her with me.”
He looked at her, startled, and she seemed as surprised as he was, as though she hadn’t quite intended to say that. But even as he met her eyes, she seemed to come to a decision. “Yes,” she said. “That’s the best thing, I think.”
“Sara, you can’t mean to stay here.”
Stubbornness darkened her eyes. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“You don’t even speak the language!”
She said stiffly, “I’ll learn.”
“You don’t have a car, a European driver’s license. What will you do with yourself up here all alone? For heaven’s sake, be sensible!”
“I won’t be alone,” she replied doggedly. “I’ll have Alyssa.”
“You can’t take care of this place by yourself, and the cost of keeping help for a house this size is beyond reasonable. This is absurd, Sara. I can’t be a party to it.”
She lifted her chin fractionally, her eyes narrowing. “What are your choices?”
He opened his mouth to reply, and said absolutely nothing. Scowling, he jerked his gaze away. “You are the most exasperating woman.”
She called, “Alyssa, be careful!”
“Soyez prudent.”
“Soyez prudent!” she repeated, and Alyssa, shrugging, lost interest in jumping two steps at a time and went to find another game.
Ash said, “I can’t just leave her with you. I’m her legal guardian.”
“And I’m her stepmother.”
Once again, what he wanted to reply died in his throat. He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to forestall the headache that was starting there. “I suppose I could try to get a nanny up from the village.”
“I don’t need a nanny.” Her tone was impatient. “I know how to take care of a little girl.”
“Sara, there are procedures,” he began, as patiently as he could manage, and then, meeting the obstinacy in her face, he finished under his breath, “Oh, bugger it.”
Sara’s expression softened, just a little. “It’s only temporary,” she said. “I know that. I’ll be here for a while. Let her stay until you find another school.”
He tried to think of alternatives, or even just one sound argument, and came up empty. He said, “The schools are unlikely to accept new applicants until fall term.”
She didn’t blink. “I’ll be here.”
She was staying the summer. That made him illogically pleased.
And worried.
Ash stood up, and walked over to Alyssa. Kneeling beside her, he said in French, “Chérie, would you like to stay here, with Tante Sara? Or do you want to go back to l’école and see your friends?”
But almost before he finished speaking she was shaking her head, curls whipping furiously. “Pas d’école!” she said adamantly. No school. She continued in the same language, “I will stay here, at my house. Tante Sara, she likes me. She thinks I am beautiful!”
Ash smiled at her, and tweaked her chin. “I think you are beautiful, too, chérie.”
He started to rise, but she caught his sleeve. “Will you stay here, too, petit-papa?”
He shot a quick, almost imperceptible glance toward Sara, who was watching them. “No,” he told Alyssa gently. “But I’ll come visit often. And you will be very good for your Tante Sara, and do whatever she says, yes?”
Alyssa nodde
d solemnly. “I am a good girl.”
He ruffled her curls affectionately, and returned to Sara. She rose from the bench to meet him, her posture careful and her eyes wary, as though greeting an adversary.
He said, “I think we can work something out, on a temporary basis.” He reached into his inside coat pocket and removed a business card, and a pen, scrawling something on the back. “This,” he said, thrusting the card to her, “is my mobile number. Don’t lose it. What’s yours?”
She said, “I’m going to have telephones installed in the château.”
“Yes, well, good luck with that,” he muttered. “France Telecom may have you hooked up by the next century. In the meantime . . .” He waited with pen poised on the back of another business card until she drew out her cell phone and brought up the number.
“Keep your mobile turned on and on your person at all times,” he instructed her. “If you have any difficulties, anything at all, call me, and if I am out of range, call my office. Mrs. Harrison knows how to reach me, and if she can’t reach me, it doesn’t matter because she knows everything I know at any rate. In the storage pantry off the kitchen, taped inside the cupboard door that holds the linens, is a list of all the support personnel—the housekeeper, the caterers, the grounds-men, the repairmen, and also emergency numbers for fire and police. Now, from your mobile, you will have to dial a six-digit exchange . . .”
Her eyes widened purposefully as she listened to him. “Ash,” she said, “I’m an American, not an imbecile. I can figure it out.”
He compressed his lips briefly, glancing beyond her, searching for words, not even knowing what he wanted to say. “This—unpleasant business,” he said at last, “may take some time. If you need anything . . .”
She lifted her chin a little. “I’m prepared to stay. Mr. Winkle is helping me set up bank accounts here, and get a visa when my passport expires. I think I can manage.”
“I want you to get help from the village.”
“I don’t need any help. I can—”
“For God’s sake, Sara, you can’t even cook! I’m sending someone up.”
She glared at him and he reminded her sharply, “Alyssa is my ward. I won’t have her starving to death. And you don’t even know how to work a European washing machine.”
“How hard can it be?”
“I’m not going to argue with you.”
“Three days a week. And she has to speak English.”
“Every morning, six days a week. Learn French.”
A smile, very tiny and almost indistinguishable, twitched at her lips. “I’ll manage, Ash,” she said.
He blew out a breath. “I well imagine you will. Sara . . .” How much easier this would have been if he could have touched her, drawn her into his embrace, stroked her hair. As it was he could only stand there awkwardly, offering an uncertain gift with the most earnest intent, knowing it was unlikely to be received. “I don’t want you to think of Daniel as a monster,” he said quietly. “He came from a different culture, with values that were different from those you and I might hold. If you stay here, you will be part of that culture. I just want you to know that.”
Her lashes shadowed her cheek, and he saw her throat convulse. She looked suddenly frail, and vulnerable, and he hated that he had done that to her. Or that Daniel had done that do her.
“And by the way,” he added, his tone hardening, “your offer is rejected.”
Her head jerked up. She stared at him. “What?”
“By the terms of my contract with Daniel,” he informed her flatly, “which is transferable to his heirs and assigns, my shares in the château may be purchased with accrued interest at current market value in cash. No allowances are made for payments over time—that was merely a suggestion I made to you on a day I was feeling generous. I am feeling slightly less generous today, so unless you have approximately 3.7 million in ready U.S. dollars, we have no deal. I will of course make certain you are reimbursed for the amount you’ve paid in taxes. I assume Winkle has your bank account information.”
Her expression hardened. “Mr. Winkle said you might pull something like this.”
“Good for him. I hope he also pointed out that you’ll thank me for this someday.”
“You’re not going to get away with this.”
“I already have,” he assured her. “You’re not going to kick my ass, and I’m not going to kiss yours. This is a compromise. Take it or leave it.”
“You son of a bitch.”
He smiled. “Bonjour, chérie. And bonne aventure. I’ll be in touch.”
Before he left, he scooped Alyssa up into the air, and kissed her soundly on both cheeks. “Take care of your aunt Sara,” he whispered to her before he set her on her feet again. “She needs you very much.”
TWELVE
Ash let himself into Michele’s Paris apartment, tossed his blazer over the back of her sofa, poured a Scotch, and made himself comfortable in one of her Louis Vuitton leather chairs. The room was decorator perfect, with art pieces collected from each of her previous three husbands. Ash’s contribution was a framed copy of a letter supposedly written to Louis XIV from the mistress for whom he built Rondelais, which he had purchased from Daniel’s father for two hundred pounds, back when he was first falling under the dark spell of Michele’s enchantment. It wasn’t worth that, since it had already been proven to be a nineteenth-century copy of a seventeenth-century document that may or may not have ever existed, but its language was explicit, if not downright erotic, and Ash had thought it would amuse her. After the divorce, he had offered to buy it back from her for a thousand pounds, simply because it annoyed him that she should have it. She of course had laughed at him.
He wandered around the apartment for a time, smoked one of her cigarettes—which reminded him immediately why he had abandoned the habit years ago—and eventually returned to the chair by the window. He sipped the whiskey slowly and listened to the muffled sounds from the busy streets below, watching the sun set over one of the most magnificent cities in the world. Michele kept excellent Scotch, and he was almost sorry when he heard her key turn in the door before he was even half finished.
Her heels were three inches high and her skirt about three inches too short, but like most Frenchwomen, even at her age, she could pull it off. If she was startled to see him sitting there in the twilight, she did not show it.
“And so, mon chéri,” she murmured, dropping her packages on the table by the door, “at last you have come to your senses.” She came over to him in a drift of musky perfume, rouged lips upturned in a practiced vixen’s smile, her fingertips threading through the back of his hair.
“Indeed I have.” He let his eyes examine what she offered: the swell of an ivory breast, the curve of a silk-clad hip. “I’ve come to understand, my love, that subtlety is lost on you. So I will be explicit.” He took one last sip of the Scotch and stood. She was so close that their thighs brushed and his face was mere inches from hers. He took her chin between the fingers of his hand and he said, softly, “You will withdraw your petition for custody before nine o’clock in the morning or at five after I will have you charged with abduction and child endangerment, is that quite clear?”
Her brows drew together in an annoyed moue and she tried to turn her face away, but he held it firm. “And you will never—please understand me, Michele, I said never—molest either Sara or Alyssa again under any pretense whatsoever. You have seen what I do to people who get in my way. You don’t want to be one of them.”
She struggled to pull her face away from his grip. “You’re hurting me.”
“Good.”
But he released her abruptly and she took a half-stumbling step back, rubbing the red marks his fingers had left on her chin. Her eyes were smoldering green embers in the dim room, but her voice was deliberately casual. “I am no fool, my love. The silly petition has been already withdrawn. But the damage, she is already done, n’est-ce pas?”
He looked at her wi
thout compassion. “It’s over, Michele. This time you’ve finally gone too far.”
He started to move past her, but she stopped him with a hand flat on his chest. Those eyes, those hard, dark gems, moved back and forth over his face, as if collecting his secrets, tasting his thoughts. “When will you abandon this foolishness?” Her breath, hot and sweetly perfumed, fanned across his mouth, her fingers closing slowly around the fabric of his shirt. “When will you stop chasing something you are not? You think your American would not have you if she knew you inside, and you are right. But I know you, Ashton.” Her breasts tantalized his chest and her nails closed on his skin, stinging, bringing fire. “I know you,” she whispered, her mouth against his now. “I know you because inside you are me.”
He felt her heat, and it was a fever in his own skin. The taste of her breath, the sharp, hot caress of her nails, caused his heart to pound and his throat to grow dry. He reached for her hands, his fingers closing tight around hers. He stepped away.
“No,” he told her. “I’m not.”
He released her hands with a motion so abrupt that she stumbled a little on her high heels, and he pushed past her and out of the door without another word.
Yet into the hallway, into the street, into the taxi, and all the way to the airport, her words clung to him like the scent of her perfume. He couldn’t get them out of his head. And what troubled him most was that deep inside there was a part of him that was afraid she was right.
Ash left sixteen messages on Sara’s voice mail over a period of half as many days. The first was when his check for five hundred euros, along with a very nice note from Mrs. Harrison instructing Sara to use the money to purchase whatever Alyssa needed for the summer, was returned without comment. He then requested that Mrs. Harrison go out and secure an assortment of “dresses and playclothes and underthings and such as that” for a five-year-old girl, along with a selection of toys and picture books, to be boxed up and sent to Rondelais posthaste. When that box, too, was returned unopened, he left a perfectly polite message asking Sara to call him. The next message was not so polite. Nor was the next one.
