‘That’s not exactly civilised,’ said Gabrielle. ‘It’s a little unrestrained.’
‘Do it anyway,’ said Simone with a snicker. ‘Get all that wild abandon out of your system now so that when you happen across Luc there’ll be none left for him.’
‘You’re making a surprising amount of sense,’ muttered Gabrielle.
‘I always do,’ said Simone as Gabrielle reached the stone wall, slipped off her shoes, and stepped through the archway and into the formal front gardens. There’d been a box-hedge maze in here years ago. A maze that had towered high over her head and had provided endless hours of play for all the children of Caverness; her and Simone as well as Rafael and Luc. To Gabrielle’s delight, the maze was still there, although these days it didn’t tower over her but stood chest high so that a person could see the summer gazebo at its centre.
‘You kept the maze,’ she said into the phone.
‘I kept the maze,’ said Simone. ‘You want to do this tour by phone or are you actually planning to converse face to face?’
‘Picky picky,’ murmured Gabrielle. ‘I brought a few things for the dinner table. I’ll put them on the terrace on the way round. See you soon.’
Sandals in one hand, goody bag in the other, Gabrielle skirted the maze and headed through the formal statuette garden towards the grand entrance to the chateau. Gabrielle’s footsteps slowed when she saw that the terrace was already in use, but then she squared her shoulders and continued on her path. The grey stone steps were cool and hard beneath her feet after the softness and warmth of the summer grass, but she would not linger long, and she did not put her shoes on. ‘Good afternoon, Maman, Hans,’ she said to the seated pair. Gabrielle glanced warily at the third person to complete the tableau. Luc wasn’t sitting and didn’t look as if he had been sitting with the others. He looked as if he’d been simply passing by and had merely stopped for a word. ‘Luc.’
Hans greeted her cheerfully. Josien’s greeting was far more subdued but it was a greeting and Gabrielle felt pathetically grateful for it. Luc said nothing.
‘I’m just on my way to meet up with Simone,’ said Gabrielle, feeling intrusive and out of place. ‘She’s determined to give me a tour of the gardens.’
Josien’s gaze flickered over Gabrielle, taking in her attire and her hair and the sandals hanging loosely from her fingertips, and Gabrielle smothered the impulse to check herself over for dirt and stains. Yes, Gabrielle wanted to reconnect with her mother, but not if it meant becoming Josien’s whipping girl again. This was who she was, the woman she’d grown up to be, and if Josien wasn’t satisfied with her appearance or her behaviour then so be it. Gabrielle took a deep breath, set her shopping bag on the wire table beside her mother, and stood a little straighter. Luc still hadn’t said a word. Okay, so their last meeting had been a little…tense, at times, and maybe he didn’t want her here any more than Josien did, but would it have killed him to say hello? How was she supposed to act civilised if he wouldn’t even afford her that small courtesy?
‘Simone took the gardens in hand a few years back,’ said Luc into an increasingly awkward silence. ‘She’s been focussing on the old orchard area of late. Most of the trees have gone to make way for roses. But not all.’
Gabrielle tucked an escapee strand of hair behind her ear with nervous fingers. Finally, a conversation. She could do conversation. Sort of. ‘It sounds lovely.’ She delved into her grocery bag and withdrew a posy of violets, their delicate scent filling the air as she set them carefully on the table. ‘For you, Maman. I had planned to leave them with Hans, but seeing as you’re here…’ Gabrielle turned to go before Josien could reject them to her face.
‘Thank you.’ Josien’s reply came to her on the breeze, thready and formal but a reply nonetheless. Gabrielle looked back at her mother and Josien held her gaze but only for a moment before she looked away, her hands folded tightly in her lap. Luc looked stern. Hans was eyeing Josien curiously. With a heavy, deliberate tread Hans rose from his chair, crossed to the table and picked up the posy. ‘My mother used to like violets too,’ he said in his big gruff voice as he thrust them into Josien’s hand. ‘Pretty little things.’
Gabrielle didn’t stick around to see the result. With the fear of rejection rising up inside her like a tidal wave, she fled.
Luc caught up with Gabrielle towards the bottom of the stairs leading down into the formal knot garden. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he said.
‘No.’ She glanced at him warily.
‘You left your bag on the table,’ he said next. ‘I didn’t know if you meant to or not. I left it there.’
She hadn’t meant to. But there was no going back for it now. ‘I’ll get it later.’ When Josien had gone. What had Simone suggested by way of civilised discussion again? Gabrielle couldn’t remember. Her brain was too busy trying to deny the raw sexual appeal of the man striding alongside her.
Yesterday Luc had been wearing working attire—a suit befitting the head of the House of Duvalier. Today his clothes ran to casual. A blue shirt with a boldly embossed stripe running through it—it was shaped to accentuate the breadth of his shoulders and had tiny tortoiseshell buttons all the way down the front. The size of those buttons was more in keeping with the size of a woman’s fingers than a man’s and made Gabrielle’s fingers dance with wanting to free them from their buttonholes. She ordered those wayward fingers still and dragged her gaze away from his chest and those buttons and concentrated on the rest of him.
Big mistake.
Luc’s trousers and work-roughened boots were more suited to the fields than to the boardroom, but they didn’t look out of place on him, not one little bit. All they did was give his inherent sexuality a dangerously earthy edge.
Luc could do mindless, earthy abandon just as easily as Gabrielle could. She knew it for a fact.
‘How do you like living in Australia?’ he asked her as they started walking through the formal French garden with its neatly clipped hedges. It was a question any acquaintance might ask her, new or old. A civilised question. A question that took her thoughts in a different direction altogether from the place they’d been headed.
Thank goodness.
‘I like it fine,’ she said and summoned a smile. ‘Australia’s a beautiful country. There’s opportunity there. Less of a class system.’ Her smile turned rueful. ‘I wasn’t the housekeeper’s daughter once I reached Australia, I was the sophisticated French girl with the Australian father and a brother who’d just bought a beat-up old winery and renamed it Angels Landing. I could be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. I could be me. It was very liberating.’
‘I can imagine,’ murmured Luc with a swift white smile. ‘Did you run wild?’
‘Oddly enough, no.’ Gabrielle swung her arm as they walked, setting her sandals to swinging like a lazy pendulum. ‘Once there was nothing to rebel against I stopped rebelling.’
‘I bet Rafe was relieved.’
‘Maybe,’ said Gabrielle. ‘And maybe he always knew that as soon as I’d broken free of this place I would find my way.’
‘You sound as if you hated it here,’ said Luc.
‘I didn’t.’ Gabrielle shook her head and looked around her at the chateau and the grounds surrounding it. ‘I don’t. How can you hate something so beautiful? No, it was my place in the grand scheme of things here that I hated. It wasn’t that I necessarily wanted to own Caverness, you understand.’ She didn’t want Luc to think that. ‘I just didn’t want Caverness to own me.’
‘I understand.’ Luc’s eyes had darkened. ‘How do you feel about coming back here?’
‘Conflicted,’ said Gabrielle with brutal honesty. ‘Part of me feels like I’ve come home. The rest of me’s desperate to get away. I know there’s no place for me here, Luc. Not in Josien’s mind and probably not in yours or Simone’s either, although you’re both being very kind.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Luc. ‘There’s room for you here, Gabrielle. Always.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Gabrielle, if ever you need my help with anything, ask,’ Luc said carefully. ‘You’ll get it.’
‘Why?’
‘You were driven from your home because of me.’
‘The way I remember it,’ said Gabrielle with a swift sideways glance for his stern profile, ‘there were two of us in that grotto that night. Besides, I may have lost one home but I soon found another and found myself in the process. I know I fought against leaving here initially, Luc.’ Gabrielle winced at the memory of the scene she’d caused—the pleading and the tears, the utter desolation that had enveloped her and that everyone, Luc included, had been witness to. ‘But it helped me to grow up.’ Grow up strong.
‘And your estrangement from your mother?’
‘Would probably have happened anyway,’ said Gabrielle with a shrug. ‘Lose the guilt, Luc. It doesn’t suit you.’
Luc’s eyes flashed fire. ‘Careful, Gabrielle.’
‘Much better,’ she murmured. ‘All that buttoned-down fire. That’s very you.’
All that buttoned-down fire came roaring to the surface as Luc caught her by the arm and drew her into the secluded shadow of the chateau walls. He stood there, glaring at her in silence as he let the awareness between them build. And build. ‘Why do you do that?’ he said at last. ‘You push and you push and then you push me some more. I warn you, but you never seem to listen.’
‘I’m listening now,’ she said through suddenly dry lips, and took a step backwards only to come up against solid stone wall. ‘I’m listening very intently.’
‘Good, because I’m choosing my words carefully. Do you remember how it was when I lost control with you, Gabrielle? Do you? Is that what you want from me?’
‘No.’
Yes, said a little voice that would not be silenced.
‘No,’ she said more firmly. ‘I want us to be civil with one another. That’s all.’
