Invitation to Provence (26 page)

“You must remember this
…” The piano player was still singing. “As Time Goes By.”

After that, she’d hung around the bar every day for a week, expecting to see him, to hear from him—a call asking her to lunch in Antibes, to dinner in Cannes, to a rendezvous on the moon… . She would have taken anything. But she got nothing.

Devastated, she went back home to the château, telling herself she was ridiculous to feel let down by a man she’d met only once and with whom she’d exchanged only a few words. But she knew those words hadn’t expressed what was going on between their linked eyes. What she didn’t know was that this was Lucas’s usual
modus operandi
with women. Of course she’d heard he was a famous polo player, but now she discovered he was also famous for his love affairs, usually with rich society women.

It didn’t matter. She was sick to have him, so she wrote inviting him to the château for a weekend house party along with a half dozen other guests. Then she moped around nervously, waiting for his reply. Two days later he telephoned.

“How are you, beautiful Rafaella in the red skirt?” he said, completely ignoring the fact that if she hadn’t sent him the invitation he might never have called her. She reminded herself that she was forty-one years old, certainly old enough to know what she was doing—and certainly old enough to know better. Lucas was dangerous, but that didn’t stop her. He said he would be happy to spend the weekend with her … “alone” his voice implied, and so of course she immediately canceled all the other guests. “Wear the red skirt for me,” he said as he rang off.

A friend had warned her that Lucas Bronson loved both horses and women—in that order. He loved horses for their beauty, their strength, their intelligence, and the responsive
way they felt between his legs when he rode them. And he loved women for their beauty, their ability to amuse, and the responsive way they felt under his body when he made love to them. The same “friend” also told her it was Lucas’s proud boast that he’d made love to many women and that he’d loved them all, some for a few hours, some a few days, some for a few months, which of course left her wondering exactly which category he’d put her in.

The Friday afternoon he was expected at the château, she was standing at the window watching as he drove up. The top was down on his pearl gray Lagonda and the crisp scent of the cypresses hung in the air. He leaped out of the car without even opening the door, and Haigh, standing on the front steps to greet him, gave him a sideways look that implied a gentleman did not behave this way. And Lucas gave him a smile back that said of course he knew that and he didn’t give a damn.

Unobserved, she watched from the library door as he looked around. The hall was bathed in late-afternoon sunshine and smelled delicious, the way it always did, of beeswax and lavender and the mimosa that was bunched in the crystal vases on the console tables and reflected a hundred times in the tall mirrors.

She was wearing her red skirt, as he had asked her to, with a chiffon peasant top, and she’d bound her hair with the strings of rubies she’d had all her life. She thought she must have looked like some Provençal gypsy from Arles, standing there, watching him. Then he saw her. He came over and took her hand. He kissed the palm and closed her fingers tightly around the kiss. “You can’t know how happy I am to see you,” he said softly, and surprised, she knew he really
meant it. She could feel Haigh’s skeptical eyes on her, but she ignored him and asked Lucas to join her on the terrace for cocktails.

Recalling the scene now, Rafaella sighed, lost in the feel of the past, remembering as though she were still there, standing with Lucas under the arbor of Chinese wisteria. The long stems of fragrant lavender-colored blooms drooped over her head. The breeze sent their petals flying, one by one, and the small velvety disks fell like kisses onto her bare arms. And there Lucas was, lean and dark and handsome, looking so coolly at her that all of a sudden she was afraid to be alone with him. She needed other people around so she wouldn’t do something crazy, like leap into bed with him right away. Instead, she decided they would go to the café in the village for dinner.

She was aware of other diners glancing at them, half hidden in their lamp-lit corner. The locals smiled and nodded at her, and the tourists and travelers who had come for the music festival up on the hill stared curiously at them, she barefoot as always in her red gypsy skirt and Lucas, a handsome famous face they felt sure they knew from the newspapers. But Lucas was unaware of them, relaxed, easy, telling her about the exotic life of an international polo player and how he handpicked his ponies from his ranch in Argentina where his son lived.

His son! Rafaella was jolted out of the dream world he’d just conjured up. She sat up very straight because if she hadn’t she might simply have crumbled from shock. She hadn’t known he was married.

Lucas looked at her and laughed. He knew she was wondering about his wife. He told her she was American, that
they’d split up after the child was born and that at first Jake had lived with her in Connecticut. He was two years old when she died and then he’d gone to live with Lucas—or at least to live at the hacienda. “You know how it is with a polo player’s life,” Lucas said to her. “I have to be wherever the game is, wherever it happens to be in the world. After all, that’s what the sponsors pay for.”

Rafaella’s heart beat again. There was no wife, though the thought of the boy alone without his father bothered her. “Your sponsors?” she said because she knew nothing of the polo world.

“The multimillionaires who pay for this expensive game. Transporting forty horses around the world is not cheap, you know. All I can afford is my little hacienda—”

“Where your son lives,” she said.

“Where Jake lives, yes.”

She said she thought the boy must be very lonely, but Lucas just shrugged and said all Jake wanted to do anyway was ride horses. Then he changed the subject back to her, teasing her, making her laugh.

She did not usually go to the café alone with a man, she always ran with a crowd. Behind the
zinc,
or bar, she was aware that old Monsieur Jarré had his eye on them. She knew he would discuss it with his wife later, after the café closed, and no doubt Madame Jarré would discuss it with her neighbors in the grocery the next morning, and the neighbors would discuss it up at the winery, and by noon it would be all around the village that Raffaela Marten was in love. But she didn’t care.

.   .   .

N
OW, AN OLD WOMAN
lying alone in her bed, remembering how happy she had been that night, Rafaella sighed. Her memories seemed to produce sighs of nostalgia for the sweetness of the way life used to be, and the next memory was the sweetest of all.

They’d lingered late over their glasses of wine, and it was almost midnight when they got back to the château, where they went for a walk to the lake. The sky was a milky, moon-hidden blue, and a white mist curled from the moist earth. The grass, crushed under her bare feet, smelled like warm hay and there was magic in the air.

Lucas exclaimed with delight when he saw the red lacquer bridge, and she told him the story of how her greatgrandfather had been in love with a geisha. She explained that of course the relationship had not worked; they could never have married, with her culture … and his. In those days you couldn’t take a woman away from that life. Perhaps it was the same even now, she didn’t know. When the affair was over, her despondent great-grandfather had built the beautiful bridge to remember his beautiful geisha by.

Lucas put his arm around her shoulders. She stiffened, afraid even to touch his hand as they walked across that lovely little red bridge together.

“Rafaella,” he said, turning her to face him. “Rafaella,” he said again. His lips were cool and unexpectedly gentle on hers, savoring her, tasting her as he might a piece of fruit. Then he buried his face in her neck and Rafaella flung back her head so that her long dark hair swung behind her. He twined the strands around his fingers and ran his lips up along the angle of her jaw, planted drifts of tender kisses over her closed eyelids, ran his hand over the high curve of her
cheekbone. Then his lips fastened purposefully on hers, drinking in her mouth, her tongue, her sweet breath of rosé wine and fruit.

Rafaella’s arms were around his neck, pulling him close so that not even the breeze could have found access between them. Her head swam. She felt that sexy slipperiness between her legs again, felt her nipples harden, felt a flush of heat that she had never known in her life before. She was tumbling into an abyss.

She pulled away from him. “Come with me,” she whispered in a voice so low and throaty she hardly recognized it as her own. Taking his hand, she led him onto the grassy island to the little white gazebo, half hidden by roses and jasmine. Inside were a couple of couches, a table and chairs, an old painted cupboard with drinks and glasses.

They sank onto a sofa and Lucas slid the gypsy chiffon blouse down her shoulders to her waist. He held her away from him for a moment, a look of wonderment on his face. “I never expected you to be so beautiful, Rafaella,” he whispered, and then his mouth found hers and she wanted him so badly that nothing else mattered.

“Oh god,” Rafaella cried out as he entered her, but what she meant was
Oh Lucas,
because this was different from the beach in Greece with the pebbles sticking in her back and Henri breathing heavily all over her. This, she thought wildly as true sexual rapture lifted her over the edge into a chaos of many pleasures,
was what loving a man was all about.

Lucas had come for a weekend. That weekend turned into a couple of weeks, then a month. In the end, except for his polo-playing activities, it was more than two years before Lucas Bronson left the château—and Rafaella—forever.

T
HINKING BACK,
Rafaella saw that she had lived through those two years in a haze of sensuality. Her skin was more alive to the touch, her hair more glossy and silken, her breasts more taut, and her belly full of yearning. She remembered the times Lucas’s eyes would catch hers across the dinner table, holding them with that deep, dark, hot look that turned her molten with silken juices. They would leave their guests still at the table, drinking wine, talking, and laughing, and slip away to her lamp-lit bedroom and its great bed, where they slid into each other’s arms, murmuring with pleasure, unable to get enough of each other.

When Lucas was away (which, now that she thought about it, had been most of the time), she’d kept that special glow of a woman in love, and she’d kept her home filled with her friends and the friends of her boys. Though her sons were grown—Felix was twenty-three and at business school and Alain was nineteen and studying at the Sorbonne—when they were home she’d devoted her time to them as she always had. She did her best to make sure they were happy, though with Felix, she never knew what really made him happy, if anything. But Alain kept her company and kept her amused. He was always laughing, always teasing, always had a girl or two around. She told Alain he was like his aunt Marguerite,
a flirt and naughty to boot. He grinned and said, “So what’s wrong with that?” “Not much,” Rafaella had said, laughing too. She hadn’t realized then that there was another side to Alain, and she would find out about it later, the hard way.

Lucas had been living at the château for about a year when he came home from playing polo in Argentina, bringing his son with him.

“This is Jake,” he said. “He’s just turned sixteen. I thought it was time he learned there’s more to life than cowboys and cattle and a thousand acres of pampas.”

Looking at Jake, Rafaella had seen a handsome, shy young man, tall like his father and with Lucas’s light gray eyes. He wore jeans and scuffed old cowboy boots and a shirt that was rapidly becoming too small for his wide shoulders. He looked warily back at her and she’d smiled, wondering what he saw with those intense eyes, what he thought of her—after all, she was his father’s mistress.

“You’re very beautiful” were Jake’s first words to her.

“Et alors, vouz êtes un homme du monde,”
Rafaella had exclaimed, laughing. “You are a man of the world. You already know how to pay compliments.” And Jake blushed and bit his lip, not knowing what else to say.

“Come, Jake.” She’d put her arm through his. “Let me show you the château. Now you are going to live here with us you must choose your room, whichever one you like. Even if there are already guests in it, we’ll throw them out, move them somewhere else. I’ll simply tell them, sorry, but this is Jake’s room now.” And Jake lowered his head, overwhelmed with shyness.

As they walked through the big old house he’d glanced around him, stopping to admire the old silver candelabra on
the polished rosewood dining table. He touched it, loving it with his eyes and his hands. “I’ve never been anywhere like this before,” he said. “This house has a history. It’s wonderful. It feels happy here. Alive.”

Rafaella nodded. “That’s the way I’ve always felt about the château. Later I’ll tell you its story. Then I’ll show you the winery and explain how we make wine and I’ll show you the stables, and we’ll get you a horse because I think perhaps the ones we have, except for your father’s own horse, might not be up to your standards. And then you will meet my sons.”

She had turned to look at him and he’d gazed back into her eyes. He had that same intense, unsettling look his father had, and she knew that one day he too would have the ability to be a heartbreaker.

“You make me very welcome,” he said awkwardly.

She reached up—he was a tall young man—and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You will always be welcome, Jake,” she’d said.

Of course Rafaella knew that Jake had fallen in love with her. How could she not, when his eyes followed her everywhere and he somehow always seemed to be where she was, lurking within sight, throwing the ball for the dogs, grooming his horse, hanging about on the terrace? Rafaella thought he was as adorable as a puppy.