Invitation to Provence (4 page)

“Cute,” Clare said, reapplying her lipstick without the benefit of a mirror.

“So where do you live anyway?” Franny asked.

“Out of a suitcase right now, honey.” Clare pointed to the collection of expensive luggage piled into the limo. She hadn’t allowed the driver to put it in the trunk because she needed to know exactly where it was at all times. After all, it was practically all she’d got now. “I guess I’ll just check into Shutters Hotel for the night. I’ll think about what to do tomorrow.”

Franny suddenly realized that because Clare had left Marcus, she was temporarily homeless. She had been so nice and understanding and it didn’t seem fair to send her off alone into the night. After all, they were sisters in this experience, facing their futures together.

“Why not come in and have some chamomile tea,” she suggested.

“Why not? ‘The night is young and we are all alone,’ ” Clare misquoted, sliding gracefully from the limo, all long legs and high heels. “Though I’d prefer coffee,” she added. She stood for a minute, eyeing the empty front porch, then she said a touch wistfully, “It’s funny, but I’ve always longed for a little house with a front porch and a rocker.”

“And I always longed for a little house with a husband,” Franny said, and their eyes met and they collapsed into giggles as Franny struggled to get her key into the lock. At last she got the door open and they stepped cautiously over the creaking loose plank into the house.

Clare made herself instantly at home, exclaiming over the multicolored rag rugs, the fifties coffee table, the antique French armoire. She inspected the framed photos, sniffed the ginger-flower candles, put on a CD and turned up the volume, ignoring the general state of disarray.

Franny put coffee on to brew, decaf of course. She fished a bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies from the pantry and put them, still in the bag, along with a couple of hastily rinsed blue pottery mugs onto a flowered plastic tray.

“Coffee’s coming,” she said, setting the tray on the buttoned red-velvet ottoman next to Clare’s bare feet. She was sprawled across the sofa looking as though she belonged, stiletto mules off, eyes closed, toes wiggling in time to Rod Stewart singing “You Go to My Head.”

“Like the bubbles in a glass of champagne,” Clare sang along with him in a low sexy voice, smiling to herself and making Franny smile, too. Clare was different from the women she knew. Not only was she enviably gorgeous and chic, she was also down-to-earth, a small-town straight shooter at heart.

Clare sat up and took notice when Franny poured the
coffee. “Just what a girl needs.” She smiled. “A good cup of coffee and Rod Stewart to curl up with.” She glanced at the small pile of mail Franny had brought in with her, noticing one envelope with French stamps. “So who’s writing to you from France?” She held up a hand, grinning. “If it’s from another married lover I don’t want to know about it.”

Puzzled, Franny inspected the large, square cream-colored envelope. She didn’t know anyone in France. She ripped it open and read the address out loud. “ ‘Château des Roses Sauvages, Marten-de-Provence.’ My great-grandfather Marten came from France,” she said, surprised. “But I never knew exactly where he was from. There was a big family fight or something and he left and came to live here. I don’t think he ever talked to his family again.”

“So read it. Maybe you’ll find out why,” Clare said, but Franny was already reading it.

Dear Franny,

I am writing to invite you to a reunion of the Marten family here at my home.

Of course you do not know me, but each of you to whom I am extending this invitation is related to me. You are cousins, perhaps many times removed it is true, but generations do not take away the fact that you are Family.

I am asking you to arrive on September 20th for a stay of three weeks. You will be contacted by a travel agent and the necessary travel arrangements will be made for you.

I will enjoy getting to know you and showing you your ancestral château, and I think you might enjoy getting to know one another, coming as you do from the farflung
corners of the world. Yet you have the same bloodline, and I’ve always believed that blood counts.

I am an old woman now and it is my wish to reunite what is left of this family. Please do not let me down.

It was signed “Rafaella Marten des Sauvages.” There was nothing shaky about her signature.

Franny read it again. And then again.

“Oh”
she said finally
“Oh no!
I don’t believe it. This is ridiculous. Of course I can’t go.”

Clare wiggled her toes and yawned lazily. “Go where?”

“To a château in Provence for a ‘family reunion’ with a family I never knew existed. Just listen to this, Clare,” she said, and read her the invitation. “I’ve never even heard of this Rafaella Marten who says she’s my aunt. All I know about the Martens is that my grandfather hated them and my father said it was with good reason. Dad never went to Provence to meet his family, so why should I?”

“Why?”
Clare sat up straight. “Well, for
the adventure,
of course. Christ, just give me the opportunity, I’d be there in a flash.”

“You would?” Franny looked doubtfully back at the invitation. Rafaella Marten was an old woman. All she wanted was to bring her family together again at her château, their “ancestral home,” as she called it.

Franny slumped onto the sofa as her empty life flashed before her eyes.
I have no one,
she thought, facing facts.
Only the animals, and even
they
don’t belong to me. Now Marcus is gone and I’m a failure in the love department, too. I never had a familyit was always just me and dad. There’s never been time to think about being lonely.
Am
I lonely? Was that why I
allowed Marcus to take a piece of me, to take my life and twist it out of shape to satisfy his own need to control?

She sank into the sofa next to Clare, still clutching the invitation in her hand, staring blankly in front of her.
Who am I anyway, besides the nice young vet at your local clinic, the one everybody can rely on to take on the extra work and to come in on Sundays… . Don’t worry, Franny will deal with it, they say. And don’t I always?

To be part of a family was what she had always wanted, though she’d never expected it to come long-distance like this. All of a sudden she had an aunt, she even had cousins. They were all to meet in some romantic old château in Provence, land of sunshine and olive trees and wine.
A family home,
she thought longingly,
a château where the Martens have lived for centuries.

She looked at the beautiful Clare sitting expectantly on the edge of her sofa. She felt as though she’d known her forever, far longer than the seven-timing son-of-a-bitch Marcus.

“Okay, then maybe I’ll go,” she said cautiously, making Clare laugh.

“What have you got to lose?” she asked. “After all, your job will still be here when you get back.”

“And Marcus won’t,” Franny said flatly.

“Damn right he won’t, baby, and you can thank your lucky stars for that!” Clare looked at her, head tilted to one side, considering. “Just do it, Franny Marten,” she said. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

And Franny beamed at her, relieved not to have to make the decision. Clare had already made it for her.

“Okay, so I’ll go,” she said, and for some reason immediately felt very lonely.

“Hey,” she said impulsively to Clare, “why not just stay here tonight, the sofa’s quite comfortable and I’ll put on more coffee.” She looked hopefully at Clare, who wrinkled her nose.

“Decaf?” she said.

Franny laughed. “Tomorrow I’ll go to Starbucks first thing,” she promised.

“You’ve got a deal,” Clare said, “on one condition. No more talk about Marcus.”

Franny laughed again. “Deal,” she said, and went to put on more coffee and find a blanket and a pillow.

J
AKE BRONSON STRODE
into the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan and stood for a moment, taking in the scene. Quite a few female heads turned to look back at him, speculating on who he might be. Tall and hard-bodied, dressed in jeans, an old cashmere jacket, and a blue shirt, he wore life’s experience on his handsome face. He also wore cowboy boots—his one concession to his boyhood dream of owning a ranch—and his thick, dark hair was rather too long because he considered getting it cut a waste of time, and he had a habit of raking his hair back with a large hand that knew how to punch out a man as well as how to gentle a nervous horse.

His light eyes narrowed in a smile, acknowledging an acquaintance across the room as he took a seat at the bar and ordered a Bud. He wasn’t a man for fancy drinks in martini glasses. “Make that glass well iced, will you?” he added. It was a quirk of his—he liked his beer at freezer temperature.

He took the invitation from his pocket and read it again. He was forty-four years old, and the last time he’d seen Rafaella Marten he’d been sixteen and more than a little in love with her. For him, she’d been the perfect older woman—beautiful, charming, intelligent, sensual, filled with gaiety and love of life. And she was also his father’s lover.

Up until then, Jake had been buried away at his father’s hacienda in Argentina, where he’d run wild with no one to stop him. His father, Lucas Bronson, was an internationally famous polo player and playboy whose profession took him all over the world. Jake’s mother, an American beauty from a good New York family, had died when he was young, after which his father had brought him back to live at the hacienda. An old woman he called Abuelita, or “little grandmother” (though in fact she was no relation and spoke only Spanish), had brought him up, and his only companions were the cowboys, the
gauchos
with whom he rode the horses culled from the pampas. By herding cattle, the little horses learned to be fleet of foot and to turn on a dime, which made them the best polo ponies of all. In fact, Jake could ride almost before he could walk, and his ambition had always been to own his own small ranch. But life had led him on a different path.

When he was sixteen, his father had suddenly summoned him to Provence and his whole life changed. He’d arrived at the château an ignorant youth with a single small suitcase
containing nothing more than a couple of frayed shirts and his other boots. But Rafaella had understood the lonely boy on the brink of manhood. She’d taught him the civilized arts of polite society, made him part of her family, was like a mother to him. For a year his life had seemed complete, though his father had never really wanted him there. Finally, of course, he’d been forced to confront his overpowering father and had left to face life alone. He’d kept in touch with Rafaella though, and over the years, he wrote her about his graduation from Annapolis, about being selected for Naval Intelligence, about his youthful marriage to “a lovely girl, too beautiful to even describe, and probably too young to settle down with a naval officer who’s always somewhere else other than with her.” And as a wedding gift, Rafaella had sent the massive old silver candelabra Jake had always admired and which had been in her family for almost two centuries.

A couple of years later, when disaster overtook the young couple, she wrote to Jake offering him sanctuary at the château, but he turned her down. He wasn’t fit for human company, he said, and he would get over it by himself. Just the way you’ve always done, Rafaella observed.

Life drifted on, there was an annual card at Christmas, a gentle reminder that the other was still there, but he never returned to the château that, for a short, happy period of his life, he’d called home.

When disaster struck, Jake left the navy and the intelligence service and eventually, after a year propping up bars and attempting to drown his sorrows, he opened his own risk management business, which is what the old-fashioned private
investigation biz came to be called after it became updated with computers and databases and young people with Ph.D.s in economics or science, rather than ex-cops with guns. Somewhat to his surprise, his business had become successful, and he now had seven hundred employees worldwide. He was good at what he did. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but it filled the gap in his life and for that he was grateful.

Now he inhabited a spare, gray loft space in SoHo that said almost nothing about him. In truth, he was rarely there. He was always roaming the world on business, just the way his father had. Every now and again, when the lure of the wild became too strong, he would escape to the mountains, where he’d built himself a rough log cabin, just two rooms and a front porch with a rail for propping his booted feet while watching the sun set through the lofty branches in a dying red glow.

The only sound would be of birds calling each other on their nightly way home to their nests and the soughing of the wind in the tall trees, and the only thing of great value he possessed was the eighteenth-century silver candelabra given by Rafaella as a wedding gift that stood incongruously on his plain wood-plank kitchen table. For Jake, heaven on earth was right there in his few solitary acres, ten miles from the nearest small town and the nearest bar and light-years away from the tensions of his business world.

He owned a ’97 mud-spattered four-wheel drive that was once green but now showed more rust, and a stray dog he’d picked up on the road and named Criminal for his wicked
ways; and also a soot-gray gelding named Dirty Harry that nobody else had wanted. The dog and the horse both lived at the stables outside the small town when he was off on his travels. Of course they preferred being with him, but they accepted the rough with the smooth and greeted him as joyfully as Santa at Christmas when he came home again.

Jake thought the emotion he felt for Criminal, his shaggiest of shaggy somewhat-of-a-retriever, was probably the closest to true love he could feel now. Which didn’t say a lot for his friendships with women, which were of the on-and-off variety, mostly because he couldn’t spare sufficient time to put into a relationship. A dog would always wait for you. A woman would not.