Keys to the Castle (32 page)

“Tante Sara, Tante Sara, tigers!” Alyssa tugged excitedly at her hand, and Sara quickly hid the faint shadow of puzzlement that had crept into her eyes as she turned her smile back to Alyssa.

“By all means,” declared Ash, swinging Alyssa up into his arms, “we mustn't keep the tigers waiting. Which way, Magellan?”

And so they were off, with Ash and Alyssa trying to outdo each other with their tiger growls, and with Sara laughing so hard that her heart barely speeded at all when she spotted the woman again as they were leaving the tiger exhibit.

Alyssa, skipping along between them, a hand held in each of theirs, suddenly stopped and gasped, her eyes big as they followed a red balloon floating free against the sky. “
Petit-papa
, look!”

He dropped to one knee beside her to better share her view. “It's a balloon,” he told her. “Shall we go and see if we can find another? Perhaps one just for you?”

Those beautiful big eyes widened even further in delight.
“Rouge?”

“Red,” corrected Sara. This time the woman did not try to avoid her eyes. She waited patiently in the shade of a sycamore a few dozen feet away, absently twirling her sunglasses between two fingers, her expression cool and unashamed.

“I think I know just the place to look,” Ash said, catching Alyssa's hand in his as he stood. “Shall we, my love?” His eyes, crinkled in the sun, looked happy and relaxed as he turned to Sara. “I saw a vendor just around the corner, there.”

“You go ahead,” Sara said, smiling quickly. “I need to find a ladies' room. Alyssa, do you need to go to the toilet?”

Alyssa shook her head, tugging at Ash's hand. “A red one!”

Ash laughed and let himself be pulled away, and Sara called after him, “I'll meet you there!”

She waited until the two of them had disappeared into the crowd before she turned and walked over to Michele. There was a wooden bench underneath the tree, and Michele had made herself comfortable there, her shapely jeaned legs crossed, a cigarette in her hand. She gestured for Sara to join her. Sara remained standing.

“Are you following us?” she demanded without preamble.

Michele looked amused as she pushed the sunglasses into her sleek red hair. “And so it is true. You have domesticated him. This I could not believe until I saw it for myself. Congratulations.” She drew on the cigarette and blew out the smoke in an elaborate sigh. “And what a very great pity.”

“What do you want?” Sara said.

Michele glanced up at her. She seemed completely unintimidated by the fact that Sara was standing over her. If anything, in fact, it was Sara who felt ill at ease in her cotton capris and sneakers, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her nose pink with the sun. But women like Michele had always been able to do that to her. She started to cross her arms over her chest, realized that looked defensive, and stopped herself. Michele smiled, unruffled.

“You are correct,” she said easily. “I have followed you since I heard Ashton tell the doorman where you were going. I always like to give my regards whenever I am in the city, but your happy little family was already leaving as I arrived. Perhaps I should have made my presence known.” She shrugged. “But one learns so many more interesting things when one watches unseen,
n'est-ce pas
?”

Sara closed her fingers, and opened them again. “What did you learn?”

Michele smoked in silence for a while, her eyes wandering in a leisurely, disinterested fashion over the families and couples that passed by. “You will be surprised perhaps to learn I came to see you. I wanted to tell you about Ashton's last visit to me in Paris.” She slid a glance upward toward Sara, and her smile was slow and sly. “Ah, I see our darling boy did not bother to mention this to you, eh? And it was only a few weeks ago. One wonders what other secrets he has kept.”

Sara knew she should turn on her heel and walk away. She did not.

Michele shrugged and drew again on the cigarette. “I was going to tell you of how he took me in his arms and made such love to me that I wept, how we lay naked and exhausted on the floor of my little apartment when the sun came up, how I took his hand and led him to the bath . . .”

Sara felt a chill go down her spine—not because of the words, but because of the desperation that must have prompted them. Until now she had thought of Michele as a shallow, bitter, and selfish woman whose only pleasure came from hurting others. But Sara realized she was just a sad woman, hurting inside herself.

Sara said simply, and as kindly as she could, “I don't believe you.”

Michele smiled, curling her tongue upward as she blew out smoke. “Then you are clever. Because it is untrue. Ashton is disgustingly loyal. It is all very boring, really. A woman, she likes a little adventure in her life now and again, don't you agree?”

Sara said nothing, and Michele took another draw on the cigarette.

“Ash did come to see me in Paris,” she said with a shrug. “The encounter, it was not so pleasant as I would have liked. He—how is this said?—used his threats against me, to protect you, and the child. My Ashton, he has been very angry with me in the past, but never has he been so forceful. And so I determined to discover for myself what manner of woman you are, to inspire such passion in him.”

Michele tossed away the cigarette and stood. This time when she tried to smile, the expression did not quite reach the corners of her lips. “He is a fool for the child,” she said. “This I knew.” She shrugged. “But when I watch him, and he does not know I'm there, and he smiles at you . . .” She glanced briefly away, and an expression crossed her face that Sara could not entirely read. It might have been a flash of pain. “Never has he looked at me in that manner. Never. And that is what I wanted to know. So you have won. Congratulations.”

And then she smiled, a stiff, brittle expression that did not come close to her eyes. “But,” she said, “still he has the secrets, no?”

Sara said softly, “You still love him.”

She laughed. “
Chérie
, don't be absurd! Of course I love him. I have loved him when I hated him. I have loved him through three other husbands. I even loved him when I was married to him.” She shrugged again, her lips forming a brief, elaborate pout. “Alas, he loves another. This I know now.
C'est la vie.
”

Sara felt compelled to say, “I'm sorry.”

The flash of surprise in Michele's eyes was covered quickly by another light laugh. “
Chérie
, do not waste your tears. I know very well the cure for a broken heart. I am off to Spain, and my new lover—who is very rich, and very old. And I will advise you”—she tilted her head speculatively, her smile cool—“to enjoy your good fortune while you may. These things rarely endure.”

Sara watched Michele walk away, and then moved quickly through the crowd, almost running at the end, until she spotted a blond man in a cherry-stained shirt at the balloon stand. She surprised him by flinging herself on him and kissing him hard on the face, and she whispered in his ear, “I have something to tell you when we get home.” He gave her a puzzled smile, and bought her a yellow balloon to complement Alyssa's red one. They walked home swinging Alyssa's hands between them, and she told him about the encounter with Michele while they chopped apples and carrots for a salad, because she did not want there to be any secrets between them.

Overnight, it seemed, Ash's bachelor life was turned upside down. His flat was reduced to chaos in very short order. The housekeeper who usually came once a week was engaged daily and could barely keep the disorder under control. There were jam smears on his chrome cabinets and orange juice circles on his countertops and fingerprints on his glass tables. And he barely noticed because in the evenings Alyssa would crawl into his lap and he would read her some ridiculous story about talking puppies or flying cats or moons, and he could feel Sara watching him and smiling and he could almost convince himself, just for a moment, that the life he was living was his own.

And then there were other times.

Sara had gotten into the habit of lying down with Alyssa, just until she fell asleep, and sometimes Ash would use that quiet time to go over paperwork or return phone calls or send e-mails. But other times, when the house rang with a silence now unfamiliar to him, he would feel compelled to go upstairs, and step quietly into the child's room, and stand over them, cuddled together as they were, and his chest would fill with a longing so intense it actually hurt. Because he knew by whose graces these two had entered his life. And sometimes, late at night when he awoke only to make sure Sara still slept beside him, or sometimes at moments like these, when he watched the two of them together, he became desperately convinced that if he were not very, very careful, Daniel would take them back.

It was their last night in London. Alyssa was growing cranky; she missed her nanny and her cat and her fairy princess nursery, and five days of overstimulation in the city had exhausted all of them. They decided to travel back to Rondelais on the afternoon train the next day. Ash would stay the weekend; beyond that they had made no plans.

He came out of the shower to find Sara sitting cross-legged on his bed wearing the nightie he liked so much, the one with the ribbons, and his reading glasses. Papers were spread out around her, and she was scowling over some of them. He said, “Darling, you're taking on some dreadful habits from me.” But he loved seeing her there. He loved the fact that she could read with his glasses. He finished drying his hair with the towel and tossed it aside. “What are you doing?”

She said unhappily, “I'm running out of money.”

“Do you need cash, love?” He turned to the mirror and began combing back his hair. “There's some in the drawer there.”

She shook her head impatiently. “I don't mean cash. I mean
money
. The Contandinos charged a fortune to repair the plumbing—not that it wasn't worth every penny—and I spent a lot more on restoring the apartment than I meant to. And your mother's right—something has got to be done with the roof, even if I can't afford to have it completely repaired. The electricity and the oil and the occupancy tax—whoever heard of charging a tax to live in your own house, anyway?—it's all more than I thought it would be.”

“Is this an accounting?” He came and sat beside her, reaching for the paper in her hand. “How much do you need?”

She snatched the paper back from him. “I don't need your money, Ash.”

“Don't be absurd. I told you from the beginning, Alyssa's trust is set up to provide for her, so whatever you've spent on her—”

“You're already paying for the nanny and the housekeeper—”

“Aside from which, any repairs you make to the property are an improvement on my investment so—”

Her jaw was set and her eyes took on that stubborn glaze that he had almost forgotten. “I don't need your money,” she told him again, very distinctly. “I need a plan.”

He smiled and plucked the glasses from her face. “Oh my. Are we about to have one of those dreary domestic squabbles over finances I hear so much about? I understand the make-up sex is simply spectacular.”

He leaned forward to kiss her neck, but she snatched the glasses back from him and returned them to her face. “I need a long-term sustainable plan for the château to pay for itself. I asked Mr. Winkle to run some figures for me. I haven't gone over all the paperwork yet, but from what I'm seeing here so far I think I can put together a viable business plan—at least enough for the initial financing.”

He frowned, taking up one of the papers. “For what?”

“For restoring the château and turning it into a B&B,” she said simply. “If your hotel company thought they could make money doing that, why shouldn't I?”

He simply stared at her. “For one thing, why should you?”

“Because it's Alyssa's heritage,” she replied simply, “and it needs to be there for her when she grows up. By that time,” she added, retrieving the paper from his hand, “the winery should be a growing concern as well. I can start out by leasing the land for vines,” she explained, “and gradually buy back the business with the proceeds from the château. It's been done before. I have several business models to back that up.”

Ash took a breath, bit back the words, and stood, pinching the bridge of his nose. He took several steps across the room before he said, “Sara, I don't doubt your ability to do this, if you're set on it. But you do understand that you have absolutely no experience in the hotel business.”

“I know how to hire people who do. And I
do
know how to sell things. Actually,” she said, and when he turned he could see the cautious excitement in her eyes, “the idea came to me from Pietro, who's always asking whether I know these rich and famous people, and then it started to make sense when your mother insisted I move into the old apartment. I started to think about that bride who fixed up the Queen's Chamber and how much the super-rich would pay for a fantasy vacation or the super-famous would pay for a luxury retreat, and I'm telling you, Ash, it could work.”

He had to smile at the enthusiasm that was so at odds with her usual reserve. He said, “I think it probably could. However, it's an extremely long-term project and—”

“Actually,” she said, “if I can make these numbers work, I can get most of the work done this winter, and open to my first guests by spring.”

He stared at her. “You can't mean to stay there through the winter.”

“Well, I'll have to be there, to supervise the labor.”