Invitation to Provence(63)
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 chateau, 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 Proven?al 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.
. . .
NOW, 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 chateau, 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.