Invitation to Provence(8)
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 chateau 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 chateau, 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 chateau 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.
He glanced at his watch. It had been exactly four hours since he’d called Rafaella and accepted her invitation. He’d rearranged his schedule for those weeks and delegated important work, so that he would be there in September, come rain or come shine. He was willing to bet that his life would never be the same. Rafaella always had that effect on him.