Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(38)
In any case—she didn’t ask if there was anything wrong.
She had enough of her own shit to think about.
“I thought I might. You have another offer on the table?”
She pointed to a discreet sign above their seats. “Wifi. Want to watch a movie?” He nodded, and she moved her pack to the other empty seat, scooted over, and made room for him to sit at her side. He swung his laptop around to face them. Aside from an intermission for the dinner and drinks served at their seats, they spent the trip quietly, watching Jason Statham kicking elaborate ass. Carmen rested her head on Theo’s shoulder, and he pulled her leg up to hook over his thigh. They shared her earbuds.
It was a nice ride. She allowed herself not to think too much for a while.
oOo
Jean, her guide at the lavender farm, spoke a heavily accented, limited English. Between that and Carmen’s heavily accented, limited French, they spent an interesting day together. Her French had been steadily improving during her stay, but she was fairly sure they were managing to invent a ‘Frenglish’ of their own. It worked, more or less. He was a nice old guy, a fourth-generation farmer watching his progeny take over for him. He looked like he’d walked off the pages of a travel magazine, short and round, a face weathered by a life in the fields. He even wore a flat cap and a tattered cardigan over a grey shirt and dun-colored workpants.
When they broke for lunch, he produced bread, cheese, and wine, and they ate at a table near the barn, overlooking the fields. Carmen wondered whether he was trying to play to what he thought her expectations would be, or whether his life was truly so pastoral. Monet could have had an easel set up at the edge of the long rows of brilliant purple flowers. It was harvest time, and the plants were at their peak. The air fairly burst with scent.
Honestly, this tour was more recreational than anything. As a landscape designer, she wouldn’t be starting her own lavender farm any time soon. None of her farm and garden tours in France and the UK were about bringing home growing ideas, not really.
Still, she was learning stuff she could use when she made a proposal. People—homeowners and business owners alike—wanted a story, a narrative about their garden or courtyard or whatever it was they were planning, and having the information and experiential knowledge that she was gleaning by spending time on these farms gave her a story she could tell. In fact, sitting alongside the long rows of aromatic lavender with Jean over crusty bread, hard cheese, and dry wine, while bees buzzed and the sun baked, was possibly more important than the specifics about how lavender was grown and harvested. She could tell the story of picturesque Avignon, of Jean in his flat cap, of how the scent of lavender shaped the taste of their lunch, how the heat of the sun and the warmth of the wine in her blood made her sleepy, made her calm.
Jean’s granddaughter walked up and spoke quietly to him. He nodded and turned to Carmen. “Pardon, mademoiselle Carmen. I…go…moment only? Restez-vous? Er…wait here?”
“Oui, Jean. D’accord.”
While he went off, she leaned back against the table, closed her eyes, and soaked up the warmth, the smells, the sounds of the day.
She had a little buzz on. Seemed like she almost always had a buzz on—or a full-on drunk, or the lingering effects of one. She didn’t drink much at home, but in Europe, she’d been drinking nearly every day. She wondered whether that should concern her at all, but, feeling the Provence sunshine on her face, she decided f*ck it. She was on vacation.
Part of the problem, if it was a problem, was that Theo didn’t drink wine. They were in f*cking France. She wanted a good French wine with a meal, and then there was the bottle, sitting at the table, while Theo drank his bourbon. So she drank the bottle. And then, sometimes, she wasn’t done and needed another.
Most nights, they were passing out more than falling asleep. Theo drank a lot. She tried to remember if he’d been drinking as much when they first met, but she wasn’t sure. She thought not; she thought the past few weeks, he’d been hitting the sauce harder and earlier every day. He’d still been in bed, practically in a coma, when she’d left this morning.
She thought his writing wasn’t going very well. Though she hadn’t asked and wouldn’t, he got prickly when his writing came up in any context, and she figured it was causing him stress, the kind eased with drink. She understood. Wine was helping her not freak out about what was going on at home. Though Rosa seemed simply to assume that things would be fine and the Uncles would handle their own business, Carmen felt she could hear the strain in the voices of her family.
Since Luca had told her about the job site fire, she’d learned that there had been trouble before that—heavy equipment vandalized and totaled, employees harassed and assaulted. The fire had been an escalation of these more minor incidents. It was causing more than a headache for Luca and John—and their father. It was hurting their business as well as their men. They were losing jobs, and that hurt the men, too. Whoever the Uncles were fighting had decided that the legitimate business of Pagano & Sons Construction was an easier and perhaps more effective target than the Uncles themselves.
More dangerous, too, though. Uncle Ben and Uncle Lorrie had a code, and that code kept innocents clear. An enemy who defied that would find those two little old men to be capable of viciously wrathful vengeance.
And so there was a war going on at home, and she was lounging in Provence with the sun on her face and a belly full of wine and cheese. It was wrong. It was tormenting her sleep with its wrongness—when she was sleeping sober enough to dream.