MAËLLE
Iwoke with my cheek on Dagger’s chest and his arm wrapped around me.
The fire had died sometime in the night, and the cottage had gone cold, but I wasn’t. The blanket was over us, but it was his warmth that kept away the chill. That, and we were both still fully dressed, down to our socks.
The rest of what had happened last night played through my mind like a movie. My begging and his hands stopping me from lowering my zipper and removing my dress.
“Ask me on an ordinary day,” he’d said. “Ask me then, and God help you, because I will never let you go.”
And after, worse than any of it, was the crying. I’d sobbed in this man’s arms until I fell asleep, and now, I had to face him.
“You’re awake.” His voice rumbled under my ear.
“How could you tell?”
“You stopped drooling.”
I lifted my head to glare at him. “I do not drool.”
“You’re right. You don’t.” He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “Coffee?”
That was it. No smirk. No comment about the state of my eyes, which had to be swollen. Nothing about last night at all.
“Oui. Please.”
He eased himself out from under me, and cold air rushed in where he’d been.
I listened to him move around the little kitchen—water running, cupboards opening—and waited for it.
The teasing. Any other morning of the past year, the man would have milked it for a week.
You begged me, mon feu. Say it again, just once, so I can remember how it sounded.
But he didn’t tease at all. He brought me coffee in a chipped white cup, drank his own leaning against the counter, and asked if I wanted to stop at the boulangerie before it closed for midday.
“We should return to the chateau,” I said. “Before Marthe sends a search party.”
“Or leads one herself.”
We closed up the cottage and drove toward Valais through frost-covered vineyards. He kept one hand on the wheel and hummed something tuneless under his breath, while I sat in the passenger seat, waiting.
He would collect. Men always collected. When my father gave my mother jewelry, he presented it at dinner parties, in front of guests, so the whole table could admire his generosity along with the diamonds.
When he’d paid for the church roof, the plaque went up within the month.
Every good deed my father ever performed was an investment, and he never failed to harvest the return.
Last night, I’d handed Dagger more ammunition than any woman had ever given him. Begging, tears, and the sight of me shattered and needy in a way I had never allowed any man to see. I expected he’d use every round of it.
Twenty minutes passed. He pointed out a hawk hunting over the bare vines. He complained that French radio played too much American music. He asked whether Marthe would poison his breakfast for keeping me out all night.
The only thing he didn’t mention was what had happened after we returned from dinner.
By the time we turned up the drive to the chateau, I’d stopped waiting and studied him instead, the way I would study a suspect whose behavior didn’t match his crimes.
Marthe opened the door before we reached it. She looked at me, then at Dagger, then at me again, and the corner of her mouth twitched in a way that, on any other face, would have been a grin. She said something in French about young people and cold nights, and muttered her way toward the kitchen.
“Do I want to know?” Dagger asked.
“No.”
She thought we’d spent the night doing exactly what we hadn’t spent the night doing. I didn’t correct her.
Dagger carried our coats to the closet, kissed my forehead in full view of the staircase, in case anyone was watching, and went to find breakfast.
I stood in the hall for a moment longer.
My father collected on every kindness he had ever performed.
Dagger had buried it instead.
I stored it away with everything else about him that didn’t fit, in a file that was getting thick.
After breakfast, Dagger excused himself from the table while Marthe was pouring my second coffee. By the time I finished eating and came upstairs, his laptop was open on the desk in my bedroom and he was reading something on his mobile.
“Any fallout downstairs?” he asked without looking up.
“If you mean has anyone asked where we were last night, the answer is no. Otherwise, Marthe is making coq au vin and expects us to be here for dinner this evening. My father is in his office, shouting at someone about barrel deliveries, and Rémy left for the co-op in Beaune twenty minutes ago. Oh, and my mother wants to discuss wedding flowers.”
“Did she say when?”
“I think I can put her off until midafternoon.”
“Then, we need to get busy.” He turned his laptop so I could see the screen. “Hornet came through overnight.”
Yesterday, I’d said the Fontenay name gave me more to search for in the domaine’s financials. Hornet’d assured me he could get access, and based on what I saw on the screen, he had.
The message contained a login, instructions, and a single line that made Dagger smile: Look. Don’t touch.
“What’s the setup?” I asked while he worked through Hornet’s notes.
“He found a back way in through the estate’s outside accountants,” Dagger said.
“They use the same system, and they review the year-end files every December. If anyone ever checks who looked at the books, this morning will look like the bookkeeper in Dijon doing exactly that. Nothing points at this house, and nothing points at us.”
“And Rémy will see nothing unusual.”
“That’s right.”
He slid the laptop in front of me and stood so I could sit in the chair.
I rested my hands on the keys and took a deep breath.
“Maelle.” Dagger’s voice was quiet. “You don’t have to be the one to do this.”
“Yes, I do.” I opened the sales ledgers. “If there is something wrong in these books, I want to be the one who finds it.”
I went straight to Fontenay.
Everything else in the ledger was a footnote beside it.
Where the estate’s other buyers took a few hundred cases at a time, Fontenay had bought by the container, twice a year, for nine years, without a single missed or late payment.
My mother had told me the deal quadrupled our sales.
Looking at the totals from ten years ago versus when they became a customer, I thought she’d understated it.
I examined the cost per case they paid versus the other distributors. “This doesn’t make sense,” I muttered.
“What’s that?” Dagger asked, peering over my shoulder.
“The prices Fontenay is paying are too high.”
“How so?”
I opened the next largest customer’s account history. “Why would they pay more?”
“The higher volume would suggest otherwise,” he said.
“It’s more than that. While discounts vary by industry, the rule of thumb is a distributor pays sixty percent of retail.” I wasn’t telling Dagger anything he didn’t already know.
“What are they paying?”
“Eighty percent.”
“Other than the obvious, what reasons would they have?” he asked. “They might pay extra to guarantee their supply. They might pay more so they’re first in line.”
“That would account for a percentage or two. Not twenty.”
“Would they do it to keep the wine away from their competitors?”
“The domaine sells the same vintages to a dozen other distributors.”
“Try this one. Fontenay sells to luxury markets. Gulf hotels, Michelin restaurants, collectors who don’t ask prices. Maybe they overpay here because their own buyers overpay them and your father knew that going in?”
“While I can’t say whether or not my father is a particularly astute businessman, it seems ludicrous to think that whoever is running Fontenay is equally obtuse.”
Footsteps too heavy to be my mother’s or Marthe’s sounded down the corridor. As they got closer, I could hear my father talking on his mobile about the spring releases. When his voice faded, I let out the breath I had been holding.
Dagger walked over to the window, then turned to face me. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“The same thing you are. My father is laundering money.”
At two o’clock, Dagger and I left the bedroom. While I met with Maman, he went for a walk in the vineyards.
My mother sat on the sofa, with a notebook open on her lap. Color had come into her cheeks since breakfast, and she’d dressed as though she were expecting guests.
“There you are.” She patted the cushion beside her. “Sit. We have decisions to make.”
I glanced at the page and the columns she’d started for flowers, linens, and music.
“How long have you been at this, Maman?”
“Not long.”
When I sat, she tapped the first column with her pen.
“First, the date. The garden is at its best during the second half of May, when the peonies open. Shall we say the third Saturday?”
“Oui, Maman.”
She wrote it down. Every time I made a decision, the weight of the lies felt heavier. When the truth came out about the engagement being fake, it would devastate my mother. I had no idea how I’d live with myself then.
“If it rains, we’ll have it in the cuverie. It will still be beautiful. Marthe will help decorate.”
“Will she agree to it?”
My mother cocked her head. “She’ll pray for it to storm just so she has more to do.”
I smiled. She was right. Marthe was always happiest when she was busy.
“For your bouquet, lily of the valley,” she continued, moving down the page. “Every French bride carries it. It brings luck.”
“Then, that’s what I’ll carry.”
“On another subject, Maelle, where will you live?”
“Geneva,” I blurted without thinking it through. “Most of Rourke’s contracts are there.”
“What about your work? Your clients?”
“It’s the same for me. Mine are from everywhere.” The statement was mostly true. Over the course of my career, I’d spent more time in Lausanne than anywhere else, but missions took me around the globe.
She set the pen down. “Maelle, what aren’t you telling me?”
“Pardon?”
“With every question I ask, your answer seems to cause you pain.” She leaned forward. “And you won’t look me in the eye.” Her brow furrowed, then smoothed as if she’d figured it out for herself. “You think I won’t live to see you married.”
I gasped, and my eyes filled with tears. “No, Maman. I swear that isn’t what I’m thinking.”
“Then, what is it? Does it have something to do with the reason you didn’t come home last night?”
“It’s nothing.”
She leaned against her chair. “You’re lying.”
Dread settled in my stomach like lead. Now, I had to come up with another lie to cover all the rest. “I spoke out of turn when I said May. I need to discuss it with Killian first.”
She studied me. “I see. He is against marrying in France? Does he want the wedding to take place elsewhere? Perhaps closer to his family?” She set the notebook on the table near her chair and took my hands in hers.
“I planned my life around your father’s.
He made no concessions for me. I don’t want to see you do the same. ”
“Maman—”
“That is all I will say about it.” She picked her notes up and turned to another page. “Your father’s list numbers eighty-one, as of this morning.”
“I’ve said family only more than once.” Why was I arguing the point over a wedding that would never take place anyway?
“You won’t invite your clients?” she asked. “What about Killian’s?”
“It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
She sighed. “Maelle—”
“The people we work with are very private. There would be security risks.”
“I see. And what about his family?”
Finally, I could speak the truth. “There is only his sister. His parents passed away a few years ago.”
“Then, she’ll sit with us. I would like to write her a personal invitation to do so. Please give me her address.”
I couldn’t come up with a reason off the top of my head not to, so I nodded.
The rest went faster. We decided on the linens, the food that would be served, and what wine would be used for the toast. When she closed the notebook and rested her head against the chair, I stood to leave.
I was nearly out of the room when she spoke again.
“Maelle?”
“Oui, Maman?”
“No matter what it is, you can always tell me the truth. I will not judge you for it. Please promise me you understand what I’m saying.”
“I do. I promise.”
Those four words were truer than any other I’d spoken. My mother would not judge me. But when the truth came out, she might not forgive me, either.