Chapter Six
The powerful note of the engine dropped to a smooth purr as Lycos steadied his speed along the highway. Arielle felt herself sink back into the deep, low-set passenger seat.
They were making for the old, walled, medieval town of Saint-Clément, popular with tourists in this part of Provence. Lycos said he wanted to get a feel for the area. He’d given her a cynical smile.
‘Show me the sights, Arielle. It will mean you don’t have to pack your bags and leave just yet,’ he’d told her.
She had no more idea of why he wanted to play tourist than she had about why, for the past week, he’d continued to stay at the mas, making himself at home.
She couldn’t stop him, the mas was his. And even if she had to share the days with him, it meant she could have that much more time there too. And that was precious to her.
Yet it was so weird to have him there, day after day, apparently content to simply go along with her uneventful daily routine.
His presence was getting easier to bear.
Maybe she was just getting used to it. Getting used to having to accept that the mas was now his.
That soon, all too soon, she would have to leave her home.
Getting used to the anguish she felt over it.
Getting used to treating him civilly, without baleful hostility. As if he weren’t the man taking her home from her.
But there was something happening to her that was distracting her from that.
She felt it again, now, as her eyes slipped from watching the road ahead, to covertly glancing at Lycos’s profile as he drove.
She felt a little frisson go through her.
It was becoming increasingly familiar and increasingly impossible to suppress.
She should suppress it, she knew. What did it matter that Lycos’s dark looks could make her pulse quicken, her breath catch? And why should she care that sometimes she saw him watching her with something in his eyes that made the colour flush in her cheeks?
Yet something was happening. She knew she could not deny it, or suppress it. It was something that had nothing to do with the malign reason for his presence in her life.
She felt a little ache inside her. It had been so long since there had been anything like that for her.
Her only big romance had been at music college, a fellow music student, a cellist, Ben, who had been taken on after graduating by a prestigious youth orchestra.
She had not been so fortunate and that had been the year her mother’s fatal illness had first made itself felt.
So, they had gone their separate ways and she had come back to the mas to stay with her mother.
To look after her, organise her treatment, then nurse her through her final months.
It had not been a time for socialising, let alone romance.
Then had come the turmoil of her father’s remarriage, his early death, his disastrous will and her futile contesting of it…
To retreat, defeated. To make the most, the very most, of her last chance to live at the mas. The home she was to lose, however isolated she was there. Where none but her nearest neighbours ever occasionally came. No one else.
Until Lycos Dimistrios.
The frisson went through her again and she dragged her gaze away. Her thoughts disturbed. Disturbing…
Surely of all men it should not be the one taking her home from her that could make her react in that way? Be so susceptible to? But then she would remind herself that, just as Lycos himself had said to her, it wasn’t him taking her home from her. It had never been hers at all.
It isn’t Lycos’s fault he owns it now.
So just as she could argue that she did not need to feel bitter and hostile towards him, maybe she didn’t have to deny or suppress the effect he was having on her? Why not just acknowledge it, accept it?
The question hovered in her head. The temptation…
Her eyes slipped back to his profile again, where they wanted to go.
A sense of release went through her, as if she’d finally given herself permission to do what she wanted to do.
To let her gaze rest on the sinewed strength of his bare, tanned forearms, the curve of his fingers around the steering wheel effortlessly guiding the powerful car with the lightest of touches, his face in profile, eyes shaded by sunglasses.
She felt that frisson come again, and this time made no attempt to resist it…
Facing the truth about herself. That there was something about Lycos Dimistrios that was more than just the man taking possession of her beloved home.
He was taking possession of her senses.
Lycos eased the car into a convenient parking space in a side road off the main square in Saint-Clément and cut the engine.
‘Well, here we are,’ he said conversationally. ‘What is there to see first?’
‘Probably the castle,’ Arielle said.
They set off in that direction, Arielle leading the way. Half a step ahead of him, Lycos could rest his eyes on her at his leisure.
And his pleasure.
Because it really was very pleasurable to watch Arielle strolling lightly along. She’d abandoned her usual shorts and voluminous tee shirts and donned instead a flower-sprigged blue cotton dress. There was nothing special about it, it was obviously cheaply bought.
But it’s she who makes it special.
His eyes flickered over her, taking in her slenderness, her natural grace, her slim waist, from which the soft swirl of her skirt fell in gathers to calf length. It wasn’t low cut, but the sweetheart neckline and cap sleeves added to its appeal.
Added to her appeal, he mused.
She’d refrained from knotting her hair, catching it instead into a tendrilled switch with a length of blue ribbon. She still wore no make-up at all and he felt a sudden impulse to want to see her dressed to the nines, gowned in couture and with full maquillage and coiffeur. En grande tenue.
Then he banished it.
She does not need it.
Certainly not here, or now.
He went back to simply enjoying the vision she now was, the pleasure it gave him to behold it. To be with her.
Because that was strange in itself. He was used to women being either self-absorbed in their own appearance, or constantly making up to him and wanting to please him.
But Arielle is nothing like that. She pays no attention to herself and certainly makes no effort to please me.
Her initial baleful hostility towards him had eased off in the days since his arrival at the mas, but her attitude towards him was casual more than anything. So was his towards her. Just as he’d said that first evening, they were going with the flow.
This last week he’d done just that and wondered at it, even while he’d gone along with it.
Day after peaceful unfolding day. Fitting, without effort or even decision, into the way Arielle lived her life, feeling the peace and quiet of the mas enfolding him.
A way of life he’d never experienced before. Never even known existed.
Just as today was a novel experience for him too.
A leisurely drive through the Provencal countryside dozing in the summer heat, to reach this old walled town and mingle with the tourists, with no purpose other than to pass the day pleasantly.
A tour of the castle, with Arielle regaling him with tales of the interminable wars of the Middle Ages, was followed by lunch at a little creperie she took him to when he invited her to choose somewhere.
The crepes, both savoury and sweet, had been humble, but tasty.
Despite, or because of, them being nothing like his usual gourmet fare.
Then they’d wandered along the narrow streets, mingling with tourists as Lycos never did, emerging into the picturesque central square that was dominated by a grand church.
They’d toured the church, Arielle pausing to step aside and light a candle—for her mother, she’d told him.
Lycos had found himself strangely touched.
And envious.
To have a mother worth lighting a candle for…
He set the emotion aside. It had no place in his life.
They left the church and Lycos went back to doing what he was enjoying most in this surprisingly enjoyable day—looking at Arielle. She had become noticeably more at ease with him as the day progressed and he was glad of it. Glad of something else as well.
She is aware of me. As a woman is aware of a man. A man who is also aware of her in that way.
He was not laying it on strong. That would be crass and Arielle was not like that.
And besides, the circumstances—his unwelcome presence at her home and the reason for it—meant that his first focus must be on lowering her guard against him.
And that was happening. There were fewer barbed comments and less sadness in her eyes.
This day out was proving a distraction for her. And that was welcome to him.
I want it gone. All that pain and stress and anger and anguish over the mas. I want her to see only me, as I am. Not as the man taking her home from her. I do not want her to feel that grief over it any longer.
Yet, as they made their easy-going way across the square and his gaze returned to her once again, he could also acknowledge, as the peace and the quiet, the restful beauty of the mas these past days had shown him, how much she would grieve at its loss.
Who would not feel it? To lose a place like that.
Thoughts rose in his mind, flickering like candles. He had assumed he would turn the mas over to the realtors the moment he arrived in Paris. But was there any rush to do so? Why not simple keep possession of it for a while and enjoy it?
Enjoy the woman—this beautiful, artless, beguiling woman—who came with it?
It would give her longer there. The place she loves so much.
And give me her.
It was a pleasing thought. For both reasons.
Arielle gazed at the display of beautifully arrayed patisserie in the glass-topped counter.
‘What will you choose?’ Lycos asked as he stood beside her.