Chapter Six #3
So when he gave his answer, as he poured their wine handing one glass to her, she knew from her reaction that he had given the answer she should not want to hear and yet did want to hear at the same time.
‘There’s no rush,’ he said easily. ‘Paris can wait. This is far more pleasant.’ He lifted his glass to her. ‘Santé! To a very enjoyable day. Thank you for being my tour guide.’
She gave a flickering smile, conscious of conflicting thoughts.
Confusing thoughts. She dropped her eyes to the plates on the table, laded with the purchases from the delicatessen.
Charcuterie and olives, a jar of caviar with blinis, poached chicken breasts and smoked trout, artichoke hearts and tiny stuffed peppers, remoulade and finely sliced tomatoes in a piquant vinaigrette, and assorted cheeses, together with the bread she’d bought.
Her gaze returned to him across the table, as she picked up her own glass.
The dusky early evening, the soft glow from the table lamp, the light thrown from the parlour behind where they were sitting out on the terrace, all threw his features into chiaroscuro, highlighting them for her.
She wanted to gaze and gaze, drink him in, but that would be far too obvious.
So, she dropped her eyes instead, taking a delicate mouthful of her wine and setting back her glass on the table.
‘What do we start with?’ she asked, indicating the spread before them.
‘Caviar,’ Lycos pronounced, helping them both to generous portions. ‘Do you like caviar?’ he asked, making a start on his.
‘It’s not part of my everyday diet,’ Arielle said wryly. ‘I assume it is for you, though?’
He glanced across at her. ‘Not always. I remember my first taste vividly. It was in my early days of making wins and I was flushed with success. I cashed in my chips and went to the bar to celebrate. Someone further down was having caviar and champagne, so I ordered the same.’
Arielle heard something change in his voice as he continued.
‘I was on my way to a new life and I wanted to mark the occasion. That first taste of caviar put my old life behind me.’
There was an edge in his voice, she could hear that too. Then, abruptly, it was gone again. ‘This should be such a moment for you too, Arielle. Putting your old life behind you. Walk away from the mas, head held high. Don’t look back. I didn’t. Nor should you.’
She felt her finger tighten around the knife she was using to lift caviar on to her blini.
‘You don’t understand—’ she started. Her voice was as tight as her grip on the knife.
He cut across her. ‘Arielle, move on! I did. I had to or I’d have gone the same way as my father—’
He broke off, swallowed his caviar and blini, reached for his wine, set the glass down with a click. Looked across the table at her.
‘My father was not a stupid man,’ he said. ‘But he was weak and self-indulgent and self-pitying. He felt hard done by, so he drowned his sorrows. When his sense of frustration mounted, he took it out on me.’
She stared across at him. ‘He…he hit you?’
‘Until I got big enough to hit back. Then he stopped.’
‘But…but what about your mother?’
‘My mother?’ Lycos’s voice was harsh now. ‘She’d walked out, fed up with his self-pity.’
‘She left you with a father who hit you?’ Arielle’s voice was hollow.
‘She went off with a man who didn’t want any baggage.’
‘But that’s awful! How could she?’
‘Very easily, apparently. But she’d never been much of a mother anyway.
My memories are of her complaining vociferously to my father all the time.
They only married because I was on the way.
She left just after the economic crash in Greece came.
My father lost his job—not that it was much of a job, but it brought in a wage at least—and then there were no more jobs to be had.
But there was liquor to be had, so he took to that instead.
Stayed with it to the end. He was a full-blown alcoholic by then.
I took what care I could of him. Not that he noticed. ’
He took a breath, looked right at her. ‘Arielle, that’s what I meant when I talked about responsibility and the freedom you have when you accept that you can’t be responsible.
I tried to stop my father drinking, felt responsible for him.
But it wasn’t my responsibility, it was his.
And when I finally realised that, accepted it, I knew I was free.
Free to walk away. So I did. He’s dead now, long ago.
As for my mother? I have no idea and don’t care.
Because she never cared about me either, so we’re quits. ’
He fell silent, helping himself to more caviar and another blini.
Arielle looked across the table at him. Her emotions were mixed.
It was hard to see Lycos Dimistrios—a man who’d turned up in evening dress and an uber-flash car, who clearly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, who could win her family home on the casual turn of a card—as that bruised, bodily and emotionally, young boy.
Abandoned by his mother. Growing into his teens to look after a violent, alcoholic father.
Emotions plucked at her, but she did not know what they were, other than a natural pity for such an upbringing.
The pain that must have caused him, even if he hid it now.
He looked across at her again. His face seemed closed now. Harder.
‘So you see, Arielle, why I have limited sympathy for your plight. You may not have the inheritance you’d expected, but you’re not penniless.
You’re young. You’re healthy. You’re beautiful.
You’re not going to have the life you thought you were going to have, but you can make a new one for yourself.
That is, if you stop feeling sorry for yourself! ’
‘I’m not—’ she started heatedly, ripped away from Lycos’s sorry childhood to what consumed her.
‘Yes, you are,’ Lycos contradicted her. He took a breath.
‘Arielle, self-pity gets you nowhere. I should know. But neither does anger and resentment. I know that too. Looking back doesn’t help, only looking forward.
Like I’ve already said to you, if this place means that much to you go off and do what I did.
Make a fortune somehow, anyhow, and buy it back.
It will be for sale for the right price.
Everything…’ his voice turned cynical ‘…is for sale at the right price.’
He reached for his wine, took a deliberate mouthful and set back the glass. He looked across the table at her again.
‘OK, subject closed. Let’s move on and enjoy the present. So, do you like caviar?’ He raised a quizzical eyebrow.
Under his scrutiny she took a mouthful of caviar and blini. Testing it out.
She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.
He smiled. It relaxed all his features. Made him less forbidding, less censorious.
‘Eat up then or I’ll polish it all off! Now, as I was saying, how shall we spend tomorrow? After a day out, my vote is for a lazy day here. Join Maurice and Mathilde in their pool,’ he said good-humouredly.
He reached for more caviar, glancing across at Arielle again as he did. He gave a nod of approval.
‘Yes, I chose well,’ he said satisfied. ‘That shawl becomes you perfectly! How beautiful you are, Arielle. So incredibly beautiful.’
He had not changed his voice as he paid her the compliment, but Arielle could not stop the flush running out into her cheeks. He gave a low laugh. The laugh that told her things she should not want to hear, yet knew she did.
She dropped her head, confused and self-conscious. Her pulse had quickened and the colour in her cheeks was not subsiding. She reached for her wine, looking up as she did. His eyes were resting on her and in the uncertain light there was a glint in them that only made her pulse quicken even more.
The glint of a wolf—
Lycos saw her react to him. It was what he wanted. He wanted her to move on from her endless obsession with her lost inheritance.
Move on to me, to what I want of her. And to what she wants too, if she only admits it.
She was on the way, he knew. Calling her out, as he had just then, seemed to have worked. She had visibly relaxed again and they went on enjoying the delicacies procured in Saint-Clément. For a moment he frowned inwardly. What he had told her about himself he had never told a living soul.
So why tell her?
He brushed the question aside, letting his eyes rest on her instead, feeling a reaction go through him that was becoming increasingly familiar. Increasingly welcome. She really was so very lovely, so very beautiful, so very appealing to him.
He got to his feet, starting to clear the table. Arielle made a move to help, but he stopped her.
‘No. Let me,’ he said.
She acquiesced and he made short work of carrying out the used plates and leftovers to the kitchen, putting the former in the sink and the latter in the fridge.
Minutes later he came back outdoors. The night had gathered in earnest now and Arielle was sitting with her back to him, her hair limned with gold from the light of the wall lamp and the glass-sheltered candle on the table.
She was relaxed back in her chair, the colourful shawl he’d bought for her gathered around her shoulders, exposing the delicate nape of her neck.
He could not resist. He paused behind her and, before she could turn her head, he’d dropped the lightest of kisses on her nape.
He felt her still, heard her breath catch.
He straightened again.
‘I come bearing sweet delight,’ he informed her as he placed on the table a large, square cardboard box, secured with ribbons and bearing the ornate name of the patisserie where they’d had coffee. He opened it with a flourish.
‘Gateau St Honoré!’ he announced portentously. Then he frowned. ‘I have no idea how to slice it without making a complete hash of it!’
Somehow, he managed it, to Arielle’s smiling applause, giving them both generous, if slightly messy, portions.
He watched as Arielle lifted a full forkful of the gateau to her lips and took a mouthful.
A low moan of bliss came from her and her eyelids fluttered shut as she relished the experience, her expression transfigured.
Out of nowhere, a dart of arousal possessed Lycos.
She will look like that when her moment comes in my arms…
‘Oh, that is so good!’ sighed Arielle, taking another forkful. ‘This was an inspired purchase! Thank you!’
‘You are most welcome.’ Lycos smiled, getting stuck into his own luscious portion, indulging a more immediate appetite.
Slices demolished, they both went for seconds, and it was a sadly depleted gateau that remained by the end of the meal. Arielle sat back with an air of repletion about her.
‘I’ll go and make some coffee,’ she announced.
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Lycos offered companionably. ‘And why don’t we move to the comfy chairs?’ he nodded at the two padded cane armchairs with footstools just by the French window to the parlour. ‘If we turn off all the lights, we can look at the stars.’
That was exactly what they did and Lycos found it pleasingly relaxing.
In the soft night there was no sound beyond the incessant cicadas, the occasional call of a night bird and the distant faint sound of a church clock striking from the village several kilometres away.
He’d moved the two chairs next to each other.
Once Arielle had placed her empty coffee cup on the stone paving, she’d rested her hands on the chair arms and relaxed back against the head rest.
Lycos did likewise. Except that his hand, adjacent to Arielle’s, did not rest on his own chair arm.
He let it fold, lightly and casually, over Arielle’s.
For a second he felt her tense, then it was gone.
He did not move his hand. Her hand was warm beneath his covering palm.
Deliberately he did not look at her. Instead, he lifted up his other hand to gesture towards the night sky, ablaze with stars.
‘Another van Gogh night,’ he said.
He let his hand go on resting over hers. Let her get used to the sensation of his innocuous touch.
‘Poor Vincent,’ she replied. ‘He had such a sad life, but I think he was happy here in Provence.’
‘It’s an easy place to be happy,’ Lycos said.
‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘It is.’
And then, quite distinctly, Lycos felt her hand turn beneath his, and her fingers mesh with his, easing into holding his hand. Slowly, very slowly, he let his thumb softly stroke hers. Not making a big thing of it, just letting it happen…
Peace filled him. It was good, so very good, just to lounge here holding Arielle’s soft hand, relaxed and replete, quietly and easily. Gazing up at the starry, starry night. Listening to the cicadas, wrapped in the warmth of the summer’s soft darkness.