Chapter 14
Gustave
Spring unfurls slowly across France, tender green creeping into the fields, the roadsides lined with the blush of blooming cherry and the cheerful yellow of rapeseed flowers.
The drive south from Paris is one I’ve done a hundred times, but with Tara beside me, her hand curled loosely in mine, it feels different…exhilarating.
The highway unspools, then narrows into winding roads through villages with stone houses, red roofs, and shutters painted in fading blues and greens. Church spires rise above the fields; vineyards luxuriate in endless rows, tidy and expectant, waiting for the summer sun to ripen the grapes.
“Picturesque overload.” Tara rests her head against the passenger-side window of my Cayenne as we pass a village square where children ride bicycles in circles. “It looks like a postcard.”
I smile. “Bourgogne does not need to impress—it simply is.”
“You sound as pompous as I was warned the French are.”
I laugh at that.
I haven’t laughed as much as I do with her—not in a long time, not in this unguarded manner. I can simply be myself with Tara. Gustave. Not le Comte. Not the heir to the de Valois name and fortune. Just a man who likes to hold the hand of his woman. It’s uncomplicated, simple, and sweet.
When we reach Pommard in the heart of the C?te de Beaune, the air is infused with the scent of tilled earth and young vines.
“This looks like something out of Chocolat,” she tells me, gushing about the wine caveaux*, the boucherie*, and the boulangerie*. “Do you know they filmed the movie in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain in Bourgogne?”
“Will I lose points with you if I tell you I have no idea what you’re talking about?”
She gave me a look of mock horror. “You have not seen Chocolat?”
I shake my head, amused. “But I do know that Flavigny is an hour north of here, and maybe on our way back, we can stop by. Does that help?”
She laughs, and says, “That may redeem you.” And then she tells me the whole story of Chocolat. Apparently, Johnny Depp is all that.
By the time she’s done, we’ve reached my house, which is outside the village. A stone manor with pale walls and weathered shutters, my haven is surrounded by vines and a long gravel drive that crunches beneath the tires.
The property is quiet.
No paparazzi.
No society dinners.
Space. Silence.
Inside, the house is spare but warm.
The wooden beams are original, and the stone floors, also original, are softened by rugs. I have a few good pieces of antique furniture I’ve inherited. And art, naturally. There are no portraits of my ancestors here, only a handful of contemporary canvases I’ve collected over the years.
Tara pauses in front of a large abstract painting in shades of midnight blue and gold—a striking canvas by Keltie Ferris, alive with motion. A burst of color frozen mid-explosion, or a whispered secret caught in paint.
She tilts her head, studying it with the kind of intent focus I’ve already learned is her default with art.
“I didn’t take you for a lover of American contemporary.” A smile curves her mouth. “You’re full of surprises, le Comte.”
“I prefer not to live entirely with the dead,” I reply as my gaze drifts, unbidden, to the oil portrait above the fireplace of a stern-eyed ancestor of the house’s previous owner, immortalized among his vines.
The brushwork is stiff, the palette dark, but there is a kind of permanence to it, a reminder of what roots us.
Tara follows my eyes and raises a brow. “I see. One eye on the future, one chained to the past?”
“Perhaps.” I tip my chin in acknowledgment. “The Ferris is here because it thrills me. The portrait is here because it came with the house, and I feel it would be disloyal to erase him.”
Her laugh is soft, warm. “You’re more sentimental than you pretend, Gustave.”
“And you,” I counter, stepping closer, “see more than you should.”
I dip my head and kiss her—soft, unhurried. There’s no rush tonight. We have the whole weekend. Two nights.
I’ll have her here, in this house that has always been mine alone, in the bed where no one but me has ever slept. Not even my family knows about this place. The thought jolts me—how easily I brought her here, without hesitation.
I could have taken her to London, to Brussels, checked us into a hotel where we’d be anonymous in a big city. Safer, cleaner, forgettable. But instead, I’ve brought her here—to a place that means something to me because she means something to me.
I give her a tour of the house. Two bedrooms. One outfitted as an office. One master. The bathroom is renovated, designed to bring the outside in.
She steps out onto the small porch off the master bedroom and takes in the view. “This is…incredible.”
“Yes,” I murmur, but I’m looking at her.
If I had brought Simone here, she would’ve been horrified—sulking at the quiet streets, sneering at the shadows of old stone, restless without Paris’s lights to feed her vanity.
Stop comparing, Gustave. You know there is no similarity between these women. Tara is Simone’s opposite in every way. Open where Simone was calculating. Warm where Simone was cold. Better for you than Simone ever was.
I spent so many years trying to make my marriage work that what’s left of it is a wound, healed but with considerable scar tissue.
But with Tara, I taste freedom. I feel, perhaps for the first time, what it means to be wanted simply for who I am—without the name, without the burden of legacy. The realization aches in me.
All the years I squandered trying to live up to the de Valois name, and the fact that I will go on wasting more.
I shake off the thought.
Duty, expectation, the mundane future—they’ll still be waiting. For now, I have Tara. I have this weekend, and the memory of it will make the coming days without her a little less bleak.
If I confess what’s running through my mind, Tara will laugh softly and call me a poor little rich boy, not to wound, but because she’d see the truth of it.
We walk into the kitchen, which is well stocked with copper pans and pottery bowls, which she admires.
“Fair warning, I don’t cook. Madame Roux prepares meals for me when I’m here and don’t eat out, and a service handles the rest.”
Tara shakes her head. “Well, you can give them all the weekend off because”— she pats the counter—“I’m cooking for us.”
“You are?” I’m thrilled to hear her say that.
I’m a kid in a candy store because she doesn’t want to go out to a restaurant, which Bourgogne has many of, and they’re superior. Michelin stars are common in this part of the country.
“Yes. It’ll be nice, won’t it, to just be us?”
She wants to spend time with me, and that’s better than any paired, vaunted menu could offer.
“Very nice,” I agree past the catch in my throat.
How will I let you go when the time comes?
That evening, she cooks a simple meal of pasta with ripe tomatoes, garlic, and basil she picked from the garden outside.
“It’s Italian, I know.” She tosses a handful of chopped green chilies into the pan. “But my father would always sneak a little heat into everything, just enough to make you sweat.”
“And you? Do you cook to make men sweat?”
She laughs, shaking her head as she stirs the pasta sauce with chilies. “Only if they deserve it.”
She dips a spoon and holds it out for me to taste.
“Should I be worried?” I ask even as I take the spoon in between my lips.
“You never have to be worried with me,” she replies huskily, and my heart expands.
“It’s delicious.” It is.
“But will it put hair on your chest?” she muses.
I raise an eyebrow.
She glances at me, the corners of her mouth tugging up in pure contentment. “My father would tell my cousins that if they ate spicy food, they’d get hair on their chest. Poor Marco; he’s still waiting, and he’s twenty-five.”
It feels good—her easy laughter filling a home and life that has been too quiet—no, not that…it’s been empty.
Though the kitchen was designed for chefs, with a stove large enough to feed an army, it feels warmer, smaller, more intimate than any dinner I’ve had in years.
She asks me to set the table for us, the small oak one by the window.
I find what I need in the cabinets in the kitchen.
Limoges porcelain plates, Beauvillé napkins, and Sabre Paris cutlery.
I light the pair of Louis XIII-style candle stands from the nineteenth century that were a gift from my grandmother to me.
I even raid my wine cellar to make our dinner special.
“Champagne for the pasta?” she teases, eyeing the unopened bottle chilling in a bucket nearby.
“That’s for dessert,” I reply.
I present to her a bottle of Pommard from my cellar, the wine dark and masculine, full of the tannins that the village is known for. “That’s for the pasta.”
She leans back in her chair, relaxed. “Tell me about it.”
“Clos des Epeneaux, 1996.” I carefully ease the cork free. “From Domaine Comte Armand. The vines there are a monopole—singular. The tannins in Pommard can be fierce, but with time….” I pour a taste of the ruby liquid into a glass. “They soften, revealing something richer, more elegant.”
I swirl it and taste it. “Parfait!”
She raises an eyebrow, amused. “You certainly love your wine.”
“Wine is….” I search for the right phrase, then smile. “As Alexandre Dumas once wrote, ‘Wine is the intellectual part of a meal. Meat is merely the material.’”
“Dumas said that?” Her eyes light up with curiosity. I love this about her—the endless inquisitiveness.
“Indeed.” I set the bottle down gently. “Dumas was not merely a novelist; he was a gourmand. Do you know which book of his he claims was his favorite?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Mine is Count of Monte Cristo.”
“Ah, yes, that’s a fine book, but his favorite was the Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. It was posthumously published in 1873.”
“Wow! I didn’t know that.” She straightens, obviously intrigued. “What is it?”