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 Americancontemporary.” 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’vebrought her here—to a place that means something to me becauseshemeans 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 apoor 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?”
