‘Have you lived here long?’ he asked.
‘Only a year. It took me a long time to find something I could afford that was also somewhere I could fall in love with living in.’ Sophie cleared her throat, as if she felt she’d revealed too much. ‘Come and sit down. Would you like a coffee? Or tea?’
‘No. Thank you, but I don’t need anything.’
He caught another flash of discomfort. Had it been his turn to deliver a reminder of boundaries? As if he’d meant that he didn’t want anything that she might be willing to provide?
Her nod was almost resigned – as if she’d expected the response. She gestured towards the sofas by the window. ‘Make yourself comfortable. I’ll just grab the file.’
Luc remained standing, pretending to admire the view. He didn’t like the frisson of something awkward that he was so aware of. On the other hand, he didn’t want to try and close the gap between himself and Sophie because it represented safety. And he needed safety. When he’d left that lunch having promised to buy Sophie some time, he’d felt as if he’d managed to push the past back where it belonged.
Their gig at the Château de la Chèvre d’Or had undermined that confidence.
It had been going so well, too, until close to the end when he’d snapped the photo of the groom lifting the bride from the horse and captured them looking at each other as if nobody else on the planet existed. If love were visible, the air all around them would have been filled with the sparkle of a million fireflies.
The air had felt thick enough with that invisible glow to make it hard to catch a breath. Luc had felt that kind of love but it hadn’t had this element of tangible joy. It had been the most heartbreaking moment in his life because he’d known, in the same instant he’d recognised it, that it was a dream he would never be able to catch in real life.
Had it been because Sophie was filling his thoughts or that he could feel her gaze on him that had made him look up?
And even though it was on the cusp of being too dark to interpret any expression at that distance, he’d known that Sophie had been just as affected by what had conjured up the fireflies.
Oh là là…The words in his head were a weary sigh. Were they never going to be able to get out from under the shadow of that moment?
He’d started to think, that evening, that it might even be possible to enjoy keeping his promise to help keep Sophie’s business afloat, but that wasn’t going to be the case if a single moment in the past could pop up like a solid wall of unfinished business.
He wasn’t going to break a promise, so perhaps he needed to change his perspective. Some people believed that things happen for a reason, so maybe he could embrace that theory and assume that the reason fate had thrown himself and Sophie Spencer back together was so that they could lay some ghosts to rest and enable them both to move on to a less shadowed future.
* * *
Sophie was holding the Manila folder stuffed with every detail of the upcoming, high-profile but very discreet wedding she’d been planning for months, including anNDAform for Luc to sign.
Not that he seemed overly keen to hear about his next job. He was standing right beside the window, his head tilted sideways.
‘You can almost see the Baou de Saint Jeannet,’ he said.
‘You just need to be a little further out,’ Sophie told him. ‘It looks like it’s hanging over the house from the balcony off the kitchen upstairs. I can sit out there with a glass of wine in the evening and it feels like I’ve got company.’
The corner of Luc’s mouth lifted. ‘It does feel like a living thing, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘I can remember it from when I was a kid. I thought it looked like a lion who’d been turned to stone by the White Witch – like the creatures inThe Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.’
Sophie liked that he wasn’t dismissing her fanciful suggestion. ‘Apparently inhabitants of St Paul de Vence used to look up at ourbaouand say that witches lived in Saint Jeannet.’
Luc’s smile widened a little. ‘And do they?’
Thatsmile. What did it remind her of?
Oh, yeah… the kind of smile he used to share with Tom. Or Hannah. A smile that was genuinely amused. Unguarded. The kind of smile he’d never given her. Because he was being so careful to hide his feelings?
With good reason.
Perhaps he didn’t have to do that now, because it was so far in the past those feelings were no longer relevant. Maybe they no longer even existed?
Sophie didn’t feel that safe. Feelings were threatening to leak from her own memories and, while they might have been dormant, they didn’t feel dead. There was danger lurking in that space and Sophie had no intention of getting too close.
So she stopped herself smiling by pursing her lips thoughtfully instead. ‘If I told you that,’ she said lightly, ‘I might have to turn you to stone.’
The sound Luc made as she sat down on one of the sofas was more of a grunt than a chuckle but he followed her example and sat down on the nearest end of the other sofa. Their knees were almost close enough to touch but the solid rolled arms of the furniture and the corner of the coffee table created the feeling of solid walls between them.
‘I spoke to Greg this morning,’ Sophie said, her tone serious again. ‘He said to say hi.’
