Fliss rolled her eyes. ‘Honestly, you two. It sounds as if I normally look like the back of a bus. I thought I might as well give Alphonse plenty to think about. I’d planned to take the sofly, softly approach and reel him in slowly but since you two have decided to stick your oar in, I’m moving my agenda forward and I’m going in for the kill.’
Hattie and Luc gave each other a sideways glance and Fliss roared with laughter. ‘I know exactly what the pair of you are up to. Luc, you have the subtlety of a dead fish. And Hattie, you couldn’t be more transparent if you were made of glass.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Luc, doing his best to look innocent, giving Hattie’s hand a surreptitious squeeze.
‘Give me a break, guys. It’s the old Beatrice and Benedick set-up. Isn’t he “well nigh dead for me”?’ She raised one elegantly arched brow and laughed. ‘Why do you think I want to stay, Hattie?’
‘For Alphonse?’
‘He’s one of the reasons.’
‘You want to stay?’ Luc asked Fliss, giving Hattie a questioning glance.
‘Yes, I have a proposal but we’ll talk about it later. So what was the plan, were you two going to abandon me and Alphonse in the café?’
‘There was no plan,’ said Hattie. ‘We were just giving you a nudge. I didn’t realise you knew Alphonse liked you.’
‘Of course I knew.’ Fliss’s scorn couldn’t have been more blatant. ‘I was just deciding how to bring him to his knees and when I’d make my move.’
Hattie admired Fliss’s confidence.
‘I think I might be starting to feel a bit sorry for him,’ said Luc, giving Hattie’s hand another squeeze.
Fliss just grinned and settled back into her seat in the back, and in the wing mirror, Hattie noted that her smile was smug as a cat’s after it had swallowed a dozen canaries.
Luc pulled up outside the café and Hattie decided he couldn’t have planned things better. Alphonse was already there, seated at one of the roadside tables, so he got an eyeful of Fliss’s shapely legs as she eased herself, with remarkable poise, from the back of the car. From the expression on his face, Hattie guessed he’d come close to swallowing his tongue. He stood up abruptly and knocked over his own chair and stared at Fliss as she sauntered towards him, a deliberate sway in her hips.
‘Alphonse,bonsoir,’ she said and went up to him and kissed him on the lips, before picking up the fallen chair and sitting down.
‘And that’s how it’s done,’ murmured Luc in Hattie’s ear. ‘She’s terrifying.’
Alphonse had gone pink and stood quite still, staring at Fliss as she crossed her legs and reached forward to pick up the bottle of wine. She examined the label. ‘Chablis?’
‘I … I … um … yes … Chablis.’
Fliss helped herself to one of the four glasses sitting on the table and poured herself some wine.
‘Nice, very nice.’ She turned to Alphonse after she’d taken a good sniff and sip. ‘You have excellent taste.’ She crossed her legs again. He seemed mesmerised by them but then he pulled himself together and sat down, although Hattie noticed, with great amusement, that when he picked up his glass he took quite a slug of wine. Poor man didn’t know what had hit him.
Luc poured wine for himself and Hattie. ‘So, Hattie? What can you taste?’
With a long-suffering sigh, she stuck her nose in the glass and… ‘Pear. I can taste pear. And…’ No? Really? But what the heck – ‘Chalk?’
Luc clapped her on the back. ‘Excellent.’
‘But,’ said Fliss, ‘do you like it? That’s always the most important thing. Life is too short to drink wine you don’t.’
Hattie took another sip of the crisp, dry wine. ‘I do like it. I like it a lot.’
‘You have expensive taste, but that’s no bad thing,’ said Alphonse, lifting his glass and holding it up to the light. ‘This would taste good with apoulet à l’estragon, I think.’ He turned to Fliss.
She smiled at him, a genuine smile for once, without sarcasm, impatience or superiority. ‘Yes. It would. I adore the flavour of tarragon, especially with chicken.’
‘I have a very good recipe at home,’ said Alphonse.
‘Which you’re going to share with me,’ observed Fliss.
‘But of course.’ He grinned.
