‘I don’t know!’ Releasing me briefly, he ran his hands through his hair. Then slumping a little, he exhaled a heavy sigh. ‘No, okay, that’s not quite true either. I have known for some time, or rather,suspected, that she believed we were going somewhere.’
‘Why would she think that?’
‘We had a brief relationship, an affair if you like,earlier this year. It was just after my father died and she was… well, she was rather kind to me.’
Kind? Caroline de whatever-her-silly-name-waskind? Now I’d heard it all. Luc was watching me.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’d sooner call Vladimir Putin a humanitarian than Caroline kind. More importantly, even without you telling me the grisly details, it doesn’t take much imagination for me to know what she said to you, and I bet it was foul. But you see…Iwas foul to you too, Alix.’
I frowned. ‘When?’
‘At the very beginning, when you arrived at the Villa Matisse, that first morning and for quite a bit after. It makes me literally cringe now to recall how horrible I was to you.’
‘Oh, that.’ I lifted my shoulders in a careless shrug. ‘It’s not important.’
He captured my hand again. ‘Yes, it is important, it’s vitally important. I’m deeply,deeplyashamed of my behaviour.’
‘Well,’ I said, slightly at a loss. ‘I expect my arriving out of the blue like that gave you a bit of a shock.’
He smiled. ‘You certainly gave me a shock, the biggest shock of my life.’
I stared at him. ‘I’m not sure I understand you.’
‘I’m not sure I understand it myself, why I treated you so badly, that is. Yes, I was tired, under enormous stress and my mother driving me to distraction, but none of that excused my behaviour. As for the thing with Caroline, it finished almost as soon as it started. Afterwards, I just wanted us to be friends, and sheseemed to be fine with that. I thought she understood the score.’
I looked away from him, watching a guard now tramping up and down the length of the train, slamming doors in a bad-tempered sort of way and looking as if he wished he had a whistle.
‘Is that what you want me to understand?’ I said distantly. ‘The score?’
‘No!’ He seized both my hands. ‘There isn’t a score with you, Alix.’
Hearing a note in his voice, a tiny frisson of hope leapt in my heart. Scarcely daring to breathe, I turned to look at him.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I love you,’ he said simply. ‘That’s what I’m saying, and that’s the something I forgot to tell you last night. I forgot to say I love you.’
The train pulled out of the station.
‘How did you know where I was?’
We’d just come up for air after the longest kiss in history.
‘My good friend Matthew, your taxi driver, called me. He asked me if I was aware that he had collected a beautiful young woman from the Villa Matisse and dropped her off at the railway station where she was now in floods of tears.’
‘Well,’ I said, blushing. ‘There was a sad song playing on his cab radio.’
‘What song?’
I told him.
‘“The Power of Love”,’ he echoed. ‘How appropriate. Is that what made you cry?’
‘No.’ I gulped. ‘I mean, it did.’ For a second I felt so brimming with emotion I nearly passed out. ‘But it wasn’t the song. It was because I thought you didn’t love me.’
‘Now you know I do. I think – no, Iknow– I loved you from the first moment I saw you. You’re not only the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, you’re clever, you’re funny and you’re good. You’re a good person, Alix, truly good. I don’t think you realise yourself how good you are. I’ve never met anyone like you.’
I gazed at him, seeing the blaze of love in his eyes and thinking how nearly I might have lost this. Even so, I could not stop myself blurting, ‘What about Esther?’
