Angus was waiting for her to say something. To offer another objection that he could refute?
Tilly ignored the faint sensation deep in her abdomen as she made her decision. A frisson of something that might have been a warning but could just as easily be interpreted as excitement, so it was best to ignore it completely.
‘I’ll take you to Aix-en-Provence,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to book another room at the hotel because my mother lives in the town. I’ll have dinner with you. You can ask me to come with you again after that, if you still want me to.’
She could see a muscle twitch in his jaw, as if her words had struck a nerve.
Pas de problème.
It wasn’t a problem. Perhaps Angus needed time to have second thoughts himself.
* * *
The words had been a slap in the face.
‘…if you still want me to.’
As if he was the one who had control of what other people chose to do, like employing Tilly to be his guide.
Or Moira to continue working for him.
Angus carried his bag as he followed Tilly along a footpath to where she’d parked her car. There were trees along the way and the sound of cicadas was loud. The clear blue sky was darkening into dusk and he remembered Tilly explaining the timetable of the arrival on this first evening. Given that he’d made them late leaving the airport, he would only have enough time to drop his bag at the hotel and then they would be due to have dinner in that courtyard restaurant that could apparently provide the best bouillabaisse in Provence.
Theromanticcourtyard.
Angus could feel himself scowling. Again. He couldn’t expect Tilly to change any romantic elements of the restaurant’s ambience, but hadn’t she mentioned paying some kind of musician to serenade the table? This could be a good test of whether his plan might work. Instead of saying anything, he could wait and see if she remembered to cancelthatin advance. If she did, he would ask her again to be his guide and companion.
If not, he would go it alone and make whatever changes to the itinerary that might be needed if it became uncomfortable in any way.
Not that he was going to demand a refund.
Because it wasn’t only this evening’s timetable that he was remembering. It was disconcertingly easy to replay the moment he saw the fear in Tilly’s eyes and the way the blood had drained from her face when he’d made the suggestion of asking for his money back.
It did more than make him cringe inwardly at his harshness this time.
It made him feel an urge to protect her from anything that had the power to make her look that afraid.
How weird wasthat?
Angus McLeod was wary of anything that didn’t have a rational explanation. The unknown was a minefield of potentially hidden risks and he’d made it his business for his whole adult life to mitigate all kinds of risk. That this woman might represent a rather large risk herself hadn’t occurred to him and that, in itself, was making him feel curiously off balance.
Tilly had stopped in front of a perfectly ordinary red Renault SUV. She was pointing a key fob at the vehicle and the blip told him that the car was being unlocked.
‘Here we are,’ she said. She opened the back hatch. ‘You can put your bag in here, Mr McLeod.’
Ah… At least he could grab hold of something that might even be accepted as a form of apology for having ranted at her.
‘Please,’ he said, deliberately echoing what she’d said to him, although he couldn’t quite achieve what you might call a friendly tone. ‘Call me Angus.’
4
The little sachet of dried lavender that hung from a ribbon below the rear-view mirror was failing to mask a scent that Tilly couldn’t quite place.
Or maybe it was the warmth of having the solid, big body of a complete stranger – amalestranger – settling only inches away from her in the passenger seat that was warping her senses. Yes… even the sound of the car’s persistent warning beep sounded louder than usual.
‘You need to put your safety belt on,’ she told Angus.
He nodded, pulling the buckle down to make it long enough to snap into place, dislodging something from the centre console as he did so, which unrolled itself with remarkable speed to puddle around Tilly’s feet and the brake pedal. She reached down and started pulling it free.
