‘I’m good.’ Tilly switched to English. ‘This is Angus McLeod. Angus, this is my friend Ellie.’
‘Enchanté,’ he said.
Her face lit up with a smile. ‘Enchantée,’ she agreed.
Ellie Rousseau was gorgeous. She had the familiar Scottish colouring of fiery red hair and fair, freckled skin but there was an aura of French chic about her as well. Like Tilly, she moved witha grace that had made him think of ballerinas when he’d first met her and she used her hands as she talked.
‘Come with me for a minute,’ she said, picking up a baby monitor and slipping it into the pocket of the apron she was wearing over her dress. ‘I need to go over to La Maisonette to close windows before Louis wakes up from his nap. I’ve been airing it out and letting some sunshine in.’
‘Where’s Bonnie?’ Tilly asked. ‘And Theo?’
‘Bonnie’s at a playdate with her cousin Bella. And Theo’s with his best friend from school for the afternoon. Have you had lunch?’
‘We’ll do that next,’ Tilly said. ‘I want to take Angus to the Café du Midi.’
‘Our favourite,’ Ellie said. She threw another smile at Angus, leading them down the steps from a flagged terrace at the back of the house, a small, scruffy white dog with ginger patches trotting by her heel. ‘You’ll love it. They have the best frites in the world.’
Angus glanced at Tilly. How could just a heartbeat of eye contact say so much? The instant connection to steak frites. That they both preferred eating steak to fish. That first dinner in Aix-en-Provence when she’d made him laugh by saying that his DNA would appreciate the money-saving tactic of drinking crémant instead of champagne and he’d rediscovered a long-lost love of mushroom sauce.
‘Come with us,’ Tilly said to Ellie. ‘Bring Louis.’
‘I can’t today,’ Ellie said sadly. ‘I have an appointment in Vence to make arrangements for a stall at the evening markets and then Louis and I are going to go and surprise Papa.’
She opened a gate that led from the garden into a patch of land with enough olive trees to be a grove, and that made Angus think of that first night with Tilly in that little stone cottage and the most amazing sex of his life.
It gave him a pang of that same yearning he’d had yesterday, listening to her astonishingly passionate defence of all things romantic. And yes, it had made himwantto believe, but how could he? It would require a suspension of disbelief that went against every tenet he lived by, thanks to all the lessons his life had provided. And it required a deliberate decision to proceed with something that he truly believed was fundamentally unreliable.
Beliefs that had truly become embedded in his DNA – unlike that joke he’d remembered seconds ago.
There was now, however, what felt like real envy that other peoplecouldbelieve and weave it into their lives to live those moments that would shine forever. He wanted to know what it felt like to drown in someone’s eyes. To let himself fall. To find out whether, if you really fell in love and you didn’t crash, was that the way humans, internally at least, learned to fly?
They were moving through lemon trees now in a terraced garden and, as if his thoughts had manifested it, he could see another charming stone cottage.
Tilly caught the expression on his face.
‘It’ssi mignon, oui? So cute. I love this house.’
‘Come and live in it,’ Ellie said. ‘We’ve been talking about renting it out for ages. It’s a house that needs to be lived in.’
Tilly shook her head. ‘I’m happy where I am in Vence, for now, anyway. You won’t have any trouble finding people who will want to stay here. It’s adorable.’
It was. Angus looked at the small terrace with a little table and chairs beneath the shade of a tree, and the French doors that were wide open, inviting them to step inside.
‘Come in.’ Ellie added her own invitation and Angus followed her into the kitchen. ‘I’ll just go and shut the bedroom windows upstairs.’
Angus walked past a big cupboard and dining table to stand in a living room. It had a very comfortable-looking leather sofa and a fireplace. The floor was covered in rustic-looking terracotta tiles and the front door was also open, showing a burst of flowers from a rose outside and a lavender-lined path leading to the road.
It felt welcoming.
Homely.
Unbidden, an echo of something Tilly had said to him yesterday surfaced.
‘You could do your work from anywhere, couldn’t you?’
‘Ellie did most of the renovations here,’ Tilly told him. ‘It’s why she stayed in France and then she met Julien, who lived next door, and the rest –c’était le destin. It was meant to be.’
Ellie and the little dog came down the stairs in time to hear what Tilly was saying.
