The Paris Apartment, page 22
“Choose, then,” Estelle said loudly as his hands closed over the cool silk. “Those dresses are all gifts from Reichsmarschall Göring. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”
The sergeant snatched his hand away as if he’d been burned and stared at Estelle.
She smiled prettily back. “The Reichsmarschall is very fond of couture,” she told him. “And he said he thought I looked like an angel in that dress. Perhaps your wife will too. Look like an angel, that is. I will tell him that.”
He closed the wardrobe with jerky movements. Colonel Meyer’s name had merely given him pause. The mention of Göring had had the intended effect.
Amid all the lies, sometimes the truth was the most useful.
The officer slid his pistol back into its holster. He retraced his steps through the apartment, Estelle trailing after him.
Frau Hoffmann was still skulking in her doorway, bouncing her fussing daughter. She glanced up, seemingly crestfallen when Schwarz returned empty-handed. “Did you find where she’s hidden them?” she demanded. “The traitors? Because I know she has.”
“There is nothing here.” The sergeant stared hard at Estelle, as if trying to understand what she was. Socialite, singer, whore, mistress, German sympathizer, or all of the above. Or maybe something else entirely. “But I won’t stop looking. Traitors will always be traitors. People don’t change.”
Chapter
16
Gabriel
Norfolk, England
8 July 2017
Millbrook House hadn’t changed in two hundred years.
Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate, Gabriel reflected, for the house had electricity and modern plumbing, and a collection of ride-on lawn mowers and small tractors now lived in the outbuildings where horses had once dwelled. But every time he came here, he liked to envision the people who had built this house.
There would have been a small army of skilled labourers who had crafted the beautiful manor, and no expense had been spared with an eye to design. The house was three stories, rows of large, rectangular windows set uniformly into the rich burnt-umber stone and topped by a smooth slate roof. The center of the house was dominated by a wide expanse that extended forward from the wings, rising to a triangular roofline with small crenellations on top, giving it a slightly medieval flair. A massive arched doorway at the bottom welcomed guests in grand style.
But it was the location that awed their visitors. Set up on a gentle rise and surrounded by carefully maintained and manicured gardens that had once made the cover of the BBC Gardeners’ World magazine, Millbrook had a breathtaking view of the sea. Stretching away until the water joined the horizon in a merging of cerulean and azure on bright days, lead and silver on broody days, the vista never grew tiresome.
“Oh,” breathed Lia as they turned off the main road and started the easy climb up the long, tree-lined drive. “What a beautiful spot.”
“It is,” Gabriel agreed, glancing over at her in the passenger seat. She had her nose pressed against the glass with the excitement of a small child, and it made him smile.
The ride up from London had been passed in relaxed companionship, some of it in comfortable silence, other parts in easy conversation. She’d been waiting outside for him when he’d fetched her from her hotel in the morning, and it had been easy to pick her out of the crowd long before he pulled up in front of the aging building. She was wearing another one of the pretty sundresses she seemed to favour, this one a deep emerald shot through with a swirling lawn-green pattern. It made her eyes seem more green than brown today, her cheeks flushed with color above her familiar smile. She’d tossed a well-travelled pack in the backseat of his car and slid into the passenger seat, and he’d had the alarming sensation of butterflies waking beneath his ribs.
As they drove, Lia had told him about her work and the many places it had taken her. In turn, she’d asked Gabriel dozens of questions about restoration, his schooling, and his travels. All light and easy-to-answer queries, and he wondered if that was on purpose. She did not raise the question of his own art again, nor did she inquire any further about the two paintings she’d asked him to sell to her.
Gabriel’s knuckles tightened on the steering wheel as he turned up the drive to Millbrook. The idea that she admired his work enough to buy it was oddly thrilling. He hadn’t had any plans at all for those two pieces, so it wasn’t as though he regretted parting with them. But he’d meant what he’d said when he had made it clear in no uncertain terms he would not fall into the trap his grandfather and father had. Yet somehow Lia had turned his own words back on themselves and presented an argument that seemed unbeatable.
“Do you have an event here this weekend?” Lia asked, twisting back in her seat and yanking him out of his ruminations.
“A wedding,” he replied, glancing at the staff who were setting up a gauzy white arbour and rows of white folding chairs near the center of the gardens. “And a movie shoot this week.”
She rubbed her hands over her bare knees. “You must be booked solid over the summer.”
“Elaine tells me we are.” He guided the car past a florist’s lorry and toward a small lane guarded by a sign stating that only employees were allowed past this point. “Elaine is our events coordinator,” he explained. “She lives on the property in a converted cottage, and she is very good at what she does. My mother hired her almost fifteen years ago when she expanded the business from a small bed-and-breakfast. We now have the capacity to host much larger occasions like weddings, and we’ve opened the house up to the film industry.” He followed the narrow road around the back of the house, bringing the car to a stop in a small lot where four other cars sat gleaming in the sunshine. “Elaine has systems and org charts and processes that only her assistants dare mess with, and even then, I’m not so sure there aren’t bodies of assistants who messed just a little too much buried somewhere in the gardens.”
Lia laughed. “What does your grandfather think of all this?”
“My grandfather doesn’t have anything to do with the business, of course, and he lives entirely in the suite of rooms on the west corner of the manor. But I think he likes having people around. I think he enjoys knowing that the house is loved and utilized. It was my grandmother who first opened the house to weekend guests. Both she and my mother were of the same mind that a house of this size needed to work for our family if it was ever going to be sustainable.” He paused, pulling up on the parking brake with far more force than was necessary. “That, and the fact that their respective husbands were chasing an unsustainable, entirely futile career path.”
“Ah.” Lia didn’t comment on his last words and instead simply got out of the car and shaded her eyes as she squinted up at the manor. “That’s a lot of space to heat in the winter.”
Gabriel unfolded himself from his own seat. “You sound exactly like my mother. She looks at this house and sees an accounting sheet full of neat numbers and sums.”
“Then I’ll take that as a compliment.” She dropped her hand, her lips twisting into a wry smile. “I, too, am rather partial to neat numbers and sums.”
Gabriel leaned on the door of the car and watched Lia as she spun in a slow circle, taking in her surroundings. He suddenly had the urge to paint her just like this—the green of her dress a jewel floating against a backdrop of fern and olive that comprised the lawns and vegetation behind the house. The curve of her soft rose-colored lips, the halo of amber and gold around her head where the sunshine illuminated the flyaway wisps that had come loose from her ponytail.
His fingers curled, as if he held a brush in his hand.
“Do you think I could look at the gardens and the view out front before we go in? Just for a moment? Before they finish setting up?”
Gabriel straightened and cleared his throat, pressing his fingers flat on the roof of the car. “Of course. Come, follow me.”
He resisted the urge to reach for her hand and instead simply waited for her as she skirted the car. They walked back up the lane, their feet crunching on the gravel.
“Are you a lord of something?” she asked conversationally as they rounded the side of the manor. “I meant to ask that earlier.”
Gabriel glanced at her. “A lord?”
“This house is rather lordlike. And it sounds like it’s been in your family a long time. It seemed like a reasonable possibility.”
“Alas, I am not a lord of anything,” Gabriel told her. “Nor is anyone in my family. Though the house was intended for one.”
“Really? Who?”
“As my grandfather tells it, a rather self-absorbed viscount who decided, on something of a whim, to build himself a fine manor in 1814. Unfortunately, also on a whim, his lordship decided that he would look quite majestic in a military uniform. Despite his family’s horrified protestations, he purchased himself a commission, marched off to Belgium in 1815, and, regrettably, did not survive the French. The house was never completed, fell into disrepair, and the viscount’s family eventually sold it to the first person with enough money and the ambition to take on an unfinished pile of brick and stone. It’s been in my family ever since.”
“So the house outranks you,” she teased.
“Completely.” He led her into the neat maze of low hedges and past the arbour that was now upright. Two young women were twining white roses into the pillars. “You have an interest in the British peerage?”
Lia shrugged. “A passing one, maybe. Leftover remnants of my boarding school days, perhaps, when such things seemed to matter.”
Gabriel suddenly understood. “Ah. That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Your English is remarkably English.”
“Dr. Sullivan would be very pleased to hear you say that. She was the headmistress.”
“But you were born in France?”
“Yes, in Marseille.”
“Yet you attended English boarding school.” He phrased it less as a question and more as a comment, leaving it up to her if she wished to answer.
“Because my parents were away so often, boarding school seemed like the best option. They told me that it was important that I have a fluency in multiple languages. That I would appreciate the opportunities it afforded later on in life. They weren’t wrong.”
They had reached the edge of the garden, ringed by deep green hydrangeas covered in a riot of snow-white blooms. Narrow openings were spaced between them, and Lia slipped through one, Gabriel following her. Here, just on the other side of the garden, the view of the sea was unimpeded. The breeze was picking up, perfuming the warm air with a bouquet of sweet floral fragrances, rich tones of recently turned earth, and a subdued salty tang from the sea. Behind them a bee droned as it worked, and, above, a seabird shrilled as it wheeled across the sky.
“When I was young, I spent an Easter with my roommate’s family farther up the coast in Scarborough,” Lia said, closing her eyes, tipping her face up to the sun, and inhaling deeply. “It smelled exactly like this.”
“You didn’t spend those holidays with your family?” Gabriel asked and then regretted it immediately. All he had done was to repeat what she had just told him in a slightly accusing manner. The dynamics of her family were none of his business.
“My parents have always spent March to May in Portugal.” Lia opened her eyes, and if she was offended by his question, she didn’t show it. “Though they head to their chalet in Switzerland for the summers before it can get too hot. That’s when I would go back to Marseille to stay with Grandmère, because she never travelled.”
“Never?” Gabriel tried again to reconcile the photos of a vibrant, daring Estelle Allard he had seen in that Paris apartment with the sedentary picture Lia was painting of her grandmother.
“Not while I knew her. Though my mother told me that, when she was a child, Grandmère would go to Switzerland all the time. At least three or four times a year. As she got older, it was only once or twice, and then, eventually, she stopped altogether.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why she went or why she stopped. She didn’t take my mother with her when she went.”
“And your parents never took you with them on any of their travels either—” Gabriel snapped his mouth shut. He sounded like a judgemental idiot. Again. Just because his family did everything together didn’t mean everyone else’s did.
Lia shrugged, ostensibly still not bothered by his lack of tact. “No.”
“That sounds…lonely.”
“Sometimes, maybe. But you get used to being alone, I suppose. And often I had friends to stay with. And it’s hard to complain or be ungrateful when I know I was given the best education money could buy. It’s taken me far. No pun intended, because I have literally worked all over the globe.”
Gabriel plucked a leaf from the hydrangea bush, thinking that the woman beside him would find the silver lining in anything that was thrown her way. It was an exceedingly admirable trait. And exceedingly attractive.
He held the leaf between his fingers. “Your grandmother must have liked the company during those summers.”
“She did. And the older I got, the more I understood that.” She rubbed her bare arms with her hands. “There was a period in my life, mostly when I was an oblivious teenager, when I resented those summers. When I had to decline invitations from my schoolmates who were going vacationing in Monaco or sailing in Spain or touring in Italy. I think, at that time, I saw it as a prison. A cage from which I could not escape.”
“And now?”
“Now I think differently. There were no hugs and kisses and excited exclamations when I arrived in Marseille. But Grandmère was always there at the train station to meet me, waiting on the platform before my train even pulled in. At home, the sheets in my room had always been freshly laundered, there was always a vase of cut lilies next to the bed, and the ancient bicycle that she kept in her shed out back always had fresh oil on the chain and not a speck of dust on the frame. And there was always a stack of new books, a collection of truly diverse nonfiction titles, with a little note in her handwriting suggesting what I might find intriguing about each one.” Lia smiled in remembrance.
“You are an avid reader?”
“I became a reader. The purpose of the books, she always said, was not to learn what other people thought but to learn to think for myself. And whether she knew it or not, over time, she created a place for me. And I know this sounds a little backwards, but knowing I had that place made it easier for me to leave. Gave me the confidence and the freedom to venture far.”
“What about your grandfather? You’ve never mentioned him.”
“Never knew him. He died long before I was born, when my mother was still young. He was a prisoner for a time during the war. His health suffered afterward.”
“And your grandmother never remarried?”
“Nope.” She put her hands on her hips. “‘You only meet the love of your life once,’ she said to me on the rare occasions when I asked. ‘And if you’re fool enough not to recognize that sort of love and treasure it for what it will become, then you never deserved it in the first place.’”
“That sounds tragically romantic.”
Lia inclined her head. “Dramatic, at any rate.” She gestured out toward the sea. “This is breathtaking. If I had to get married, I’d get married here.”
“If you had to? I didn’t take you for another romantic, Mademoiselle Leclaire.”
She arched a brow and glanced at him. “Is that sarcasm I detect?”
“You make the institution of marriage sound like an incarceration.”
“Have you been?”
“Incarcerated or married?”
She laughed. “Either.”
“No. And no.”
“Engaged?”
“No.”
“Ever been tempted?”
The leaf tore between his fingers.
“Sorry. That was a personal question and none of my business.”
“No, it’s all right,” Gabriel replied. “The truth of the matter is that my work has always been a priority.”
“Now that I can completely understand,” she said, “and endorse. Though I suspect you get far fewer well-meaning admonishments about your ticking biological clock than I do.”
“Jesus.” He tossed the shredded leaf away. “I’m sorry. People can be utter prats.”
She gave one of her very French shrugs. “I ignore them. Not worth my time or energy.”
“Have you? Ever been tempted?” He had no idea why he was asking this, other than that she had asked him first.
“No. I’ve never stayed in one place long enough for a serious relationship.”
“Would you?”
“Would I what?”
“Stay. Would you stay if you met the love of your life? If you recognized what it might become, like your grandmère said?” He was veering into dangerous territory here, places he had no business going with Lia—a client. Yet for some reason, he wanted to know what Lia the woman would say.
Her hands dropped from her hips. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
He met her eyes, his mouth suddenly dry. He stepped back. “Come,” he said, hoping his voice sounded smoother than it felt. “Let’s go inside, and I’ll introduce you to my grandfather.” He took another step back for good measure. “He may ask you a million questions about your job and where you’ve travelled but I can guarantee that he will not inquire about your biological clock.”
