Sara Craven - Dawn Song

‘Tell me,’ he said softly, ‘why you were so reluctant to answer when I asked you to dine with me? There is a man in England, perhaps, who might cause—complications?’

Meg stared ahead of her. Tim Hansby? she thought with a kind of desperate amusement. She said shortly, ‘There’s no one.’

‘ Vraiment ?’ Jerome Moncourt sounded sceptical. ‘I cannot believe there is no one you care about.’

She shrugged, pride making her reluctant to admit that up to now she’d occupied a fairly undistinguished place on the shelf—that there were only two people she really cared about, she realised with a pang. A retired second-hand bookseller, and the elderly woman who’d taken the place of her mother, and given her the affection and comfort that her father, dazed with grief at the loss of his young wife, had been unable to bestow. For whose sake she was here in the first place. She swallowed. Not a lot to show for her twenty years, she thought. Although this was not the time to start feeling sorry for herself.

And what the hell? she argued inwardly. It’s nothing to do with him if I prevaricate a little. Although why she should wish to appear marginally more interesting than actual reality was something she didn’t want to examine too closely, she thought, biting her lip.

‘Does it make any difference?’ she challenged. ‘An invitation to dinner hardly constitutes a major breach of faith.’

She took a breath. ‘For all I know, you could be married.’

‘Would it matter if I was?’ he tossed back at her.

That sounded like hedging. Her heart plummeted in a dismay as acute as it was absurd.

‘I think it might matter a hell of a lot to your wife,’ she said curtly.

‘Then it is fortunate she does not yet exist.’ There was a note of mockery in his voice, mingled with something else less easy to decipher.

‘Fortunate for her, anyway,’ she muttered, self-disgust at the relief flooding over her making her churlish.

He clicked his tongue reprovingly. ‘That’s not kind. You don’t think I’d make a good husband?’

‘I can’t possibly tell on so brief an acquaintance.’ Meg kept her tone short. She knew he was laughing at her, even though his expression was serious, almost frowning.

‘But you have an ideal? What qualities should he possess? Would you require him to be faithful?’

Meg twisted the strap of her bag in her fingers. ‘I’d want him to love me, and only me, as I’d love him,’ she said at last. ‘I suppose that takes care of most things.’

‘It is certainly sweeping,’ Jerome said, after another pause. ‘And if, in spite of that love, another woman intervened—tried to take this paragon away from you—what would you do then? Make the sacrifice? Let him go?’

‘No,’ she said, fiercely. ‘I’d fight for him with everything I had.’

‘You would be ruthless?’ his voice probed softly. ‘Use any weapon?’

‘Of course.’ She hesitated uncertainly. ‘Why do you ask me all this?’

‘Because I wish to know, ma petite ,’ he said softly. ‘It is part of that journey of discovery I mentioned—to find that you would fight like a tigress for love.’

Again that odd note in his voice. Meg felt herself shiver. He noticed at once. ‘You are cold?’

‘Oh, no.’ She forced a smile. ‘Hungry, perhaps.’ She thought of her picnic lunch, crushed in the car.

‘You’ve been patient long enough. Now you shall be fed.’ He turned the car suddenly off the road, and on to a track leading downhill. Meg braced herself as the Citroën swayed and jolted over stones and deep ruts.

‘There’s actually a restaurant down here?’ she gasped. ‘I hope there’s another road out, or people’s meals won’t stay down for long.’

‘Not a restaurant.’ Ahead of them, bathed rose-pink in the sunset, there was a straggle of buildings, a chimney from which smoke uncoiled lazily in the still evening air.

‘Then where are we?’ They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, she realised with alarm. And isolated too. There were no other cars around that she could see, so it couldn’t be a very popular establishment.

‘This is my house.’ The mockery was back, full force. ‘The family mas I was telling you about.’

He paused. ‘I decided, ma belle , that we would dine at home tonight. Enjoy our mutual discoveries in private.’ He let that sink in, then added silkily, ‘I hope you approve?’

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