Beatriz Williams - Along the Infinite Sea - Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read

“Can we go in?” I asked.

“We can try.”

The sun had not quite scaled the rooftops yet, and the terrace was in full shade. We walked up the path until an entrance came into view, interrupting the rough stone of the fort walls: a wide archway beneath a modest turret. There was no door, no impediment of any kind. A patch of white sun beckoned on the other side.

“Are there any soldiers about, do you think?”

“No, the garrison was disbanded some years ago, I believe. It is now a—I don’t know if there is some particular term in English—a monument historique . I suppose it belongs to the people of France.”

“Then it’s mine, because I am a person of France, after all,” I said, and I walked under the archway and up the stairs to the patch of light that squeezed between the corners of two buildings.

“But you are not simply a person of France, are you?” said Stefan, coming up behind me. “You are a princess of France.”

“That doesn’t mean anything anymore. We’re a republic. We shouldn’t even have titles at all. Anyway, I’m half American. It’s impossible to be a princess and speak like a Yankee.”

“It suits you, however. Especially now, when the sun is touching your hair.”

I stopped walking and turned to Stefan, who stopped, too, and returned my gaze. He was almost a foot taller than I was, and the sun had already found his hair and eyes and most of his face, and while he could sometimes look almost plain, because his bones were arranged so simply, in the full light of morning sunshine he was beautiful.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like you want me to kiss you.”

“But I do want you to kiss me.”

Stefan shook his head. “How can you be like this? No one in the world is like you.”

“I was going to say the same about you.”

He lifted his hand and touched the ends of my hair, and such was the extraordinary sensitivity of my nerves that I felt the stir of each individual root. “I don’t know how I am going to bear this, Annabelle,” he whispered. “How am I going to survive any more?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to disturb the delicate balance, one way or another. I took a step back, so I was standing against the barracks wall, which was already warm with sunshine, and Stefan followed me and raised his other hand to burrow into my hair, around the curve of my skull. His gaze dropped to my lips.

“ Alles ist seinen Preis wert, ” he said, and he lowered his face and kissed me.

I held myself still as his lips touched mine, lightly at first and then deeper, until he had opened me gently to taste the skin of my mouth. I didn’t know you could do that, I didn’t know you could kiss on the inside. I thought it was all on the surface. He tasted like he smelled, of champagne and cigarettes, only richer and wetter, alive, and I lifted my hands, which had been pressed against the barracks wall, and curled them around his waist, because I might never have the chance to do that again, to hold Stefan’s warm waist under my palms while his mouth caressed mine. He cradled the back of my head with one hand and the side of my face with the other, and he ended the kiss in a series of nibbles that trailed off somewhere on my cheekbone, and pressed his forehead against mine. I relaxed against the barracks wall and took his weight. A bird chattered from the ridgepole.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. Still alive.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t really know how to kiss.”

“Don’t ever learn.”

I laughed softly and held him close against my thin nightgown. The new sun burned the side of my face. I said, “I suppose your mistress wouldn’t be happy to see us now.”

Stefan lifted his head from mine. “As it happens, I do not give a damn what this woman thinks at the moment, and neither should you. But come. The groundskeepers will be coming soon, and then the tourists. It will be a great scandal if we are seen.”

“I don’t care.”

“But I do. I will not have Annabelle de Créouville caught here in her nightgown with her lover, for all the world to stare.” He gave my hair a final stroke and picked up my hand. “Can you walk all the way back in your bare feet, do you think?”

“Must we? I wanted to see the rest of the fort.”

“We will come back someday, if you like.”

His voice was warm in my chest. I wanted him to kiss me again, but instead I followed him around the corner of the barracks to the stairs. Your poor feet, he said, looking down, and I said, Your poor leg, and he kissed my hand and said, The lame leading the lame.

I said, I thought it was the blind, the blind leading the lame, and he said, I am not blind at all. Are you?

No, I told him. Not blind at all.

There were two weather-faced men smoking on the terrace when we passed under the arch. They looked up at us and nearly dropped their cigarettes.

“ Bonjour, mes amis, ” said Stefan cheerfully, and he bent down and lifted me into his arms and carried me the rest of the way, to hell with the wounded leg.

An hour later, we were standing inside the Isolde ’s tender, a sleek little boat with a racehorse engine, motoring across the sea to my father’s villa on the other side of the Cap d’Antibes. The wind whipped Stefan’s hair as he sat at the wheel, and the sun lit his skin. Against the side of the boat, the waves beat a forward rhythm, and the breeze came thick and briny.

We hardly spoke. How could you speak, after a morning like that? And yet it was only seven o’clock. The whole day still lay ahead. We rounded the point, and the Villa Vanilla came into view, white against the morning glare. Stefan brought us in expertly to the boathouse, closing the throttle so we wouldn’t make too much noise.

“I will walk you up the cliff,” he said. “I do not trust that path.”

“But I’ve climbed it hundreds of times. I walked down it in the dark, the night we met.”

“This I do not wish to think about.”

The house was silent when we reached the top. No one would be up for hours. There was a single guilty champagne bottle sitting on the garden wall, overlooked by the servants. Stefan picked it up as we passed and then looked over at the driveway, which was just visible from the side as we approached the terrace. “My God,” he said, stopping in his tracks. “Whose car is that?”

I followed his gaze and saw Herr von Kleist’s swooping black Mercedes, oily-fast in the sun. “Oh, that’s the general, Baron von Kleist. I’m surprised he’s still here. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself.”

“Von Kleist,” he said.

“Do you know him?”

“A little.”

We resumed walking, and when we had climbed the steps and stood by the terrace door Stefan handed me the empty champagne bottle and the small brown valise that contained my few clothes. “You see? You may tell your brother I have returned you properly dressed, with your virtue intact. I believe I deserve a knighthood, at least. The Chevalier Silverman.”

“What about me? I was the one who nursed you back to health, from the brink of death.”

“But you are already a princess, Mademoiselle. What further honor can be given to you?”

All at once, I was out of words. I was empty of the ability to flirt with him. I parted my lips dumbly and stood there, next to the door, staring at Stefan’s chin.

His voice fell to a very low pitch, discernible only by dogs and lovers. “Listen to me, Annabelle. I will tell you something, the absolute truth. I have never in my life felt such terror as I did when I saw you lying on that beach this morning in your white nightgown, surrounded by the rocks and that damned treacherous Pointe du Dragon.”