The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,7

any more, Luc. It’s just Poppy.’

Luc stood up and Gabriel flinched again. ‘Well, I go. I will call Poppy, maybe I will see her tonight.’

‘I’ll tell her you came by.’ I stood up too, trying to shuffle him towards the front door.

Luc paused, looking out of the kitchen window. ‘There is a horse out there,’ he observed.

‘Patrick,’ Gabriel and I said together, him slightly muffled by two layers of tea towel.

Luc raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought you said our daughter would be a horse person over your dead body?’

He said it as though it was a personal accusation. As though I’d spent all those years denying our daughter an experience from sheer bloody-mindedness, rather than the fact that London wasn’t exactly known for its acres of free riding space. Yes, there were riding schools, but…

‘He’s mine,’ Gabriel said nasally. ‘Just staying for a few days.’

Another Gallic shrug, as though Luc had forgotten all those arguments over what Poppy should be allowed to do. As though nothing I had said had ever been important or taken notice of. But then, here was a man who’d promised to love me forever. Who’d met and married me during my year in France where everything had seemed charmed and easy, whose money had greased wheels I hadn’t even known existed and whose charisma should have come with a health warning.

Gabriel and I sat in silence, listening to the rumble of Luc’s car engine as he slowly edged it around in the lane and headed back up the track towards civilisation and chilled Chardonnay. We stared at different parts of the room; my gaze was riveted on the crack in the deep enamel sink, he seemed to be finding the dresser on the opposite wall absolutely fascinating. The sun had moved out of the room now and the smell of damp was back. A few woodlice scurried busily across the stone floor, and I concentrated on those for a while.

‘Sorry about that,’ I said eventually. ‘My ex-husband and his lack of boundaries.’

‘It’s fine,’ came the muted reply.

‘How’s the nose?’

‘Um.’ The tea towel lifted. ‘It’s nearly stopped bleeding.’

‘I’m really sorry.’ The woodlice had shuffled off under the door to the walk-in pantry. I made a mental note to never keep anything that wasn’t in tins in there.

‘It was an accident.’ A cautious finger poked at the bridge of his nose. ‘It was, wasn’t it? I mean, you didn’t do it just to keep me captive here?’

‘Stephen King?’ I looked at him directly now.

‘Maybe. I read too much. Well, audio books, mostly. I’ve got a Kindle but it’s on about two words to a page.’ A bit of a grin appeared under the layers of cotton. His glasses were on the table and I could see again how thick the lenses were. ‘Eyesight’s not great.’

Without the glasses, and even with his nose swollen and his eye discoloured by the spreading bruise that the back of my head had caused, he looked model-like. Cheekbones like cheese wire and almond-shaped eyes that, in this now-shadowed room, looked almost black. Dark stubble outlined his jaw and highlighted his mouth. It seemed an awful shame to waste such good looks on me, who currently had as much desire to appreciate handsomeness as I did to take up deep-sea fishing. Which was none.

Luc was handsome. He’d also got an attractive accent. He was the kind of mistake I would only make once in a lifetime. Besides, for all I knew Gabriel was married, gay, asexual, violently insane and a narcissistic fantasist. I hoped, for his sake, that he wasn’t all of those simultaneously.

‘Well,’ I began. I didn’t know how to go about getting him out of my kitchen gracefully, particularly when I’d just broken his nose, given him a black eye and subjected him to Luc. ‘I ought to get on with, you know, stuff.’ I glanced at the bucket of now cold and scummy water in the corner where I’d been washing walls. I actually wanted a glass of wine and maybe a bacon sandwich, but felt that offering those to Gabriel would be tantamount to saying, ‘I’m a divorced woman in her mid-thirties who wants to work on a drink problem and gaining four stone in solitude and misery.’ So, I didn’t say anything.

‘What colour were you thinking of painting it?’ He was looking at the bucket too.

‘Not sure yet.’ Then, with some suspicion, because he was looking around the room again. ‘Why?’ I really hoped he wasn’t going to