We’ll toast Monsieur Gardin at dinner tonight to make amends for spoiling the custom.”
“I’m sure he would appreciate that. Until then I’m off to gather a few supplies for a project I’m working on.” She swung the basket in her hand for emphasis.
Jean-Paul glanced up at the darkening sky. “Will you be all right walking by yourself?”
His genuine concern for her safety disarmed her. Odd how he could win her over in the most unpredictable moments. “I’ll be fine,” she said and even managed a smile. “I’ll return before dark.”
“Maybe I should accompany you.”
To see the worried expression on his face, as if she were a mere defenseless mortal in a dangerous world, made her almost sorry she’d had to use the wishing string on him. He wasn’t truly bewitched, but he wasn’t capable of seeing her for what she was, either—a witch who experimented with poison in her spare time so she could kill the former lover who’d betrayed her.
“No, that won’t be necessary,” she said and then saw he’d taken her answer as a rejection. “But perhaps next time?”
“Of course. Well, I’ll leave a lamp burning for you in the courtyard.” With nothing left to say, he shoved the witch bottle back in the bag and led the horse toward the stable.
Elena tucked her basket in the crook of her elbow and headed out the gate, wondering why she’d said that last thing. She had no reason to spare his feelings. Did she?
For someone who didn’t approve of spellcraft, this handsome mortal was very good at the charm business.
CHAPTER NINE
Jean-Paul had not lived with a woman for three years, not since his fledgling marriage had been allowed to fall apart under the new secular law. Now he lived with two. Yet when he’d first bought Château Renard and invited Ariella Gardin to continue on at the estate, the arrangement had felt little different than sharing a home with an elderly aunt. They complained about the weather when it rained, gossiped about the neighbors when it didn’t, and on Saturday evenings he endured her gentle teasing about being a bachelor as they ate their supper together in the kitchen with a glass of red wine from the cellar. Sometimes he’d wished he’d had the house to himself, of course, but most days he was happy for the company. With two women now coming and going in the house, there were days he barely knew how to navigate the hallways without feeling like a guest who’d overstayed his welcome.
From the first night, the Boureanu woman had slipped off to sleep in the cellar workroom—the room Madame had long claimed was a storage room full of useless broken equipment. During the day she came and went inside the main house as if she owned the place, but at night she always retreated to the workroom. Peculiar for a woman to want to sleep in such spartan surroundings on her own, but on reflection everything she did was slightly strange.
His curiosity had, of course, boiled over. While she and Madame went to finish pruning the old vines Monsieur Gardin had planted, he had tried the door to her room. He’d found it locked, as usual, and for a moment considered breaking the door down. He gave it a hard shove with his shoulder, testing, but the solid oak door might as well have been a tree still rooted in the ground.
He swore the house hummed with her energy. Even now, as she sat at the dining room table with Madame, a pile of charts and maps spread out under the light of a work lamp, a wave of static electricity skittered along the hairs on his arm. He never quite knew what to make of the phenomenon. Or of her. She completely disarmed him, and yet not in the way a woman normally did. Despite Madame Gardin’s chiding, he had courted a few women from the village. He wasn’t shy around a woman if he was touched by desire. He would charm her with witty compliments, smile and take her to dinner, and more often than not accept an invitation to her bed. But this was something different. Despite the awkward revelation that he found Elena oddly attractive—and not because some woman who baked sweets for a living claimed to know his taste in lovers—he’d fought the impulse to act. He likened it to obeying the same instinct that warned one not to pick up a scorpion by the tail. Her allure