back home.”
An hour later Elena stood on the road overlooking the village, rubbing her sore foot where the wooden sabot pinched the nub of her missing toe. From where she stood the town looked much the same as it always had. The abbey’s bell tower rose above the tile roofs like a compass pointing at the sky, while at street level the cobbled stonework buildings bore the burnished patina of centuries of wear. But smaller changes disoriented her once she reached the main street. There had been a metalwork sign—a dragon with elaborate grape clusters draped about its neck—that hung over the door of the first shop after the bridge. A bit of whimsy, something from childhood she had always looked forward to seeing on her trips to the village. When very young she’d imagined the dragon winked back when she said hello, and once she mastered her magic, it actually did. But the sign was no longer there. Nor were the Aucoins who ran the shop inside.
Elena raised the hood on her cloak over her head and turned her face toward the empty shop glass as a man approached on the sidewalk. She didn’t yet know what to expect from the village and its inhabitants. Would they recognize her? Would they wonder where she’d been? Would they even remember? The man, a banker as she recalled, didn’t even tip his hat as he passed, presumably taking her for the goatherd she pretended to be. Confident of her disguise, she limped past him to the place where the road split—one fork bending uphill toward the respectable shops and businesses, the other descending to the more unsavory end of the village, where there were no streetlamps to chase away the shadows.
At the top of the hill she spied a gentleman’s tavern. A man wanting to hide from the truth might spend a night and a day drinking in a place like that, she reasoned. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and peered inside at the half-filled room ripe with the aroma of onions and garlic and sour beer. A handful of men in patch-worn corduroy jackets and dingy white shirts with tab collars loitered at the bar, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and lifting warm glasses of beer to their mustached mouths. A few cocked their heads in her direction, but none let their eye linger for long. Not seeing Jean-Paul among them, she was forced to try the bistro, the general store, and the one small hotel, where she asked for him by name. But all shook their heads, saying he had not been in town for a week or more and, anyway, it was no business of a goatherd’s what a gentleman like Jean-Paul Martel did with his time.
She had never felt more like a stranger. The disguise had done its job, but she’d had little need for the charade. So many faces were unfamiliar to her. Three new houses had been built on the hillside, a perfumery had opened where a flower shop used to be, and a wine merchant on the corner sold bottles from Domaine du Monde that advertised “tastings.”
And then there was Pâtisserie d’Amour. She knew without entering that Tilda still ran the shop as its secret magic wafted out the door.
The smell of fresh-baked pain au chocolat hit her full in the face. The scent intoxicated, filling her with the same warmth she’d felt the night before. Temptation drifted under her nose, stirring a craving inside her like she’d never known. She yearned to taste the buttery sweetness in her mouth, feel the warm chocolate melt on her tongue, and lick the flaky crumbs from her lips. It frightened her how much she wanted to give in because she understood how the magic worked. Tilda’s magic wasn’t a love spell exactly, but if you caught a whiff of one of her confections and found the lure impossible to resist, it meant she’d tapped into your tastes and desires. But the craving only took hold if there was someone in your thoughts. Someone you were falling in love with. Someone basic and good and reliable, yet filled with surprising stubbornness.
Elena began to cross the street toward the shop, her will not her own, when a horse and wagon thundered past, forcing her to step back. That moment of disruption wrenched her loose from the spell, and she backed away from the pâtisserie. Covering her nose and mouth with the end of her cloak, she darted