this is all you’ve brought with you?’
‘I put some of my things in storage.’
‘In case it doesn’t work out here.’ He nodded. ‘It’s sensible to play it safe.’
It sounded like a compliment, yet it felt like an insult. She decided not to rise to the bait. ‘Did you get the proposals I emailed you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
In other words, he was going to be difficult. ‘How was your business meeting?’ she asked.
‘Fine, thank you.’
She coughed. ‘Vineyard business, would that be?’
‘No, actually.’
Infuriating man. Would it really kill him to tell her?
As if he read her mind, he smiled. ‘All right, if you must know, I bunked off for the afternoon and had lunch with Marc.’
‘Marc, as in Monsieur Robert? Harry’s—my lawyer?’ she corrected herself.
‘We didn’t discuss you,’ he told her loftily.
She scowled. ‘You know, sometimes you can be so obnoxious.’
‘No, really?’ He slanted her a look as he put her cases into the back of his four-wheel drive. There was the tiniest, tiniest quirk to his lips, a hint of mischief in his eyes—just like the Xav she remembered from years ago, rather than the wary stranger he’d become—and suddenly she found herself smiling back.
‘Welcome back to France. Come on, I’ll drive you home,’ he said.
Home. Was he being polite, or did he mean it? She wasn’t sure.
‘What happened to your sports car?’ she asked as she climbed into the passenger seat. The one his father had bought him for passing his driving test, an ancient classic car with a soft top. The one in which he’d driven her all round the Ardèche, showing her all the beauty spots—from the natural wonder of the Pont d’Arc, a huge stone arch across the Ardèche river, through to the Chauvet Grotto with its incredible thirty-thousand-year-old cave paintings, and the beautiful lake in an old volcano crater at Issarles.
‘It wasn’t practical,’ he said, surprising her. ‘This is.’
‘Practical?’ She didn’t follow. Practical had never been a consideration. Xav had loved that car. He’d chosen it in favour of a new one, and restored it with the help of Michel, who owned the garage in the village and had sighed with Xavier over how beautiful the car was. She and Guy had teased him mercilessly about the amount of attention he gave the car, but he’d never risen to the bait. He’d simply smiled and polished the chrome a little bit more.
‘Sometimes I need to use my car off road, and sometimes I need to take a few cases of wine to a customer.’
‘This has rather expensive upholstery for a delivery van,’ she remarked.
‘What do you expect me to do, use a pushbike and trailer?’
She had a vision of him doing just that and smiled. ‘Well, hey, that’d be the eco way of doing things.’
‘This car is as eco as a four-wheel drive gets, right now.’
‘This is an eco car?’ she asked, surprised.
‘It’s a hybrid,’ he explained. ‘I put my money where my mouth is. The vineyard’s organic. I carry the ethos through to the rest of my life, too.’
A life she’d once thought to share. A life she knew nothing about.
Not that she wanted to tell him that, so she subsided and looked out at the countryside as Xavier drove, the fields full of sunflowers and lavender becoming hillier and full of vines and chestnut trees as they travelled deeper into the Ardèche.
Two suitcases really weren’t much. Xavier knew women who needed more than that for a week’s holiday, and Allegra was supposed to be here for the next two months. Was she going back to London again to bring more things over, or had she arranged to have things shipped? Or wasn’t she planning to stay? ‘What are you going to do about transport while you are over here?’ he asked.
‘I assume Harry still has his 2CV. I’ll get that insured for me to drive.’
Harry’s old banger? She had to be joking. ‘He hasn’t used it for years. You’ll need to get a mechanic to look at it and check it over before you drive it—that’s if it’s still driveable.’ He gave her an enquiring glance. ‘Why didn’t you bring your car over from England?’
‘I don’t have a car. I don’t need one in London; I use public transport,’ she explained.
‘What if you had to go away?’
‘If it was on company business, I used a hire car.’
Knowing that it was none of his business, and yet unable to leave it alone, he asked, ‘So why did you resign? Why not just take a sabbatical?’
‘I don’t think the MD would have been too keen on that.’
‘Your boss?’
Her lip curled. ‘For the last six months, anyway.’
‘You worked elsewhere before then?’
‘No.’ She sighed. ‘Peter took over the agency, about a week after my boss—the Head of Creative—went on sick leave. I was Acting Head in his absence.’
‘And now your boss is back?’
‘He didn’t come back,’ Allegra said softly. ‘He decided it was too much stress, so he took early retirement, two months ago.’
‘And you took his place?’
‘That was the idea. But Peter brought someone else in. Clearly he’d been planning it for a while.’
Her words were cool and calm, but he could hear the hurt in her voice. In her position, he would’ve been furious: doing a job for months, on a promise that it would be his, and then having it snatched away. Why hadn’t Allegra fought back? ‘Peter being this MD?’
She nodded.
The expression on her face told him more. ‘He was the one who made you go to New York before Harry’s funeral.’ It was a statement rather than a question.
She swallowed. ‘He said I had to prove myself to the company.’
‘But you’d been Acting Head for…?’ He paused for her answer.
‘Five months.’
‘So you’d already proved that you could do the job.’
She shrugged. ‘That wasn’t how he saw it. And he’s the MD. What he says, goes.’
‘And everyone else in the agency gets on with him?’
‘No, but they put up with him. It’s not exactly easy to change jobs in the current economic climate.’
‘So if Harry hadn’t left you the vineyard, what would you have done?’ Xavier asked, curious.
‘Probably found myself another job. And worked out where I could get a reference.’
Xavier blinked. ‘He refused to give you a reference?’
‘Not refused, exactly. But he could have written a reference that would’ve made any prospective employer have second thoughts about me.’
‘Then you could have sued him for defamation.’
‘Mud sticks,’ she said. ‘And would you employ someone who’d sued her previous employer? Doesn’t that just scream “troublemaker” at you?’