Page 16 of Liaison with the Champagne Count
But she saw now how her time had not been her own. It had been the price of being absorbed entirely into Garrett’s life. She’d liked their life, but she was liking this new life of hers, too. She had a chance to discover whoshewas, and who she was becoming. This was an unexpected gift, something she’d not known she wanted.
Women were passed so swiftly from man to man there was seldom time for them to know their own minds. A girl left the schoolroom at eighteen to enter Society with the express purpose of finding a husband so that she could be transferred from a father’s responsibility to a husband’s. Should that fail, as it had in her case when Garrett died, a girl would return to her family’s care once more. But Garrett had freed her from that cycle with this chateau. He’d given her a place where she could be herself, whoever that might be, and it touched her deeply that he’d understood her so well as to recognise her need to be her own person.
Her vision blurred at the thought of her husband’s kindness. It was an extraordinary gift he’d left her, but it was also extraordinarily lonely. Was she meant to spend her days alone? To never know the comfort of companionship that she’d known with Garrett? She’d always appreciated him, but in hindsight, she saw how truly rare their marital friendship had been. It set a dilemma for her. How would she find another man to equal Garrett? And if she did, how would she honour the relationship she’d had with Garrett by putting another in his place? Would that diminish Garrett’s memory?
She swiped at the tears that stung her eyes and set aside Bidet’s treatise. She’d read well past lunch and clearly her thoughts were beginning to wander. Emma moved towards the wide library windows that looked out over the vineyards, noting that the sun had come out from behind the clouds at last. Movement in the vineyard caught her eye. It was Julien, strolling the vines, dressed in his work clothes, a battered hat on his head. Perhapsstrollingwasn’t the right word. Strolling implied a sense of laziness and there wasn’t a lazy, idle bone in Julien’s body. If her days were her own, his days were ruled by the grapes.
Julien was up with the sun, walking the vineyards each morning, something she knew only because she asked,notbecause she’d witnessed it first-hand. He was up and gone long before she took her breakfast. Their paths would not cross until the afternoons and only if she went to the cellars. His afternoons were spent in his offices there, something she’d discovered on one of her many visits to the wine caves beneath the chateau. He would come out and greet her as she toured the caves, but he never invited her into his space. She told herself it was because the space was small and cramped and he was a busy man. To prove, one had only to know that he spent his early evenings walking the rows again. She told herself she should not begrudge him his afternoons when she had his evenings.
Supper was fast becoming her favourite time of day at the chateau, the one time of day when their worlds merged, the one time they were together. She enjoyed those evenings more than she probably ought to. She thought he enjoyed them too, although probably not as much as she. After all, she was the one who’d initiated them. She’d sent the first invitation the day following their picnic, on the grounds of wanting to discuss the reading he’d recommended.
She’d started with Diderot’s encyclopaedia and read his description of the influence of land on winegrowing, her mind filled with questions prompted by the reading. She wanted to know more. As she read Diderot, the voice in her head became Julien’s, reading the entries out loud just as he’d lectured her on the grapes the day of the picnic. She’d read the books but what she really wanted was for Julien to harness the extraordinary amount of knowledge he possessed in that dark, tousled head of his and teach her himself.
Those dinners became the high point of her days. After mornings and afternoons of self-guided learning, the evenings were a time to practice her knowledge. Dinners turned into tastings. She prepared menus that required her to broaden her scope of wine knowledge, to challenge her palate, to become more discerning, all under Julien’s guidance. Then, the debates would begin, sometimes at the table, sometimes in the library, where she had her books and notebooks at hand.
They might debate tasting rules: Could someone serve a red wine with fish? Or they might debate wine lore: Did the English really discover champagne first? She rather thought there was decent evidence to suggest that was true. The English had imported still wines and deliberately added sugar to it for fizz. She proudly cited the Christopher Merret treatise in support. But Julien insisted champagne’s origins were French even if the process had been codified in England before being refined back in France. It had been a rousing discussion, one that made her smile even now, days later.
But despite those meals followed by those wondrous evening debates, Julien made no further overture to partnership. Each evening the connection between them would surge in the enjoyment of one another’s company and her hopes would surge along with it. She would think: perhaps tomorrow would be the day he’d want to discuss the June event, or show her the books, or discuss the business he’d been running for Garrett. But each morning, he was gone from her again, out walking the fields, conducting his business without a thought for her until evening.
Sometimes she felt as if she were living a fairy tale where the princess lived in a lovely chateau of her own, the master of the house only appearing for evening meals to quiz her. She did not carry those stories to their conclusions where, based upon scintillating dinner conversation, the princess fell in love with the ogre despite his looks. Julien’s looks were fine—quite handsome when he took the time, and quite appealingly rugged when he did not.
It was his aloofness that she struggled with. If she’d not invited him to supper, would he have ignored her entirely? That gave her pause. Perhaps the mistake was hers. Perhaps she should not wait for an invitation to take part in the day-to-day running of the vineyards. She’d already been waiting several weeks. It was nearly April. How much longer should she wait? There were consequences for not waiting; not waiting would risk the perception that she was shouldering her way into his territory, something he’d been sensitive to since the first night.
It would be far better if he invited her in, which was why shewaswaiting. But at some point, she could wait no longer for him to do the inviting, even if barging in would hurt both their feelings. This was why one did not mix business with pleasure. She had imagined the beginnings of a friendship and had imagined such a friendship entitled her to certain considerationswhile he clearly did not, indifferent perhaps to whether they spent their evenings together.
She watched him stop to study a vine, then his head bent, leaning against a nearby post, and his broad shoulders sagged. At this distance, he seemed tired, vulnerable, as if the weight he carried had suddenly broken him. The thought taunted her, her mind unable to tolerate the idea of a defeated Julien. Julien was strong and contrary, a stone wall to batter away at endlessly with her ideas and questions.
Was something wrong with the vines? Was there a blight? That was the word, wasn’t it, for grape diseases? Did blights happen before the grapes even blossomed? But there was no time to look through her notebooks. Whatever was happening down there, he wasn’t going to face it alone. She took a final look out the window and raced for the stairs, stopping only to grab a shawl. These were her vineyards; she ought to face whatever was down there with him. And it was the perfect time to delicately remind him who was truly in charge.
‘Julien!’ The sound of her voice startled him into lifting his head. He spun around to see Emma, hatless, pelting towards him, skirts lifted high to show bare legs and half-boots, the ends of her shawl flapping wildly. ‘What is it?’ She panted breathlessly, her words coming out in a worried rush as she bent, a hand clasped to her waist. ‘I saw you from the window.’
‘You were watching me?’ He smiled, in part because she looked so delightfully mussed compared to the usual perfection of her, the usual control.
‘I was looking at the vineyard, you just happened to be in it.’ She straightened, her breathing evening out. She shot him a dagger stare with her quicksilver eyes. ‘That is beside the point. You looked distressed. What has happened?’ Ah, there it was, the sharp tongue, the feistiness he’d become used to over their supper debates. She’d taken to her reading assignments with gusto, ingesting the tomes at an impressive speed and with an even more impressive level of comprehension. She wasn’t afraid to test him with her new knowledge.
‘But youwereworried about me.’ He couldn’t resist one further tease.
Her brows scrunched. She was starting to second-guess her conclusion. ‘Are you not in distress? Is something not wrong with the grapes? You bent your head, your shoulders sagged.’
She’d been studying him in detail. Her observations rather stunned him, touched him. When had someone paid that close attention to him? Had a woman ever? Usually, a woman’s attention went as far as his title, assuming he was in possession of it. And when he didn’t have the title...well, the last four lonely years were proof of how that went. But Emma Luce had watchedhim.
‘No, I am not in distress. You could say I am in relief.’ He directed her attention to the vine. ‘Look, there’s sap.’ He couldn’t stop grinning now that the initial relief had passed and reality had settled. ‘Do you remember what that means?’ It was his turn to watch her now as she bent towards the vine, her eyes riveted on it.
She flashed her gaze at him, a smile taking over her face as she proudly announced, ‘Budburst.’ He watched laughter bubble up in her, watched it bring a spark to her eyes, a light to her smile, and he thought he’d not truly seen her alive until this moment. ‘It means spring is beginning, the vines are alive,’ she quoted him. ‘The grapes will start growing.’ Her enthusiasm was infectious and rivalled his own. He’d been worried for a week now; budburst had come much later than he’d anticipated. He’d begun to believe something had happened in the winter to kill the vines.
‘How wondrous,’ she breathed, and he had the sense that she meant so much more than the wonder of the grapes, that the wonder extended to celebrating not only the grapes, but life, and simply being here. Her gaze held his, her smile widened, dominating her features until she shone like a dazzling star. ‘We will make wondrous wine this year, Julien, I just know it!’
The moment got the better of them. She was in his arms, her face turned up to his, her arms twined about his neck in what could only be termed as a hug. Emma Luce washugginghim, and he was hugging her back. He may even have given her a little spin around in his enthusiasm over the grapes, over her. She laughed up at him, the sound full of life, just before she kissed him, on the cheek of course, an enthusiastic peck of celebration. It felt good. It felt right, and that made it not only wrong, but perilous. How did one come back from this line once it was crossed?
Chapter Eleven
‘What shall we discuss tonight?’ Julien spoke the usual words as they made their way into the dining room that evening, but she did not miss the forced casualness with which those words were infused. She’d overstepped herself in the vineyard and they’d both felt its effects.
‘I thought we might discuss Chaptal now that I’ve completed reading his treatise, and because you seem to dislike the fellow.’ She strove to match his casual tones, strove to set aside what it had felt like to be surrounded by the strength of his embrace, what it had felt like to look up into his face and see another man entirely—a man open to joy. He’d looked younger in those moments. Of course, he was still young, not yet forty.
How old was he? Thirty-five? Thirty-eight? Julien had a rather timeless quality to him. That she was trying to pin down a specific age spoke to her growing curiosity over him on a more personal level, a curiosity that had been piqued the day of the picnic, hearing stories of him as a schoolboy in England.
You think about him too much,came the scold.Face the evidence.You know his schedule, and you look forward to the evening meal because those debates are with him.
