“No, no,” he said, shaking a finger. “After him. Joan told me about him. She said she couldn’t move you even to have that dinner. I think she decided to try a little-well, foreign intrigue. You were investigating a murder at the time. Some terrible thing at Lincoln Center, and it seemed rather foolish to try to take you away from that. Did you get your man?”
“I wish I could say she always does.”
“Yes, the police solved it.”
“So what kind of business are you in?” Nina wasn’t the least bit subtle in trying to get Luc’s pedigree.
“I own a restaurant. In Mougins. I do some consulting in Paris and New York. That’s why I’m here so often.”
“So, you wear the toque and the white jacket and sprinkle pepper in the pot and go ‘Bam!’?” Nina asked.
Luc laughed. “No, chere madame, I’m not an entertainer. I own the restaurant. I’m the executive chef, as we say, but I don’t do the cooking.”
“How many stars?” Nina asked.
“Michelin? Three stars, naturally,” he said playfully, feigning surprise that she even needed to inquire.
“Excellent,” she said. “I’m not going all that way to sample any one-star joint. Truffles?”
“In season, of course. From Perigord, not those ridiculous American ones you try to cultivate in North Carolina.”
“Your wine cellar?”
“Superbe.”
“It’s a very tough business. It’s so competitive,” Nina said. “How did you get into it?”
“The easy way,” he said, pocketing his glasses, so that the blue-gray eyes appeared to be more vivid. “I was born into it. Did you two ever know Lutece?”
The landmark French restaurant that had closed its elegant doors a couple of years ago had been the center of the culinary world in New York for four decades.
“Very well. Alex took me there the first time I came to the city on a business trip.”
“Andre Rouget?” Luc asked.
“America’s first superstar chef,” I said, thinking of the many special occasions in my life that had been feted in that wonderful town house on East Fiftieth Street.
“He’s my father. So you see, I had rather a good head start.”
“How divine it was,” Nina said. “I wish it hadn’t shut down.”
“Well, perhaps we can do something about that,” Luc said. “One of the things I’ve been exploring on these trips is the possibility of re-creating the restaurant.”
The music had started and the bridal couple made their way to the adjacent tent, which had been set up for the small band. When others joined in on the second number, Luc asked Nina to dance. She tried to resist and turn him over to me.
“When I hear a Smokey Robinson song,” he said, sounding ever so French as he pronounced my favorite Motown name, “then I understand I’m to come back for Alexandra.”
The next few hours were a seductive mix of dancing and dining, talking while trying to keep myself grounded as my heart fluttered for the first time since my ill-fated romance with Jake Tyler.
By the end of the evening, after Joan had tossed her bouquet and driven off with her groom, only a dozen of us were left on my deck.
“Would you like to take a walk?” Luc asked.
I stepped out of my heels and rested my empty glass on the ground, leading him to the footpath beyond my caretaker’s cottage. “Let’s go down to the water.”
I hadn’t felt this kind of electricity in a long time, but I knew I had to get off this one spot, this piece of earth that still called up Adam’s memory whenever I stood on it. I wanted to kiss Luc, I wanted to be held by him and caressed, and yet I wanted to pace this newfound excitement just as badly.
Nina saw us start to walk away and followed me to the top of the steps. “See you in the morning, mes amis,” she called out to us. “She’s really gotten rusty, Luc. Her French-I mean her French is rusty. Make her work on it.”
He picked up my hand as we walked down the grassy slope, neither saying a word until we reached the edge of the pond. The sand felt good underfoot, and I let go of Luc to wade into the shallow water, refreshed and a bit sobered by the cold June current that lapped over my feet.
I turned around and Luc took my face in his hands. Moonlight bounced off the surface of the pond, and for three or four minutes we just drank each other in while he held on to me and stroked the outline of my features. Then he started to brush at the tendrils of hair, wisps that had broken loose from my ponytail as we’d danced, that had curled around my forehead and the nape of my neck.
Gently but firmly, he put his lips down against my mine, kissing me over and over until I opened my mouth and kissed him in return. For more than an hour, we walked the shoreline and climbed slowly back up to the yard, stopping to taste each other from time to time, trying to slow ourselves down.
The lights were out in the guest bedrooms and my other friends had departed. I started to lead Luc back out to the deck. The night was too beautiful to waste on sleep.
Instead, he opened the screen door into the living room. “I know you won’t turn into a pumpkin, but I have very strict orders from Joan to send you off to sleep before it gets to be too late. She said you’re in the middle of a big trial and you must absolutely be tucked in by-”
Luc looked at his watch and uttered a completely Gallic “Ooof. You see? I lost all sense of time.”
“But we can sit up for a little longer.”
He put a finger up to my lips to quiet me. “I’ve got to pay attention to the rules or maybe I won’t be invited back. Your room is here?”
“Yes,” I said, walking through the kitchen and study. Luc followed behind me and took my arm as I opened the bedroom door to go inside.
He pressed me against the wall and kissed me again-harder this time-on my mouth. Then he nibbled at the top of my ear, smiling as he pushed me over the threshold and backed away. “Bonne nuit, ma princesse. Bonne nuit.”
18
“Sorry to bring you back early,” Mike said, closing the car door outside the shuttle terminal at noon on Sunday. “I think I need you for this interview. Festivities over?”
“Mostly.” I had been sitting on the deck of the Chilmark Store with Luc, drinking coffee, eating a blueberry muffin, and reading the Sunday Times when Mike had called. Switching my flight from evening to midday was simply a reality check. Holding people’s lives in our hands as we did with every serious case we handled, I never questioned the urgency of an interruption from Mike or Mercer. Today-leaving the Vineyard, and Luc-I felt as if I’d been wrenched out of paradise.
“Tell me about the call,” I said. I needed to focus on Mike’s new information, but last night’s hours with Luc had been one of those encounters that struck like a thunderbolt. “You think she’s for real?”
“The first one came in this morning. Peterson said she sounded legit.”
“Caller ID?”
“Yeah. Just a pay phone. But it’s right around the corner from the funeral home in the Bronx where Duke Quillian’s being waked, so that fits.”
“She asked for you specifically?”
“‘Detective Chapman. The man who locked up Brendan Quillian.’ That’s how she put it.”
“Did she give a name?” I knew I was missing a chance to let Luc’s magic work itself on me back in Chilmark, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that was a moment that would ever present itself to me again.
“Nope. Said she wouldn’t talk to anyone but me. Peterson told her to phone back in an hour, then called and told me to get myself back to the squad,” Mike said. “Something wrong? You look distracted.”
“Just tired. Has he got anyone sitting on the phone booth?”
