Keys to the Castle (33 page)

“Impossible,” he said flatly. “I won't allow it.”

She removed the reading glasses slowly. “Excuse me?”

“You can't mean to live there, Sara,” he said impatiently, “all by yourself. And I certainly can't have you in charge of a gaggle of foreign laborers—”

She started laughing. “What century are you from?”

“Besides, what about Alyssa?”

“She'll be in school.”

“In London.”

A silence as sharp as a guillotine fell over the room.

“I was going to tell you about it,” he said, with only the slightest edge in his voice. “I've enrolled her in an excellent girls' school for the fall. They have a superlative arts program and even horsemanship, should she care to take that up when she's older. She will be home on weekends and holidays. I thought we could take her to visit there the next time you come to town.”

She said evenly, “What's wrong with the school in Rondelais?”

And he replied, “It's in France.”

“She's French!”

“And I'm British. This is where I live. This is where . . .” He stopped on an indrawn breath, his brows drawing together sharply, because he realized he had never said it out loud to her before. “This is where I want you to live, and Alyssa. Here, with me.”

She simply stared at him. “But . . . what about Rondelais?”

He had no ready answer, and she must have seen that. “We can go there on holiday, now and again,” he said, perhaps half a beat too late. “If . . .”

“If what?” Her tone was cool.

He met her gaze evenly. “If we decide to keep it.”

“It's my home,” she said. “And Alyssa's. It's where I live.”

He was growing impatient. “And I live in London. This is where my business is. Even if there were any practical reason at all for you to keep the château, you surely wouldn't expect me to just pull up stakes and move across the Channel—”

“Which is so much harder than moving across an ocean,” she retorted. “And do you mind explaining to me just exactly what stakes you're talking about, anyway? From what I can tell, the longest you've ever lived in this apartment is the past two weeks that I've been here.”

And then he drove his fingers fiercely through his damp hair, forcefully pushing back anger. “Now we
are
going to fight,” he muttered.

“No,” said Sara. Quietly, she began to gather up the papers. “It's just the same fight we've been having from the beginning. It's about who has control—of the château, of Alyssa. And I think you may have been right all along. It will have to be settled in court.” She replaced the papers in the leather binder from which they had come, the one stamped Lindeman and Lindeman in gold. Her smile was weak and unconvincing. “The trouble with sleeping with the enemy is that you sometimes forget he
is
the enemy.”

“Or she,” he replied, before he could stop himself.

And she said, “Touché.”

He said, “Should I sleep elsewhere tonight, Sara?”

“It's your bed.”

He looked at her for a moment, and then he came and sat beside her on the bed. She started to slide over, so their legs would not be brushing, but he placed a hand lightly on her knee. He said, “Can we agree, at least, that we want to be together? Wherever we live?”

Her nostrils flared with an indrawn breath, and she shifted her gaze briefly to the ceiling. “The master negotiator,” she said. And when she looked at him, there was no gentleness in her eyes. “I don't think there's compromise on this, Ash.”

He said, holding her gaze, “It's Daniel's house.”

And she replied, “No. It's mine. And Alyssa's.”

He had to say it. “You don't know that. Until the DNA test comes back, nothing has changed. I'm still Alyssa's guardian, and she's going to school in London. I'm sorry.”

Sara looked at him for another moment, her expression unchanged. And then she said, “So am I.”

She turned back the covers on her side of the bed, and lay down with her back to him, switching off the lamp. After a moment he got into bed beside her and lay there stiffly in the dark, because he simply did not want to leave her. And after a time he said quietly, “I'm not your enemy, Sara. I'm just trying to do what's right.”

It was a long time before she spoke. He thought she might be too angry to respond at all. And then she moved and laid her head on his shoulder. “I know,” she whispered. “But why can't we do it together? Why do we have to be on opposite sides when we both want the same thing?”

“Alyssa is my responsibility,” he said, his voice low and tight in the dark.

“And you're always in charge. And always right.”

A moment passed. “I'm sorry. I wish it could be different.”

She sighed again. “I know.”

She spread her fingers over his heartbeat, and he wrapped his fingers around her shoulder, and kissed her hair, and they lay together, holding each other, and said nothing else. But it was a long time before either of them slept.

There are some things that are simply inevitable. That was why Sara did not spend a lot of time anymore thinking about the shadow life she had left behind . . . the life where gulls swooped and called on summer days, where lovers walked on sun-bright beaches and little yellow houses baked on salty streets. She didn't think anymore about the time when there had been no stately, ancient château in her life, or about the time before she had known a dark-eyed French child with bouncy curls and nonstop enthusiasm. She didn't think about the time before she had gone to Ash's room and told him what she deserved, because it had simply been inevitable. As had the way her life had changed, had been turned around and inside out, in the short time that they had been together. Because she had changed completely inside, it was inevitable.

She knew of course that nothing between them was really settled. She knew that, in a lot of ways, they had only been playing house these past few weeks and that it could not go on forever. But she also knew that, because of him, everything was different. She knew who she was now, and she knew what she wanted. As outrageous as it sometimes seemed when she thought about it, she knew she was never going back to North Carolina. She was going to stay in France, and she was going to restore and manage a four-hundred-year-old château, and she was going to raise a child who wasn't her own.

She didn't want to do this alone. But she could, if she had to, because she had met and loved Ash. The irony was that the only thing that stood in her way was, in fact, Ash.

She had spoken to Mr. Winkle—who was every bit as handsome as Ash had indicated, and thoroughly intimidated by his boss—about her options for adopting Alyssa. Although he admitted family law was not his strong point, his opinion was that, under the current circumstances, the chances were not good. She was a single woman, and an American who had not, as of yet, established legal residence in France, and had no claim of relationship to the French child at all. He indicated, but was polite enough not to say, that should new information about her parentage arise, the situation certainly would be worth revisiting.

Which was, of course, exactly what Ash had told her.

He also went on to say that while she was indeed free to deed the château to anyone she wished, when a minor child was involved the simplest and safest thing to do would be to simply transfer her title to the property into the existing trust—which, of course, Ash administered. She couldn't seem to make him understand that was not an acceptable solution to her. And that was why he had sent her away with a copy of the entire Rondelais file, including the record of the transfer of shares from Daniel to Ash, and of the documentation of the trust that had been set up for Alyssa. To reassure her. Because, as owner of Rondelais, she had a right to see all of the details of every transaction that had ever taken place concerning the property. Something Ash had never bothered to mention to her before.

She had arisen early, because the tension between them still had not dissipated by morning, and although she knew Ash was awake, he said nothing when she left the bed. She went into the kitchen and spent the hour before Alyssa woke studying the file on Rondelais, noting the documents she would need to copy for inclusion with her business plan. And then she noticed something she had never expected to see.

Ash came into the kitchen a few minutes later, showered and dressed, and texting something as he spoke. “Sara, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to go with you to France this afternoon, after all. I've just had a message from Dejonge offering to meet with me in the morning. I've been trying to set up this meeting for months, and I won't get another chance. If I drop you and Alyssa at the station at eleven o'clock, I can just catch my flight to Johannesburg. I'll try to make it to Rondelais early next week. I've just arranged for Jean-Phillipe to meet your train in Paris.” Finally he looked up, perhaps noticing her silence. He saw the expression on her face. He saw the open folder on the table.

She held up a paper. “Ash, what is this?”

He closed the phone, and put it in his pocket. His face went very still.

“It would appear to be a transfer of ownership certificate,” he said, his voice completely expressionless, “for a certain number of investment shares in Château Rondelais.”

“You told me Daniel put the money you gave him into a trust for Alyssa. But this says you transferred your holdings to her name, too. And it looks to me like you did it all on the same day.” She stared at him, trying to make sense of it all. “You never owned shares in the château.”

He said briefly, “No.”

“But all this time . . .” It made no sense. She couldn't comprehend it. “You let me believe you owned a legitimate part of the property. You used that to convince me to . . . You lied to me.”

“As administrator of Alyssa's trust, I was negotiating on her behalf.”

Sara pushed herself up from the table, simply because she had to move away from him. She was still in her robe and slippers, and she felt oddly vulnerable. Completely confused. “But . . . I don't understand. It makes no sense. Why would you do such a thing? Why would you sign everything over to Alyssa? And why didn't you just tell me what you'd done?”

“Because,” he murmured, almost absently, almost as though to himself, and without looking at her at all, “then I'd have to tell you the truth, wouldn't I?”

Her heart was tight in her chest, and as hard as she tried, as closely as she looked, she could see nothing on his face but . . . inevitability. Her fingers went to her throat, which was suddenly dry. “What truth?”

He walked over to the table, absently turning some of the papers around so that he could see them. “Winkle,” he observed. “I suppose I always knew it was only a matter of time.”

She said, with her thoughts still twisting and turning, trying to understand, “That's why you couldn't sell me your shares. Because they weren't yours.”

“Partially,” he agreed. “In the beginning, I could have arranged the paperwork easily enough, without violating the terms of the trust. But once you found out about Alyssa, once you became so determined to be involved in every bloody little detail . . . I didn't want to have to explain it all to you. Easier to let you be angry with me over a simple property dispute, than to despise me for the truth. Particularly since it was something I've spent all these years trying to deny, myself.”

“Please, Ash. I don't understand.”

He said abruptly, “It wasn't Daniel's idea to set up the trust. It was mine. He didn't ask me for money. I insisted upon his taking it. And I couldn't keep the shares he gave me in exchange because . . .” She could see his jaw knot, and flex. “Because it was blood money.”

He looked at her then, and it was as though the act of looking at her was a punishment. His eyes were cold and still, but behind that practiced, determined, detached gaze there was a slow, churning torment. He said, “When Daniel told me about the woman, Alyssa's mother, I advised him to settle the matter of paternity, that much is true. He refused, and I didn't care why. I was annoyed with him and his constant scrapes, his constant coming to me to bail him out, and this was just one more muddle I had to pull him out of. But as I told you before, taking care of the Orsays is what we do.” With each word he spoke, his voice became flatter, more detached. “So I went to the woman—a girl, really, I can't imagine she was more than nineteen—in that squalid little room where she and Alyssa lived in my hand-tailored suit and custom-made shoes and a tie that cost more than she'd probably ever seen in a lifetime because that's what I do. I fix things. And in my most intimidating, lawyerly fashion I told her that she was to desist immediately from annoying Monsieur Orsay and leave the region by the end of the week, and if she did not, I would have the authorities come to her room and break down her door and take her child away from her. The entire time she just sat there, terrified, holding her baby and crying. I gave her a hundred-Franc note and walked away. And that evening, the police think it was, she took a straight razor to her wrists.”