Red Wine and Her Sexy Ex

‘Sorry, Guy. I’m just not hungry.’ Xavier eyed the slightly dried-up cassoulet and pushed his plate away.

‘If you’d come back from the fields when I called your cellphone the first time, it might’ve been edible,’ Guy pointed out.

‘Sorry.’

‘So what is it? A problem with the vines?’

‘No.’

‘Your biggest customer’s just gone under, owing you a huge amount of money?’

Xavier shook his head impatiently. ‘No. Everything’s fine.’

‘When you work yourself into exhaustion and you’ve still got shadows under your eyes because you can’t sleep, everything’s not fine.’ Guy folded his arms and regarded his brother sternly. ‘I’m not a child any more, Xav. You don’t have to protect me, the way you and Papa did when we had two bad harvests on the trot and the bank wouldn’t extend the vineyard’s credit.’

When life as he knew it had imploded. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to baby you.’

‘If it’s money, maybe I can help. The perfume house is doing OK right now. I can lend you enough to get you out of a hole—just as you helped me out a couple of years back.’

When Guy’s ex-wife had cleaned him out and he’d almost had to sell his share of the perfume house. Xavier gave him a weary smile. ‘Thanks, mon frère. It’s good of you to offer. But there’s no need. The vineyard’s on an even keel financially, and I’m being careful about credit—even with my oldest customers.’

‘Then it’s Allie.’

Yeah. He couldn’t think straight now she was back. ‘Of course not. I’m fine,’ he lied.

‘You waited just a little too long before you denied it,’ Guy said. ‘You never really got over her, did you?’

Xavier shrugged. ‘I dated.’

‘But you’ve never let any of your girlfriends close to you—not the way you were with Allie that summer.’

‘It was a long time ago, Guy. We’ve both grown up. Changed. We want different things out of life.’

‘It sounds to me,’ said Guy, ‘as if you’re trying to convince yourself.’

He was. Worse, he knew that he was failing. ‘It’s just the surprise of seeing her again. Let’s drop this, Guy. I don’t want to discuss it.’

‘OK, I’ll back off,’ Guy said. ‘But if you decide you do want to talk about it, you know where I am.’ He patted Xavier’s shoulder, then topped up their glasses. ‘Just as you were there for me when it all went wrong with Véra.’

Long nights when Guy had ranted and Xavier had listened without judging.

‘Maybe Lefèvre men just aren’t good at picking the right women,’ Xavier said. ‘Papa, you, me—we’ve all made a mess of it.’

‘Maybe.’ Guy shrugged. ‘Or maybe you and I just haven’t met the right ones yet.’

Allegra had been the right one for him, Xavier thought. The problem was, he hadn’t been the right one for her. And he needed to remember that, if he was to have any hope of a decent working relationship with her.

In London, Allegra didn’t have a minute to breathe. Between sorting out a marketing plan for the vineyard; offering the lease of her flat to Gina, her best friend at the agency; sorting out what she wanted to take to France immediately and what could stay until she’d decided what she needed at the farmhouse; picking up her things from the office and trying not to bawl her eyes out when Gina threw a surprise leaving party for her and the whole of the office turned up except for her muchloathed ex-boss…There just wasn’t a spare second to think about Xavier.

Until she was on the train from London to Avignon. That gave her seven hours to think about him, and to fume over the fact that he hadn’t even acknowledged the receipt of her proposals, let alone asked her when she was coming back.

Getting angry and stressing about it wasn’t a productive use of her time; instead, she mocked up the content for her proposed changes to the vineyard’s website and a running feature about being a rookie vigneronne. But when she arrived at the TGV station, prepared to find a taxi to take her to the old central station to catch the local train through to the Ardèche, she was surprised to see Xavier leaning against the wall.

Though she wasn’t surprised to see that he was attracting glances from every female in the place. Even when he was scruffy from working on the fields, he was a beautiful man. Today, he was dressed simply in black trousers and a white shirt, with an open collar and his cuffs rolled back slightly; his shoes were perfectly shined, too, she noticed, and he looked more like a model for an aftershave ad than a hotshot businessman.

He seemed to be scanning the crowds, waiting for someone. When he saw her, he lifted a hand in acknowledgement before coming to meet her.

He was waiting for her?

She set her cases down. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Hello to you, too.’

‘Bonjour, Monsieur Lefèvre,’ she chorused dutifully. ‘Seriously, what are you doing here?’

‘I had business in Avignon and you need a lift back to Les Trois Closes. So it seemed sensible for me to wait for you.’

Served her right for thinking, just for one second, that Xav might’ve made a special trip to Avignon to pick her up. Of course not. He’d admitted to working crazy hours, and he certainly wouldn’t let up the pace for her. This was the man who’d pushed her away and broken her heart. He hadn’t wanted her then, and he didn’t want her now. ‘Thank you. How did you know I was going to be here?’

‘Hortense told me.’

Allegra blinked.

Xavier shrugged. ‘Now, are you going to stand there and argue all day, or can we go?’ He lifted her suitcases.

‘I can handle them myself,’ she protested.

He shot her a look. ‘Men in London might no longer have manners, but this is France.’

She subsided. ‘Thank you.’

Another Gallic shrug. ‘Ça ne fait rien. How was London?’

‘Fine.’

‘And 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?’

‘You have a point,’ he said.

‘I might’ve gone freelance, worked for myself. This just crystallised it for me—it was time to get out.’

So she was running from her job. That didn’t bode too well for her working at the vineyard. He’d wondered before what would happen when the going got too tough for her; now, he was pretty sure she’d do exactly what his mother had done. Walk out. Find someone to rescue her.

Just as she was obviously seeing the vineyard as a way of rescuing her from the collapse of her job in London.

‘If you sold the vineyard to me, it would give you enough money to set yourself up in business,’ he pointed out quietly. ‘You could go and do what you really want to do in London, instead of being stuck here.’

‘I’m not selling, Xav. I’m going to make this work.’ She lifted her chin. ‘And I’m not going to let you bully me into changing my mind.’

Bully her? He stared at her in surprise for a moment before concentrating on the road again. ‘I wouldn’t bully you.’

‘Intimidate, then.’

‘I’m not intimidating.’

‘Actually, you are,’ she said quietly. ‘You have strong views and you’re not afraid to voice them.’

‘Which doesn’t make me a bully. I do listen. I listened to you, the other day,’ he reminded her. ‘Without judging. Much,’ he added belatedly, trying to be fair.

‘And you’re so sure of yourself, of where you’re going.’

‘I see what needs to be done, and I do it without making a drama out of it.’ He shrugged. ‘If that’s intimidating…sorry. It’s how I am.’

‘Whatever you throw at me, I’ll handle it.’

So there was still some fire there, even if it was buried fairly deeply right now. ‘Is that a challenge?’ he asked, interested.

‘No,’ she said, sounding bone-deep tired. ‘Why do men always have to make issues out of things?’

‘I’m not making an issue out of things. Yes, I admit, I’d prefer you to be a silent partner, the way Harry was, but that obviously isn’t going to happen. For the next two months, we’re stuck with each other. I’ll expect a lot from you, but I won’t go out of my way to make life difficult for you.’

‘Thank you for that. And I do mean to pull my weight. I’m not a slacker.’

Had this Peter accused her of that? he wondered. But for her to have wrapped up all the loose ends in London over the last couple of days and said her goodbyes, as well as emailing him a detailed report that had clearly taken time to research—no, Allegra Beauchamp wasn’t a slacker.

Finally, Xavier parked on the gravel outside Harry’s farmhouse. He was out of the car and holding the door open for Allegra before she had a chance to unclip her seat belt, and then he took her cases from the back of his car.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Um, would you like to come in for a coffee or something?’

‘It’s kind of you to ask, but I have work to do.’

‘Of course.’ And there was something else she needed to know. Her normal skill with words deserted her, and she ended up blurting out, ‘Um, is it going to be a problem for your wife, having me as your business partner?’

Xavier gave her a speaking look. ‘If you want to know if I’m married, chérie, just ask me—don’t do that feminine subterfuge stuff. It’s annoying.’

She felt the colour flood into her face. ‘All right. Are you married?’

‘No. Happy?’

Right at that moment, she really regretted accepting the lift from him. ‘It doesn’t actually make a difference to me whether you’re married or not,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘I was just thinking, if you were involved with someone, I’d like to reassure her that I’m no threat to your relationship. Out of courtesy to her.’

Xavier spread his hands. ‘You wouldn’t be a threat.’

Of course not—he’d made it clear years ago that she wasn’t what he was looking for. That he didn’t have time for her. Though the comment still stung.

It must have shown in her face, because he said, this time a little more gently, ‘I’m not involved with anyone. My energy’s concentrated on the vineyard. I don’t have time for complications.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re celibate.’ The words were out before she could stop them.

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