Queen of Babble

That girl being me, and the desert island being my life.

Except, of course, he isn’t mine.

A fact about which he is undoubtedly vastly relieved, I realize, when I see his gaze going from the gown I’m holding to the clothes I’m wearing-which happen to be my Sears jeans and Run Katie Run T-shirt.

Well, Mrs. Thibodaux had been pretty explicit about what we’d be doing all day-setting up tables and chairs in preparation for tomorrow’s wedding. I don’t want to get one of my nice dresses dirty.

Plus I couldn’t be bothered with my hair this morning, so it’s piled into a ponytail coming out of the top of my head. At least I have makeup on. Some, anyway. Enough to keep my eyes from looking piglike.

“Cream of tartar works, huh?” is all Luke says, though, as his gaze goes from me back to the dress. Which is something of a relief. I get positively jumpy when those dark brown eyes turn in my direction.

“It sure does,” I say, giving the gown a satisfied flick. “Of course, it doesn’t always work this fast. Sometimes you have to go through multiple soakings. I don’t think that gun could have been there that long. The grease and rust didn’t really set in that deeply. Now I just need to mend and iron it, and it’ll be as good as new. Whoever it belongs to is going to be stoked to get it back good as new.”

Luke grins. “I think tracing its ownership is going to be a tad difficult. We’ve had a lot of guests here over the past few centuries.”

“Well, this one probably stayed here sometime in the past few decades,” I say. “I’m thinking late sixties, early seventies. Though, I grant you, with Givenchy it’s hard to tell. His lines are so classic…he really isn’t influenced by the vagaries of popular trends.”

Luke’s grin broadens. “The vagaries of popular trends?”

I blush. “I thought that sounded good.”

“Oh, it did. You’ve got me convinced. So. Want to come with me to get the croissants?”

I stare at him. “Croissants?”

“Yeah. For breakfast. I’m going into town to the bakery now, to get them before everybody wakes up and comes downstairs, whining for breakfast. I know you haven’t seen Sarlat and I think you’ll like it. Want to come with me?”

If he’d asked me if I wanted to go to Family Day at the local Gap, where all Gap employees give their friends and relatives thirty-five percent off all Gap products-which is basically my idea of hell on earth-I would have wanted to come with him. That’s how far gone I am about him.

Except, of course, for that one trifling detail.

“Um,” I say, “where’s Dominique?”

I feel like that’s a nice, neutral way to ask if his girlfriend is going along, too. Without coming right out and asking it that way. Because “Is your girlfriend coming?” might sound as if I don’t like her, or that I only want to go if I can get him alone, or something like that. Which isn’t true. At all.

Although if she is coming along, I might find something else I have to do instead. Just because having to sit and watch the two of them together isn’t really high on my list of fun things to do while on vacation in the south of France.

“She’s still sleeping,” Luke says. “Little too much champagne with Mom last night.”

“Oh,” I say, keeping my expression carefully neutral. “Well, just let me hang this to dry. And I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be out in the car,” Luke says, indicating the back door to the kitchen, in front of which the butter-colored convertible is parked.

I run like the wind. I hang the dress from the peg (what servants used for their uniforms in the olden days?) on my wall, with the bucket underneath to catch the drips.

Then I grab my purse and tear back downstairs.

Luke is sitting behind the wheel. There is no one else in the car. Around us, the morning air smells as fresh as newly folded laundry, and the sun, already getting hot, feels delicious on my skin. It’s completely quiet except for birdsong and the huffing of Patapouf, the basset hound, who has come sniffing around the back kitchen door in hopes of getting some handouts.

“Ready?” Luke asks me with a smile.

And, despite all my best efforts, my heart bursts right out of my chest and flies around my head on little cherub wings. Just like in a cartoon.

“Yes,” I say to him in what I think sounds like a perfectly normal voice-considering the fact that my heart is twittering around and around my head-and hurry to slide into the front passenger seat.

I am so, so dead.

But so what? I’m on vacation! It’s okay to have a little crush. In fact, it’s better to have a crush on Luke, who is safely taken, than it would be to have one on, say, Blaine. Because I might actually end up hooking up with Blaine, who is available, and that would be very emotionally risky, considering my fragile state of rebound.

No, it’s fine that I have a crush on Luke. He’s safe. Because nothing will come of it. Nothing at all.

The ride down the same driveway it took us so long to climb up the night before last is hilariously bouncy. I have to hang on to keep from being thrown around the massive front seat. But Luke and Chaz really did do a good job cutting the tree branches back-none of them whip at us.

And then suddenly we’re bursting out of the trees onto the same road along the river that we’d traveled from the train station the other night…but that had been in the dark. Seeing the river up close for the first time in daylight, I can’t help gasping.

“It’s so beautiful!” I cry. Because it is. A sun-dappled, gently flowing river, with wide, grassy banks, over which tall oak trees tower, their leafy branches providing bathers and rafters with welcome shade.

“The Dordogne,” Luke explains. “I used to go rafting on it when I was a kid. Although that makes it sounds like there are rapids, which there aren’t, really. We’d go down it on inflatable tires. It’s a nice, lazy ride.”

Impressed by so much natural beauty, I shake my head. “Luke, I don’t get how you can go back to Houston when you have all this.”

Luke laughs and says, “Well, much as I love my dad, I don’t exactly want to live with him.”

“No,” I say mournfully. “Neither does your mom, I guess.”

“He drives her crazy,” Luke agrees. “She thinks all he cares about is his wine. When he’s here, all he does is fuss over his vines, and when he’s back in Texas, with her, all he ever did was worry about them.”

“But he loves her so much,” I say. “I mean, can’t she tell that? He can barely take his eyes off her.”

“I guess she needs more than that,” Luke says. “Some kind of proof that when she’s not around, he thinks about her, too. And not just his grapes.”

I’m mulling this over when we turn a corner and I see the Laurents’ millhouse-with Madame Laurent outside, watering the explosion of blossoms in her arbored garden.

“Oh!” I cry. “It’s Agnes’s mom!” I wave. “Bonjour! Bonjour, madame!”

Madame Laurent looks up from her flowers and waves back, smiling, as we whiz past.

“Well,” Luke says, glancing at me with a grin, “you’re certainly in a good mood this morning.”

“Oh,” I say, sinking back into my seat in embarrassment over my excitement at seeing the Chateau Mirac cook in her own habitat. “This place is so beautiful. And I’m just. So happy. To be here.”

With you, I almost add. But for once, I manage to shut my mouth before it runs away with me.

“I suspect,” Luke says, making a turn toward the high-walled city I’d seen perched up on a cliff the night I’d arrived, “that you’re the kind of person who’s in a good mood wherever you are. Except when you’ve just discovered your boyfriend is a welfare cheat,” he adds with a wink.

I smile a little queasily back at him, still feeling mortified. Of all the people I had to open my big mouth to about my romantic problems, why did it have to be him?

But a second later, as we enter the city of Sarlat, I forget my chagrin at the sight of all the red geraniums spilling down from window boxes above my head; the narrow cobblestoned streets; the villagers, hurrying along to the open-air market with their baskets filled with baguettes and vegetables. It’s like a movie-set version of a French medieval village-only it isn’t a movie set. It’s a real medieval village!