Lily laughed. ‘OK. That works for me. Thank you and I’ll be in touch soon, I’m sure.’ Stepping outside, she looked around for Luc.
‘Hey.’
She turned and there he was. Wearing the brown fur-edged ski jacket he’d been wearing the other night with jeans and some matching brown Moon Boots that only certain men could pull off.
‘How did it go?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lily pulled a face. ‘I don’t even know if anything happened.’
Luc laughed. ‘I know. I felt the same when Bernadette hypnotised me.’ He started walking and Lily fell into step with him.
‘What did you have hypnotherapy for?’
Luc’s face closed over. ‘Aah well. I don’t like to talk about that.’
‘I don’t like to talk about the stuff that came up in my session either,’ Lily said, mildly irritated by Luc shutting her out, which was totally irrational because they barely knew one another. Luc was entitled to his privacy.
‘Oh.’ Luc gave her a sideways glance. ‘Aren’t we both… what is the word I have heard the English use? Precious. Is that it?’
Lily thought for a second. ‘Precious? Yes. Maybe. You definitely are. I’m just private. And you didn’t tell me it was free either.’
‘You are uncomfortable with that?’ Luc looked surprised. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. But if you don’t feel OK with it, you could always buy me dinner.’
Lily let out a laugh. Cheeky sod!
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let me know when you want me to do that.’
‘Now?’ Luc suggested, his face deadpan.
‘Fondue?’ Lily offered, remembering Luc waxing lyrical about it the other day. It was early, but she could always eat. Especially as the last thing she had had was an orange liqueur hot chocolate.
‘You had me at fondue.’ Luc pulled a face at his shit joke. ‘I mean, that sounds great. I know the best place, if you’ll allow me to show you.’
Lily followed him, feeling her stomach fizzing slightly. What on earth was happening here? She had barely thought about Jamie and she felt absurdly over-excited about a silly lunch with Luc. And she shouldn’t. He was just being friendly and he was in love with Elodie. They had probably been laughing at her the other day at the Christmas cocktail party.
Lily climbed the steps to the restaurant, glad she had reminded herself of those things. Now she felt more in control. As attractive as Luc was, he probably just felt sorry for her. If blondes with big lips and size eight figures were his bag, it was unlikely Luc was going to be attracted to a size ten (twelve on a fat day) redhead.
Good to know, Lily thought to herself as she tore her eyes away from his backside, which looked pretty fantastic in those tight jeans.
Chapter Fourteen
They were sitting in a chalet-style restaurant with wood on the floor and walls and the low glow of lamps and candles on every surface. The aroma of the cheese was tantalizing and, tucked inside the restaurant, it felt much later in the day with the dim lights and the cosy atmosphere. The restaurant was very busy, teeming with a lunchtime crowd of skiers and a gaggle of noisy children. It was festive, too, decked out with pretty Christmas lights and decorations with a large tree dominating one corner. It was covered with surprisingly trashy-looking baubles and gaudy tinsel.
‘Forgive the décor,’ Luc commented. ‘They don’t like the subtle look in here.’
‘I don’t mind it,’ Lily said with a smile. ‘But I love Christmas, as you know.’
Luc said nothing but took a menu from a waitress. The waitress said hi to Luc in a flirtatious way, as though she knew him. Lily wasn’t sure why that bothered her; Luc was a playboy. He had probably made his way around most of the girls in the village, according to Elodie.
‘I thought I owed you a massage, not dinner,’ she said rather snippily.
Luc pushed his dirty blond hair back and eyed her with some amusement. ‘That was for skiing lessons, not for hypnotherapy.’
‘I’ve only had one lesson,’ Lily returned. She had no idea why she was acting like she had ferocious PMT.
‘That’s not my fault,’ Luc protested mildly. He regarded her with some confusion. ‘I said I would help you, but then you had that accident with Ollie.’
‘Sorry,’ Lily said shortly. ‘I’m being a bitch. The hypnotherapy brought up a few things.’
‘Such as?’ Luc leant forward with interest. ‘Oh, I’ll have a beer,’ he told the waitress with a pleasant, but not overly friendly smile. ‘And for you, Lily?’
‘I’ll have the house wine, please,’ she decided. ‘A big one.’ She closed the wine list.
‘What colour?’ Luc enquired politely.
‘Oh yes.’ Lily cringed. ‘White please. I don’t discriminate based on colour when it comes to wine.’
The waitress looked confused.
‘It’s OK,’ Luc told her. ‘She’s making a joke.’
The waitress shrugged and left. Luc grinned at Lily. ‘You’ve confused her, I think. Her name is Claudette. She went to my school, but she’s a few years younger than me.’
‘Oh, right.’ Lily hadn’t considered Luc’s place in Chamonix, in the community, as it were, but she guessed he had grown up here. ‘Where did you go to school then?’
Luc told her the name of his school and where it was. ‘I used to be a waiter in this place too, years ago.’
‘You?’ Lily pretended to be shocked. ‘Waiting on tables?’
Luc laughed. ‘I know. I wasn’t very good. I dropped four bottles of wine and at least three fondues.’
‘No, you didn’t!’
Luc rolled his shoulders modestly. ‘OK. So it was only one bottle of wine and two fondues.’
Lily couldn’t help smiling, but she wasn’t sure if he was pulling her leg. She couldn’t imagine Luc as a teenager, gauche and clumsy. She wondered if he was handsome as a boy or if he’d grown into his looks.
‘Luc.’ An older woman with curly bobbed hair and wide eyes walked over to the table. ‘So lovely to see you.’
They did the double cheek kiss and she smiled at Lily. ‘And who is this?’
‘This is Lily. Lily, this is Francine. Lily works at the hotel as a masseuse. I am teaching her to ski,’ Luc added.
‘Aah lucky girl.’ Francine nodded. ‘He is the best. At skiing. Not at carrying fondues.’ She rolled her eyes and hurried over to another table.
So Luc had dropped a fondue!
Luc’s face became more serious. ‘Can you tell me about the hypnotherapy?’
Lily gave him a clinical overview, describing how it had felt like five minutes, not an hour, and that she wasn’t convinced she had lifted her arm or fingers. And she didn’t remember anything Bernadette had said except when she had been ‘going under’ and as she had come out of it.
‘All sounds fairly standard,’ Luc said, munching on some complimentary olives that had been brought over. ‘I felt the same. But it made all the difference for me. What I mean was not so much the hypnotherapy itself, but what it brought up for you.’
Lily sat back and took a swig of wine to buy some time. Did she trust him? She had thought she did when she had first met him, despite all the warnings Elodie had given her. Normally, Lily always trusted her gut, but there was something about the way Elodie talked about Luc…
‘Hey.’ Luc shrugged easily. ‘If it’s private, it’s private. I just thought maybe it might help you to talk about it.’
‘Why do you hate Christmas so much?’ Lily blurted out. ‘Why won’t you talk about that?’ She took another gulp of wine.
Luc’s lip tightened, but then he relaxed again. ‘That’s a fair question, I guess. Especially as I’m asking you to open up about something very personal.’
‘I was just being silly,’ Lily went into damage limitation mode. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No, that’s OK.’ Luc drained his beer and asked for another one, getting Lily another wine at the same time. ‘OK. I do have a good reason for hating Christmas. Well, not
Christmas itself, but the time of year. Something happened one Christmas that has affected me ever since.’
Lily watched Luc’s troubled face as he appeared to grapple with himself. What on earth had happened to him?
Before he could speak, the fondue arrived. It came in a large pot with a stove underneath it, a tealight keeping the fondue warm.
‘This is called a caquelon,’ Luc told her, pointing to the pot.
‘It smells divine,’ Lily said, inhaling the mouth-watering aroma of cheese, white wine and just the faint whiff of garlic. ‘Wow. I mean, that’s literally just calories in a pot, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but it tastes so good. Tomorrow we will ski and you won’t even remember that you ate all this cheese.’
‘God, I hope so.’ Lily took one of the long-stemmed forks and speared a cube of bread with it. Dipping it into the fondue, she twirled the bread around in the unctuous mixture. Christmas tunes started playing loudly in the background, an interesting mix of English and French. The French didn’t quite cut it with the traditional English pop tunes.
‘This is comté and reblochon,’ Luc informed her, tipping his head back to put a cheese-soaked cube of bread into his mouth. ‘Mmm. That is amazing. The Swiss version has gruyere and emmental, but I think this one, with the stronger tasting cheese is better, non?’
Lily was in cheese heaven. She couldn’t even speak. She just wanted to enjoy the exquisite flavour of the melted cheeses and the wine and the bread.
‘When this is finished, there is usually a crust of toasted cheese in the bottom of the dish,’ Luc told her. ‘It’s not burnt – it’s toasted. You can scrape it out and eat it. It’s superb.’
‘I think I’ll probably have had enough by then,’ Lily said, loving how her wine complimented the cheesy taste in her mouth.
‘You might be surprised. It’s incredible, isn’t it? It’s essentially just garlic rubbed on the bottom of the dish, wine and grated cheese. But it is heaven.’ Luc’s phone rang and he took a glance at it, then turned it to silent, placing it on the table between them. ‘Where was I?’
‘You were talking about Christmas and why you hate it,’ Lily prompted. She didn’t want him to lose his train of thought because the food had arrived, however fantastic it was.
‘Oh yes.’ Luc’s face fell again. But within a few seconds, he was speaking again. ‘OK. I had a younger sister, Anais. There were four years between us. She was very different than me. Not as happy, always troubled. We never knew why.’
Lily stopped eating, listening with rapt attention, trying to ignore the jolly Christmas music in the background.
‘She made some strange friends,’ Luc said, wiping his mouth with his napkin as he took a break from the fondue. ‘Started to behave… erratically, I think the word is. My parents, me, we knew there was something wrong. We tried to help her. They sent her for therapy and we asked her college to talk to her. But nothing seemed to help.’
‘How worrying.’ Lily knew she would feel sick if she had to watch Ivy going through something like that.
‘We found out she was taking drugs. Heavy use. Different types.’ Luc looked devastated.
Lily stared at Luc. He was clearly carrying a terrible pain around with him.
‘One December, five days before Christmas, she disappeared. We couldn’t find her or reach her by phone and none of her friends knew where she was. Not even the people she took drugs with knew.’ Luc gazed at Lily, his dark eyes haunted. ‘I looked everywhere for her. I searched Chamonix and all the surrounding villages for five days. I knocked on doors, went to all the places she liked. And all the places she hated.’ Luc paused, his hands twisted on the table.
‘Go on,’ Lily said gently. ‘If you can. If you want to.’
Luc nodded slowly. ‘This is the hard part. I finally found her. Well, not me exactly. The day before Christmas Day.’
‘You found her on Christmas Eve?’ Lily felt deeply upset for Luc. ‘Where? What had happened to her?’
‘Yes. We were due to have our réveillon, our big dinner on the night before Christmas, but none of us wanted to. My grandparents were hosting the dinner and just before it, we received a call from Bernadette.’
‘Bernadette?’
‘Yes. She found Anais down by the river when she went out to get extra chestnuts for my grandparents’ dinner.’
‘Was she…’ Lily’s voice came out as a whisper.
‘She was dead,’ Luc admitted painfully. ‘A drug overdose.’
‘Oh no.’ Lily felt immeasurably sad and suddenly wanted to call Ivy and tell her she loved her.
‘We don’t know if it was an accident or if she did it on purpose. There was no note, but it may have been washed away by the river. I think that is what hurt my parents the most… not knowing. Not knowing if it was an accident or if Anais was so desperate and unhappy that she took her own life.’
Lily felt tears pricking at her eyelids. How awful for Anais to die that way, all alone. And how horrible for the family.
‘I don’t even know what to say,’ she managed, feeling a sob in her throat. ‘I’m so sorry, Luc. So very sorry.’
Luc reached out and touched her hand. ‘It’s OK. And I’m sorry… it’s a tragic story, I know.’
‘Don’t apologise.’ Lily dabbed at her eyes with her napkin, streaking it with eyeliner and mascara. ‘Thank you for trusting me. I must look a mess. I have an older sister, Ivy. The thought of her getting involved with drugs like that and dying all alone… it’s a hideous thought. Your poor family.’
Luc nodded. ‘My parents have never gotten over it. It was twelve years ago, but it often feels as though it happened yesterday, especially at this time of year. She would have been thirty-two this year.’
‘So sad.’ Lily took a shaky swig of wine. ‘No wonder you hate this time of year. And here I was, trying to get you to appreciate the tinsel and the bloody trees and all that nonsense. I can only apologise.’
Luc let out a laugh. ‘Don’t be silly! How could you know I had a story like that? I know I must sound like… who is that character in English literature who hates Christmas?’
‘Scrooge?’ Lily offered, blowing her nose into her napkin. ‘Oh dear. How rude of me. You’re nothing like Scrooge.’
‘Well, hopefully not. I would love to enjoy Christmas again, if I’m honest. I think my parents would too. I think we always feel too sad and guilty and we cannot seem to break out of that pattern.’
‘Understandable.’ Lily gazed at the fondue. ‘I’m not sure we did the fondue justice.’
Luc peered into it. ‘Aah well. Another time, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps.’
Lily eyed Luc over the rim of her wine glass. She was seeing him in a totally different light now. She had imagined him as some shallow playboy – amusing and surprisingly kind, but maybe without much depth under his good looks and amiable manner. However. There was Elodie to think about and the last thing Lily wanted to do was fall for someone else the way she had with Jamie. She was supposed to be getting over someone, not getting on top of someone else.
‘So. I’ve shown you mine… now you show me yours,’ Luc said, relaxing back into his chair.
‘S-sorry?’
Luc smiled. ‘I just meant that I have opened up to you. So maybe you feel you can with me as well.’
‘Oh, right.’ Lily wasn’t sure she could after hearing all of that. Her childhood had had its moments, but no one had died. ‘Another time if that’s OK? I promise I will, but not right now.’
Luc shrugged, but in a friendly fashion. ‘No problem. A phone is ringing, though, and it’s not mine.’
‘It’s me.’ Lily took her phone out. It was Jamie. Shit. She didn’t want to talk to him now. Not right now, anyway. There were also three missed calls from Imogen. She had been so engrossed that she hadn’t even heard her phone.
‘Do you need to take it?’
Lily shook her head and turned the phone to silent, the way Luc had earlier. �
��No. It’s not someone I want to talk to right now.’
‘Ex-boyfriend?’ Luc inquired, while asking for the bill.
‘Ha. No. Far from it.’ Lily turned her phone over in her hands. ‘Ex-best friend, sort of, who is dating my sister.’
‘Ohhh,’ Luc said, managing to make the word sound long and drawn-out. ‘That’s not great.’
‘No, it’s not. I want them to be happy, obviously. But still…’
‘That’s a hard situation. When did you find out about that?’
‘A few weeks before I came here.’
‘Really?’ Luc looked taken aback. ‘You had deep feelings for this guy then. To have come all this way to get away from him.’
Lily thought about that. She did have deep feelings for Jamie, but it was more about confessing her own feelings and being deceived by the two of them. She was sure Luc didn’t want to hear all the gory details.
‘Well, there was more to it than that, if I’m honest. I told him—’
Luc finished his beer. ‘You don’t have to defend yourself. We’ve all been in love before.’
Had she been in love with Jamie? Lily had thought she was. She missed him like crazy on some levels, and she had come all this way to get away from him. Or was it to get away from the cringeworthy embarrassment of offloading her feelings only to have them rejected?
Was it possible she just missed Jamie’s friendship? Lily had a feeling that much of her reason for leaving England had been about the betrayal and the fact that it was Ivy whom Jamie was seeing that had made her feel foolish, making her want to disappear. She wanted to articulate these feelings to Luc for some reason, but before she got a chance to do so, Luc’s phone lit up again on the table. Before he picked it up, Lily saw that it was Elodie. And by the looks of it, it was Elodie who had phoned the first time. Luc frowned and didn’t answer.
‘She has phoned twice,’ he commented.
‘Is that normal?’ Lily said, gathering up her jacket and handbag. ‘Imogen has phoned three times as well, but we’re in touch on and off all day long so it’s not necessarily weird.’
Luc pulled his ski jacket on and he seemed to have shut down. His face was now unreadable. ‘It depends. I’ll call Elodie on the way back to the hotel. Shall we go?’
Christmas in Chamonix Page 14