Unbitten (3 page)

“I’m fine,” said Jo, a little
defensively. “I didn’t even realize he was
behind me, it’s nothing.” It felt to her as
though Angélique was too motherly and it made Jo
bristle.

“Come on,” said Angélique, taking her by
the arm and leading her to the car, opening the door for
her and then gathering up her duffel and carry-on bag and
throwing them in the trunk. “The Château is
very close by, we’ll be there in a few
minutes.”

Angélique was capable, and hardheaded, and no dummy.
She took care of quite a lot of the Château business,
all of the day-to-day running of the place, in fact. She
was a woman you wanted on your side.

Jo realized with surprise that she had shifted easily into
speaking and understanding French–as though the
incident with the creepy man had momentarily distracted her
from any anxiety about whether all that French she had
taken in school would mean anything once she was really and
truly in France and talking to an actual French person.

“That was not much of a welcoming,” said
Angélique as they sped out of the village and down a
long straight road lined with poplars. “Mourency is a
lovely village. I grew up here, and really, we do not have
problems of violence, not usually. But of course, no place
is without its scoundrels, yes?” She glanced in the
rearview mirror as she speeded up even more.

Jo smiled to herself at “scoundrels”. Such a
romantic word choice, she thought.

“Good police? Or just…nobody committing
crimes?” she asked.

“I’d say the latter,” said
Angélique. She paused before continuing. “It
is not fortunate,” she said, “but in Mourency,
the head of police–he is not a good man. Lazy.
Corrupt. Dealing with him is usually a waste of time,
comprenez
?”

Angélique began talking about the stable and the
horses and upcoming shows, in a fast stream of quite good
English, waving her hands around but still managing to keep
the Citroën on the narrow road.

Jo mumbled something in response and looked out of the
window. She began to look forward to meeting David de la
Motte, feeling excited to see the stables and meet the
horse she was supposed to ride, and drinking in the scenery
of France where she had never been before. She looked at
what she could see of the fields of sunflowers whizzing by
in the dark, and small cottages, cozy with lights on, none
of it looking even in the smallest detail like Trenton,
where she had grown up.

“…you’ll be staying in the left tower. I
am in a tower bedroom on the other side of the
Château,” Angélique was saying.
“You do not mind if I shift into English? I need the
practice,” she said, with a rueful look.

“Your English is really good, Angélique. And
the tower room sounds amazing,” said Jo. She
struggled to find more to say. “How is David to work
for?”

Angélique smiled. “David…” she
said.

Jo waited, but Angélique never finished her
sentence. She stopped the car and pointed a clicker at an
immense iron gate with gold-tipped spikes, and then as it
slowly swung open, guided the Citroën through, past
eighteen foot high stone posts covered with carvings, a
coat of arms, and lots of decorative flourishes.

Down a long drive they went, ancient plane trees towering
on either side like a row of guards, watching them pass.

Around a bend, up a short hill, and then, across a field,
Jo saw the lit-up Château Gagnon for the first time.
She couldn’t help gasping even though she had seen
photographs online.

Angélique laughed. “Yes, it has that
effect,” she said. “I remember the first time I
came here, as a little girl,” she said.
“I’m French, I had seen plenty of
châteaux before. But this one, she is a little bit of
different,” she said.

Jo loved the way Angélique’s English was
perfect and then all of a sudden it would hit a bump.

The central part of the Château looked very
old–and in fact it was, certainly by an
American’s frame of reference, having been built in
the early 1400s. Then it expanded on either side, with
additions of various architectural styles, so that the
Château was like a textbook example of French
Architecture Through the Ages, going from early
fortress-like Romanesque all the way through 19th century
Neoclassicism. But remarkably, the building did not look
like a crazy mish-mash, but almost as though it had been
designed by one architect, who had been able to predict the
styles of the future and thereby create a building with a
coherent and powerful beauty as it developed over the
centuries.

France, thought Jo, really is a different world. It’s
not like New Jersey with a different accent plus snails.

Angélique expertly weaved through various
obstacles–an old wooden cart, a sleek black Peugeot,
several dogs–and parked next to what looked like a
garage with wooden doors two stories high.

“Here we are!” she said. “Let’s go
straight in and see David. Someone will be out to take your
bags to your room, don’t worry about that.”

Jo followed Angélique inside, her eyes wide, taking
everything in. Her jet-lag was forgotten as she felt a
surge of her usual excitement and energy, wanting to get to
know her new home. She was chattering to Angélique,
wanting to know about the dogs, about the stable; she had
questions about everything she saw.

Then she saw him.

David was striding down a corridor on his way to meet them.
He was wearing a white shirt with several buttons open so
she could see a wedge of his chest. Jodhpurs with suede
patches on the inside of the thighs, with high black riding
boots. Jo felt blood rising into her neck and face and she
was helpless to stop it. It was infuriating. She wished as
she had wished so many times before that her body would not
so easily betray what she was feeling.

“
Enchanté
,” said David, taking
her hand and slowly raising it to his lips, a hank of hair
falling over one eye. He smiled at her, a knowing smile, as
if to say that they were in on a little joke together, that
this being kissed on the hand by an aristocrat was not just
a bit of old-world politeness, that it could also be
modern.

In other words, seriously and blazingly hot.

She felt his lips brush her fingers and linger, just a
moment, on her fingertips. Her blush intensified so
dramatically that she looked feverish.

“I am so very glad you are here,” David said,
his English impeccable. “Please, let me know anything
at all I can do for your comfort and happiness. I know you
are a little bit, what is the expression, fish out of
water? And I want you to feel at home here,” he said,
licking his lips, his hands on his hips and legs apart,
like he was thinking of straddling something.

“Thank you,” said Jo, looking at his face
intently, as though she needed to memorize every detail.
She noticed a scar over one eye. It was a clean, smooth
scar, like he had been sliced with something extremely
sharp. She wanted to run her finger along it.

“I’m afraid you have missed lunch,” David
said, “but I can have someone bring you
something–our dinner is later, I believe, than
Americans are used to.” He smiled a smile of such
confidence that Jo felt that she was in a place where the
men were able and strong and knew what the hell they were
doing. She smiled an ironic smile at herself for being at
the Château for maybe fifteen minutes and already
imagining she trusted this man.

What would Marianne say, she said to herself.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m
starving.” Feeling her blush reignited, she looked
down at the stone floor, silently swearing and praying for
the blood to stop pumping into her face.

David, meanwhile, was praying for just the opposite.

The sight of this blonde American girl with her pale skin
and excitable manner had him more inflamed than he could
remember feeling in years. Her face kept becoming
charmingly red, flushed with her hot blood–he could
even see her carotid artery bulging and throbbing.

Jo glanced at Angélique, thinking that David’s
sexuality was so powerful, so overwhelming, that any woman
in the room would have to be feeling the same heat she did.

Angélique was making herself useful, neatening up
some leaves and petals that had fallen from a flower
arrangement on an ancient console table, her face composed
with the expression of a good assistant–pleasant,
ready to listen and get to work, no complicated emotions.

Jo wanted to slide David’s white cotton shirt off his
muscular shoulders, and press her body up against his
chest. She shook her head a bit, trying to push such
thoughts out of her head. Which never seemed to work.

“Angélique will get you settled
upstairs,” David said gently. “And I will send
Albert up with a little something for you to eat.”
Again, his eyes were dancing with merriment, though he was
not laughing or even smiling. His expression was full of
promise that whatever the future held, it was going to
be…interesting.

Tristan Durant leaned back in his chair and looked up at
the ceiling. The police station was quiet, as it usually
was, since crime in the village and even the entire
département
was minimal. You had your
vacation home break-ins, your teens stealing mopeds, and
that was more or less it.

And if that had indeed been all there was to it, Tristan
would have found another job and forgotten his dream of
being a
gendarme
–because Tristan wanted his
job to
matter
. He wanted to do something with his
life besides molder in the small village, eating the same
dinner his father had eaten, and his grandfather, and on
into genealogical infinity. He wanted some excitement, and
the knowledge that he had helped people in a meaningful
way, something more than getting their moped returned.

But Tristan had not gotten a different job because this one
was turning out to be a whopper after all. He wasn’t
absolutely sure. Maybe he was wrong. But he thought,
finally, that he had proof. Not court-of-law proof, but
enough proof to convince himself to carry on with his
investigation.

Tristan Durant believed that Mourency was home to a
vampire. Make that
vampires.

For starters, the Marquis’ younger brother, David de
la Motte.

He had been suspicious for years, really. He had wondered
why the family was so reclusive, why they never joined the
village for fairs and markets and all the other seasonal
rituals that other noble families of other villages
considered it a duty to participate in. He had tried, once
he was a
gendarme
, to get to know the family in an
official capacity, offering his support and expertise on
security.

But Tristan had been utterly and completely rebuffed. David
de la Motte made it clear that he and his family had no
desire to interact with Tristan Durant or anyone else from
the
gendarmerie
for that matter–no driving
by to check on the Château, no offering of services,
no conversation, no nothing,
rien
.

Which by itself, of course, was inconclusive. The la Mottes
were aristocrats, and even though the French Revolution had
been rather bloody for their social set, some of the
families that managed to survive held on to their belief of
being elevated, better than the rabble, and they carried on
their lives with as little contact with regular people as
they could arrange.

Tristan had even heard of families living in enormous
châteaux who could no longer afford any help, and who
believed themselves too noble to get jobs. So they lived
strange and lamentable lives, isolated from the rest of the
village and the world, scraping by with meager vegetable
gardens and hunting, cutting firewood for heat. A few were
actually squatters on their ancestral estates that the
government had long ago seized for failure to pay taxes. It
was a kind of mental illness, thought Tristan, to consign
yourself and your family to a life without electricity or
contact with the outside world, just so you can pretend you
are something that in the real world no longer has the
meaning you are assigning to it.

So at first he thought perhaps the la Mottes were one of
those families. But, as he kept up his watchful eye,
certain facts did not fit. For one thing, they certainly
did not isolate themselves but had even opened up their
home to strangers with their
chambre
d’hôte
, something any of those hermit
aristocrats would consider anathema. And from what Tristan
could see, they seemed to embrace technology, not recoil
from it.

But then there was the incident with Pierre Aucoin. That
baffling, exceptionally unusual incident, and suddenly, the
la Mottes were falling all over themselves to be helpful to
the investigation, and helpful to Pierre as well. That was
what sent Tristan looking in other directions.