Then I’ll grab lunch for both of us and come back.
He drove to a bistro and picked up some food for them. When he returned, she came out of the house having changed into jeans and a blouse. She looked good enough to eat.
“Do you have to stay out in front?” he asked after she’d climbed in the car.
“No. My mother is home today.”
Good. “In that case I’ll drive us to that overlook we went to before.”
He felt her cast him a covert glance. “I can’t believe you came.” There was a tremor in her voice.
“As you can see, I’m unable to stay away from you.” Dominic drove up into the hills and parked the car under the same olive tree. “I bought us some meat pies and coffee.” He reached in back for their lunch and they both started to eat.
“Thank you. I don’t deserve how good you are to me.”
“I’d like to do a lot more for you if you’d let me.”
“Dominic—I never planned to be with you again, but now that you’ve seen Alain, I can’t keep the truth from you. Over sixteen months ago my stepsister had a baby.”
“Your stepsister...”
He groaned as unmitigated joy streamed through him. Her stepsister had been the one in love with this mystery man. Everything was finally starting to make sense.
“Yes. She adored him and named him Alain. But ten days after he was born she died of a staph infection.”
“I’m so sorry that happened to her.” He studied her profile. “How hard that had to have been for you and your family.”
“You have no idea.”
“I’m sure I don’t.” He leaned closer. “You’ve been such a good listener I want to hear whatever you’re willing to tell me.”
Nathalie smoothed a strand of hair behind her ear. “She was an elementary school teacher. One evening she and some other teachers from her school went to the Guinguet, a place I’d never heard of. I was working in Nice at the time and learned all this from her best friend, Claire, who lived across the street from us.”
At the mention of the Guinguet, Dominic’s heart began pounding like a jackhammer.
“Apparently it was love at first sight for her, but she kept him a complete secret from our family. According to Claire, her affair lasted a month, then he suddenly stopped meeting her. Two months later she went to the doctor and found out she was pregnant. I remember that she was in a terrible depression throughout her pregnancy and refused to talk about the man she’d loved.”
“Incroyable,” Dominic murmured.
“She refused to give our family any information about the man and insisted we never talk about him again. She begged us to leave the whole subject of Alain alone.”
“But you couldn’t do that.” How he loved this woman!
Nathalie looked at him with tear-filled eyes. “I honored her wishes until the beginning of this summer after I broke it off with Guy. When I told him I was going to adopt Alain, it changed our relationship. He didn’t want to bring her son into our marriage. For that and other reasons, I said goodbye to him.”
Grâce à Dieu.
“Oh, Dominic, Alain is so adorable and it seemed so terrible he didn’t have a mother or a father, I couldn’t bear it. So I thought that before I started adoption proceedings, I’d at least try to find my stepsister’s lover, as he has a right to his child.
“That’s when I called Claire to gather any information she could give me. All she said was that he was a Provencal, had worked on your family’s vineyard and Antoinette met him at Le Guinguet. At that point I started wondering about the man she’d loved. Knowing her, he had to have been someone exceptional. Maybe something serious had happened to him and he couldn’t let her know why he’d stopped seeing her. He left before she learned she was pregnant so he never knew he was a father.”
All the time she was talking, Dominic was fitting two and two together so fast, his thoughts were running away with him.
“I’m pretty sure she’d met a married man who’d wanted an affair and forced her to keep quiet about it. Since none of us knew the truth and never would, she asked our family to put the questions away and simply love Alain. I know now it was wise advice. I’m through looking.”
“Nathalie—” He was trying to control his emotions. “Now that I know the truth, then there’s no reason we can’t go on seeing each other.”
She averted her eyes. “I couldn’t. Please don’t ask. If you wouldn’t mind driving me back home now, I promised my mother I wouldn’t be long.”