I knew she’d slough off my admiration, though, so I just smiled. “Just tell me one thing. Is it Captain Cameron you’re meeting tonight?”
Eve shrugged, cryptic as always. “Aren’t you headed for that village where your cousin went?”
“Yes.” Three days we’d been in Limoges already. I’d have taken off for Rose’s village sooner, but Finn had to do some more patient tinkering with the Lagonda’s innards before he trusted her on the country roads. Today he’d pronounced us ready, and we were leaving Eve behind to await her mysterious dinner companion.
“What do you think?” I asked Finn, sliding into the front seat. “Is it Captain Cameron she’s meeting?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Think we’ll be back in time to see him?”
“That depends, doesn’t it?” He set the Lagonda’s fuel-air mixture, advanced the timing. “On whether we find out anything about your cousin or not.”
I shivered, part anticipation and part fear, as we started down the street. “Today might be the day.”
Finn smiled in answer, driving us out of Limoges at a leisurely pace, one arm along the wheel. He wore his usual old shirt with the sleeves rolled up, but he’d shaved, his jaw smooth for once instead of stubbled, and I wanted to reach over and stroke my hand down his cheek. I wanted it so badly that I had to keep my hands primly folded in my lap. How was it that the Lagonda felt more crowded when we didn’t have Eve along?
“We should be there soon,” I said, just to be saying something. According to Finn’s crumpled road map, our destination was only fifteen miles or so west of Limoges.
“I reckon.” Finn steered the Lagonda past a fenced meadow where cows munched grass, a gray stone farmhouse in the distance. The outskirts of Limoges had quickly given way to quiet country roads and rutted lanes. It couldn’t be more picturesque, and I sat there stiff as a board. I didn’t know why I was nervous, just that I was. Finn had kissed me back when I planted one on him a few nights ago, but he hadn’t made reference to it since. I wanted to move the game along, but I didn’t know how. I might be a whiz with numbers but I was a dismal flirt.
“What’s this village called again?” Finn asked, breaking my awkward swirl of thoughts.
“Oradour-sur-Glane.” On the old road map it looked like a tiny place. Hard to imagine Rose in a French hamlet too small even to deserve the word town. She’d always dreamed of Paris boulevards, Hollywood lights. New York in a pinch, I remember her saying, New York’s chic enough for me. And instead she’d come to Oradour-sur-Glane, a hamlet in the middle of nowhere.
The Lagonda rounded a corner, following a rough stone fence seeded with wild wallflowers, and I saw a little French girl walking barefoot along the top, arms out for balance. She had dark hair, but she instantly became Rose to my eyes, blond curls dancing over a blue summer dress I remembered my cousin wearing long ago. A wave of premonition hit me so strongly it was almost certainty. You’re at Oradour-sur-Glane, Rosie, I thought. I know you are. Lead the way, and I’ll find you
“We won’t get there faster with you pushing,” Finn commented, and looking down, I realized I was pressing my cork-sandaled feet against the floor like it was a gas pedal. “Why are you sitting like you’re in church?”
“What do you mean?”
The Lagonda came to a stone bridge, a bicycle passing over it in the opposite direction. Finn braked to let the bicycle pass, then leaned down, took hold of my ankles, and swung my feet up onto the seat. “You usually sit with your feet curled up.”
I was blushing as he put the car back into motion. His fingers could circle almost all the way around my ankle. I wished my legs weren’t so skinny. I wore a narrow red skirt I’d bought in Paris, and a loose white buttoned shirt like a man’s that I’d pushed over my elbows and tied up at the waist rather than tucking it in, and I knew I looked well in it—but I still wished I didn’t have such skinny legs. Rose had nice legs, even when she was just thirteen. First thing I’d do if I found her was hug her till she couldn’t breathe and then ask if I could have her legs.
“We took a wrong turn somewhere,” Finn said some minutes later. “This is south, not west. All these unsigned roads . . . Here, wait a moment.”
He pulled up outside a roadside shop with a display of postcards and a cat dozing on its step. The cat yawned as Finn stepped over it to address the proprietor in his rough Scots-accented French. Rose and I could get a cat, I mused as the tabby washed its tail. My dearly departed Donald (God rest his soul) would never let me get a cat, because they made him sneeze. “I’ve decided I hate Donald,” Rose said in my imagination. “Couldn’t you at least invent a nice dead husband?”
“You’re smiling,” Finn said, dropping back into the still-running Lagonda.
“Just wondering what you’ll think of my cousin when you meet her. Well, not really wondering. Everyone likes Rose.”
“Is she much like you?”
“Not at all. Funnier, braver. Pretty.”
Finn had been about to turn the car back onto the street, but he paused, giving me a long look out of those dark eyes. Finally he turned off the engine, reached out, and pulled me across the seat up against him. Winding his hand through my hair, he put his lips to my ear. “Charlie lass.” His breath was warm, sending a spark of current through the entire surface of my skin as he kissed the beating pulse below my ear. “You.” Kissing the point of my jaw. “Are.” Kissing the corner of my mouth. “Brave.” Kissing my lips, very lightly. “Not to mention pretty. Bonnie as a spring day.”
“You know what they say about Scotsmen,” I managed to say. “They’re all liars.”
“That’s Irishmen. No blarney about a Scot.”
His mouth found mine again, and he kissed me for quite a while. Dimly I heard a passing bicycle ring a bell at us, but I had my arms tight around Finn’s neck, and my heart was thudding against his hard chest.
Eventually he pulled back, though he still held me tight against his side. “I could stay here all afternoon,” he said. “But why don’t we go find your cousin?”
“Okay,” I said simply, and I had not been this happy in a long time.
“You want to take the wheel?”
I stared at him, and then I grinned. “You’d trust me with the old girl?”
“Slide over.”
We traded places. I stretched my feet for the pedals, still smiling. Finn took me through the start-up—“If she was starting cold, you’d set your fuel-air mixture to slightly rich, but you can move it closer to center”—and eventually I turned the Lagonda back toward the west. She purred in my hands.
“Funny,” Finn said. “The old man at the shop who gave me directions—he gave me an odd look when I said I was looking for Oradour-sur-Glane.”
“What kind of look?”
“Just odd.”