“Oh, this old thing?” she said, flipping the skirt a little to show off more of the amazing polka-dot petticoats underneath. “It’s at least fifty years old so if it hasn’t given up the ghost by now, I don’t think a little sawing is going to harm it.”

But it wasn’t Josh’s style to let her get away with flirty evasions. “So,” he said. And she knew he meant: So, you know that the photographer is Jessica May.

“So,” she repeated.

Then Célie appeared with a picnic basket. “Everything you need should be in here,” she said, smiling at Josh.

“Who are you picnicking with?” D’Arcy asked, voice light as if she didn’t care. Maybe he had a girlfriend? Someone coming to the chateau to picnic with him and spend the night. It would be the most romantic place to spend a dirty weekend. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to kiss her. D’Arcy felt her heart twist with what she was almost sure, even though she’d never felt it before, was jealousy.

“I’m picnicking with you, I hope,” he said. “Unless you’d prefer to saw. I’ll even get changed.” He actually smiled.

D’Arcy’s stomach contracted in response.

* * *

D’Arcy agreed to meet Josh in half an hour, which gave her enough time to find a hat from Célie and send her mother a text to say she was busy and would call later. Because she still had no idea what to ask her, what to say. Staring at photographs all morning hadn’t made anything any clearer.

When she met Josh downstairs, he was indeed much more casually dressed. “There’s a nice spot close to the canal,” he said to her. “It’s only a short walk.”

“I feel like a child skipping school,” she said as they started out on the gravel path. “As if someone from the museum is going to ring at any moment and catch me sipping wine under a chestnut tree rather than crating fragile photographs and talking to customs agents.”

“They’ll be asleep. Besides, it’s siesta time. We’ll work late tonight.”

Work. What if he was just being polite, would rather be writing up contracts but felt as if he had to show the Australian art handler around and be hospitable? “We don’t have to picnic if you’re busy,” she said.

“I know. I never do things I don’t want to do,” he said.

D’Arcy couldn’t resist. “Including having sex with women in mini-dresses when they throw themselves at you?”

Her reward was a laugh, like the one she’d heard the first day when she’d called him dashing. “Do you have a single shy bone in your body?” he asked.

“I don’t think I do,” D’Arcy replied honestly as they passed a row of Judas trees in lavishly pink flower. The busy sound of woodpeckers contrasted with the lazy circling of a lone hawk, and the brusque quacking of distant ducks. The air smelled better than the Buly 1803 shop ever could, a melange of pollens so heavy and diffuse it was impossible to separate the individual scents, more dangerously heady than cognac at midnight. They passed an elfin tree, dressed in a canopy of green as rounded as a crinoline skirt, but beneath the foliage D’Arcy could see the crone-like branches whorling and winding into grotesquely beautiful shapes.