Peach (2 page)

Amelie de Courmont’s room was lit with the glow of a perfect Florida dawn promising another golden day. Closing the door softly behind him, Gerard paused, identifying the tangle of scents that hung in the air. Amelie’s favourite perfume, carelessly unstoppered in the big crystal
flacon
that he’d bought her on their last trip to Paris, the butter-yellow jug of fading blossoms whose weightless petals drifted like confetti across the soft silk of the Persian rug, and the green garden scents on the early morning breeze from the open windows.

The baby’s elaborate crib, ruffled in white lace, stood by the side of Amelie’s bed. Walking softly so as not to disturb his wife and child, he peered at the little pink bundle that
was his daughter. Her flawless lids with the ridiculously long curve of blond-tipped lashes fluttered for a moment, as if she knew he were watching her, then her gaze locked with his. His daughter had deep, dark blue eyes, definitely her grandfather’s but, unlike Monsieur’s, hers were full of innocence. Her hair was neither brown nor blonde, but a sleek bronze shade, somewhere in between. And, miraculously, her skin was not the usual blotched pink and white of the newborn, but a pale golden colour as though from a summer spent beneath some gentle sun. The curve of her cheek, the slender arms and dimpled wrists, the fragile bumps of her spine were dusted with a golden down too fine even for the silkiest velvet. It was exactly, thought Gerard with a smile, like the tender bloom of a fresh peach.

Half-asleep against her pillows Amelie watched as Gerard ran a gentle finger over the baby’s soft cheek. After fourteen years of happy marriage she had almost given up hope of giving Gerard a child and when she knew she was pregnant she had hoped for a boy. Gerard would have a son to succeed him and to inherit the business empire created by his father. But Gerard hadn’t cared about the sex of the child—he’d been too worried about
her
. Having a baby at forty wasn’t the easy business it had been when she was nineteen and married to her first husband, Roberto do Santos. The birth of their twin girls, Lais and Leonore, had been effortless. This time the pregnancy had been tiring and fraught with risk—but it had been worth it even if just to see Gerard’s face now, as he looked at their daughter.

“It seems I woke you both,” said Gerard ruefully.

Amelie took his hand as he sat beside her on the bed. “I was half-awake, remembering when Lais and Leonore were born. Gerard, I hope they will be pleased with their new half-sister.”

“They’ll be as thrilled as I am,” he replied firmly. “How
could they resist her?” Lifting the baby he placed her in her mother’s arms. “Just look at our daughter, Amelie. She’s a beauty. A perfect little peach.”

Amelie laughed delightedly, folding their baby close to her breast. “Of course she is, and she will be named Marie-Isabelle Leonie de Courmont. But from now on, Gerard, she’ll be just Peach.”

At the de Courmont mansion on the Ile St Louis the butler waited, a silver tray in his hand.

“A telegram for you, Mademoiselle, from America.”

Lais snatched the flimsy envelope, tearing at it impatiently. It must be the baby. Oh God, she begged, suddenly afraid, let Maman be all right, forty is too old to be having babies. Damn!
It was a girl
. All she needed was
another
sister!
Peach!
My God, what a name. She only hoped the creature could live up to it. Lais stared at the telegram uneasily, unable to shake off the feeling that this new half-sister would cause ripples on her smooth personal pond. Or maybe even a tidal wave.

“It’s a girl, Bennet,” she called, heading for the door. There was just time to make Carrier’s before they closed. She would buy the baby a christening gift, squander her monthly allowance on something wildly extravagant to make up for the guilt at her lack of joy in having a new sister, and something totally unsuitable, damn her, because she didn’t really want to give her anything at all. She didn’t want to share any part of her life with Peach.

*  *  *

Tossing the expensively wrapped gift into the back of the big, dark blue de Courmont convertible, Lais pulled into the Paris traffic, checking her appearance in the mirror as she drove.

Lais patted her tawny blonde hair doubtfully. Perhaps the short haircut was a mistake? But it
was
fashionable and if you didn’t have the latest look, if you weren’t wearing the latest style, weren’t seen in the smartest places, then you simply didn’t exist! She was in Paris supposedly studying at the Sorbonne but, in truth, the number of lectures she attended were few. Her blue eyes looked back at her from the mirror with disarming innocence and Lais turned away impatiently. Maybe she was a bit selfish, but she only wanted to enjoy herself. And the truth was she had a short fuse on boredom.

Lais double-parked the car on the corner of Boulevard St Germain and rue Bonaparte in front of the Café des Deux Magots and sauntered towards the young man waiting for her at a table on the terrace.

He had been waiting for her over an hour and empty coffee cups and small glasses marked the passing of time that for him had been an eternity. “Here you are at last,” he cried, relieved. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

Why was it, wondered Lais, frowning, that he had seemed so attractive last night? For that matter, why did all the men she met seem more attractive by night than in the cold light of day?

The young man smiled anxiously as the waiter placed a Pernod in front of her. “Your drink, Lais,” he said, touching her hand.

“I can’t stay.” She rose almost immediately. “I’m already late for an appointment.”

He knocked over the glass as he pushed past the table after her. “Lais, Lais … wait …”

Lais pressed a firm white-shod foot on the accelerator. She flung back her head relieved at her escape, taking deep breaths of the special Paris smells of chestnut trees in blossom, of petrol fumes and fresh baked breads and rich coffee and wonderfully scented women. Dusk was closing in, lights sparkled from shops and in cafés, threading jewelled necklaces along the River Seine. The passion she’d felt for him the previous night was gone, withered by his very eagerness to see her and his anxiety to please. What Lais liked was the anonymity of a hotel room, the secret rendezvous in some afternoon apartment, or the shuttered heat of a summer boathouse … sometimes she wondered if the intrigue weren’t more exciting than the sex. And sometimes it was.

There was that man she’d met the other night, the Russian exile—Nikolai. He was different, intriguing. His harrowed dark eyes had stared at her with such calculating appraisal that she’d trembled inside. Nikolai was older than her crowd, and maybe a little bit dangerous. She’d waited for him to come over to her, but he hadn’t and she’d circled the crowded room, ignoring the rest of the party, lured by his gaze. But when she’d finally approached him, he’d dismissed her with a disdainful smile as though she were a tiresome child and departed, a glamorous woman in large diamonds and ink-blue velvet on his arm. Lais knew Nikolai had been invited to the Villiers’ party tonight. And that’s where she was heading.

Lais laughed out loud. She was free again and just twenty years old. And life was a marvellous game—to be played on her terms.

Leonore de Courmont hurried across the pink marble hall of the hotel on her way to the restaurant where she had been warned there was a problem of overbooking. Distinguished guests were being kept waiting and were not at all happy about it. It was just one of a dozen problems that had confronted her that day and which only she was able to sort out because, as general manager of the Hostellerie la Rose du Cap she was responsible for the mistakes, as well as the triumphs, that made up its daily life.

Leonore had served her apprenticeship well, beginning at the Palaçio d’Aureville, her mother’s family’s hotel in Florida. As a child she had lurked wide-eyed in the hotel’s great kitchens, marvelling at the flurry of lunchtime activity that seemed to her like a ballet choreographed to split-second timing. The head chef called out the orders to his underchefs who were cooking meats or preparing vegetables, or whisking delicate sauces, while pâtisserie chefs created elaborate sweet delights, and waiters hurried in and out through the swinging double doors submitting each dish for a quick inspection by the head chef before departing for the restaurant tables. Leonore had got under their feet, earning their temporary wrath as she peered into pots or stole the little pastries. She’d followed the housekeeper, checking the huge piles of linen sheets and fluffy towels that lived in vast closets, loving their fresh crisp smell. She had helped the
chambermaids make beds and she’d hovered around the reception desk investigating the miracles of the switchboard. She had chatted with the concierge and with the porters, smiling shyly at the people on whom all this activity centred.
The guests
. It had been a natural progression to the hotel school in Lausanne, and then six months ago, when she was only twenty, Amelie, her mother, had surprised her by giving her the entire responsibility for this new hotel in its jewelled setting—the green wooded headland of Cap Ferrat jutting into the blueness of the Mediterranean that gave the coast its name, the Côte d’Azur.

Leonore could still remember the feeling of terror as her mother, smiling in anticipation of Leonore’s delight, had broken the news. How ever would she live up to the task? How could she possibly
cope
when most of the guests would be
older
than she?

“Nonsense,” Amelie had dismissed her plea that her inexperience would be disastrous for the new hotel. “I was only a little older than you when I took over the Palaçio in Miami. Your Uncle Edouard simply handed me the keys and said, ‘It’s all yours—if you don’t do it then nobody will. The Palaçio will close before it even opens.’ I worked eighteen hours a day then—and I had you and your sister to look after. You must plunge right in at the deep end, Leonore, it’s the only way.”

Leonore had felt closer to the schoolgirl that she had so recently been than the manager of the Riviera’s newest and most exclusive hotel. And she had this awful stammer—true it wasn’t so bad now, but when she was upset it resurfaced to embarrass her.

“It’s your chance, Leonore,” Amelie had said, trying to impart some of her own confidence to her shy daughter. “Take it and win.”

It seemed to Leonore that she’d always had to try harder,
that she’d always been in the shadow of her outgoing, extrovert sister, Lais. Yet
she
had been cleverer than Lais—it was
her
school reports that Maman and Gerard had been so proud of. But it was Lais who had been the star of the school plays, and Lais who on sports day had collected the little silver cups for hurdles and high jumps and swallow dives. It wouldn’t have been like her sister to go in for something long and tedious like the cross-country run or the marathon.

When they were children Lais had discovered that having an almost identical sister could be a distinct advantage when she was in trouble—though Maman and Gerard had soon put a stop to that! And, of course, they weren’t
exactly
alike. Lais had blue eyes, like their real father who had died when they were only two years old, and Leonore had the odd tawny-colour eyes of their grandmother, Leonie. “Cat’s eyes,” Lais had taunted her when they were small, but Leonore had always suspected that they were the one thing that Lais envied about her.

Pausing for a second in front of the large Florentine gilt mirror in the corridor, she smoothed back an escaped strand of fine blonde hair, tightening the velvet ribbon that secured it. Her dark blue silk suit was cool and businesslike and she wore tear-shaped canary diamonds in her ears—a touch of vanity for they complimented her golden eyes. The Cartier watch had been a present from her stepfather Gerard when she had taken over the hotel and she had worn it every day since—like a lucky charm. And so far her luck was holding. No one could mistake Leonore for a carefree holidaymaker; she looked what she was, a young businesswoman with things on her mind that placed a permanent small furrow between her brows. And one of those worries was still her sister, Lais. Stories of Lais’s antics in Paris were filtering
back to her—and they weren’t the sort of stories she’d want Grand-mère Leonie—nor Maman and Gerard—to hear.

With a sigh Leonore placed the gold-rimmed spectacles on her small straight nose, hoping they added a touch of authority a twenty-year-old girl might lack. She would soothe the ruffled egos of her guests with complimentary champagne—the best, naturally—and arrange for an extra table to be squeezed in so that they might be served immediately. Then she must reprimand the receptionist who had taken the booking and warn her to be more careful. The Hostellerie couldn’t afford to upset its customers when its reputation was based on exactly the opposite principle. She would make time to scan the bookings for next week to see who needed to be VIP’d—and then she’d dash down the path from the hotel to the villa to dine with her grandmother and Jim. And of course, she’d be late, as usual!