‘Anything. Kneading bread dough is therapeutic but I love making sweet things, like baklava or Danishes. I always get requests at work for my honey-chocolate sponge cake.’
How apt that she tasted like one of her pastries—of vanilla and sugar. Except Imogen was more delectable than any cake he’d ever eaten.
It had been days since he’d tasted her. Yet, despite his determination not to press her when she was unwell, Thierry’s craving for her sweet lips had grown, not eased, with abstinence.
‘So, I’m pretty boring, really.’
He flicked on the car’s indicator and changed lanes, accelerating as they left the city behind.
‘You’re anything but boring.’ Thierry paused, mulling over what she’d told him. ‘You like being at home.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Tell me about it. What’s your home like?’
Imogen shifted in her seat. ‘I was saving up for a place of my own when this... When I decided to come to France. I’d been renting, sharing a flat, but I moved back in with my mother while she was ill.’
In other words she’d nursed her mother through her decline. What must it be like, after watching her mother’s fatal deterioration, to know in intimate detail what she herself could expect?
Thierry put his foot to the floor and for a short time focused on the satisfying distraction of speed. But it didn’t work. His thoughts kept circling back to Imogen.
‘Your family home, then. What was it like?’
Again that short laugh, a little ragged around the edges. ‘We didn’t have one. We moved too often.’
He shot her a questioning look.
‘My mother worked hard to qualify as a teacher when Isabelle and I were little, but she had trouble getting a permanent position. She never said so but it might have been because of the demands of raising twins. Anyway, she worked as a casual teacher, filling in where needed, sometimes for a term at a time if we were lucky.’
‘In Sydney?’
‘All around the state, though in later years she worked in Sydney. By then she’d come to enjoy the challenge of dealing with new pupils and new surroundings all the time. She chose to keep working on short-term placements.’
‘Maybe that explains the bond between you all.’
‘Sorry?’
‘When you speak of your mother or sister I hear affection in your voice. I get the impression you were close.’
She was silent for a few moments. ‘I suppose it did draw us closer together in some ways.’
‘But not all?’ Thierry passed a slow-moving truck then rolled his shoulders. Already he felt a familiar sense of release at leaving Paris.
‘Isabelle thrived on new places, making new friends, starting afresh. She was the outgoing one.’
‘You’re not outgoing?’ He thought of her laughter the night they’d met in Paris, the confident way she’d bantered with him. Plus there was the enthusiastic way she embraced every new experience.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her rub her palm down her jeans. He jerked his attention back to the road, before his mind wandered to places it shouldn’t.
‘I’m the reserved one, the cautious twin. Izzy would walk into a new classroom and by the end of the day she’d have five new best friends. It would take me weeks or months, and by that stage we’d usually be on the move again. My sister thought it a grand adventure but I...suppose I just wanted more stability and certainty.’
Hence the affinity for creating order out of chaos with numbers. Thierry tried to imagine what it must have been like for such a child, averse to change, being carted around the countryside. It didn’t escape him that her other interests—reading and baking—were home-based. It was a wonder she’d crossed the globe in search of adventure.
As if she’d read his thoughts, she spoke. ‘My sister followed her dream and took the gamble of coming to France, hoping to work in fashion, though everyone said her chances were slim. I was the one who stayed where I was.’
‘I was always looking for adventure,’ he said then paused, surprised he’d shared that.
‘What sort of adventure?’
‘Anything to break the monotony of home.’ He sensed her surprise and shot her an amused glance. ‘My childhood was the opposite of yours. Everything in my world was so stable it was almost petrified. Things were done the same way they’d always been done.’
If it had been good enough for the Girards to dine in the blue salon a hundred and fifty years ago, the Girards would continue to do so, even if it was a cold room that missed the evening sun in summer. Male Girards entered the diplomatic corps or the military before taking their place managing one of the family enterprises and there was an end to it. Rules covered everything, from his choice of friends to his behaviour in public and in private.