Page 30 of Across Time

"And as I recall," he says, lifting me high in the air, seemingly without effort, "you said you thought I was strong."

His hands, firm and gentle at once, stay in place until he’s certain I’m stable, though his proximity makes me feel far more unstable than the weight of the cast. I swear I can feel the press of his fingers through my clothes, and it makes my breath come short. “I’m okay,” I say.

He releases me and jumps onto Napoleon—so named, he says, because as a foal he was “little but mean”—and heads toward the vineyard, trusting me to follow.

The vines are lush and green, dotted with tiny purple clusters. I’ve never been in a vineyard before, and it’s beautiful, yet my eyes want to lock on Henri instead—on his broad shoulders ahead of me, or on the nape of his neck, where the hair is shaved close and would feel rough to the touch. Like his jaw might, this late in the day.

I picture pressing my mouth there for a moment and flush when I catch my own thoughts. I’ve been away from Mark too long, is all. I force my eyes back to the vines.

“So the wine we’ve been drinking,” I say, “did you make that?”

He shakes his head. “Mostly, no. We have a few Beaujolais vines here, but we’re too far north for them to grow well. On the nights when we’ve had a good wine, I can assure you it wasn’t ours.”

I shrug. “I don’t really like wine anyway, so I can’t tell the difference.”

He glances at me with a furrowed brow. “You don’t like it?” he asks, as if he thinks he misheard me.

I like daquiris and margaritas, which are essentially slushies for adults, and that’s about it. Mark teases me about my unsophisticated palate, but I hadn’t even turned twenty-one until the month before I left, so it’s not as if I’ve had a lot of exposure to anything but beer at this point in my life.

“I’m starting to get used to it.” I look around. “So what are these if they’re not the Beaujolais?”

“Champagne. You’re in the champagne region of France. Didn’t you know?”

I guess that explains all the champagne bottle-souvenirs in town when I arrived. I give him a rueful smile. “I didn’t read up much before I came. The only thing I wanted to know was when the Germans would arrive.”

He looks at his vines and his smile fades. “As much as I wanted to study architecture, I love all of this too. It would be hard to watch the Germans destroy it.”

I follow his gaze, looking out over the acres of green in the bright sun. “The Germans like champagne too, so I can’t see why they’d ruin it. But when they come…” I swallow. “I hope you don’t plan to try to fight them for it.”

He laughs. “You’re not serious? You really think I’m just going to hand my home over to them?”

If I’d given it any thought before I spoke, I probably wouldn’t have suggested it. That’s not who he is. “No, but you should. You know why Paris falls so quickly once it all begins? Because they’re completely outmanned, and they’ve got to choose between total destruction or possibly surviving the war and preserving the city. There is absolutely no chance they can prevail, and there’s no chance you can either. Your single gun won’t last you an hour against a couple dozen well-armed Nazis.”

“That’s not the point,” he mutters. “It’s the principle of the matter.”

“Your principle will get you killed.”

He glances at me with a small smile. “A horseback ride through a French vineyard and all you can do is scold. What a lucky man Mark is.”

I roll my eyes. He doesn’t want to discuss it and there’s no point anyway. He’s too stubborn to listen to anyone but himself. I suddenly notice we’re heading toward the woods. “Where are we going?”

"There's a lake at the border of the Bousonne Wood you might like."

I stiffen. "That's okay."

He turns to look at me. "You're getting tired?"

"No," I reply. "I just don't like lakes."

He looks at me for a moment, waiting, perhaps, for me to explain. Saying you don’t like lakes is like saying you don’t like good food, or comfort. Who doesn’t like lakes? When I say nothing, he just shrugs. "We can ride to the eastern meadow. It's a sea of wildflowers at the moment."

We turn and head north, picking our way through the vineyard and then the woods, until the trees clear and a hill stretches in front of us. "Just to the top," he says, hovering close to me as we proceed.

When we finally ascend the hill, my breath releases in one long, contented sigh. It's not merely a field of flowers. It's a field of lilies, so densely packed it's hard to believe they're real.

He climbs down and before I can stop him, he's grabbed me by the waist and set me gently on the ground. "The horses will graze and we will rest."

I have far less faith than he does in the animals’ obedient nature. "What happens if they run off?" I ask.