The Hotel Riviera (2 page)

“That's a pretty little sloop,” Miss Nightingale called. “Rather different for these waters, don't you think?”

“It is, and I hope they're not going to play loud music and interrupt your peaceful dinner,” I said.

“Oh, I shouldn't think so, my dear, it doesn't look the right boat for that sort of thing. It's more of a proper sailor's boat, if you know what I mean.”

I smiled at my favorite guest. Mollie Nightingale was a retired British schoolmarm, and by way of being my friend. Nothing had ever been said, but it was just there between us, that warm feeling, a kind of recognition I suppose you might call it. She had certain qualities I admired: integrity; an offbeat sense of humor; and a personal reticence that matched my own. Miss Nightingale kept her own counsel and I knew little about her private life; just the woman she was here at the Riviera. A woman I liked.

She had been my first guest, the week the Hotel Riviera opened for business, and she had been back every year since, coming late in the season when prices were lower and she could afford to stay for a month, before heading home to her cottage in the Cotswolds and her miniature Yorkie, Little Nell, and another long English winter. Meanwhile, she lived out her annual dream here, alone at a table for one, with a small carafe of local wine and book to hand, and always with a pleasant word and a smile for everyone.

Miss Nightingale was, I would guess, somewhere in her late seventies, short, square, and sturdy, and tonight she wore a pink flower-print dress. A white cardigan was thrown over her shoulders, though it was still warm out, and as always she had on her double row of pearls. Like the Queen of England, she always carried a large handbag, which, besides a clean linen handkerchief and her money, also contained her knitting. Now, I'm not sure if the Queen of England knits, but Miss Nightingale, with her determinedly gray hair set in stiff waves and curls, and her piercing blue eyes behind large pale spectacles, was a dead ringer for Her Majesty.

She was usually first down for dinner, showing up about this time for a glass of pastis, a little self-indulgence to which I knew she looked forward. She'd mix the anise liqueur with water in a tall glass then sip it slowly, making it last until dinner, which I also knew was the social highlight of her day.

I sat with her while she told me about her outing to the Villa Ephrussi, the old Rothschild house with its spectacular gardens up the coast near Cap-Ferrat. She always liked to tell me about the gardens she had discovered; she was a keen gardener herself and her own roses had won many local prizes. In fact, she was often to be found pottering about the gardens here, straw sunhat slammed firmly over her eyes, pulling up a naughty weed or two, or snipping back a recalcitrant branch of honeysuckle that threatened to overwhelm the already out-of-hand bougainvillea.

Settled at her usual table, the one at the end of the terrace nearest the kitchen, glass of pastis to hand, she gazed at the spectacular view and heaved a satisfied sigh.

It was that special time in the evening on the Côte d'Azur, when the sky seems to meld with the sea and all the world turns a shimmering silver-plated midnight-blue. In the sudden breathless silence that always comes when day turns into night, the chatter of high-pitched French voices floated from the kitchen, and a tiny lizard swished by, pausing to stare at us with jeweled yellow eyes.

“Divine,” Miss Nightingale murmured. “How you must love it here, my dear. How could you ever bear to leave it?”

Without realizing it Miss Nightingale had struck right at the heart of my dilemma.

I do love it here. The trouble is I do not love my husband. All I feel for him right this minute is anger, because I believe that when Patrick left that morning he knew he was not coming back. He simply left me without a word, left me not knowing where he was, what had happened to him, or even if he were safe. If he'd run off with another woman, or decided just to wander the world the way he used to, at least he should have told me. And if he was in some kind of trouble, then he should have shared that with me too, and not just left me alone like this. Not knowing.

“The Hotel Riviera is my home,” I said to Miss Nightingale. “It's my own little piece of paradise. I'll still be here when I'm an old, old lady, still looking after my guests, still cooking, still drinking rosé wine and not believing how blue the late evening sky can be just before night falls. Oh no, Miss Nightingale, I'll never leave here, even if Patrick never…”

“If Patrick never comes back.” She eyed me sympathetically from behind her large glasses. “My dear, do you think he's run off with another woman?”

I'd thought of that possibility so many times, lying in bed, tossing and turning, and I'd decided it was the only answer.

“Miss Nightingale,” I said, genuinely lost, “what do I do now?”

“There's only one path for you to take, Lola, and that's to move on with your life.”

“But how can I? Until I find out the truth?”

She patted my hand, gently, the way she might an upset schoolgirl. I almost expected her to say, “There, there…,” but instead she said, “The answer to that, my dear, is you must find Patrick.”

I wanted to ask her how, where do I start? But my other guests were showing up for predinner drinks and a chat with the
patronne
, so I pulled myself together, dropped a kiss on her powder-scented cheek, and with a whispered “thanks for being so understanding,” went to greet them.

Miss Nightingale

Mollie Nightingale had fallen for the Hotel Riviera the first day she saw it. She'd fallen for its simplicity: “like a country house by the sea,” she'd said, amazed by her luck. And she'd fallen for Lola, who always had a welcoming smile, even though she was so busy. Of course Patrick had never bothered to waste his charm on his guests, he'd saved that for other women, and in fact for the past couple of years, he'd hardly been around. And now he was gone. If it were not for Lola's obvious pain, Miss Nightingale would have said “good riddance to bad rubbish,” but she hated to see Lola hurting like this.

She hadn't wanted to bring up the matter of Patrick's infidelity, because she knew if a woman chose to close her eyes to that sort of thing, there was nothing anyone could do about it. But now Patrick had gone missing, and she for one was not surprised. What she was surprised about, though, was that he'd simply left his hotel without making any claims on it. As husband and wife, Lola and Patrick must own the place together, which seemed unfair to Miss Nightingale, who believed that Lola had created the Hotel Riviera, as surely as she believed that God had created man.

Lola always treated her like a favorite aunt, well, great-aunt was more like it, she supposed, because though she hated to admit it, she was getting on in years. Seventy-eight was the exact number, though Lola was too polite to ask and Miss Nightingale was too vain to tell. And if you thought that meant she was old, then you didn't know that inside she still felt like a spring chicken. Her brain was still as sharp as it had been when she was headmistress of Queen Wilhelmina's Day School for Girls, in London.

She and Lola rarely exchanged much personal information, so today's confidences had come as a surprise. Usually, they just talked about the weather, a subject about which there could be no controversy, or about food and wine, or the places Miss Nightingale had discovered on her travels up and down the coast on her rented silver Vespa.

She had found many out-of-the-way places that even Lola had never visited, such as the tumbledown villa near Cap-Ferrat that had once been a hotel, owned by an exotic turn-of-the-century French singer and beauty by the name of Leonie Bhari. Now, Lola was nothing like the famed Leonie in looks, but with her “villa hotel” on the Côte d'Azur and her disastrous relationships with men, Miss Nightingale thought there were distinct similarities.

By now too, Miss Nightingale thought of the Hotel Riviera as her home away from home, though in fact she had started out as the “daughter of the manor” in the village of Blakelys, in the very heart of the English Cotswolds.

Times and circumstances had changed, and now she lived alone in what had once been the head gardener's cottage in the village her family had once owned, with just her yappy Yorkie, Little Nell, for company on the long winter evenings, and her memories of her beloved husband, Tom, to make her smile, and her monthlong stay at the Hotel Riviera to look forward to at the end of summer.

It was enough, she thought, taking another sip of pastis, smiling as the other guests began to show up for dinner. Though it didn't exercise her brain very much, and she missed that the way she missed her Tom.

Jack

Jack Farrar, with only his faithful dog for company, was enjoying a drink on the deck of his sloop, his current crew member having taken off for a bout of shopping in Saint-Tropez.

Jack met a lot of women on his travels, like for instance Sugar, the blonde currently crewing his boat: good-looking girls ready for fun and with no demands because Jack certainly wasn't the marrying kind. And anyhow what woman in her right mind would want to spend a year in a boat circumnavigating the globe, battling storms and eating out of cans and having to wash her hair in salt water for weeks on end? None, so far as he knew. And certainly not one he could have spent that kind of time alone with.

In fact, the times spent alone on this little sloop with only his dog for company were quite simply the best. Nothing could compare with those quiet moments, with just the stars overhead and the wind tugging the sails. Just him and the dog, the ink-blue water, and solitude. They were the highlights of his life. As, in another sense, were the storms he battled on the longer voyages, steering the bigger sloop he owned, the
In a Minute,
through towering waves that threatened to capsize them while the wind tossed them around like dandelion fluff. His crew tackled the elements along with him while the mutt cowered in the tiny salon, whining and strapped to a flotation device, just in case. And Jack also strapped himself to the wheel, just in case. Then the adrenaline would shoot through his veins, powerful as hot rum, and his triumph when they overcame the elements was, he thought, the peak of a man's experience.

For Jack, there was nothing to touch that feeling, not even sex, though he was a sensual man. Or perhaps it was just that he hadn't allowed any women into his life to share that deeper, all-consuming emotion that happens when love is added to the sexual equation. He had yet to find a woman who could give him the ultimate sensation he got from battling the elements alone on the sloop.

He was a loner, a nomad, a roamer, at home in the fishing ports of the world. He loved that life and he wasn't about to give it up for any woman.

Of course, on the long-haul trips on the fifty-footer, Jack wasn't accompanied by any flighty women. Then his crew consisted of six men, one of whom was his good friend, the Mexican Carlos Ablantes.

He'd first made Carlos's acquaintance in Cabo San Lucas, a little town on the Baja Peninsula, where he'd gone fishing for marlin and dorado. It was November and the weather had turned rough, with water too cold for the big fish. But Carlos had been born and raised in Cabo and he knew his stuff. He was a true man of the sea, just the way Jack was. Carlos had taken him out on his boat; they'd spent a couple of nights out there together on the Sea of Cortez, reeling in only a lone dorado and getting to know one another, the way men do: few words spoke volumes; they knew who they were and that they liked each other.

Later, Carlos had come north for a spell, and he'd just stayed on. He worked at the boatyard, sailed with Jack on weekends, and crewed for him on his long trips, but every few months Carlos would return to Cabo, lured back like the marlin.

Carlos was pretty good in the galley too. He cooked up a mean shrimp dish,
fajitas de camarones,
and mixed the best margarita in the world, with Hornitos tequila,
limones,
ice, and salt. Soon he and the rest of the crew would be joining Jack, here in the Med, and they'd set off in the
In a Minute
on another of their long voyages, to South Africa this time, heading for Capetown where the surfing was good, the women beautiful, and the wine just fine.

Baja was where Jack had also met Luisa, the one woman he'd really loved. Lovely Luisa—hair like black satin, eyes like green jewels, and skin like bronze velvet. She'd loved him for all of three months, and he'd loved her about the same length of time. But passion can play havoc with a sailor's schedule if he lets it, and Jack wasn't about to do so. He was tough when it came to women. He valued his friendships and his sailing, in that order. Give him his boat, his friends, and his dog and he was a happy man.

Life was pretty good. He had made enough money to keep him in the style he enjoyed, plus a little extra. When he wasn't roaming the seas, he had a boatyard in Newport and that kept him pretty busy. He built racing yachts there, far sleeker and more expensive than his own. But this little old sloop was his favorite.

He thought about the woman who'd caught him naked in the telescope earlier tonight. There was something interesting about her. Something about the long untidy sweep of taffy-colored hair, the lift of her cheekbones, the soft, full mouth, and the stunned look in her big brown eyes when they had met his in the binoculars. He grinned, just thinking about her shock at being caught peeking at him naked, and the way she looked in her too-tight T-shirt and odd pants.

He also liked the look of the small pink hotel, perched above the rocks amid a bower of tamarind and silvery olives. Even without binoculars, he could see the luxurious purple-pink tumble of bougainvillea and the candlelight flickering on the dining terrace. Lamps lit in the rooms behind cast an inviting amber glow, and the crackle of the still-lively
cigales
floated across the water, along with some music. Could that really be
Barry White
? He grinned, thinking about the shocked taffy-haired woman. Maybe there was more to her than had met his eyes.

Either way, he was getting hungry and she was obviously running a restaurant. He might as well kill two birds with one stone, meet the woman and find out if she was as sexy as her mouth and the Barry White implied, and at the same time have a decent meal.

He didn't bother to change, just raked his hands through his disheveled brown hair, hitched up his baggy shorts, pulled on a white T-shirt and his old Tod's driving shoes, the most comfortable shoes he'd ever owned and with which he would never part, despite their age and shabbiness. The shaggy black dog he'd rescued from the pound and certain death some years ago pranced at his side, eager to go wherever Jack led him. He'd named the unruly mutt Bad Dog, because he had never learned how to behave in civilized company. And then, because he loved Bad Dog as much as his boat, he'd named the sloop after the mutt.

“Sorry, old buddy,” he said, stooping to caress Bad Dog's head, “but the other diners wouldn't appreciate your finer qualities, especially when you attempt to steal the food from their plates.” He grinned. Bad Dog was a street hound, a scavenger of the highest order. Fancy joints with candlelight and good wine were definitely not for him.

He put food into Bad Dog's bowl, made sure he had fresh water, gave him a new chew bone, then climbed into the dinghy, unhitched the line and started up the small outboard. Bad Dog hung his head over the side, gazing piteously down at him. He hated being left behind.

“Back soon, old buddy,” Jack called, as he slid over the smooth dark blue water toward the tiny wooden jetty sticking out into the Hotel Riviera's cove. But what he was really thinking about was the look on Miss Taffy Hair's face when she saw him again. In the flesh.