She heard him coming down the stairs before she heard him speak, calling back gaily to Pilar in French as the girl stood with wet hair on the second-floor landing. It was something about staying out of Nice and making sure she behaved herself in Antibes. Unlike Deanna, Marc would be seeing his daughter again in the course of the summer. He would be back and forth between Paris and San Francisco several times, stopping off in Antibes for a weekend, whenever he could. Old habits were too hard to break, and the lure of his daughter was too great. They had always been friends.

“Bonjour, ma chère.”

Ma chère, not ma chérie. My dear, not my darling, Deanna observed. The i had fallen from the word many years since. “You look pretty this morning.”

“Thank you.” She looked up with the dawn of a smile, then saw him already studying the papers. The compliment had been a formality more than a truth. The art of the French. She knew it well. “Anything new in Paris?” Her face was once again grave.

“I’ll let you know. I’m going over tomorrow. For a while.” Something in his tone told her there was more. There always was.

“How long a while?”

He looked at her, amused, and she was reminded once again of all the reasons she had fallen in love with him. Marc was an incredibly handsome man, with a lean, aristocratic face and flashing blue eyes that even Pilar’s couldn’t match. The gray at his temples barely showed in the still-sandy-blond hair. He still looked young and dynamic, and almost always amused, particularly when he was in the States. He found Americans “amusing”: It amused him when he beat them at tennis and squash, at bridge or backgammon, and particularly in the courtroom. He worked the way he played- hard and fast and well, and with extraordinary results. He was a man whom men envied and over whom women fawned. He always won. Winning was his style. Deanna had loved that about him at first. It had been such a victory when he first told her he loved her.