A Place of Storms Read Free Page B

mounted through a succession of hairpin bends, praying she would not meet anything coming in the opposite direction.
    She looked at the heavy clouds massing in the west and grimaced. All during the drive, the weather had been perfect—golden and autumnal. She had put to the back of her mind all the things she had heard about Auvergne— she'd read somewhere, where the weather was eternally in conflict with itself. Judging by those clouds, war would soon be declared once again!
    She reached for her road map and sat studying it, her brows furrowed slightly. Blaise Levallier was making few concessions to his future wife, she thought, asking her to make her own way to this inaccessible place. In itself, this seemed to contain an element of warning, silently conveying the amount of courage and self-sufficiency it would require to survive in this bleak mountain region with its dead volcanoes, and buildings that seemed to have been hewn from solid lava. Yet, in spite of her nervousness, Andrea had to acknowledge its strange compelling beauty. And of course, she told herself, she was not going to be asked to survive here. She gave a slight mischievous grin as she imagined what Clare, a nervous driver at the best of times, would have said when confronted with the valley road she had just traversed. That might have been one way of solving the problem, she thought, stifling her mirth. How would the unknown Blaise Levallier have coped with a bride who applied her handbrake and stubbornly refused to budge? Anyone as determined as he seemed to be would probably have hired a tractor from one of the hill farms and had her dragged to St Jean des Roches.
    She sobered slightly as she put her map away. She had only a few kilometres to go to her destination, and the thought was singularly unappealing. A warning voice inside her seemed to be saying it still wasn't too late to turn the car around and drive back to the comparative sanity of Clermont-Ferrand. She could leave the car there and get a train back to Paris. If Clare had been her sole consideration in all this, she might just have done it, she thought as she re-started the car.
    She had made that brutally clear to Clare as well, not just that first night when she had reluctantly agreed to go to St Jean des Roches in her cousin's place, but during the subsequent discussions that had taken place. Clare seemed convinced that the incriminating papers would be quite easy to find, but Andrea was not so sure.
    'Ask to see them,' Clare had suggested. 'Say you're not too sure about the wording—oh, you'll think of something.'
    'I'll have to,' Andrea conceded rather drily.
    She had read Blaise Levallier's letters, especially the last one, a dozen times, until she felt every word was imprinted on her memory, and as she read, a slow anger was kindled. Who was this man who thought he could threaten the people she loved and damage their happiness and well-being with impunity? He was simply not going to get away with it. Clare might have been an utter fool, but at least she had seen the error of her ways in time, and he should have had the decency to release her from the ludicrous promise she had made him when she asked him to. Was he so unfeeling that the thought of life with a girl he had literally forced into marriage and for whom he could have no emotional attachment could actually seem tolerable?
    If so, his reasons for wanting this hasty marriage must be extremely cogent ones. She had questioned Clare closely about them, but Clare had destroyed the earlier correspondence with him long ago, and was aggravatingly vague about their contents. She maintained, however, that he had not been at all specific, except about the urgency of his need for a wife at least on paper. That he had said it was 'a legal necessity' was almost all dare could recall. Andrea had brooded about those words, but they still conveyed very little to her. She had also tried to probe further into the reasons for Martine's family's