Suddenly Last Summer (O'Neil Brothers 3)

“You’re not tired. You just don’t want to talk about your feelings. But I wish you would. You listened to me. I’d like to listen to you.” He saw her shoulders tense and took a gamble. “At least give me his name and address. Then I can send Tyler to punch him. I’d go myself, but I don’t want to ruin another shirt. And if I use my fists, it messes up my operating schedule, I’m sure you understand. Lives to save and all that.”

“Are you ever going to go to sleep?” But this time there was laughter in her voice and he felt a rush of relief.

“First we have to have the whole wilderness-bonding thing. Am I doing it the wrong way? I’ve never done this before so I’m bound to make some mistakes.”

She rolled over to face him. “Let me get this straight. You, Sean O’Neil, master of the superficial, want me to spill my innermost feelings?”

He knew a brief moment of panic and then reminded himself he dealt with blood and guts on a daily basis. He could handle emotions if he had to. He just had to tread carefully, and not do or say the wrong thing. “Yes. I want to know why you don’t want a relationship. You told me you learned a lesson.” He softened his voice. “What lesson did you learn, Élise? Why is love not possible for you?”

He thought she wasn’t going to respond but then she sat up, the sleeping bag still snuggled around her middle. She was wearing a loose T-shirt and it drifted down over her arm, exposing her shoulder. There was something about the curve between her neck and that bare, slender shoulder that made her seem even more vulnerable.

“I am not a good judge of character. I am very emotional. It blinds me.” She hauled the T-shirt up and it immediately slid down again. “Sometimes I make very, very big mistakes. I have too much passion.”

After their encounter in the forest he was ready to disagree with that.

But it was obvious to him now that she’d loved someone and he’d let her down.

It explained the contrast between heat and cool. “Is there any such thing as too much passion?”

“The problem with passion,” she said softly, “is that it is all too easy to mistake it for love. It blinds you to lies. You believe what you want to believe and you give your all. And the risk of giving your all, is that you lose everything.”

“It was him, wasn’t it? Pascal Laroche.” He wondered why it had taken him so long to work it out. “He was the one.”

“I was eighteen. He was thirty-two. Older. Very attractive. I’d been working for him for four months when he kissed me for the first time. At first I didn’t think he could possibly be interested in me. I was so naive. So unlike the women he usually dated. I said no, without realizing that for him ‘no’ was the incentive he needed to start the chase. Pascal was the most competitive person I have ever met. In the kitchen he was a genius, admired by everyone. That admiration was his fuel. It drove him. He pursued me relentlessly and I fell in love. You are wondering why, but he could be so charming and I suppose I was flattered. I loved him with every part of myself and I truly believed he loved me back. That was when I learned that wanting something doesn’t make it happen. My mother was worried, but I wouldn’t listen. She was always overprotective and usually I tolerated that, but this time I reacted in a bad way. Rebelled.”

“Every teenager rebels. You should talk to my mother about some of the stuff Tyler did. He got a girl pregnant. That was a pretty rough time, I can tell you. The Carpenter family wanted to kill Tyler. Gramps still can’t drive past their apple farm without growling. He never liked Janet.”

“But your family stuck together. When my mother became pregnant, her parents refused to have anything more to do with her. My grandparents never even wanted to see me. As a result my mother and I were very close. I was her only family and she mine.” She paused for a moment and then carried on. “When I got the job at Chez Laroche she was very proud of me. And then when she met Pascal and saw how things were, how he was, she was frightened. She could see instantly what sort of man he was. She tried to warn me but I wouldn’t listen.”

“That sounds like a fairly typical teenage response to me.”

“It was the first time in our lives that we argued. She would yell at me and threaten me and I would yell back. I can see now she was at her wits’ end, not knowing how to control me but to me it made me want to go home even less.”

It was all too easy to see parallels with his own situation and Sean shifted uncomfortably.

Hadn’t he felt exactly the same way after the row with his grandfather?

“You were being pulled in two directions.”

“I stayed out at night and wouldn’t tell her where I was because I knew she would try and stop me going. All I cared about was Pascal. I was blinded. Dizzy with it. I was in love and I was dismissive of all her warnings. What could she possibly know about love? She got pregnant with me when she was eighteen and she admitted she was crazy in love with the man who was my father. She told me that loving like that blinds you to how a person really is. You see what you want to see, and believe what you want to believe. She told me I had to end the relationship and get another job.”

“You didn’t.”

“No. I was in love with him. I didn’t want it to end and I certainly wasn’t about to listen to my mother. We had a horrible, screaming row and I told her I was moving in with Pascal.” Her hand gripped the edge of the sleeping bag, her knuckles white. “She was on her way to the restaurant to reason with me when she was hit by a cab. I had a call from the hospital. She was—how do you call it?—dead on arrival.”

Sean closed his eyes and then shifted across the tent and pulled her into his arms.

Suddenly it all made sense to him. The reason she was so desperate for him to fix things with his grandfather. The emphasis she placed on family. Her reluctance to ever allow herself to fall in love again.

“Th

at wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault.”

“If I hadn’t moved in with Pascal she wouldn’t have been crossing the Boulevard Saint Germain at that moment.” Her voice was muffled against his chest and she sat rigid in his arms. Inflexible. “I never had a chance to say goodbye. I never had a chance to say I was sorry. Nothing. The last words we both spoke were angry ones and I have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

“But she loved you and she knew you loved her.”

“Perhaps. I do not know. Back then I was such a mess maybe she didn’t love me. And I didn’t say that I loved her, so perhaps she didn’t know that, either. I will never know. And afterward, I fell apart. I didn’t know what to do. I had no one. No one except Pascal. He took care of everything, including me. I leaned on him. I took his kindness as evidence that my mother had been wrong about him, but of course, she wasn’t.” She pulled away a little and pushed her hair away from her face. “This story has a horrible inevitability to it, doesn’t it? Are you sure you want me to carry on?”