I swallowed. “Lucie?” I repeated, a small chill running over my arm just before Julian answered.
“My daughter.”
It felt like my org
ans had all crashed to my feet before he clarified.
“She isn’t biologically mine,” Julian said, looking at me. “Liz got pregnant with her around the time of one of our breaks, but I specifically didn’t do anything to confirm paternity when Liz said the child belonged to me. I wanted a kid. I wanted that family. I raised Lucie till she was four years old.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed. It was a much more significant amount of time than I had thought. “How old were you?”
“Twenty-five,” Julian replied. “From the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine, I was a dad. And a fucking good one. I was the father my own father raised me to become, and I was proud of myself. I adored Lucie in a way I didn’t know was possible. But Liz couldn’t handle it. Lucie and I were closer than she was to either of us. Lucie had anxiety. Panic attacks.”
Julian glanced at me, and my reaction to the explanation I now had for that night. He had been able to put air back in my lungs the night at the pool with Turner and Carter Roth, because he’d spent years using the same tricks to soothe the girl he raised as his daughter.
“I was the only one who could calm her down, and Liz resented that,” Julian said. “She resented that she was second best to the both of us. She resented that the love Lucie and I had together upstaged anything we had for her, and it was a painful daily reminder.”
“That sounds hard,” I couldn’t help but murmur. It really did. There was nothing more hurtful than being unloved and unwanted, and I knew well that being reminded of it every day was like torture following torture. A revolving door of pain.
“It had to be hard. I didn’t even realize myself how much it had to hurt,” Julian said, remorse in his voice. “I was just so hell-bent on having a family again. I was transfixed with Lucie, and with being a father. It felt like through the universe, my dad and I were somehow sharing a connection again. I knew exactly what he had felt when he was raising Emmett and me.” Julian paused, as if suddenly losing his breath. I squeezed his hand. “Lucie would look at pictures of my dad and say ‘Grandpa,’ and it was the best feeling. I was so over the moon, I didn’t know Liz was unhappy. I had no idea I was hurting her constantly.” He swallowed. “And I had no idea that she was plotting to hurt me back.”
A pang of fear hit my chest. “How?”
“I woke up one morning in December, and they were gone. Bags packed. Just gone. Liz didn’t tell me where she went with Lucie, and it wasn’t till months later that I found out they moved to France, where Liz is from.”
“Biarritz?” I guessed.
“No, but close by. She had always talked about going there with her family growing up, and how it was always a dream, and she wanted to raise her children there.”
“So you built the resort,” I murmured, staring ahead of us in pure, stunned awe.
“Yes. Before all the renovations and additions, it started out as a home. A big one. Liz said if I somehow showed her my love, maybe she would come back. Just maybe. So I designed a fucking mansion for her. At least I said it was for her.”
“But it was for Lucie.”
“Yes.”
The heat of the sun was almost unbearable now.
I was speechless.
I had been so sure Julian Hoult was unfeeling, made of steel. But for this little girl, he had turned himself inside out and worked tooth and nail – all for the fighting chance to perhaps see her again.
And apparently, he did. But it was short-lived.
Liz had returned to Julian, and they had spent all of four months in the Biarritz home before she detected the lie of his love and disappeared once again.
“They live somewhere outside of Paris now. Liz told me she would make sure I’d never be close to Lucie again. She promised me she would stop speaking English to her, and place her in a strictly French-speaking school.”
My jaw dropped at the unbelievably calculated cruelty of it all.
“So Lucie would be unable to communicate with you?”
“Yes. She writes letters here and there, and I provide financial support here and there. But the relationship we once had is gone, and now that she’s almost nine, I doubt she really remembers it. Which is okay. It’s less painful for her.”
The anguish in his voice was more than evident now, so I let him be for awhile. I needed the quiet myself, too, because my image of Julian had just been completely rocked. He wasn’t just cold, hard and efficient.
He was a million layers of complexities that made my heart actually ache for him more. He knew grief and suffering all too well – he just kept it always locked tightly inside of that ironclad exterior.