Suddenly Last Summer (O'Neil Brothers 3)

Part of him didn’t. He sensed what might be coming and it sickened him. “Yes.”

“The first time I caught him with another woman was the day after our wedding.”

“You married him?” That he hadn’t expected and he struggled to hide his shock. Listening was like watching a runaway train, knowing that disaster was imminent but having no way of stopping it.

“I was in love with him, so for me that was the obvious conclusion. I dreamed of building a family with him, of having children together and maybe buying a place in the countryside outside Paris. It is funny, no? You are thinking I watched too much Disney growing up.”

“Sweetheart—”

“The signs were there, but I ignored them. I saw only the parts of him I wanted to see. His genius. His charm. I told myself his temper was natural because he was so brilliant it was understandable he would be frustrated with those less brilliant. And he was very attentive after my mother died. Coping with that loss was terrifying. Without him I think I might have died, too. I was so heartbroken, so lonely, that when he proposed to me I didn’t think twice. It was like being swept down a raging river and suddenly being offered a stick to hold on to. It was grab it or drown. Looking back, I can see my neediness fed his ego. I made him feel important and feeling important was essential to him. It was another type of adulation and he fed on that. He was not interested in a relationship of equals. Always, he had to be the superior one.”

His gut clenched.

A lonely, grieving girl at the mercy of a narcissistic bastard. “You don’t have to talk about this. I’m sorry I pushed you to tell me.”

“On the day after the wedding, when I caught him with the other woman he told me it was a mistake. A mistake! As if two people could slip on a wet floor and land like that.” She rolled her eyes and even managed a laugh but Sean wasn’t close to laughing.

“You forgave him?”

“Yes, because the alternative was too brutal to confront.” She shook her head. “It shames me to admit that I gave him another chance, but I was very vulnerable and admitting that my mother might have been right was just too painful at that time. Of course, it didn’t end there. It never does, does it? He was famous. There were always women. The fact that he was married to me made no difference. He had a continuous string of affairs, sometimes more than one at the same time. And always the endless lies. Everything he said was a lie. One night in the middle of a terrible row I told him I wanted a divorce. That was the first time he hit me.”

“Christ, no.” Sickness mingled with the anger. “Oh, baby—”

Why the hell hadn’t he guessed?

He didn’t know what to say. What was he supposed to say to that?

“Afterward he was sorry. He said he was so desperate at the thought of losing me, he’d flipped a little bit. Just as his affairs were all accidents, so this was an accident, too. It was my fault for provoking him. Pascal never took responsibility for anything he did. Everything was always someone else’s fault.” Her voice was flat. Matter-of-fact. “He told me it would never happen again. He was just stressed. It had been a very bad night in the restaurant, three members of staff off sick and lots of pressure. I was shocked, of course. No one had ever hit me before. My mother never hit me. You read about these things, but when it happens to you it’s scarily easy to listen to the excuses. And I told myself everyone makes mistakes. I’d made plenty myself so I was very tolerant of mistakes in others. And I knew that if I’d left him, I would have lost not just my home but my job. And I actually did love my job. Some of the customers were regulars. Pascal worked long hours, I was lonely and they were the closest thing I had to family.”

Diners in her restaurant, family?

He thought of his own family. Tight-knit. Infuriating. Always there. Always.

“It wasn’t just that one time. He hit you again?” He forced the question through clenched teeth. Thinking about her coping with it alone made him ache.

“Yes. And that time I did walk out.”

He wanted to cheer but he could tell from the look on her face that the story wasn’t finished. “Where did you go?”

“I got a job in a tiny little place on the Left Bank. It was low-profile. Under the radar. I thought Pascal would be relieved I had gone and wouldn’t bother following. I was wrong. Turned out that me leaving him was the ultimate humiliation. As punishment for taking me on, he put the owner of the restaurant out of business. And when he came to break the good news, he told me that I would never get a job in Paris again and I would be forced to come back to him. And then he hit me again. And I’m forever grateful that he did because Jackson was in the restaurant that night.”

“Jackson?”

She gave a soft smile. “He’d come in three times that week because he liked my cooking. He’d been telling me about his business, about the hotels and the skiing. He was the one who found me in the street outside, bleeding and in a state. He took me to the hospital, reported Pascal to the police and then took me back to his hotel. I slept in his bed and he slept in the chair.”

“Was Pascal arrested?”

“Yes. But he hired a lawyer and his PR people hushed it up. Told some story that the media believed. The next morning Jackson offered me a job, cooking for him. To begin with I said no, because I didn’t want to risk bringing trouble to him after all he had done, but he refused to leave Paris without me.”

“Good.” Not for the first time in his life, Sean had reason to admire his twin brother. “So you went to Switzerland.”

“Yes. Jackson gave me that opportunity. He saved me. I owe him everything. And I have not been back to Paris since, even though the apartment I shared with my mother is still there. And sometimes it makes me sad because once I loved the city so much, but after my mother and Pascal—” She shrugged. “For me the place is poisoned. I can never go back. It would be too painful. I can only think how much I let my mother down.”

Finally everything made sense. All of it. Her devotion to his brother. Her loyalty. Her unwavering love for his family.

And her reason for not wanting a relationship.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want love. She was desperate for a relationship and a family of her own, but she was too scared of getting it wrong to trust her judgment again.