“Autumn, with a cold, fast wind pushing the dead leaves through a forest.”
“Oh.”
He kissed her hair. “Too depressing, hmmm?”
“No. It suits you. You always look at the dark side of life.”
“And you have a great deal of optimism for one who has had so little encouragement. Don’t ever let it go. Don’t ever let anyone keep you from following your dreams. You can be anything you want to be. You can have anything you want, if you never stop working for it.”
“You don’t know how much I want.” She slid her arms around his neck, hugged him, and said no more.
“Learn the difference between what you want and what is best for you,” he whispered against her ear. “That’s the hardest lesson of all.”
“Have you learned it?” She tilted her head back and searched his face desperately.
“Yes.” He could see by the sorrowful expression on her face that she wouldn’t ask him to explain; that she knew she wouldn’t like the explanation. “Stop, Amy.” He repeated the words, feathering them over her mouth. “No more thinking about the future.”
“Make me stop,” she ordered softly, her fingers sliding upward into his hair, then holding him while she lifted her mouth to his.
“You are learning,” he said, when she let him catch his breath. “You’re learning very, very fast.”
Jeff Atwater stood on the chief of cardiac surgery’s desk and made a toast to Sebastien, who had always impressed him as being his exact opposite. “Farewell, Frenchy. May the natives be friendly, the work interesting, and the karma good.”
Sebastien bowed slightly. “Working with you has been an enlightening experience. Thanks to you, soon after I arrived here I learned all the slang for street drugs and many useful obscenities.”
Jeff bowed back. “You’re goddamned welcome.” He got down from the desk and sipped from his cup of herbal tea as one of the cardiac residents made a farewell toast, a rather timid one. Looking around, Jeff wasn’t surprised to find only a few people in the office. While the staff considered Sebastien brilliant, they didn’t like him. He was too young, too confident, too French. French surgeons tended to rely on logic more than statistics. That drove American surgeons nuts.
Jeff liked Sebastien because he was brutally honest, the honesty part of a strict personal code. The man had integrity. His arrogance held no hint of petty prejudice. Women were both intimidated and fascinated by him, but he never treated them like easy prey. He never promised more than he gave. Jeff respected that, although for himself he believed women deserved every callous thing a man could to to them.
As people began dispersing Sebastien called him aside, looking more serious than usual, but distracted. Jeff wondered how much the child’s bloody death had upset him. Everyone on the staff of the transplant unit was talking about the pitiful event and Sebastien’s violent reaction. Interesting that reaction, Jeff thought. Surgeons were such perfectionists.
“I need to ask you for a rather involved favor,” Sebastien told him. “I hate to impose on you, but you’re the only person I can turn to.”
As he explained, Jeff listened in solemn silence. Afterward he nodded sagely. “Fascinating. How can I pass up the opportunity? See you at your place for dinner tomorrow night.”
He watched Sebastien leave the room, moving with a long, confident stride as usual, nodding majestically to the people who bid him good-bye, his manner indicating he found the whole sentimental business awkward and unnecessary. This was a man who would probably spend most of his life alone, because he had all the warmth of a cold steel wall. Jeff had always been in awe of his self-sufficiency.
That was why, as he mentally replayed their conversation, he felt stunned and disappointed. What kind of power did this girl have over him?
Later, when Pio Beaucaire called to introduce himself and ask for Jeff’s help, he thought the coincidence was promising. He wanted to meddle in Sebastien’s life, and here someone was asking him to do just that.
Jeff chewed on a grape sucker and waited in the atrium of the trendy hotel restaurant. He disliked places that reminded him of his own greed. Impatience brewed inside him, though he cultivated an appearance of calm. Stress was an ailment suffered only by establishment types. He told himself that he hadn’t lost his individuality. At the bottom of his dress shirt, loosely knotted blue tie, and tan slacks, his feet were encased in red socks and leather sandals.
He was a product of a fading era. He’d spent most of the turbulent decade of the Sixties as a tow-headed, jug-eared, lanky bookworm in the middle-class atmosphere of his parents’ orange orchards, south of Los Angeles. But a latent sense of adventure caught up with him finally, and he experienced the seventies in college at Berkeley, floating on a cloud of drugs most of the time, waggling the peace symbol at everyone, and living in a commune.
A few bad experiences with hallucinogens and the discovery that he liked to make money had convinced him to sober up, and he’d gotten his M.D. degree, then gone into a psychiatric residency.
Which suited him perfectly. He was a master at using people, at charming them, at deciphering what they needed and feared. He liked power, especially when it concerned women, and the only time it had served him badly was when he married a sloe-eyed fashion model who spelled her name Aleze when it was really Alice. That pretention alone should have been enough to warn him, he thought later.
But he had been obsessed with her, and during the first six months of their marriage she had returned his adoration with an intensity that couldn’t have been more real. They settled cheerfully into a cheap duplex in suburban L.A. When her career began to take off and she made the cover of a leading women’s magazine, he had been so proud.
She spent his modest resident’s income with abandon, a problem he could dismiss because he loved her so much. Their life revolved around glorious escapades in bed. When she gave him gonorrhea he was stunned. His magnificent Aleze was one part fashion model and nine parts prostitute, a profession she practiced from a nicely furnished apartment overlooking Sunset Boulevard.
After the divorce he had pulled up stakes and moved across the country. Having recently celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday, he stared into a mirror in the hotel lobby and wondered if his hair was receding as fast as he suspected. Oh, well, as long as he got everything else he wanted from life, he could live without hair. What he wanted was simple: money, professional prestige, and the chance to take revenge on as many women as were foolish enough to give him the opportunity.
He winked at his reflection. Misogynist. It had a nice ring to it.
“Monsieur Atwater?”
Jeff turned at the sound of the accented voice. A stocky man gazed up at him with limpid, solemn eyes. His robust face and white hair gave him the grandfatherly appeal of a clean-shaven Santa Claus, a corporate Claus in a double-breasted gray suit.
“Mr. Beaucaire?”
“Yes.” They shook hands. “Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me.”
“No problem. Let’s go inside.” Jeff controlled his curiosity until they were seated at a table in the restaurant. “You said on the phone that you’d heard Sebastien mention my name over the past two years, and that’s why you contacted me?”
“Yes. You seem to be a close friend.”
“You’re an employee of his?”
“Of his father’s, actually. I’ve worked for the de Savin family all my life. Sebastien is to me as precious as a grandson. That is why I have come to you for help. Because I love him. Because his father loves him even more, and his father sent me to America to watch over him.”
Jeff couldn’t imagine Sebastien de Savin needing anyone’s guardianship, but Beaucaire’s sentimentality touched him. He was definitely distraught. “Why come to me?”
“Sebastien does not become friends with many people. You must be a fine man.”
Jeff grinned, enjoying the praise. It was true—only an expert at manipulating human relationships could get
beyond Sebastien’s reserve. “What can I do for you, Mr. Beaucaire?”
A waiter appeared. They ordered drinks, and for no apparent reason the dapper Beaucaire began elaborating on de Savin history. It was like listening to a lecture on European civilization all the way back to Charlemagne. By the time Beaucaire finished, Jeff realized his point. The de Savins weren’t just any family; they were one of the oldest lineages in Europe, and Sebastien was dawdling with a girl whose illustrious family history could probably be traced no further than the night grandpa met grandma at a hoe-down.
“It shouldn’t surprise you if I say that Sebastien has been involved with several women since I’ve known him, and each of them came away with freezer burns when they tried to get too close,” he told Beaucaire.
“But this one … she is crafty. She is unique.” Beaucaire spread his large, ruddy hands on the linen tablecloth in a gesture of appeal. “You can reason with Sebastien. I’m asking you as his friend to speak with him about this.”
“But he’s going to Africa soon. He’ll leave her behind.”
“Who knows for sure? This girl, she might appeal to his sympathies. She is poor and ignorant and tries to appear helpless. Her provincial charm may remind him of his mother, you see. I am absolutely certain that such thoughts influence his judgment.”
“I doubt that Sebastien is looking for a mother figure.”
“No, of course I don’t mean it that way! But you see, his maman was a pitiful little thing, and she died in an automobile accident when he was a boy. It affected him greatly. No one has understood him since. His father has tried so hard, but without success. The comte de Savin is heartbroken over the situation, and he is growing older. He is not well. He wants to have his eldest son’s love. He fears that Sebastien will never come home.”
“And you want me to intervene in Sebastien’s relationship with this girl? I admit it’s a strange infatuation on his part, but I’m afraid you overestimate my influence with him. In fact, no one has much influence over Sebastien.”
“This girl does, obviously.”
“Hmmm. I wish I could help you, but—”
“Sebastien’s father wishes to employ your professional services.”
The conversation halted. Jeff studied Beaucaire in astonishment. “You mean pay me to assess the situation and make a report, without Sebastien’s knowledge?”
His eyes never leaving Jeff’s, Pio Beaucaire leaned forward and said in a careful tone, “There could be a great deal more to it than that. The comte de Savin would like your evaluation of the problem, certainly, but he would also be interested in your continuing supervision of it, as well.”
Jeff traced a line of moisture on his martini glass while he weighed ethics and friendship against his bank balance. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Fifty thousand dollars now. Fifty a year from now, and a hundred when Sebastien returns to France, in two years … if he returns alone, and the girl is no longer a problem.”
Jeff’s mental scales slid heavily to the side of his bank balance. He hadn’t been out of medical school long enough to acquire a champagne income, but he had a helluva taste for it. He watched his finger tremble on the martini glass. “Two hundred thousand dollars to intervene in a problem that will probably take care of itself, as soon as Sebastien leaves for Africa?”
“The comte is a cautious man.”
“And an extravagant one.”
“Only where love for his son and his family heritage are concerned.”
Jeff drank his martini in one swallow. “I’m not sure I can do what he wants. This is a tad outside the bounds of professional ethics.”
“He would be hiring you as a private consultant. No one other than you, he, and I would ever know. And he really doesn’t care how you accomplish his goal. You’d have complete freedom. He would never ask you to violate your honor.”
“There’s no guarantee I could succeed.”
“Of course. He understands. Do your best, and if you fail, you’ll be fifty thousand dollars richer, regardless.”
“I’ll have to think about this offer.” He had already thought about it, accepted it, and begun spending the money, but he didn’t want to sound overeager. “I promise you,” he told Beaucaire, clasping the older man’s hands, “that I’ll try to help, even if I don’t take the comte’s offer.”
“Bless you.”
Jeff gave him a reassuring smile. “Believe me, I’m an expert at dealing with manipulative women.”
Jeff was in a sour mood by the time he arrived at Sebastien’s town house that evening. From the entrance foyer he sniffed the scent of fried chicken. Fried chicken. He’d learned to recognize the heavy, greasy aroma in every two-bit diner he’d ever entered in Atlanta. It was pervasive and uniquely Southern, lard sizzling around bloody fowl. It made him want to stuff his nose with tofu.
“You’re letting her cook for you?” he demanded of Sebastien.
Sebastien studied him shrewdly. “You don’t like this situation.”
“I just didn’t peg you for the domestic type.”
“You’re very astute.”
“Did I get this right? She’s only eighteen?”
“Yes. That also is not my type, I think you know.”
“I thought I knew. Frankly, you’ve left yourself open for a lot of problems, pal.”
“Hmmm. I regret requesting your assistance. I won’t have you insult her. Let’s forget that I asked—”
“No, pal, let’s not forget. If you want someone who knows how to handle hysterical females, you’ve come to the right man. I’ll give her the old big-brother treatment and ruffle nary a feather on her fledgling wings. But I tell you, I’m a little surprised.”
“No more than I. Come and meet her.” Something dark and warning rose in Sebastien’s eyes. “And by the way, my friend, she is the least hysterical female you will ever encounter. Don’t patronize her.”
Jeff followed him through a curving hallway past his stark art deco living room and into the kitchen. He swept a quick, professional assessment over the girl who looked around hastily from her place at the stove.
Her eyes disappeared behind her lashes as she gave Sebastien a vivid smile. It became uncertain when she looked at Jeff. The smile tugged at the large Band-Aid on her chin. She’d been smacked by her father, Sebastien had said. Jeff’s case studies were full of patients who’d suffered abuse. They were emotionally vulnerable and desperate to find security. She was the kind who’d prey on a man’s protective instincts. No wonder Beaucaire was worried.
He could understand her appeal. There was an intriguing mixture of merriment and caution in her face. She had a goofy, endearing smile. Auburn hair curved gracefully around it in a short style with feathery bangs. Her jeans and plain white T-shirt showed off long legs and a decent ass. She had an adequate set of knockers.
But she was just an odd, timid-looking eighteen-year-old. Yet she’d managed to move in with Sebastien and convince him to pay her way through college. Jeff watched with hidden amazement as Sebastien went to her and took her hand. He drew her forward, not with obvious affection but with solemn consideration that said even more. The man as treating her like an equal, it seemed.
“Amy, I’d like to present Dr. Atwater. Jeff Atwater. Jeff, this is my house guest, Amy Miracle.”
Jeff stuck out a hand. “Hi ya.”
“Hi.” She shook firmly but briefly. Color flamed in her cheeks. She stuck her fingers into her jeans’ pockets and stared at a point at the center of Jeff’s sport shirt.
He tried to draw her out. “So … you’re cooking dinner, I see. Do you like to cook?”
“Sure.”
“Fried chicken, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Smells great,” he lied. The girl had about a five-word vocabulary. What else did she have, besides a mouth that could probably suck chrome off a tail pipe, or some other incredible sex skill that held Sebastien’s attention?
“What else is
that I smell cooking?” he asked politely.
“Turnip greens.”
“Great. My favorite. So … you’re planning to go to the university this fall, Sebastien tells me.”
“Yeah.” She hugged herself, met his eyes for a second, then looked as if she might sway from one sneakered foot to the other. Sebastien moved past her to pick up a glass of wine from the island at the center of the kitchen. In passing he stroked a hand over her shoulders. The gesture might have been meant to reassure her. If it was, it worked, because she relaxed visibly. Jeff found the silent communication disturbing; it was so intense for two people who were completely unsuited to each other.
“What do you want to study?” he asked her.
“I’m not sure.”
“For the first two years she’ll be in a basic liberal arts program regardless of her major,” Sebastien interjected, pouring amber liquid into a fluted wineglass. “She has plenty of time to decide on a major.”
“Oh, I’ll study something respectable,” she added quickly. She sounded determined, almost adamant. “Maybe I’ll become a lawyer.”
Now that she’d managed a full sentence, Jeff did a double take over her voice. Besides having a pronounced drawl, she sounded like she was just coming down from a hit off a helium balloon. Cartoon characters had voices like this, not real people.
Recovering his train of thought, he told her, “Pick a more respectable profession than the law. Like stealing used cars or robbing old ladies. Why in the world would you want to be a lawyer?”
She turned beet red. “Well, I, uhmmm—”
“Ignore him. He has some personal reasons for disliking lawyers,” Sebastien explained. Once again he rested a soothing hand on the girl’s back. She shot him a look filled with the kind of devotion one sees in an adoring pet—totally focused and sincere. Jeff cursed silently. A kid with an infatuation. This had more potential for causing Sebastien trouble than he’d expected.
Sebastien handed him a glass of wine. “One of the best zinfandels you’ll ever taste.”
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