Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3)

by Fanetti, Susan

  Summer fling. Maybe. How bored could she get with a guaranteed end in three months?

  Before he pulled away, he placed a light peck at the corner of her mouth.

  “What’s your name, beautiful girl?” His voice was low and gruff.

  Buzzing from the kiss as much as the wine, she briefly considered keeping up with the coy, but decided it was stupid. “Carmen.”

  That grin had become downright obnoxious in its cockiness. “Beautiful. Well, Carmen, you were wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “This was our Woody Allen meet-cute.”

  ~ 2 ~

  Theo stood on the sidewalk and watched Carmen walk, not too unsteadily, into the building. When she went in the front door, he looked up and scanned the windows. About half of them glowed from the interior lights of their apartments. He wondered if the lights were already on in hers. He wondered, too, if it meant he was stalking her if he stood where he was and waited to see if new lights came on.

  She really was a beautiful girl. He’d found himself studying her as he’d sat across the little table. Her beauty was the kind Italian Renaissance painters had tried to capture. Botticelli, maybe. She looked Italian, too. Long, straight, thick hair, so dark brown it was nearly black. Olive skin. Big, brown eyes under naturally arcing eyebrows. High cheekbones. And a mouth—God, that mouth. Full lips, with just the slightest downward turn at the corners—that mouth and those eyebrows gave her an intelligent, sardonic aspect, one which apparently suited the intelligent, sardonic personality behind the beautiful face.

  She was tall—taller, he thought, that any woman he knew. And though she’d been dressed casually, in jeans and a light pullover sweater, she’d filled out both perfectly.

  He was filling his own jeans out pretty well at the moment, too.

  It had charmed him to no end to watch her ease from cold aloofness—hostility, even—to warm good humor as her wine had worked its magic on her. Her wit was sharp and quick, a no-bullshit approach to conversation, even after the ice had melted. He liked that. Since Orchids had become a critical darling with modestly successful sales, he most often was told what people thought he wanted to hear. After a while, that had created as much of a complex in him as hearing nothing but criticism would have.

  He could certainly go home and tell Elias and Jordan that he had spoken with a beautiful girl.

  And kissed her, too.

  It wasn’t that he’d been a monk since Maggie’s death nearly five years ago. In the past couple of years, he’d let friends, colleagues, or Jerry, his agent, fix him up occasionally. For functions and dinners and whatnot. But he hadn’t felt much of anything for the women he’d been paired with. He’d kissed them goodnight and left them at their doors. Just now, with the mysterious Carmen, was the first time he’d had his tongue in anyone’s mouth since he’d become a widower.

  There might have been some monkishness, actually.

  That had been a kiss worthy of throwing off the horsehair shirt, though. Wow. Carmen was here for the summer. He’d like to see more of her, he thought. Maybe a few weeks in Paris with a beautiful girl, with no commitments or complications, was the thing he needed to dispose of the monkish trappings completely.

  His boys were right. He spent too much time alone.

  A light went on at the top floor of the building. A few seconds later, Carmen came to the window and pulled the draperies closed. Flush with his stalkery success, Theo turned smartly on his heel and headed back toward the flat he was staying in, which was only a few blocks away.

  ~oOo~

  He woke the next morning to the aroma of baking cinnamon. Eli was up, then. Theo tossed back the comforter and walked to the en suite bathroom. He was naked; his boys were grown and, anyway, knew to stay out of his bedroom.

  When he was done in the bathroom, he grabbed his jeans from the floor near the bed and pulled them on, closing them as he left the room.

  He’d been staying in this huge apartment now for nearly a month, and he’d almost lost the urge to roll his eyes every time he came through the living room—or, as Hunter Anders, its owner, called it, the salon. The décor was ostentatiously opulent, and this western boy who’d been raised in a dilapidated bungalow on the wrong side of Cheyenne was still afraid to sit on the furniture, most of which looked like it had been looted from Versailles. Not his taste at all.

  But beggars shouldn’t be choosers, and he was here on Hunter’s euro. The grant that was paying the bills for Theo to focus on writing his next book had Hunter’s signature at the bottom. The apartment was an added bonus, because he’d made some kind of favorable personal impression on the old man, who lived primarily in Manhattan and rarely traveled far from home anymore.

  Theo turned and looked out the central window of the salon—which was filled from top to bottom by the Eiffel tower. The window was surrounded by a golden, rococo frame, like a portrait.

  It was shitty to grumble about a few florid, gilt chairs when that was his view while he was sitting on them. He shook his head at himself and headed to the gourmet kitchen.

  Elias, his eldest child, all broad muscle and virile blondness, stood at the tall oak island, wearing nothing but grey sweatpants, beating the bejeezus out of a bowl full of eggs. He’d developed a love of cooking when he was still young enough to need to stand on a chair next to his mother while she taught him her tricks. They’d watched the food channel together for years and had yelled at the television during Iron Chef, or whatever those competition shows were called, sounding like he did on Sundays watching the Broncos.

  Eli also sat with him on those Sundays and yelled just as loudly about football as he did about foodies. He’d played ball in high school and in college. Now, he was working in a cubicle at an investment company in Augusta, Maine, hoping to make his finance degree worthwhile.

  As Theo came in, pulled a large mug down from one of the open cupboards and made himself a cup of coffee, Eli looked over his shoulder. “Morning, Dad.”

  “Morning. Cinnamon rolls?”

  “Nah. Crumb cake. And herb and brie omelet.”

  “Wow. You stay here long enough, I’m going to gain fifty pounds.” One thing he still had to work out about being in Paris was how to work out. He’d be fifty in August. He knew he looked considerably younger, but staying fit was a big reason for that, and he was vain enough to be worried about skidding toward visible age.

  “Want to talk to you about that.”

  While Eli poured the eggy concoction into a skillet heated on the range, Theo took his coffee to the table at the side of the room. “What’s up, E.?”

  Without turning from his work at the skillet, Eli answered with a question. “How long can I stay?”

  He and Jordan had arrived three—no, four—days earlier, for a two-week vacation. Or so Theo had thought. “Don’t you need to get back to work?”

  His son shrugged his wide shoulders. “Can I stay a while?”

  Theo set his mug down and went to his son’s side. He laid his hand on his shoulder. “As long as I can, E. What’s going on?”

  “Fucked up. I got fired.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry. You want to talk about it?”

  Again, he shrugged. “Not much to say. I missed something important, lost a client a boatload of cash—real money. There are no apologies or second chances when a multimillionaire is screaming for your head.” He picked up the skillet and tipped it, letting egg run to the sides of the pan.

  “What can I do?” Knowing that his son wanted distance more than comfort, Theo dropped his hand and went back to the table.

  “Let me hang out while I figure it out? I hated that job, anyway. Like you said, it was a mistake to pick a career for money. Mom would’ve kicked my ass when I changed majors.”

  Theo laughed. “Yeah, she would have. Archeology is definitely more interesting than finance.”

  Turning the fire down under the skillet, Eli opened the door to one of the wall ovens, and a thick rush of cinnamon scent
billowed almost visibly into the room. Theo’s mouth watered.

  Eli set the glass pan full of cinnamony goodness on the counter and closed the oven door. “It’s not like jobs in archeology open up every day. Or every year. I just didn’t want to end up working at the sporting goods store for the rest of my life.” He chuckled without humor. “But I’m never going to get an investment job again, so it looks like it’s retail for me, anyway.”

  Theo got up and pulled plates and silverware from the cupboards. As he set the table, he asked, “What about food? You love this, what you’re doing right now. Be a chef. You could apply to the big school here, what’s it called—”

  “Le Cordon Bleu, Dad. It’s pretty famous. And I bet I’d need to speak French a lot better than où est les toilettes.”

  “It’s pronounced like a long ‘a,’ not ‘ehst.’”

  Eli grinned as he brought the skillet over and slid a third of the enormous, fragrant omelet onto the plate in front of Theo. “My point exactly.”

  Theo intended to rebut that with an argument that his embarrassingly rudimentary French had not yet impeded him; nearly everyone he encountered spoke far better English than he did French, and as far as he had seen, the reputation of Parisians as rude and supercilious had been vastly and unfairly overstated. But before he could, Jordan came into the room with a flourish.

  “Bonjour, ma famille. C’est une très belle journée, n’est-ce pas?”

  Jordan was so different from either Eli or Theo that people often expressed shock that they were not only related but by the closest possible blood. Both his sons had his blue eyes. Eli had his height and his rough, ruddy blondness. But Jordan took much more after Maggie. He was small—five-eight and slender—and had his mother’s fair, brunette coloring. At twenty, he was five years younger than Eli but seemed, in some ways, older. He was comfortable in his own skin. He knew what he wanted from life. Already.

  He’d come out to his parents and brother when he was twelve years old. Just set his fork down on his plate at dinner one night and announced, “I’m gay. Thought you should know.”

  No one had been surprised. He’d been playing with his mother’s makeup since he was two, fastidiously assembling and accessorizing his outfits since he was three, and none of his tastes in any regard were what one might call ‘macho.’ When he went to his brother’s football games, he watched the cheerleaders, but not for the reason the other boys were. He was critiquing their style and moves.

  That night, Maggie had looked across the table at him, said, “Yep. Pass the rolls, would you?”

  And exactly nothing had changed in their family, because they’d already known, and he’d never pretended to be anyone but Jordan.

  Now, he was standing in the doorway with one hand high on the jamb and the other on his hip, wearing a gold and black brocade dressing gown and a jade green ascot, the pants of jade green silk pajamas underneath. His hair was styled in a perfect quiff, and his eyeliner was already in place. He certainly had a flair.

  Theo grinned. “Morning, gorgeous. How’d you sleep?”

  With an irritated huff, Jordan came to the table. “Dad! We’re in Paris. Speak Parisian! And j’ai bien dormi.”

  With Eli’s life concerns dwarfed by his little brother’s extravagant enthusiasm, the three Wilde men sat at the table in their borrowed Parisian kitchen and ate a gourmet breakfast, chatting about their plans for the day. Theo was writing. Eli and Jordan were going to do a sightseeing circuit, walking or using the Metro to catch the biggest highlights, starting with a ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower and ending at the Louvre.

  Theo finished his omelet and pushed his plate aside. That crumb cake was calling to him. Maybe he’d write for a couple of hours and then take a run to burn off his son’s cooking. “Let me know when you’re heading to the Louvre. I’ll meet you. I know a secret way in—no line.”

  Jordan clapped. “Dad has the goods. Okay, we’ll text. And I want dinner out. With wine.”

  The mention of wine brought Carmen back. He’d gone to sleep thinking about that kiss—first he’d jacked off thinking about that kiss—but this morning his thoughts had been of his usual variety: his work, his sons. Now, he smiled as he recalled watching her become charmingly inebriated and increasingly, correspondingly friendly.

  “Dad? I’m pretty sure you’re blushing right now. What’s that about?” Eli crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Oh! Oh, oh!” Jordan gasped. “Did you keep your promise? Is that a beautiful girl blush?”

  Trying to ignore the sudden rabid interest of both his children, Theo stood and cut himself a piece of still-warm breakfast cake. “You boys should get dressed and get moving if you’re doing the town today. Lots of summer crowds.”

  “Oh, no. You have to say! Did you meet somebody?”

  In the past couple of years, since he’d gone off to college, Jordan had begun to fret about his father’s solitude. At first it had been little comments, offers to come home for weekends, things like that. But he’d been pushing harder and harder, and when Theo was awarded both a sabbatical and the grant, Jordan had decided that a sojourn in France was the perfect opportunity for his father to have a romance.

  And hell, maybe he was right.

  He looked at both of his sons now. He had their undivided attention. “I kept my promise and spoke to a beautiful girl—a woman, actually—last night, yes. We had a nice conversation. She’s even read Orchids.”

  Jordan clapped. “Ooh! Then she knows you’re available and have a heartbreaking backstory! Somebody call Nicholas Sparks!”

  Eli stood up and grabbed his plate. “Jordan, jeez. Sometimes you really suck, you know that?” He dumped his dishes in the sink and turned on the professional-style faucet.

  Jordan simply shrugged.

  Both boys adored their mother. Both boys had mourned her hard and mourned her still. But they had done so in different ways. Theo had written a little bit about it in the book in question. Eli’s way, like Eli himself, was more traditional, and thus more widely understandable. He was even now reticent to talk about his mom with anyone but the people in this kitchen, because he could not always trust himself to keep his cool.

  Jordan was Jordan, and he grieved like he lived. The same wry aplomb that had carried him through an adolescence and a public school education as a proudly out young man, that had lifted him off the pavement when he’d been bullied and beaten, and that had spurred him to coat in fuchsia glitter the casts he’d had to wear on his arm on three separate occasions—that aplomb had carried him through the loss of his mother, too.

  Eli understood that. But sometimes he didn’t.

  Under that fuchsia glitter had been a devastated boy. But Jordan needed to keep that boy safe and tucked away. Only Theo had been allowed to see the brokenhearted child who’d lost his mother.

  Theo’s own grief had eased over the years like a stone in a river. He would always love Maggie and the life they’d had together for twenty-two years, but the edges of his pain had worn away, and now he carried her memory like a smooth agate in his pocket—or, more concretely, like the jasper stone around his neck, a comforting reminder of a past that was no longer.

  Jasper. A healing stone. Maggie’s best friend, Phyllis, had given it to him at the funeral.

  He put his hand to his throat and picked up the pendants hanging there from leather cords. Two of them—the jasper circle, and a rough pewter disc engraved with the letter M.

  Eli saw him do it and came to his side. “Mom would be glad. She told you she’d be pissed if you pined after her for the rest of your life. I think four and a half years is enough.” He grinned. “You’re gettin’ up there, you know, Dad. If you don’t get moving, you could croak, and then you’ve pined for the rest of your life, after all.”

  “I haven’t been pining. Also, screw you.” He punched his eldest on the arm.

  He honestly hadn’t been pining, not for the past couple of years, anyway. He just hadn’t been interes
ted. Nobody compared to the woman he’d had, and dating and all that crap seemed like too much of a hassle without any real interest in the person he was with. He’d gotten used to a life without sex while Maggie was ill. She’d lingered, a shell of herself, for a long time. The transition from the watchful solitude of a caretaking husband to the true solitude of a widower had been so slow it had been almost imperceptible. So he hadn’t been desperate for physical companionship, either. It had simply been easier to be alone. Until there was somebody interesting enough to make that not true.