by Stacy Gail
Scout’s smile was… glorious. There was no other word for it, and he’d some spectacular smiles in his line of work. Hers was the kind of smile poets wrote sonnets about, and could live a lifetime in the memory of a man. He was an expert at reading people through their eyes, but he’d never really noticed that the quality of a soul could also be reflected in a smile.
Now he knew better.
Mirroring her position, he squatted down and focused on her tearing the last of the meat in two to drop one piece a few inches from her feet. Warily, as if it had an invisible rock strapped to its back, the cat slunk up to get the bite. He was positive it would have retreated if Scout hadn’t held out the last piece to it, held carefully between her finger and thumb. He held his breath, holding back the cautionary words through sheer force of will. This wasn’t a sweet little lap cat she was feeding, after all. It was a feral animal that lived in an urban jungle. It could rip her hand apart to get to the food without a thought, yet here she was thinking that she was safe with—
With the greatest care, the scrawny cat arched its thin neck up to the food and plucked it gently from Scout’s fingers. It didn’t retreat like he’d expected it to, nor did Scout reach out to pet it, instead tucking her hands under her chin in an obviously nonthreatening pose. He clicked the camera again and again, uncaring that he was filling up his memory card as the cat chowed down, then looked up hopefully to Scout, who simply shook her head and showed empty hands. The cat looked away, obviously aware that the free meal was done, came all the way up to sniff at her shoes, then went back under the sandwich board for a thorough face-washing.
Scout watched for a couple seconds before she slowly rose and made her way back to him. And as she did, that smile that belonged in a poet’s sonnet lit her face.
Chapter Eleven
“I’m not promising anything edible.” Scout felt compelled to offer a warning as they sat down at the kitchen island, the savory scent of French-fried potatoes perfuming the air. The potatoes had been cut to the thickness of steak fries and fried to a rich golden brown, and the poutine gravy was a light brown color, flavored with both beef and chicken stock and seasoned with a hint of garlic. “I’m not sure how assembly on this goes, so if you want to take over from here, feel free to show me how it’s done.”
“Assembly is simple enough.” Looking thoroughly pleased with what she’d laid out on the counter—a heated ceramic casserole dish of golden, salty fries, a pan of steaming hot gravy and a bowl of white cheddar cheese curds—he grabbed up a shallow soup plate and began to layer. “I like to mix it all up together anyway once all is said and done, so that I get a bit of everything in every bite.” He handed her the dish after crumbling a handful of cheese on top. “All you need is some cracked pepper on top of that, and you will be in gastronomic heaven.”
“This looks incredibly bad for me. That means I’m going to love it.” Hitching herself up on one of the calla lily stools, she waited for him to join her before grabbing the bottle of beer he’d insisted was the best drink of accompany his favorite dish. “Here’s to trying new things.”
He picked up his own bottle to clink its neck to hers. “To trying—and loving—new things.”
“What’s not to love about this dish?” She sipped before grabbing up a fork. At the first bite, she closed her eyes to savor the sharp tang of cheese, the richness of gravy and the crispness of salty potatoes. “Okay. That’s good.”
“Just wait until the cheese curds squeak against your teeth. That used to be my favorite thing when I was a little kid.”
“I don’t know a lot about your childhood, but somehow I can’t imagine a comfort food dish like this being served in some fancy formal dining room.” She forked up some more and grinned when long strings of melted cheese had her stretching her arm. “I mean, can you picture this happening at the Fournier table?”
“As far as I know, poutine has never made an appearance in the gourmet kitchens of my grandmother’s home.” Clearly taking pity on her, he reached over and cut the strings of cheese with his own fork. “This is what the Fournier family would refer to as ‘peasant food.’ They were too good for what commoners eat, you see.”
There it was again—the bitterness, the barely veiled distaste. Whenever he spoke of his family, he couldn’t seem to hide that he was toting around some seriously heavy baggage. “How did you stumble across the yummy goodness that is poutine?”
“I had a nanny the first five years of my life.”
“Yeah?” She was still no expert when it came to reading the subtle nuances in his expressions, but she’d spent enough time with him to recognize a softening in his otherwise shuttered eyes. “Sounds cool. Generally speaking, what are nannies like?”
As she’d hoped, the question earned her a lopsided smile. “I do not know about every nanny, but the nanny I had was wonderful. For the first five years of my life, I knew what it was to be loved and accepted, no matter what I did or said. I lived with her and her husband and children, and my life was the happiest it would ever be.”
Scout fought against a shocking wave of dismay, but it was almost impossible to hold it in check. Did he understand that his admission revealed just how awful his life was? For him to calmly accept that he’d already maxed out the happy meter in the first five years of life was heartbreaking. “What made life go downhill from there?”
“It was when my grand-mére, my grandmother, came to collect me. I always knew it would happen,” he added and took another swig of beer while she tried to read the shifting emotions crossing his face. “From the beginning I knew I was merely in my nanny’s care, and not of their family, however much I wished it to be otherwise. I knew I would be forced to one day leave that happy home.”
“That’s a horrible feeling, isn’t it?” With an understanding that stretched all the way back to her earliest childhood memories, she tried to smile and almost made it. “Having that ax hanging over your head, knowing it’s going to fall someday and cut you off from a life you’ve come to love. Trying not to get too attached while at the same time wishing you could, and turning yourself into a paranoid, exhausted mess as you wait for that inevitable severing to happen”
“It is beyond horrible. It is limbo.”
And limbo was an absence of anything, a void. She knew better than anyone that nothing could stay alive in a void. “Where was your mom? Your dad? Why didn’t they raise you?”
“My father.” The stillness in his face was alarming, it was so unnatural. “I was told my family was very busy and was unable to care for me themselves, but that I was loved by them and had a great destiny to fulfill as a Fournier.” The laugh that escaped him had nothing to do with humor, and everything to do with what seemed to be an endless, depthless rage. “Children are told pretty lies to keep them docile. Did you ever notice that while growing up?”
“I figured out a long time ago that I prefer the ugly truth to a pretty lie.” Shifting on her stool, she ran a soothing hand down his back. “I bet that’s something you can understand. Your nanny setup sounds like the wealthy version of foster care.”
“I have often thought you and I have much more in common than you might think.”
“But I‘ve never had an actual biological family out there in the world.”
“Consider yourself lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“A family can be a person’s worst nightmare.”
She wanted to argue that any family was better than none. But that was her truth, not his. His truth was hurting him now, and she’d do whatever it took to make that pain go away.
“Okay,” she said, keeping her voice soft and the hand on his back slow and easy. “Tell me how bad a family can be so I can be glad I don’t have one.”
“Family can hurt you,” came the flat reply, while his mouth curled in a dark, frigid smile. “Hurt you so bad that all you can think of is running from it, but your blood leashes you to them, and them to you, so there can be no escape. They can tell y
ou that you are a burden at best, a monster at worst, and you can do nothing to prove otherwise. They can lock you in a closet for days without food or water or a toilet, then punish you for pissing in a corner like an animal. They can make you watch them eat sumptuous meals while you are made to stand against the wall and watch, starving, because you refuse to answer to the name Monster. They can slap you for smiling, for crying, for speaking, for frowning, for sighing. For showing any emotion at all. I was a happy, well-adjusted kid when I was five. By the time I was twelve and my grandmother, Lady Albertine, handed me over to my mother’s former modeling agent to make me ‘presentable’ enough to make money off of, I was a robot programmed to do only what she wanted, when she wanted it.”
“Wow.” Her heart tore with each word, bleeding for the badly abused boy he’d once been, and knowing too well the helpless fury that came with it. “Now I understand where that blankness comes from.”
“Blankness?”
“It’s like you become a blank wall—no emotion, no reaction, just... nothing. When I first met you, it made my trouble alarm go off, because I thought you were hiding something. But now I get it. You adopted that first-class poker face in order to survive.”
He looked at her for a long moment, and for once she could easily read the war going on within him. “You thought I was hiding something?”
“That’s why I wasn’t going to let you anywhere near me, or the House. Remember, you weren’t the only one raised in a hell where instincts had to be perfect in order to survive. You developed the ability to turn off. I learned how to read a person’s potential for causing me trouble.”
He took his time digesting that before he gave her another smile, and this one was so dark she couldn’t stop herself from shivering. “Maybe you were right to call me Trouble. Maybe trouble is all I am to you.”
To her heart, maybe. To her peace of mind, definitely. “You’re not that scary.”
“My grandmother, the baroness Albertine, called me Monster.”
That fucking bitch. “You know my social worker called me a stray. The dandelion stomper called me an unsuccessful abortion. I’m neither of those things.”
“Fuck.” Fierce anger twisted his features until the impossible happened and he was almost unattractive. “Fuck them all. My Scout is magnificent.”
“We both are.” But she couldn’t help but beam at him. She absolutely adored it when he called her his Scout. “I’d say the adults in our lives were pretty goddamn immature to stoop to name-calling small children, wouldn’t you?”
At that, some of the darkness trickled away. “They seem pretty pathetic, when you put it that way.”
“Then that’s the only way to put it.”
“Yeah.” He said it fiercely before he cupped his hand warmly over hers lying on the counter. “We are quite the pair, aren’t we, ma fleur?”
“You could say that.” Then she sighed and rolled her eyes at him. “I feel so stupid.”
“Why?”
“Until tonight, I sort of assumed it was just ordinary people with no pedigrees who amused themselves with making helpless kids miserable.”
“Cruelty does not discriminate.”
“Since that’s obviously the case, it’s kind of wonderful, the way we wound up.”
His brows shot up. “You are going to have to explain that one to me.”
“We’re still here, Trouble. We know how to enjoy and be thankful for the good things in life,” she added, gesturing with her free hand toward their meal. “We’re valued by the people around us. We’re good at what we do and as far as I can tell, neither one of us is insane or a career criminal. We beat the odds. I can look at you and know, without a doubt, that you’re extraordinary. That’s what I mean when I say it’s kind of wonderful. It’s wonderful we were able to beat our pasts and put them behind us where they belong.”
“Scout.” With his eyes never leaving hers, he slid off his stool, pulling her out of hers as he went. He wrapped an arm around her back while his free hand came up to cup her jaw. “You are the one who is extraordinary. You came from nothing, without a cent to your name and no powerful connections in this world to help you, yet look how far you have come,” he added, glancing meaningfully around the penthouse. “And every scrap of it was earned with your talent and your drive. You believed in yourself when no one else would. You are the one who is extraordinary, not me.”
If they weren’t careful they’d start up a mutual admiration society. “I had a lot of help, thanks to Payne’s vision, and tons of lucky breaks that came my way.”
“Only you, the lover of dandelions and walks on rainy days, could say that all the obstacles you have had thrown in your path were lucky breaks.”
“I’m talking about all the people who’ve helped me along the way, like Papa Bolo and Mama Coco, who kept me and my dreams alive. I’ve got so many foster siblings cheering me on that it seems like a cast of thousands. Then there was House Of Payne’s financial backer, Frank Bournival who desperately wanted Payne to be his son but settled for him being his business partner, as long as I ran the business side of things. Payne can be a little on the head-in-the-clouds artsy side, but don’t tell him I told you that. He thinks he runs House Of Payne, but he couldn’t begin to figure out how to do payroll.”
Ivar looked at her as if he was suddenly unsure of his fluency in English. “Bournival… wanted a son?”
“He wanted Payne as a son, and I can’t say I blame him. Payne might be the primary source of all the headaches in my professional life, but he’s pretty awesome otherwise.”
“Of course.” Ivar smiled one of his blank-eyed smiles, but she now understood where it came from. Family talk hit too damn close to sore points they both had, but she had the hope that he’d learn she could be his safe zone. “I’m shocked this Bournival guy didn’t want you, the ever-efficient Scout, as his daughter.”
“He already had a daughter who was more than enough for one man to be afflicted with. I, on the other hand, was the daughter he said he’d wished he had, and that meant the world to a stray like me. He even left me this penthouse in his will,” she added, sweeping a hand to encompass the luxurious place she’d once thought was too good for her. At times that thought still crept in, but she wasn’t about to admit that now. “The only drawback to it is that when I first moved in, all of Frank’s stuff was still here, waiting to be sorted. Which is why he left me the place,” she added honestly, shrugging. “He could no longer trust anyone in his life to put his house in order, so to speak. His daughter was a meth head, he had an asshole of a personal assistant who was bleeding him dry financially in his final days, and he didn’t have anyone else to lean on.”
“I see.” His gaze went around the room as if seeing it for the first time. “So everything here was once Frank Bournival’s? It seems more like your style.”
“That’s something you learn how to do when you’re shuffled from foster to foster—make wherever you are into your home as quickly as possible. Claim your space in order to feel safe inside of it, even if that safety’s just a stupid illusion. Does that make sense?”
His expression softened. “I think so.”
“All that’s left of Frank that you’ll see around here are some boxes I need to ship off to either the industry museum here, or maybe one in Quebec, if they have one. I’m just not sure what else I should do with them, because he didn’t leave any specific instructions in his will—just that he knew I’d take care of it. Hey,” she said, perking up, “maybe you’ve heard of Frank? He was a big wheel where you come from—brought a lot of business into Quebec’s economy, as well as Chicago’s.”
“Quebec is a large city, Scout. And at the risk of giving you yet another headache, I am also more on the artsy side, like Payne. I can assure you that I never met this man of industry.”
Immediately she felt like an idiot. “Right. I guess that’d be like you expecting me to know, say, Michael Jordan. Payne does, but I don’t, other than to jus
t nod hello.”
That made him smile, though to her distress it didn’t reach his eyes. “Exactly.”
“Frank was an easy guy to talk to. I remember I found myself telling him my life story, and that I’d made the decision not to be ashamed of where I came from,” she went on, trying to get through that blank layer of ice she could see glazing him over, an ever-thickening barrier that kept the world out. She could sympathize, since she had her own ways of self-protecting. But he needed to know he didn’t have to protect himself from her. “He told me it was the healthiest decision I could ever make for myself, and he was proud of me for reaching it. Good or bad, everything I’ve gone through, every struggle I’ve survived, it’s made me into who I am today. I know how strong I am, because I know all the things I’ve had to endure. Maybe you’re like that too. You wouldn’t be who you are now if you hadn’t gone through so much when you were growing up.”
“Who I am now.” A corner of his mouth curled, but it wasn’t a smile by any stretch of the imagination. “I have no idea who that is.”
“I do.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned into him for many reasons—to comfort and be comforted, to distract him and to make him smile. But mostly because he felt so damn good against her, she couldn’t help herself. “You’re what I’ve named you—Trouble. My favorite kind to get into.”
“I like that we have that in common.” At last the ice began to thaw, and the arm around her waist tightened. “I excel at that kind of trouble.”
