by Sarah Morgan
“Just one more reason why I don’t want to see it on my day off. You have a good day, Sam. Say hi to your mom and dad for me.”
Sam cycled off, wobbling a little while Sean watched.
“I hope they’re careful on that trail. He isn’t that stable.”
“He’s adorable. And he adores you.”
“He’s been coming here for years and he’s easily impressed. Are you okay with your backpack or is it too heavy?” He swung his own backpack onto his broad shoulders and secured the straps. Élise watched those muscles flex and ripple under his shirt.
For a moment she felt a little of Sam’s admiration and then pushed it away. Physically Sean O’Neil was as close to masculine perfection as it was possible to get. That was a fact. It wasn’t something to get emotional about.
And then she met his gaze and saw the heat in his eyes.
Raw chemistry slammed into her and she steadied herself, telling herself it was the backpack that was making her legs unstable.
“I’m fine. Let’s walk.”
“Tyler gave me the route he’s planning to take. We’ll follow it exactly and break where they are going to break.”
“Bien. It sounds good to me.”
“So did you ever do this in France? Hiking?”
“Oui, of course. In the mountains, with my mother.” The memory squeezed her heart. “She used to cook in the winter for skiers. Occasionally we would go to Chamonix in the summer and she would cook for hikers and climbers. Chamonix has some of the best climbing and skiing in the Alps.”
Sean led the way onto the trail that led from Snow Crystal up onto the Long Trail.
“We walked here all the time when we were kids. Gramps used to take us out camping and then leave us to find our own way home.”
“That didn’t worry your mother?”
“Probably. She worried about Tyler. He was the daredevil, always breaking something, so there was more reason to worry. Jackson and I looked out for each other. But Mom didn’t have much say in it. Gramps ruled. Still does.”
“He is looking much better. I hear the hospital appointment went well?”
“Yes.”
“So did you clear the air? Did you have that conversation?”
“Not yet.”
She felt a rush of frustration. “Why do you keep putting it off?”
“I was going to, but then he started going on about—”
“About what?”
“Nothing. Shit.” He swore fluently as he sank ankle-deep in mud. “How the hell did I miss that?” They were in the heart of Vermont’s backwoods, surrounded by tall trees and the scent of the forest. And they had the trail to themselves.
“City boy.” Smiling, Élise stepped past him, sprang over the mud and landed on solid ground.
“You’ve been talking to Tyler.” Still muttering, Sean scraped the worst of the mud off his boots. “Great. You’re going to love sharing a tent with me tonight.”
“We have two tents.”
“One tent. Two people. Two tents is unnecessary weight.”
“I thought there were two tents.”
“Just the one. Is that a problem?”
“I prefer my own space.”
“You can have your own space. The left-hand side of the tent is yours. Right-hand side is mine.” The corner of his mouth flickered into a smile. “Relax. We’re not moving in together. This is strictly a temporary arrangement.”
And there was nothing she could do about it, was there? To make a fuss would give the situation too much weight and importance, so she forced herself to shrug and carry on up the trail.
The forest grew dense, the light dimmed and then finally the trail opened out, revealing incredible views of the Green Mountains.
“C’est incroyable.” Élise stopped dead, drinking in the view, feeling the cooler air on her heated skin. “It’s truly beautiful.”
“Yeah, it really is.” Sean eased the pack off her shoulders and put it down next to a rock. “Let’s take a break and cook up some of that food you brought with you. What’s for lunch? Langoustines à la greque? Coquilles Saint Jacques?”
“You are in the mountains.”
“Nothing in the Green Mountain code book tells me I have to compromise my standards of eating just because I’m in the wild. Look—” he pointed as a bird soared above them “—red-tailed hawk.”
She stared up at the sky. “You know this, how?”
“Gramps. He knows everything there is to know about the birds and wildlife around here. You want to know which mushrooms are safe to eat? He’s the one to ask. And talking of eating, I’m starving.” He reached into his pocket and removed a pair of sunglasses.
With the sunglasses catching the light, she could no longer see his eyes.
“I don’t have mushrooms.” Élise opened her backpack and removed the first pack from the cool bag. “Lunch is a picnic. Local Green Mountain ham served with my sourdough bread and fresh olives.”
“If I found you mushrooms you could make some of those delicious pastries we ate the night of the party.”
“And how would I cook it? You think I am carrying around an oven? A simple life calls for simple food. But ‘simple’ does not mean poor quality.” She handed him a neatly wrapped pack and he picked out a spot on a rock and sat down.
“When we did these trips as kids, Gramps didn’t let us carry food. We had to eat what the forest provided.” He tucked ham inside thick chunks of fresh bread. “We knew which berries were safe to pick and which ones would poison us. We knew how to catch fish from the river and how to light a fire to cook it that didn’t burn the forest down. Jackson and Tyler used to do the foraging for food while I found the wood for the fire. In reality I found a quiet spot in the forest and sat down to read the book I’d sneaked into my backpack. The ham is good. Is there any more?”
She wondered if he realized how much he talked about his grandfather.
“Did your father go, too?” Élise handed him another slab of bread and slice of ham.
“He was usually working.”
“You were very close to your father.”
“Yes.” He tore off a chunk of the bread. “I was.”
She wondered if that had something to do with the row he’d had with his grandfather, but she didn’t pursue it. If he wanted to talk about it, he’d talk and if he didn’t—well, she understood more than most the need to keep some things close.
When they’d both finished eating they carried on up the trail, walking along the ridge with views of Lake Champlain.
“It is the prettiest view I’ve ever seen. Why haven’t I been up here before?”
“Because my brother works you to the bone.” He shielded his eyes. “We’re lucky it’s a clear day. Often the visibility is poor up here. See the lake? That was discovered by your countryman, Samuel de Champlain. He was a French explorer and he sailed inland from the Atlantic Ocean and found this large freshwater lake.”
“It is the most beautiful place. Where are we supposed to camp?”
“Walter’s Ridge. We camped there all the time as kids. If you drop down the other side you can follow the river back home. It’s the reason we never got lost.”
They walked a little farther and then reached an open area with boulders and a spectacular view.
Sean eased the pack off his back and glanced around him. “This is good.”
“So camping is allowed?”
“In some places. Part of the Long Trail crosses our land but we allow public access and camping in designated areas. No campfires. Campfires have the worst ecological impact of all camping practices. And we stay off the trails during mud season in late fall and early spring when the ground is saturated.”
“So you own this land?”
“Yeah, it’s part of Snow Crystal.” He grinned. “I’m trying to impress you.”
He did impress her. Not because they owned the land, but because he knew so much about it. Despite complaining when he stepped
in something soft and smacking insects with his hand every few minutes, he’d proved himself to be tough and competent in the outdoors. He was skilled and efficient and in no time they had food cooking on the camping stove and the tent erected.
Élise sprinkled freshly grated Parmesan over a bowl of pasta and handed it to him, trying not to think about the two sleeping bags laid side by side inside the two-man tent.
“Tomorrow you are catching fresh fish for our lunch.”
“No way.” He shuddered dramatically. “I am not wading in a stream and catching my own food. That’s too primal. When I choose fish I prefer it to already be dead and on a restaurant menu, not swimming around my feet.”
“Fresh is best.”
“There is fresh and then there is still alive.” He forked up the pasta and tasted it. “Mmm. This is spectacular, and not just because I didn’t have to gut it before I ate it.”
Laughing, she ate, too. “Bien. I think even the most inept corporate person will be able to manage this. It is good, no?”
“Far too good for them. I thought the idea was that we made them suffer a little so that they bonded together in the face of adversity.”
“Is that what you and your brothers did when your grandfather left you out here to find your way home?”
Sean finished his food and helped himself to more. “It didn’t feel like adversity to Tyler and Jackson. And not to me, either, I guess, although I would rather have been left in peace to read.”
“You always liked books?”
“It was a way of escaping.”
“Escaping from what?”
For a moment she thought he was going to make his usual glib, dismissive comment but he didn’t.
Instead, he put his bowl down and stared off into space. “The pressure.”
The atmosphere shifted. There was a serious note to his voice she hadn’t heard before.
“What pressure?”
“For my grandfather the world begins and ends at Snow Crystal. He’s never been able to figure out why not everyone feels the same way. It was the reason he put so much pressure on my father. The atmosphere was pretty tense when we were growing up.”
“But your father loved it here?”
“He loved the place. He was an excellent skier. There are people around here who think he was almost as good as Tyler when he was in his teens. What he didn’t love was the work. He wasn’t built to be trapped behind a desk being nice to tourists. He just wanted to ski.”
Exactly like Tyler, she thought. “Then why did he stay? Why not do a different job?”
“Love. Isn’t that why most people end up compromising their dreams?”
“Do they?”
“Sure. It’s logic if you think about it. How can two people possibly have the same goals? They can’t, so it’s obvious that at some point one of them is going to have to give up on their own ambitions to satisfy someone else. In my father’s case, he was torn between his own wishes and the responsibility of running the family business. I guess the fact that my mother loved this place tipped the scales for him. A career in competitive skiing would have meant leaving her alone much of the time, traveling, living a life that was insecure and nomadic. It’s not great for a marriage.”
Élise thought about Tyler’s reputation. “No.”
“And it would have meant Snow Crystal being run by someone outside the family. He couldn’t do that to Gramps, so he stayed and did a job he didn’t want to do. And the resentment ate him up.”
“He talked to you about it?”
“All the damn time.” Sean leaned forward and turned off the stove. “He used to call me, mostly late at night, when Mom had gone to bed and he was on his own drinking in the kitchen, staring at a mountain of debts and paperwork he had no idea how to handle. He’d call me and he’d say the same thing every time, ‘Stay away from this place. Never give up on your dream.’”
“Does Jackson know he used to call you?”
“There was no reason to tell him.” He reached into his bag and pulled out water. “His business was going well in Europe, he was having a blast, making money, living the dream. It was all blue skies for him and I didn’t see any reason to put a cloud in that sky.”
He’d been protecting his brother. Carrying the weight by himself. “You didn’t tell anyone?”
“No. And then Dad was killed and I wished I had. If I’d said something sooner maybe we could have done something.”
“His car spun on the ice. How could you have prevented that?”
He turned the water bottle in his hands. “Dad was traveling because he couldn’t stand to be at home. He wanted to be where the snow was so he went to New Zealand. Gramps wouldn’t leave him alone. He pressured him to spend more time here, and the more he put the pressure on, the less Dad wanted to be here. He was already giving it everything he could.” His voice was raw. “At the funeral, I lost it.”
“This was the row you had? It was because of your father?”
“I blamed Gramps.” He rubbed his fingers over his forehead and pulled a face. “I accused him of putting too much pressure on Dad. I said it was his fault. He lost it, too, and told me I should have been at home helping. He said if I’d been here, there wouldn’t have been so much pressure. He told me I didn’t have a clue what was really going on. Neither of us has mentioned it since.”
Two men, both too stubborn to say they were sorry.
But it explained a lot. It explained the tension between the two men. It explained why Walter was so defensive with Sean and why Sean still hadn’t dealt with it.
“You still blame him. You’re still angry.”
“Yeah, I guess part of me is and I hate that. That isn’t the way I want to feel.” He stared at his hands. “I need to apologize because obviously Gramps wasn’t responsible for Dad’s death and I should never have said that, not even in the black misery of grief, but that doesn’t change the fact I’m still angry at the pressure he puts on everyone.”
She swallowed. “And your brothers don’t know why you stopped coming home?”
“They didn’t notice much of a difference. Work has pretty much kept me away for the past few years and when we were together it was usually around the holidays and there were so many of us the rift wasn’t so obvious. When Jackson called to tell me about Gramps I knew I had to come home, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to see me. And I was right. The moment I showed my face at the hospital he told me to go back to Boston.”
“But not because he didn’t want you there.” Her heart ached for him. For both of them. “It’s been two years. You must talk to him.”
“Maybe.” He stood up, his mouth a grim line. “But he isn’t easy to talk to and I don’t trust myself not to say the wrong thing and make it worse. Being home just brings it all back. The pressure. The anger. The guilt. It’s all there in a great churning mess.”
She stood up, too. “It’s grief,” she said quietly. “Grief is a messy, horrible thing. Guilt and anger are all part of it. You think the emotions should be clean and straightforward, but they’re not. Believe me, I know. I felt it all when my mother died. You should talk to him. I don’t think it matters if you say the ‘wrong’ thing. What matters is that you’re talking.”
“What do I say? The truth is he did put pressure on my father. There’s no getting around that. But I shouldn’t have lost my temper and I definitely shouldn’t have blamed him. And yeah, I regret it. There isn’t a day when I don’t wish I could pull those words back.” He rubbed his hand over his jaw and gave her a lopsided smile. “I’ve never told anyone that before. Here I am, baring my soul. I guess that’s what happens when you’re out in the wilderness.”
The air was still, the sun dropping down behind the mountaintops sending a rosy glow over the peaks and the forest.
“We all have things we regret in life. Things we wish we hadn’t done. Things we wish we hadn’t said. Your grandfather loves you, Sean. He really loves you. You have to try and fix i
t.”
“So do you have things you regret?”
Her heart thudded a little faster. A little harder. “Of course.”
“Name one.”
She pulled the pan away from the camping stove, thinking of Pascal and wishing she wasn’t. She’d erased him from her life. It was just a shame she couldn’t erase him from her thoughts.
“My mother taught me to think of mistakes as a lesson. She used to say ‘If there is a lesson to be learned learn it and move on. Everything else is just experience.’”
“So what was your biggest lesson?”
Élise stared into the stove for a long moment, feeling vulnerable and exposed. “We should probably go inside the tent before the insects start biting.”
“They’ve already bitten. Hey—” He closed his fingers over her arm, his hand strong and comforting. “You know all my innermost secrets. At least give me one of yours. What was your biggest lesson, sweetheart? I want to know.”
The endearment, so unexpected, knocked the breath from her lungs.
“My biggest lesson?” She felt his touch through layers of clothing and the softness of his tone penetrated the layers of defenses she’d wrapped around herself. “There are two. The first is never to delay saying sorry to someone you love because you may lose the chance, and the second is that for me, love is not possible. And now we need to get some sleep.”
* * *
SEAN PACKED AWAY the evidence of their meal, wondering what was wrong with him.
He wasn’t the type to talk about his feelings. Hell, most of the time he didn’t even think about his feelings. He was too busy to dwell on should have, would have and what if. But tonight, sitting outside with Élise, it had all spilled out. He’d said far more than he’d intended to and she’d listened quietly, allowing him to talk.
But still she’d said nothing about herself.
Just enough to tell him she’d been hurt. Badly hurt.
For me, love isn’t possible.
She hadn’t said “I don’t believe in love” or even “I don’t want love.”
He stood, staring at the mountains, analyzing the facts at his disposal.
He’d assumed her lack of interest in a relationship had been linked to her career goals and ambition. He worked with plenty of women who were unwilling to compromise their careers for a family so it hadn’t occurred to him to question it.
