Suddenly Last Summer

by Sarah Morgan

  What was it Jackson had said?

  You have no idea what you’re dealing with.

  Swearing softly, Sean dropped to his haunches and finished removing all evidence of their presence.

  Leave no trace. Wasn’t that what his grandfather had taught them?

  You’re a guest in the forest, Sean, and guests don’t leave a mess behind when they leave.

  Life, unfortunately, wasn’t so clean and tidy. It left plenty of traces. Plenty of mess. And clearly life hadn’t just left a trace on Élise. It had left deep scars.

  He glanced across at the tent, but there was no movement. No words encouraging him to join her.

  Once he’d cleared the site to his satisfaction he strode to the tent, pulled off his boots and ducked inside.

  Élise was already in her sleeping bag, curled up in a ball. Her body language sent a clear message that the conversation was over.

  “Is this the penthouse? Room service? Air-conditioning, infinity pool and 360-degree views?” He tried to remove his jacket, a task hampered by the width of his shoulders and the small tent. “There is no way this is a two-man tent. Tyler always did have a sick sense of humor. Still, at least we won’t be cold.”

  Something about the way she lay, huddled down and hiding, tugged at his heart. He wanted to comfort her and he didn’t understand it because comforting women definitely wasn’t on his list of skills. Comfort was Jackson’s domain.

  Aware that he was stepping over a line he didn’t usually cross, Sean stripped off his shirt and trousers and stretched out next to her. “I’m feeling naked here.”

  “Then keep your clothes on.” Her voice was muffled and she didn’t lift her head.

  “Not that sort of naked. The sort of naked where I just spilled my soul and you gave me nothing in return.” He shifted closer to her. “Why isn’t love possible for you?”

  “Good night, Sean.”

  “I hate it when you do that. You did it to me the night of the party. You just shut down a conversation when you don’t want to talk. It’s the verbal equivalent of slamming a door in someone’s face.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You’re not tired. You just don’t want to talk about your feelings. But I wish you would. You listened to me. I’d like to listen to you.” He saw her shoulders tense and took a gamble. “At least give me his name and address. Then I can send Tyler to punch him. I’d go myself, but I don’t want to ruin another shirt. And if I use my fists, it messes up my operating schedule, I’m sure you understand. Lives to save and all that.”

  “Are you ever going to go to sleep?” But this time there was laughter in her voice and he felt a rush of relief.

  “First we have to have the whole wilderness-bonding thing. Am I doing it the wrong way? I’ve never done this before so I’m bound to make some mistakes.”

  She rolled over to face him. “Let me get this straight. You, Sean O’Neil, master of the superficial, want me to spill my innermost feelings?”

  He knew a brief moment of panic and then reminded himself he dealt with blood and guts on a daily basis. He could handle emotions if he had to. He just had to tread carefully, and not do or say the wrong thing. “Yes. I want to know why you don’t want a relationship. You told me you learned a lesson.” He softened his voice. “What lesson did you learn, Élise? Why is love not possible for you?”

  He thought she wasn’t going to respond but then she sat up, the sleeping bag still snuggled around her middle. She was wearing a loose T-shirt and it drifted down over her arm, exposing her shoulder. There was something about the curve between her neck and that bare, slender shoulder that made her seem even more vulnerable.

  “I am not a good judge of character. I am very emotional. It blinds me.” She hauled the T-shirt up and it immediately slid down again. “Sometimes I make very, very big mistakes. I have too much passion.”

  After their encounter in the forest he was ready to disagree with that.

  But it was obvious to him now that she’d loved someone and he’d let her down.

  It explained the contrast between heat and cool. “Is there any such thing as too much passion?”

  “The problem with passion,” she said softly, “is that it is all too easy to mistake it for love. It blinds you to lies. You believe what you want to believe and you give your all. And the risk of giving your all, is that you lose everything.”

  “It was him, wasn’t it? Pascal Laroche.” He wondered why it had taken him so long to work it out. “He was the one.”

  “I was eighteen. He was thirty-two. Older. Very attractive. I’d been working for him for four months when he kissed me for the first time. At first I didn’t think he could possibly be interested in me. I was so naive. So unlike the women he usually dated. I said no, without realizing that for him ‘no’ was the incentive he needed to start the chase. Pascal was the most competitive person I have ever met. In the kitchen he was a genius, admired by everyone. That admiration was his fuel. It drove him. He pursued me relentlessly and I fell in love. You are wondering why, but he could be so charming and I suppose I was flattered. I loved him with every part of myself and I truly believed he loved me back. That was when I learned that wanting something doesn’t make it happen. My mother was worried, but I wouldn’t listen. She was always overprotective and usually I tolerated that, but this time I reacted in a bad way. Rebelled.”

  “Every teenager rebels. You should talk to my mother about some of the stuff Tyler did. He got a girl pregnant. That was a pretty rough time, I can tell you. The Carpenter family wanted to kill Tyler. Gramps still can’t drive past their apple farm without growling. He never liked Janet.”

  “But your family stuck together. When my mother became pregnant, her parents refused to have anything more to do with her. My grandparents never even wanted to see me. As a result my mother and I were very close. I was her only family and she mine.” She paused for a moment and then carried on. “When I got the job at Chez Laroche she was very proud of me. And then when she met Pascal and saw how things were, how he was, she was frightened. She could see instantly what sort of man he was. She tried to warn me but I wouldn’t listen.”

  “That sounds like a fairly typical teenage response to me.”

  “It was the first time in our lives that we argued. She would yell at me and threaten me and I would yell back. I can see now she was at her wits’ end, not knowing how to control me but to me it made me want to go home even less.”

  It was all too easy to see parallels with his own situation and Sean shifted uncomfortably.

  Hadn’t he felt exactly the same way after the row with his grandfather?

  “You were being pulled in two directions.”

  “I stayed out at night and wouldn’t tell her where I was because I knew she would try and stop me going. All I cared about was Pascal. I was blinded. Dizzy with it. I was in love and I was dismissive of all her warnings. What could she possibly know about love? She got pregnant with me when she was eighteen and she admitted she was crazy in love with the man who was my father. She told me that loving like that blinds you to how a person really is. You see what you want to see, and believe what you want to believe. She told me I had to end the relationship and get another job.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No. I was in love with him. I didn’t want it to end and I certainly wasn’t about to listen to my mother. We had a horrible, screaming row and I told her I was moving in with Pascal.” Her hand gripped the edge of the sleeping bag, her knuckles white. “She was on her way to the restaurant to reason with me when she was hit by a cab. I had a call from the hospital. She was—how do you call it?—dead on arrival.”

  Sean closed his eyes and then shifted across the tent and pulled her into his arms.

  Suddenly it all made sense to him. The reason she was so desperate for him to fix things with his grandfather. The emphasis she placed on family. Her reluctance to ever allow herself to fall in love again.

  “Th
at wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault.”

  “If I hadn’t moved in with Pascal she wouldn’t have been crossing the Boulevard Saint Germain at that moment.” Her voice was muffled against his chest and she sat rigid in his arms. Inflexible. “I never had a chance to say goodbye. I never had a chance to say I was sorry. Nothing. The last words we both spoke were angry ones and I have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

  “But she loved you and she knew you loved her.”

  “Perhaps. I do not know. Back then I was such a mess maybe she didn’t love me. And I didn’t say that I loved her, so perhaps she didn’t know that, either. I will never know. And afterward, I fell apart. I didn’t know what to do. I had no one. No one except Pascal. He took care of everything, including me. I leaned on him. I took his kindness as evidence that my mother had been wrong about him, but of course, she wasn’t.” She pulled away a little and pushed her hair away from her face. “This story has a horrible inevitability to it, doesn’t it? Are you sure you want me to carry on?”

  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.

  She was too scared of losing everything.

  She’d made his family her own because that way she could have all that without risking her heart.

  And he understood why Jackson had wanted him to stay clear of her.

  His brother was right. He was entirely the wrong sort of man for a woman like her.

  “Pascal Laroche might be a brilliant chef but he’s obviously a pathetic excuse for a human being. I want to operate on him without an anesthetic.” With a supreme effort of will, he let her go. “Have you had any relationships since him?”

  “You know I have.”

  “I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about intimacy.”


  There was just enough light left for him to see the color streak across her cheeks. “I don’t want that.”

  “What about just having some fun? Dinner in a restaurant? A night at the opera?”

  “People do that when they’re dating and want to get to know someone. I don’t want that. I can’t have that. Love blinded me. I saw what I wanted to see. I gave all of myself, everything. I won’t do it again.”

  But she’d done it with his family. She’d taken that love that she was too afraid to give to a man, and she’d given it unreservedly to the O’Neils. She’d found somewhere she felt safe and she’d hidden herself there, wrapped in the warmth of his family.

  He ached for her. “It’s the reason you walked away after the party.”

  “I don’t usually spend two nights with a man. It shook me.”

  It had shaken him, too.

  The desire to haul her back into his arms was overwhelming but he knew that would be the wrong thing to do. Exercising willpower he didn’t know he possessed, he slid down inside his sleeping bag. She did the same and the wriggling treated him to a glimpse of shoulder, a hint of breast and a smile, complete with dimple.

  “It is a good job it was you on this trip and not Tyler. If I’d said all that to him I would have killed him dead. He would rather wrestle a bear than listen to a woman unload her emotions.”

  But they both knew she never would have said any of that to Tyler. She’d never said it to anyone before.

  For some reason, knowing that warmed him. “Get some sleep. You need to rest. If a bear comes in the night I expect you to protect me so you need energy.”

  “You’re still trying to persuade me you don’t know how to survive in the wilderness? It’s too late for that. I know the truth.”

  “Maybe you don’t. Aren’t you scared the tent will collapse on you in the night?”

  “You already know what scares me. I just told you.” She lay facing him, snuggled inside the sleeping bag. “What about you? What scares you, Dr. O’Neil?”