Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3) (14 page)

He knew the scent now; he’d seen the pretty little pink bottle, adorned with a rosette. Such a delicate, feminine bottle. So full of liquid need.

“Theo.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

No. He wasn’t. And he supposed it showed. After his shower, he’d felt a lot better, and he thought the night had been normal, even though he and Eli had been tense with each other. He’d had only three glasses of bourbon—and they had brought him fully back, not sunk him under. Hair of the dog and all that. Now Rosa and Eli were, as usual, staying in Carmen’s friend’s flat, and he and Carmen were here alone.

She’d never asked before if he was okay, which meant either that he was showing something or Eli had said something. In either case, denial was his strategy. “Yeah. I’m good. Right now, I’m great.” To print that point in boldface, he squeezed his arms around her. “I should be asking you that question, sitting up in the chill in the middle of the night.”

“I’m okay, too. Like you.”

He smiled into her hair. She was wily. She was telling him that she wasn’t okay while at the same time forcing him to expose himself if he called her on it. “Well, that’s good, then, right?”

“Are you sure you want to come with me next weekend? I’m going to be working a lot of it.” She was touring lavender farms in Provence. But he wanted next weekend. She and Rosa were heading to Germany a week from Wednesday, and then there’d be barely three weeks left before they returned to the States. He knew—he didn’t know how, but he knew—that if he was going to get to her, get through her spiked armor, it would happen while they were staying in Avignon. Quaint, ancient, lovely, romantic Avignon.

“I’m sure. While you’re taking time to smell the flowers, I’ll set up my Mac at a table in a café and write. Working weekend for both of us.” Actually, based on the current status of his writing health, he’d likely spend that time doing crosswords online, but she didn’t need to know that. Until he found himself writing
All work and no play makes Theo a dull boy
over and over and over for hundreds of pages, he and his writer’s block would hang out alone.

She laughed again. “You know, I feel like I’m leaving a child home alone for the first time. It’s stupid. Rosa lives on her own most of the time anyway. But it feels strange to be leaving her alone in Paris while we trot off to the south of France.”

“Not alone. Eli’ll be with her.”

Shifting in his arms, Carmen looked up at his face. Her dark eyes reflected the pearly, pale light from the windows. “Does that bother you at all, how close they’ve gotten?”

“Why would it?” Theo felt a small push of adrenaline. They were getting close to questions he had about the two of them.

“I don’t know. What happens when Paris is in the past?”

“Paris is eternal, Carmen.”

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

He did. And he thought she knew what he’d meant, too. They were talking about more than Rosa and Eli. “I think you fight for what you want. When you want something enough, whatever’s in the way is immaterial. Clear it from your path. Nuisance, nothing more.”

“You believe that?”

“I do. You don’t?”

“No. Life gets in the way. That’s what it does. Man plans, and God laughs.”

“Christ. That’s fatalistic as hell.”

“Your wife died. What—is that because you didn’t fight hard enough, or because she didn’t? Or maybe you didn’t want her enough?”

He sat up, stunned and hurt. “Carmen, shit. That’s fucking low.”

She sat up, too. “No—tell me. In your rosy worldview, how do you factor the untimely death of someone you love? A wife? A mother?”

Tossing the covers back, he stood. He couldn’t be in the bed with her right now. “Carmen, shut up.”

Now she stood, too, facing him across the wide bed. “No. Explain to me how it makes sense.”

His throat was tight and his heart thumped, but he had an answer. He’d been grappling with the answer a lot lately. “You can’t fight your end.” His voice shook, and he took a breath and tried to calm down. “You fight for the life you want. But you can’t fight your end. For the living, a loved one’s end becomes a thing to clear from your path. Or you let it stop you cold, and then you’re not fighting anything but yourself.”

“Fuck you.”

Until that moment, Theo had not realized that they weren’t even talking about Maggie. Not really. Redirected, he scrambled through his bewildered brain for some crumb of information she might have let fall about herself, her past, her family…

“Your mother.” She reacted as though he’d spanned the bed and slapped her. “Carmen…”

“No. Fuck you.” She turned and went for her clothes.

Oh, no. She wasn’t leaving. Not when he’d finally found a crack. He didn’t know what it was about her mother’s death that had made her this suddenly vulnerable, but it was a crack, and he wanted, at least, to mark its place.

He made it around the bed in a blink and yanked her jeans from her hands as she was trying to step into them. His force overbalanced her as she stood on one leg, and she fell toward him. He caught her, and she punched him. In the face.

Theo tried to think when he’d last been punched, or had thrown a punch. Twenty years, easy. When he’d been punched by a woman? Never. He shook it off and pushed her against the wall. She tried to knock his hands from her, but he was stronger than she was.

“Carmen, stop. Stop.
Stop
. What the fuck?!” She settled, just a little, her arms going still, but her eyes were so vivid with anger or stress or panic or who knew what that they practically illuminated the dim room. “I’m not trying to make you say something you don’t want to. I’m not trying to make you
think
something you don’t want to. I’m not trying to say anything about you or your life. I’m not digging. What I said—set it aside. I was talking about myself.”

“My life is different.”

The assertion was so plain, so pleading despite her sharp tone, it made him ache. In these last, brief minutes, Carmen had rewritten how he knew her. “Okay. No argument from me.”

She began to relax under his hands. “What I said to you was fucked up.”

“Yeah, it really was.” She’d blindsided the hell out of him.

“Are you angry?” Her eyes changed.

Despite her new vulnerability, which was closing up as he watched, he had an easy answer. His jaw was sore, his chest thumped with adrenaline, his belly was full of bile, and his head was full of the poison of his doubt. “Yeah.”

She reached back and snatched a handful of his hair, closing her fist. “Good. Fuck me angry.” She yanked his head down to hers and kissed him.

He fucked her angry.

Twice.

~ 9 ~

Carmen sat with a huff, dropping her backpack on the seat next to her. Across the table, Theo, already seated, grinned at her, and she glared. “What’s funny?”

“You. You do understand that shouting at the rail agents doesn’t actually make them more helpful, right?”

“I fucking hate this station. It’s insane and confusing, and that guy was rude, anyway.”

“He might argue that you were rude first.”

Knowing that she wasn’t going to win that debate, she changed tacks. “Why are you so bloody calm, anyway? We almost missed the train. I fucking hate running through stations and airports.”

He was still grinning at her in that condescending way—which matched his condescending tone. “You’ll notice that I didn’t run, and yet I caught up with you while you were shouting. Carmen, trains leave this station for Avignon every single hour. If we’d missed, we’d just have caught the next one.”

Oh, she hated reason at moments like these. “So, you’re grinning at me because you think my rage is cute. Asshole.” Damn those fucking dimples.

“I’ve decided to think of it as cute, yes. Do you always get this bent when you travel?”

“I’m not a fan of mass transportation. There are a lot of people, and I don’t like people much. And I
really
don’t like being dependent on other people’s schedules.”

“We could have driven.”

“I know. But it’s silly. Six and a half hours by car or two and half by train. So I’ll deal. You’ll just have to deal with me while I deal with this.” She gestured around the first class car of the TGV. It was nice, actually. Quiet. The seats were soft and roomy, and they seemed to have this table group of seats to themselves. Theo had taken the rear-facing seat. With a deep, cleansing breath, she sighed and smiled. “Okay. I’m sorry. I shall endeavor to be more civilized. You’ve just met bitchy Carmen.”

He chuckled and opened his Mac on the table between them. “She was the first one I met.”

Remembering that first night at Café Aphrodite, when he’d come up to her with that stupid come-on, she laughed. “Fair enough. She’s out front most of the time, I’ve been told.” She nodded at his computer. “You working?”

A cloud passed over his blue eyes and then quickly cleared, and Carmen thought again that there was something going on with him. She didn’t ask, though. She’d asked once, a few days ago, when he and Eli had been weird with each other. He’d told her he was fine. So either he was fine, or he didn’t want to talk about it. Or he was one of those people who insisted they were fine because they wanted you to push and obsess until you dragged it out of them. In the first case, there was nothing to talk about. In the second case, she respected his desire not to talk. She knew him enough to know he wasn’t the kind of person of the third case, which was good. She hated that manipulative bullshit.

In any case—she didn’t ask if there was anything wrong.

She had enough of her own shit to think about.

“I thought I might. You have another offer on the table?”

She pointed to a discreet sign above their seats. “Wifi. Want to watch a movie?” He nodded, and she moved her pack to the other empty seat, scooted over, and made room for him to sit at her side. He swung his laptop around to face them. Aside from an intermission for the dinner and drinks served at their seats, they spent the trip quietly, watching Jason Statham kicking elaborate ass. Carmen rested her head on Theo’s shoulder, and he pulled her leg up to hook over his thigh. They shared her earbuds.

It was a nice ride. She allowed herself not to think too much for a while.

~oOo~

Jean, her guide at the lavender farm, spoke a heavily accented, limited English. Between that and Carmen’s heavily accented, limited French, they spent an interesting day together. Her French had been steadily improving during her stay, but she was fairly sure they were managing to invent a ‘Frenglish’ of their own. It worked, more or less. He was a nice old guy, a fourth-generation farmer watching his progeny take over for him. He looked like he’d walked off the pages of a travel magazine, short and round, a face weathered by a life in the fields. He even wore a flat cap and a tattered cardigan over a grey shirt and dun-colored workpants.

When they broke for lunch, he produced bread, cheese, and wine, and they ate at a table near the barn, overlooking the fields. Carmen wondered whether he was trying to play to what he thought her expectations would be, or whether his life was truly so pastoral. Monet could have had an easel set up at the edge of the long rows of brilliant purple flowers. It was harvest time, and the plants were at their peak. The air fairly burst with scent.

Honestly, this tour was more recreational than anything. As a landscape designer, she wouldn’t be starting her own lavender farm any time soon. None of her farm and garden tours in France and the UK were about bringing home growing ideas, not really.

Still, she was learning stuff she could use when she made a proposal. People—homeowners and business owners alike—wanted a story, a narrative about their garden or courtyard or whatever it was they were planning, and having the information and experiential knowledge that she was gleaning by spending time on these farms gave her a story she could tell. In fact, sitting alongside the long rows of aromatic lavender with Jean over crusty bread, hard cheese, and dry wine, while bees buzzed and the sun baked, was possibly more important than the specifics about how lavender was grown and harvested. She could tell the story of picturesque Avignon, of Jean in his flat cap, of how the scent of lavender shaped the taste of their lunch, how the heat of the sun and the warmth of the wine in her blood made her sleepy, made her calm.

Jean’s granddaughter walked up and spoke quietly to him. He nodded and turned to Carmen. “
Pardon, mademoiselle Carmen.
I…go…moment only?
Restez-vous?
Er…wait here?”

“
Oui, Jean. D’accord.
”

While he went off, she leaned back against the table, closed her eyes, and soaked up the warmth, the smells, the sounds of the day.

She had a little buzz on. Seemed like she almost always had a buzz on—or a full-on drunk, or the lingering effects of one. She didn’t drink much at home, but in Europe, she’d been drinking nearly every day. She wondered whether that should concern her at all, but, feeling the Provence sunshine on her face, she decided fuck it. She was on vacation.

Part of the problem, if it was a problem, was that Theo didn’t drink wine. They were in fucking France. She wanted a good French wine with a meal, and then there was the bottle, sitting at the table, while Theo drank his bourbon. So she drank the bottle. And then, sometimes, she wasn’t done and needed another.

Most nights, they were passing out more than falling asleep. Theo drank a lot. She tried to remember if he’d been drinking as much when they first met, but she wasn’t sure. She thought not; she thought the past few weeks, he’d been hitting the sauce harder and earlier every day. He’d still been in bed, practically in a coma, when she’d left this morning.

She thought his writing wasn’t going very well. Though she hadn’t asked and wouldn’t, he got prickly when his writing came up in any context, and she figured it was causing him stress, the kind eased with drink. She understood. Wine was helping her not freak out about what was going on at home. Though Rosa seemed simply to assume that things would be fine and the Uncles would handle their own business, Carmen felt she could hear the strain in the voices of her family.

Since Luca had told her about the job site fire, she’d learned that there had been trouble before that—heavy equipment vandalized and totaled, employees harassed and assaulted. The fire had been an escalation of these more minor incidents. It was causing more than a headache for Luca and John—and their father. It was hurting their business as well as their men. They were losing jobs, and that hurt the men, too. Whoever the Uncles were fighting had decided that the legitimate business of Pagano & Sons Construction was an easier and perhaps more effective target than the Uncles themselves.

More dangerous, too, though. Uncle Ben and Uncle Lorrie had a code, and that code kept innocents clear. An enemy who defied that would find those two little old men to be capable of viciously wrathful vengeance.

And so there was a war going on at home, and she was lounging in Provence with the sun on her face and a belly full of wine and cheese. It was wrong. It was tormenting her sleep with its wrongness—when she was sleeping sober enough to dream.

Not that she could do anything at home. And, true, she was keeping Rosa clear of it, too. But it felt wrong to be here, away from the family. She should be home, not enjoying Europe and Theodore Wilde.

Pulled in two directions. What she wanted and what she should do—they’d never converged onto the same path in her whole adult life. She’d always taken the path of ‘should’ and abandoned the path of ‘want.’

So, what did she want?

She didn’t know.

The path of want was overgrown, indistinct by now.

She sat up and grabbed the bottle of wine from the table. Filling her glass to the brim, emptying the bottle, she waited for Jean to return.

~oOo~

When she got back to the room, again feeling content and buzzy from the sun and the wine, Theo looked fresh and gorgeous. He was wearing only a hotel robe. She cocked an eyebrow at him.

“You look better. Did we have a spa day?”

He dimpled at her. “Nope. Got up, went out for lunch, walked around the city—tomorrow, we should do the same. It’s just spectacular. And then I came back and wrote some.”

“So what’s with the robe?” She dropped her bag on a tufted chair and bent over to unlace her boots. They’d booked a suite, with a sitting room and bedroom, both opening onto a balcony overlooking the rolling countryside.

When she stood up, he came over and kissed her, his arm coming around her waist and pulling her hard to him. He tasted of bourbon, and he smelled like his usual, amazing self. “I want to stay in tonight.”

“We’re here for a weekend, and you want to stay in? Why?”

He released her and took her hand, leading her into the bathroom.

It was a large room, done in all in marble, with a pale pink tone, like a blush. In one corner was a large, deep tub. The kind built for two. The tub was empty, but all around its wide edge were votive candles in small glass holders. They were unlit. A silver bucket on the shelf behind the tub held an iced bottle of champagne—a magnum. Two crystal flutes stood next to it.

Carmen just gaped for a few seconds. Then she muttered, “Jesus, Theo. I’m gonna find and destroy that book with the lame pickup lines. It must have an appendix for schlocky ideas for romantic evenings.” In truth, though, it looked nice. That tub was…enticing. “You don’t have to seduce me, you know. I’m gonna fuck you. Promise.”

Undeterred by her snark—she was sure he was used to it by now—he stepped up behind her and circled her waist. With his mouth on her ear, he murmured, “There’s romance in you, beautiful girl. I know there is. Come on…Avignon, a nice hotel, a great tub, a fine bottle of champagne…and I have room service coming up at eight. You can relax in the tub, I’ll wash your back…sound nice?”

She loved his voice. She loved his body. She loved his arms around her. She even loved his dopey romantic streak. There was a lot she loved about this man.

That thought normally would have caught her up, but she was high on Provence—and on the good, dark wine she’d had with Jean. Maybe she would commit some kind of cultural treason to say it, but she liked French wine better than Italian.

Leaning back on his chest, she sighed. “Okay, I admit it’s a cute kind of lame. Is the water imaginary, though?”

He laughed and kissed her cheek. “I wanted it hot. Go get undressed, and I’ll fill the tub and light the candles.” With a swat to her ass, he let her go.