Because when I turned the corner and started down the street to my building, the door to a sleek, low black car opened right in front of me.
And then he was there.
Sebastian. My Sebastian.
Not a fantasy this time, lost somewhere in Paris with angel wings and the magic of the burlesque.
Big and real and right here, in my real life.
CHAPTER NINE
Sebastian
IT HAD BEEN a shite few weeks.
At first, I told myself everything was normal and I was fine. Because everything was normal and I bloody well should have been fine.
I’d left the club that following morning and I hadn’t charged about the streets of Paris like a madman, looking for a woman who wanted neither me nor my money. I hadn’t begged or pleaded with her before she left, or given in to any of the equally appalling urges I was horrified to discover clambered there inside me. She had left, then I had called for my car, and I had resumed my life with nary a ripple.
That was the point of the club, after all.
But no matter how hard I worked to stop thinking about that night—and that woman—I couldn’t quite make it stick.
I thought about my little dancer in meetings. During negotiations. When I woke in the morning and all throughout the day, when I should have been thinking about other things—from macro concerns like the corporation I preferred not to run into the ground due to my inattention and more micro concerns, like John Delaney’s islands that my brother, Ash, was doing his level best to steal out from under me. I castigated myself for these lapses in the strongest possible terms.
And then, every night, I dreamed about her in vivid color—sound and scent and the silken feel of her skin against mine—and woke to begin the mad cycle anew.
I hardly knew who the hell I was.
Maybe I didn’t have to fear becoming like my father, which had always been my gravest concern—especially after my great failure, which he’d openly sneered at. It had been easy enough for me to keep everything and everyone at arm’s length after the disaster with Ash, because my father had been a huge fan of pretending that he was capable of relationships. Fidelity. Fatherhood. My solution was not to pretend.
But maybe the true worry was how easy it was for me to become like my mother, instead. Obsessed forever with a person who had forgotten her long ago.
Everything I had told Darcy was true. My mother had never tolerated my father’s infidelities well, but it was Ash’s existence with which she found it impossible to make her peace. It was Ash who had rendered her distraught—for years. Not Ash himself, whom I doubted she had ever met, but the fact of him.
My mother had believed herself special among my father’s many liaisons because she alone was the one my father had married. She’d imagined that she was the only one to bear him a child, too. And even all these years later, she couldn’t stand the idea that Ash’s mother had been doing the same thing. At the same time.
She had viewed my friendship with him in school as a betrayal. And after everything had fallen apart, I had agreed. I should never have let myself imagine that I—or Ash and I—could overcome the curse of my father’s blood. I should never have allowed my youthful naivete to hurt my mother, whose only sin was in wishing my father was a different man.
I paid my penance to this day. That was why I subjected myself to trips home to the unhappy house in Surrey where I had been raised—between terms at my various boarding schools, that was—and danced attendance on the woman who acted as if I’d wronged her yesterday. And was capable of turning operatic when distraught.
I was no longer friends with Ash. He considered me an enemy now and had for years. My father was dead, and my mother had received the bulk of his estate. He had not recognized his host of mistresses in that way. Only my mother got to live in style with the old man’s ghost.
I would have preferred to burn the house and its memories to the ground, I reflected as I drove up to the sprawling old house that day. That I hadn’t yet done so was a monument to my strength of character, I liked to think.
Especially when I knew my mother would spend our visit as she spent every visit, regaling me with tales of her victimhood as she sat surrounded by all the luxuries my father’s money could buy and mine could support. But that was part and parcel of the penance I paid her. She behaved as she liked and I took it.
I strode inside, nodding curtly at the butler. “Is she downstairs today?”
“I’m afraid not, sir,” the man replied, without inflection.
That wasn’t a surprise. I took the grand stairs two at a time, then made my way down the hall toward my mother’s private rooms. And found her where I expected I would, swaying as she stood behind the settee in her drawing room, shakily fixing herself a drink.
It was clearly not her first.
That wasn’t remotely surprising. My mother did not work. She did not even dabble at the sort of “work” women in her tax bracket normally did—meaning hosting charity events with high profiles. What was surprising was my own irritation with it today. I normally viewed interactions with my mother as a kind of hair shirt. Not comfortable, certainly. But mine to suffer anyway.
I should have been focused on my mother today, a week or so after I’d left Paris, but all I could think about was Darcy.