Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(36)

“I don’t think so. I think the cold did.” He rose up on an elbow and took her arm in his hand, pulling her to lie with him again. “You’re freezing.” He tugged the covers over their shoulders and snugged her against his chest. She let him, tucking her head under his chin, tracing her fingers through the hair on his chest.

She took hold of his pendants. She did that often; he didn’t know what to make of it. She’d called them ‘poignant’—it was a word she’d used often enough with him that he’d noticed, and in his constant quest to discover anything he could about her, he’d tried to make it meaningful. She thought his history poignant. She thought his writing poignant. She thought his pendants poignant. Poignant—moving, emotional, heartbreaking. Powerful. A compliment, maybe. He thought she meant it as such. Yet there was more meaning in her use of that word, but he either couldn’t find it or instinctively shied from it.

He pressed his lips to her temple, smelling the faint linger of her perfume. She always wore it now. She’d told him that she didn’t habitually wear scent, so, desperate for signs of connection, he took her new habit of dabbing perfume on the spots behind her ears as a sign for him, a sign that he wasn’t making a total f*cking fool of himself and sending his heart to the gallows while he did.

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 f*cking 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.”