Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(37)

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 f*ck?!” 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 f*cked 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 f*cked 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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.