A Deceptive Attraction: The Wilsons, Book 3 (5 page)

It was really a shame, he thought. Colette was smart, beautiful, capable, and would turn herself inside out when it came to helping others. She had a rare ability to size up who needed help and figure out a way to help them without being a busybody.

But Colette set herself up so she didn’t really need a man. She had a beautiful three-bedroom apartment in Paris overlooking the Seine. In the summers, she, Leon, and occasionally Henri split their free time at the villa in Provence that they had inherited from their parents.

Maybe, Leon thought, if a woman doesn’t need a man to support her
financially, then there’s no good reason to keep us around.

“Adele and I broke up right before I left Paris,” he said.

“I’m so sorry, Leon.” Colette’s gaze was sympathetic. “Please, order your coffee and we can go from there.”

After the waiter brought Leon a café au lait, she asked, “Who left whom?”

“It wasn’t her, it was me. In fact, that’s what I told her.”

Colette wrinkled her brow. “Leon, you should never tell a woman that if you want her to respect you when it’s over.”

“Why not?”

“Because a girl knows damn well…” Colette stopped and made a face, “that a man doesn’t break up with her unless he either stopped loving her, or he never loved her in the first place.”

“Well, I couldn’t very well tell her that I stopped loving her,” Leon complained. “So what should I have told her, ma sœur?”

“Just tell her you’re breaking up with her and sincerely say you’re sorry it didn’t work out.”

“That’s what I did.”

Colette held up her hand. “Wait, I’m not finished.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Speak your piece and then get out of the way. Grant her the freedom to think of you as the bad guy – it will help her get over you faster. Anything you tell her about how either you or she should have been different will only cause regret.”

“How do you know?” Leon asked.

“Because I’ve been there
.”

Chastened, Leon decided to stop defending himself and start listening better when women talked.

His memory of the breakup with Adele last weekend was painful. They had met for coffee at one of the new Starbucks in Paris. Leon didn’t care for the taste of the big American chain’s coffee, but it was an appropriate setting for a conversation that he hoped to finish as quickly as he had started it.

He didn’t want to tell Adele why he was ending their relationship. He felt terribly guilty. For years, before he met Adele, he had lived up to his reputation as a player because he wanted to avoid breakups. Breaking up with a woman went against every single value he had learned, as a Frenchman and as a man. In his heart he wanted to believe in himself as a gentleman and a protector of women.

Maybe it really was me, he thought. Adele was certainly beautiful. Tall and thin, too thin, really, she had spent a few years on the Paris fashion runway before Colette had introduced them.

But Adele was demanding, and not the least bit polite about it. She didn’t wait for expensive gifts from him, even though he gave them frequently and generously. She expected them, and there were never enough of them. It was always all about her. When she didn’t get her way over the slightest little thing, she erupted in anger and could take weeks to cool off.

Leon expected women to be emotional, but there was something about Adele’s emotions that left him feeling drained and depressed after one of her temper tantrums. Gradually over the past three years he had come to grips with the fact that she was an incorrigible drama queen.

There was something else, too. Their sex life just wasn’t good.

Leon had just turned thirty-five, and he had the typical sexual appetite of a man his age. He loved sex, and he liked to think he was good at it. But he just couldn’t reach Adele.

He had tried everything, from romantic candlelight dinners to blunt advances, only to be met with the same sexual indifference every time. Adele allowed him to take pleasure for himself with her, but she bluntly refused to pleasure him, or to allow him to please her.

More than once he had opened his eyes to look at her during sex and found her staring at the ceiling with an expression on her face that made it clear she couldn’t wait for him to finish what he was doing.

For Leon, whose enjoyment of sex hinged on the enjoyment he brought to his partner, Adele’s coldness was more than a rebuke. It was something akin to heartbreak.

In the end, he had decided he just couldn’t go on anymore. He wished he had faced the truth earlier, before both of them had three years invested in the relationship. He had tried to be a good guy and give her a chance, but really, he had only made things worse.

“Leon, I have something to tell you.” Colette startled him out of the unpleasant memory he had been reliving.

His sister looked thoughtful. “I’ve always felt responsible for you because I was the one to fix you up with Adele. Soon after you became a couple, I realized I had made a mistake.”

“Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad,” he reassured her. He had never noticed that there was any friction between the two women, but then he had never been good at picking up on the undercurrents in female relationships. He wasn’t sure that any man could be good at it, or if he should even try.

His sister took a deep breath and dropped the bomb.

“Adele lived a double life, Leon,” she said. “She was always very concerned with appearances, as we both know.”

Leon nodded. “Yes, go on.”

“She had already been a rich old man’s mistress for several years when I first met her on the Paris runways. When she told me three years ago that they had broken it off, I set her up with you, hoping to steer her toward someone her own age, someone who knew how to have fun.”
Colette sighed. “It didn’t work out that way. Instead of you teaching her to have fun, she taught you to be inflexible and never have any fun. I could see it happening, and it was painful to watch, but it wasn’t my place to interfere.”

“Last year I found out that Adele was seeing her paramour again,” she continued. “I have no idea how long it had been going on. For all I know, maybe it had never stopped. That was when I realized that she was keeping you around as window dressing, to make her look respectable. There’s something odd about her…she just seems to need the security of a man twice her age. It wasn’t about her need for money – she knew the Girards have plenty of that.”

Leon sat in his chair and listened to Colette. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Three years of trying to be good enough for Adele, and the whole time she had been doing him wrong?

“I’m so sorry,” his sister was saying. “I know you must be really hurt. It was my mistake. Maybe I should have told you, or figured out a way for you to find out.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Leon replied. “And I’m not hurt. I was hurting after I talked to Adele because I felt so guilty for making what I knew was the right choice for me. Now I have to thank you, because I don’t need to feel guilty anymore.”

He thought of Adele’s indifference to him during their lovemaking, and an enormous weight lifted from his shoulders. For the entire three years he was with Adele, he had spent the whole time feeling like he wasn’t enough – not rich enough, not considerate enough, not funny enough, not sexy enough, not well endowed enough…the list went on and on. Now Colette had told him the truth about Adele.

It wasn’t him. It was her.

Leon started to laugh. Colette looked at him quizzically and finally joined in.

“I don’t know why you think this is funny, mon petit frère,” she gasped. “But I haven’t heard you laugh in a long time, so ce n'est pas grave.”

“It’s all good,” Leon agreed with her in French.

“Now, about the American girl you asked me to fix you up with,” Colette said. “Violet Wilson.”

“Yes?” Leon
gave her an innocent look. Colette was good at startling him.

“I met her yesterday. She’s a lovely person,” Colette said briskly. “Very talented, and a native New Yorker who knows her city forward and backward. I did some checking around and learned that she comes from a good family. The Wilsons own the Zetta Corporation. Perhaps you have heard of them?”

Leon put on the most neutral expression he knew how to wear. “Yes. They have been very successful.”

His ruse worked. Colette didn’t realize that he was several steps in front of her, for once. His job required him not to talk about it to anyone, not even his sister and best friend on earth.

Again he wished he could tell Colette everything. He was certain that if she knew what he was about to do to the Wilsons, she would be very angry with him, and for good reason. It was his job, but it was terribly unfair to Violet.

He reached for his wallet to pick up the tab, but Colette stopped him with a wave of her hand.

“My turn,” she said. “After the disaster with Adele, I should be picking up the tab for a good long time.”

Outside the hotel they exchanged kisses on the cheek and she watched him walk down the sidewalk and disappear into the crowd.

Chapter 7

Violet awoke shortly after eight o’clock in the morning in her bed in Leon’s suite, yawned, and stretched. At first she had no idea where she was. All she knew was that it was warm and comfortable, and the sheets were made with a high thread count.

Gradually the memory came back to her, played in reverse order. Leon had showed her this room and kissed her good night. Another passionate kiss in the living room of the suite with the brightly lit skyline of Upper Manhattan for a backdrop. The way his mouth had played along the edge of the neckline of her dress, setting her skin and her soul on fire. The excellent food at Rolfio’s, followed by the kiss under the Columbus statue, and drinks in this very hotel.

Violet rose from the bed and wrapped herself in a pink spa robe from the closet.

When she thought of Leon she was torn between two conflicting visions of him. The first vision was of someone very much like herself. She had been told for years, by family and friends, that she was more reserved than most New Yorkers. Leon’s easy affability and slightly sardonic sense of humor were a perfect match for the same qualities in herself, and like Violet, he seemed to have no taste for drama. His perfect manners would be met positively if she ever took him home for Sunday brunch and introduced him to her family.

But that was getting ahead of herself, Violet thought. There was another side of Leon that she didn’t like so well. He had a way of creating an impression that he was being honest without telling her anything close to the whole story. She had no proof, but she didn’t need proof. She was an artist and long ago had learned to trust her intuition. The only bad decisions she had made in her life had happened when she had ignored her inner voice – with Tim, for instance.

She had forgotten all about Tim until now, but the note Leon had left her was an unpleasant reminder:

Off to an early morning meeting. See you at 11 in the lobby downstairs. Kisses, L.

Tim had been the master of the breezy little note full of lame excuses, Violet thought. Apparently, Leon was too.

She continued to play the tape in reverse and remembered her agreement with Colette, which she intended to keep. Even though she had her suspicions about the Frenchwoman’s brother, the opportunity to show her designs in Paris was just too tempting to pass up. All she had to do was keep her wits about her.

There was only one problem. Just thinking about the way Leon touched her, made her wits scatter like a flock of stupid New York pigeons.

Returning to her room, she showered and pondered what to do. She could walk through the lobby in last night’s clothing and hail a cab to her apartment, change clothes, pack some things, and return by eleven to meet Leon.

It wouldn’t take long, but she had a strong aversion to going back to her apartment. She hadn’t really lived there for over a year, since she started staying with Tim. It was an expensive place, and at times she wondered why she had kept it. Now she knew it had been her safety net, but she didn’t like it. It was lonely there.

She thought of her first encounter with Leon on the sidewalk outside of Tim’s building with her two bags. Of course. In a flash she dug her cell phone out of her handbag and called the shop.

Troyesha answered. “Daylily, may I help you?”

“It’s Violet.”

“Where you been, girl? I was getting worried about you.”

“I’m fine, really,” Violet said. At least for now, she thought. “I’ll fill you in about it later, I promise.”

“You’d better,” Troyesha said.

“Right now, could you please call a taxi and have it run my two suitcases from the shop up to Columbus Circle before ten?”

Troyesha was all business as she took down the address and suite number, then immediately started to laugh. “Pretty good neighborhood you ended up in
. Did you take him on that bus tour yet?”

“No, that’s today,” Violet said. “Really, Troy, I can’t talk now. I’m supposed to meet him at eleven. Please hurry. Can you handle the shop yourself if I take the day off so I can show him around? You can call in your sister to help if you need to.”