A Summer In Europe (27 page)

As they strode along the boulevard devoted to the worship of material luxury, Cynthia chattered mindnumbingly, describing the handbags she’d seen as if they were the Hungarian crown jewels.

Emerson contributed a few price comparisons between men’s colorful silk ties and the best-crafted belts.

Louisa moaned softly every dozen steps and complained about a bothersome strap on her leather sandals.

Even Thoreau observed that the sterling silver versus platinum cufflinks he’d seen in one shop window were hard to distinguish from each other without closer inspection.

In what appeared to be a never-ending discussion on clothing accessories, Gwen—in her simple T-shirt, knee-length shorts and sneakers—felt like a fifth wheel, and a badly dressed one at that.

She pretended to glance at a store display, slowing her pace so the two couples could shoot ahead of her. Oddly, it was Thoreau who noticed first.

He nudged Louisa forward so she could join the line leaders, Cynthia and Emerson, while he slipped back to wait for Gwen.

“What’s with this dallying?” he asked lightly, as if he already knew. “Aren’t you anxious to get to the fake vampire castle?”

She allowed a small grin. “Who wouldn’t be?”

He rolled his eyes as they fell into step together, several yards behind the other three.

“So, you’re deep in thought,” he said. “What big mystery of the universe are you trying to unravel?”

A gust of wind caressed her face and she closed her eyes for a second, breathing in the still-humid city air. She had a number of mysteries she could ask about: What war was being played out between the Edwards brothers? Why had Thoreau insisted on including her while Emerson hedged? Who were these men, really, and what were her feelings for them ... and vice versa?

But she didn’t ask any of these. Instead, she decided to turn the tables. “What’s been happening with you and Amanda lately? Have you called her? Texted or e-mailed?”

He blinked a few times in surprise, but he didn’t look shocked by her redirection. “She’s ... all right. I guess. I think.”

Gwen raised her eyebrows at him. “You don’t
know?
”

“I know what she
tells
me. I’m not sure if it’s the truth.” He paused. “Look, I don’t really know how
I
am either. When I think about her, I miss her. I feel the absence that makes the heart grow fonder, rather than an out-of-sight, out-of-mind reaction. But I don’t know if my brain is playing a trick on me. I’m not sure if I’m remembering our real relationship clearly or merely my wishes for how I wanted it to be.”

She could understand this. A part of her was questioning her memories of Richard, too. Had she been remembering him unfairly while on the trip? Either unkindly or
too
kindly?

“What about when you see other, um, women? Like”—she made an almost imperceptible pointing motion with her index finger—“Cynthia,” she whispered, even though she was far enough ahead not to overhear. “Is she someone you find yourself attracted to?”

“Bitchiness and all?” he murmured.

She nodded.

He squinted at the trio walking and talking half a block ahead of them now. “She’s not unattractive,” he admitted. “Nice legs and, when she’s in a mellow mood, a rather pretty smile. But no. Not seriously.”

“Because of the age difference?”

He shook his head. “Four years is insignificant. No, it’s more because of the ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ cliché when it comes to her—or, at least, exhaustion. She drains me because I can tell she doesn’t know what
type
of man she wants. She simply wants one.”

Gwen shot him a puzzled looked. “How do you know that she doesn’t know—”

Thoreau cut her off. “Because she’s made advances at a number of us. Emerson. Hans-Josef. Even me. And that’s on this trip alone. I’ve observed her trying to hook up with a dozen different blokes back in England. I don’t know the personalities of all of those men, but speaking of the three of us here, we couldn’t be more different underneath the skin. To behave as if she wants all of us is, actually, to want none of us. She’s not being properly discriminating.” He shrugged. “She sees men who are tall, well-educated, reasonably cultured, and she springs into action, completely missing important things like my brother’s dark side, our tour guide’s bizarre attachment to his pet rodent, my catastrophic relationship history. She’s not interested in a flesh-and-blood man. She’s after an illusion.”

Gwen swallowed at his words and at the undisguised bitterness behind them. She wouldn’t admit this aloud, of course, but she felt a sudden spark of empathy for Cynthia. In Gwen’s case, there were only two men she’d been concerning herself with—Emerson and Richard—but they were different enough to have her questioning whether
she
knew what she wanted in a man. She comforted herself with the certainty that she at least hadn’t been oblivious to Emerson’s darker side. She’d caught him in serious moods and conflicted moments. She knew he wasn’t always the fun-loving extrovert he appeared to be.

Not that she was prepared to discuss
that
with his brother, either.

There was, however, a part of Thoreau’s confession that required greater candidness from her than she typically felt comfortable sharing. She touched her Mouth of Truth pendant, took a deep breath and prepared to be honest. “I’m not sure of the accuracy of my memories either. For my boyfriend,” she whispered. “He’s going to be here soon, at the end of the trip, and I—I’m a little afraid of what it’ll be like when we see each other again. We’ve been together for two years and have never been apart for more than a couple of days. But now—”

“Now your eyes are open to the wider world,” he finished for her, nodding. “It happens. It’s rather like being a teenager, is it not? How we all think we know everything at fifteen or sixteen, but then we eventually leave home for work or university and, suddenly, we realize how many experiences are left untapped.”

She bit her bottom lip and bobbed her head. Much as she didn’t want to admit this, even to herself, Aunt Bea may have been right. Gwen probably
did
need to see more of the world, more of life, before making any big decisions.

To her, this realization trickled down her spine like midnight sweat. Like the terror she might’ve felt in the hour before taking a final exam in math—one where she’d thought she’d been well prepared because she’d studied everything in her algebra notebook—only to find out that the test included geometry, trigonometry and calculus, too. And she hadn’t even gotten notes for those yet.

It was a good student’s nightmare.

Real perspiration beaded up on the back of her neck, which she quickly swiped away. Thoreau, however, seemed not to notice that.

Instead, he grinned at her, as if finally connecting a couple of puzzle pieces. He threw his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. She stiffened slightly in surprise.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler,” he said in a low voice, “if we could just get together? You and I? We’re friends. We can talk to each other without all of that relationship angst,” he reasoned. “No Amanda and her issues. No—what’s your boyfriend’s name?”

“Richard,” she said, laughing and allowing him to lean into her a bit more.

“No Richard and whatever his annoying traits are. No people making unwelcome romantic advances at us.” He nodded comically in the direction of the threesome ahead, and Gwen laughed again. Thoreau was funny, although she wasn’t sure she’d necessarily term Emerson’s kiss as
unwelcome,
just unanticipated.

“We could actually enjoy our sightseeing without all of those aggravating undercurrents on the trip or worries about people waiting to bawl us out back at home,” he added, devilishly bringing his face closer to hers as if to rub cheeks. “Wouldn’t it be nice if—” He stopped talking. He stopped walking, too, and so abruptly that Gwen was inadvertently yanked backward. “Uh-oh.”

She followed Thoreau’s gaze and immediately encountered a lethal glare from Emerson, directed like a burning solar flare at his brother. The trio had paused to look in a shop window, but Emerson wasn’t yakking it up with Cynthia and Louisa anymore. He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, arms crossed tightly, looking very, very irritated.

Thoreau made a show of removing his arm. “Now we’ve displeased him,” he said, far too delightedly, and Gwen was again reminded of the sibling chess rivalry currently in progress.

“Nice,” Emerson hissed, not quite under his breath to Thoreau when they reached him. Then he turned his attention to her, his harsh stare softening, but his eyes still troubled. “Hello, there,” he said.

“Hello.” Gwen smiled carefully at him, the pull of her attraction to him warring with her desire to be a principled person, one who honored her commitments to other people. But she was having a harder and harder time determining right from wrong when she was around him. And she didn’t know what to say or do when in his company.

Cynthia appeared to be not nearly so conflicted. “Pay attention, Emerson,” she demanded, stepping away from the shop window and playfully slapping him on the chest. “Louisa keeps insisting that the necklace in the corner is tanzanite.” She pointed toward the display they were ogling. “I think it’s tourmaline. Could you just take a peek—” She paused and glanced at Gwen and Thoreau. “You two, as well. I would like to know what this is.”

Clearly, the discussion of accessories had not yet ceased.

Gwen glanced at the necklace but wasn’t certain what it was. To her, the gemstone looked like a cross between sapphire and aquamarine in color. Emerson hazarded a guess that it was tanzanite, but he didn’t look very closely. Thoreau studied it far more carefully and took Cynthia’s side. “It’s tourmaline,” he proclaimed. “Of the Brazilian indicolite variety. Beautifully cut.”

“Well, thank heavens we know the truth now,” Emerson murmured dryly. His brother shot him a cool, triumphant look, but the two other women appeared oblivious to their antagonism.

The rest of the walk to the park went quickly, all five of them clustered together like an imbalanced molecule—Thoreau ahead with Cynthia and Louisa, Emerson with Gwen just behind. But their pilgrimage to Vajdahunyad Castle was stymied by an unusually early closing time for visitors that day. It housed the city’s agricultural museum, and there was a private event scheduled. So their excursion morphed into a full tour of the City Park instead.

“At least we can look at the building from the outside,” Louisa said, taking several steps back from it. “That section over there is quite sinister.” She indicated the façade that, according to Thoreau, most resembled the castle in Transylvania.

Gwen studied its gothic architecture and, as the sun hid momentarily behind the clouds, she could almost see Dracula escaping from the imposing building and into the darkening night, black cape flying behind him. Too bad Richard hadn’t joined them on the trip sooner. He could have had the perfect setting for his “serious” Halloweenesque proposal.

The mental image of Richard with a vampire cloak and fake teeth offering her an engagement ring never ceased to amuse her. She laughed aloud and Emerson, still by her side, said, “What’s so humorous?”

She shook her head. “Just a memory that never happened.”

He eyed her with surprise. “A very poetic way of phrasing it. I was hoping you’d say it was a highly explicit sexual fantasy involving neck biting.”

She laughed again, but didn’t reply. She’d let him think what he wanted.

He was still staring curiously at her. “Fine, don’t tell me. But I like the sound of your laugh. It’s charming.”

“Um, thanks,” she managed, but she could feel herself blushing at his words and his attention. She tried to remember if there had been anything Richard had ever said to her that had made her blush. She couldn’t, but it had been a long time since their early days of dating. And, besides, Richard wasn’t an outrageous flirt like Emerson. He never set out to make her feel self-conscious and unnerved.

Before Emerson could make any new embarrassing comments, Thoreau pointed out a statue of a man with a pen in the nearby courtyard.

“It’s famous in Budapest,” he said. “It’s called
Anonymus,
and it’s, apparently, the anonymous notary of one of the kings. Probably King Béla III, who wrote the first history books on Hungarians, mostly based on legends.” He pointed at the pen held in an eternal grip by the man in bronze. “One local superstition is that you’ll have good luck if you rub the pen.” He raised his eyebrow, walked over to it and caressed the pen tip with his fingers.

Cynthia and Louisa immediately followed suit. Gwen, feeling the pinches of peer pressure and, also, not willing to turn down any good luck she might get, dutifully stroked the pen, too.

Emerson, of course, had to be contrary.

He shrugged at his brother, crossed his arms, sighed heavily and acted no better than a petulant kindergartner. “I’m lucky already,” he said with an arch glance.

Thoreau strode by him, murmuring loud enough for only Gwen and Emerson to hear, “Ah, but not as lucky as you want to be.”

Gwen noticed a decided shift in the air after that. The atmosphere between the men felt charged with a more competitive edge than usual. The brothers—typically assertive and frequently oppositional in regards to their interactions with each other—had become silent but uncompromising. It was like being the knotted rope in the center of a tug-of-war match. Both sides trying to wordlessly draw the knot closer, but neither man fully succeeding in wrestling the advantage from his opponent.

And then, of course, there was the problem with the map. A problem the Edwards brothers claimed didn’t exist.

The five of them had meandered around the City Park for, perhaps, a half hour, and then for a half hour more into the neighborhoods at the outskirts of it. Caught up as she was in their explorations, and distracted by the nonverbal jousting of the brothers, Gwen had lost track of their precise location and had simply trusted the others to know how to return to familiar roads. She was not the only one holding this false assumption.