Chapter 20
Ransom
It’s been three meals and one snowball fight, and I’m no closer to even having a real conversation with Ember. At this rate, New Year’s Eve will come and go, and I won’t have made an inch of progress toward winning her back.
She’s at the dining table for breakfast, and when I say good morning, she responds like I’m an acquaintance she vaguely knows, and not the man who once made her come four times in one night.
She is civil to me.
Painfully, icily, heartbreakingly civil.
“Em—”
“Can you pass me the butter?” Freja interrupts.
“Ember—”
“Oh, Ransom, can you check your phone? Your mother sent you some dates for the Parson wedding in January,” Margot cuts in.
I’m not going to the damn wedding in January, and both my mother and Margot know that, so this is just the classic Rousseau two-step to protect Ember…from me.
That stings. That they think she needs to be shielded from me, the man who’s in love with her, the man who found out too late what she means to me.
She doesn’t look at me. She sips her café crème, eats her croissant that she dips into the coffee like a proper Parisian, and listens to Freja, who’s talking a mile a minute.
“You look like someone kicked your puppy.” Jonathan sits next to me, giving me a measured look.
I glare at him.
He raises both his hands. “Man, I come in peace. When I fucked up with Freja, this lot showed up at my office in DC. Bob wasn’t allowed in ‘cause he had a baseball bat.”
I raise an eyebrow. Jonathan just may have the key to winning back the fair maiden, since he’s with Freja, who’s, let’s face it, not easy to please.
“What did you do?” I ask curiously.
He pours himself some coffee. “I may have gone on a date with Freja’s colleague when we were on a break.”
“But you were on a break?” I ask, confused.
He shrugs. “The family didn’t think so. Freja didn’t think so. I didn’t think so, either.”
“Then why did you do it?”
He grins. “Sheer criminal stupidity? I thought it’d make her jealous. It did. And Jean almost cut my balls off.”
“How did you get back in their good graces? Hers?”
“Took a year of some major groveling.”
“A year?” I panic. I wasn’t going to last a year without Ember, now that I knew, felt it in every cell of my body that I loved her.
“Maybe you can shortcut it since you’re both stuck in this chalet for another five days,” he offers, and then looks at the defensive line, metaphorically, in front of Ember, and shakes his head. “They’re not going to make it easy.”
Ember smiles at Tanya. My heart stutters.
She looks beautiful. Soft sweater, hair half-up, her glasses perched on her nose, which makes her look younger than she is, and more dangerous than she realizes.
I can handle anger. Rage. Tears. Even her throwing things at me.
But this cool detachment—like she’s written me out of her story—is killing me.
I stand up. I know there’s no way around this. “Ember, may I speak with you?”
Before the others can start foiling my plan, I raise my hand. “Enough. This is between Ember and me, and you all need to stop running interference.”
“Go fuck yourself.” Aksel gives me the one-finger salute.
“Yeah, go fuck yourself.” Freja goes next.
I look at Margot, who just shrugs. “What they said.”
“Jean? Bob? Tanya?” I ask, wanting very much to get all the objections and abuse out of the way.
Thankfully, Heidi and Giselle have left. They’re going to spend New Year’s Eve in Reykjavik, otherwise they’d be giving me their opinion on the matter—which is mostly the same as the Rousseaus. I’m an asshole. Ember is a princess. I deserve to get kneed in the nuts.
“I’ve got a shotgun,” Bob declares, miming the motion with his fingers like he’s cocking a real one.
Jean looks me up and down, then turns to his youngest daughter. “Ember, do you want to talk to him?”
My heart seizes in my chest.
She looks at me, eyes wide, filled with hurt. She isn’t hiding one damn thing. I crushed her, and she isn’t pretending she’s alright.
“What do you…ah…what do you want to talk about?” she asks.
I want to talk about how much I miss you.
I want to talk about how much I love you.
I want to talk about how fucking sorry I am.
I want to….
“Can we go for a walk?” I’m more nervous than I am when I walk into surgery. “Alone,” I emphasize, looking around the room.
Freja eyes me across the table like a hawk watching a wounded rabbit.
Aksel slouches, smirking.
Margot sips her mimosa (hold the orange juice) with the smug patience of a woman watching a Greek tragedy she’s seen before and knows ends badly for the male lead.
She clears her throat. “Maybe later,” she croaks out.
It’s not a no. That’s a positive. A win. Take it and run, Ransom.
After breakfast, after she’s gone, I go to my room.
I don’t have a plan. I don’t even have a second draft of an apology, and my first draft was shit.
There’s a knock on my door, and before I can respond, Tanya walks in.
She closes the door behind her with the kind of theatrical sigh only a woman who’s survived marrying Bob can deliver. She has the inimitable air of someone about to meddle.
“I brought reinforcements.” She tosses a small linen pouch onto the bed.
I pick it up and peer inside. Lavender and chamomile?
“What’s this? Witchcraft? Are we making a love potion?”
“A tea blend.” She gives me a withering look. “You look like you haven’t slept in forever.”
I sit on the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, pouch in hand. “She won’t even look at me.”
“Of course, she won’t.” Tanya walks over to the window and pulls back the heavy, forest-green curtains that frame the tall windows, dusted with frost. “You broke her heart and then had the gall to show up with that Dior-wrapped, petty bitch in stilettos. Ember isn’t a saint.
She is someone who feels everything and hides it just well enough to make you think she doesn’t. ”
“I know I screwed up.”
She turns, arms crossed. “Then fix it. But don’t do that thing men do—make one apology, get cold feet when it doesn’t magically solve everything, and retreat into self-pity. You want her?”
“Yes.” Desperately.
“Then, show up every day. Try again. And again.”
“I have no fucking idea what to do. I mean…I keep trying to talk to her, but honestly, I’ve got no clue what to say if she gives me a chance.”
Tanya gives me a dry look, barely hiding her irritation. “No clue? You’re a neurosurgeon. You’re smart. Get. A. Clue.”
I fling my arms up in the air, and the pouch of tea falls on the floor. I pick it up and set it next to me in bed. “I threw us away, and she tells me she’s been waiting for me, loving me. And then…damn it! I should never have brought Calypso—”
“Please.” Tanya raises a hand to silence me. “You brought that tasteless clown along as a shield against what you feel for Ember. It’s time to be honest.”
I run a hand over my face and stand up. I walk up to the small seating area and pick up a cut-crystal decanter from the dark wood bar cart in the corner, which I know has scotch, the Islay kind. Peaty.
“Drink the tea, not the alcohol.” Tanya yanks the decanter away from me and sets it back down. “What on earth is the matter with you? You want something, you usually go get it.”
“I’m fifteen years older than her,” I say in frustration. “I…I’m bad at relationships. I don’t….”
Tanya tilts her head. “Ember doesn’t give two hoots about your age, and neither should you. And she’s not waiting for your sweetness, Ransom. She’s waiting to see if you’re serious. And right now, she’s expecting you to give up.”
Her words punch harder than Aksel’s fist.
“What if she never…what if she just keeps walking away?”
Tanya makes a face. “Oh, you poor thing, so insecure.” Her sarcasm cuts cleaner than a number ten blade in the hands of someone who knows exactly where it hurts. “You keep saying how much older you are than her, so act your damn age.”
I huff out a breath at her verbal beating. “I thought you were here to make me feel better.”
“What gave you that dumb idea?”
My room is decorated in warm, moody tones—deep charcoal walls, aged leather armchairs that look like they belong in an old London club, and a low-slung slate-gray velvet sofa that Tanya sinks into with a sigh.
I crouch by the fireplace, striking a match and holding it to the kindling stacked neatly beneath the logs.
“I can understand that she thinks it’s guilt talking when I say I love her.”
“Well,” Tanya says gently, “don’t you think you’d feel the same way after that debacle in the library where you said things you now say weren’t true?”
The hearth, framed by rough-cut stone, crackles to life as flames catch and dance.
“They weren’t true.” I stand and look at the fire. “The truth is that…I have had to stop myself from reaching out to her. Every time I went to Boston, I…I’d go by her building like a creepy stalker and…ultimately chicken out.”
“Then man up, Ransom.”
I rub my temple, feeling a stress headache coming on. “What does that even mean?”
“You can’t just say I love you and think it’ll solve a damn thing. You show her that you’re the kind of man who earns her back. Gesture by gesture. She needs to see that you’re not running. That you’re not afraid of the hard parts. That you’re in it. For good.”
I nod slowly, the ache in my chest swelling again. “What if I’ve already messed it up too badly?”
“Then you become the man who tries anyway. The man who doesn’t stop.”
She stands, brushing invisible lint off her cashmere dress. “And next time you say something important to her, make sure she knows you’re not performing. Be raw. Be unpretty. Be honest. Ember can handle anything except dishonesty. She was raised in a family that thrives on calling bullshit.”
I exhale a bitter laugh.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Tanya says as she opens the door. “Don’t try to make it perfect. She doesn’t want perfect. She wants real.”
The door clicks behind her, and I sit in the silence she leaves behind, Tanya’s words looping in my brain like a steady, rhythmic pulse.
Don’t make it perfect.
Make it real. Whatever the fuck that means!
Don’t stop trying. Right!
Then it hits me.
Ember’s not waiting for an apology. She’s waiting for me to mean it, to be convinced of my remorse.
She expects me to give up. She expects me to run, get frustrated.
Well, I’m going to disabuse her of those notions.
Tonight, I’ll try again.
Tomorrow, I’ll try again.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
Until she believes me.
Until she believes in us.
Even if I get nowhere and we leave Chamonix, return to the States, I’ll keep working to win her trust and her love, because I’m a better man than I used to be.
All evidence to the contrary, Ransom!