43. Primrose
PRIMROSE
He asks me to be honest and all I can think is, I see you hiding.
He asks me to be honest, but what I want is for him to ask me to stay.
Stay. I nibble the inside of my lip. How would that even work?
He lives in Paris, and I live in London.
His children belong in Paris—it’s what their mother intended for them.
And London is my home; my job is my home.
How would we even navigate our lives, our commitments, and a relationship with the English Channel between us?
This is ridiculous, I think as I adjust the throw pillow behind my head then almost frisbee my book to the coffee table. He’s not going to ask me to stay. We have seven days—that’s all. Two more without the children. Is it weird that I miss them?
“Everything okay?” Luc glances up from his own book as his fingers tighten on my ankle. I cannot express how sexy he looks in those dark-framed reading glasses.
“I’m bored.” I’m not. What I am is driving myself crazy. But if there’s one thing guaranteed to distract me and to get his attention, it’s the suggestion that I’m at a loose end.
Idle hands and all that.
“That is bad news,” he murmurs.
“I know.” I stare at my toes as I point them like a ballerina. A ballerina lying on a sofa, but still.
“What a bad host I must be.” His hand glides a little higher to my calf. “What could we do to relieve that boredom, I wonder?”
“How about you tell me a story.” I give a little pout.
“Let me see. Once upon a time,” Luc begins, his expression so serious, “there lived a lonely Frenchman who invited an exceedingly lovely Primrose into his garden.”
“Because he wanted to plough her?” I give a soft undulation of my body as I adjust the pillow behind my head. “Did she make him wet his plants?”
“Who’s telling this story?” As he stares at me, a suffer a tiny throb inside, like my body remembers the feel of him. The whole of him. “The little Primrose insisted she was there only to admire the landscaping—”
“The manscaping.” I press my hand to my mouth as I snort.
“The landscaping.” He lifts his hand to take off his glasses.
“Um, no sir,” I say with a waggle of my finger. “Put ’em back on.”
He says nothing but the look he slides me is incendiary. And the glasses stay on.
“This is a slow story.” But I jolt as his hand slides around to the back of my knee. “Hurry and get to the bit with the garden bed.” Or where you bed me. So little time. So many feelings.
“Before very long, the Primrose was tending to his…” He quirks a teasing brow. “Shrubbery.”
“His what?” I almost shriek. I push up onto my forearms, and not only because it makes my boobs look good.
“The little Primrose felt so much power that she ran amok over the lawn, cartwheeling and showing off her tiny underwear. The exhibitionist,” he adds heavily.
“Was she?” Blood seems to rush through my veins with a mixture of excitement and something harder to define.
“She undoubtably liked to be watched. It made her feel powerful.”
“Why? Why is that?”
“Control.” The word feels like a tiny explosion of delight deep inside. “The power of being seen is a heady aphrodisiac.”
What I feel for him, it’s more than skin deep. It’s more than his looks and his words or how he makes me feel. There’s magic between us, I swear.
I could be his for eternity.
“In the garden, the little Primrose insisted on climbing tallest tree,” he says as he returns to his tale. His tale about me.
“She was a hoe for that wood.”
“She could take it, she said. Take it like a good little girl.”
“I’ll bet she did.”
“She made such enthusiastic use of his garden hose that the neighbors were jealous.”
“Okay, what in the name of gentilism is the tree in this story? I mean, it’s obvious what the hose is.”
“The tree is me. The tallest tree in the garden.”
“Well, you are tall,” I whisper suggestively. “But do me a favor. Don’t tell this story to the children.” I stretch languorously across the couch, and Luc moves with me, sliding his hand under the hem of my dress. I give a soft sigh of a moan as he draws teasing circles against my inner thigh.
“It’s not a story they’d care to hear. Speaking of children, what did you do to make Felix your champion?”
“How’d you mean?”
“During their call earlier, Felix was… protective.”
“Of me?” He nods. “Well, I am the best nanny in the world, according to Poppins and McPhee.”
“Direct quotes?”
I give a nod. “And as far as he’s aware, I haven’t told you about his very particular TV habits.”
“His taste in pornography,” he says flatly.
“I wouldn’t phrase it like that. But I would like to keep it between us.” I lift my head and stare at him. “Seriously. Don’t tell him I told you.”
“Of course. But I sense that’s not what it was about.”
I pull a doubtful face, though I’m not sure he notices as his gaze seems to have turned inward.
“Felix will tell me in his own time. Whatever’s going on in his life, his mind, he always comes to me eventually.
Sometimes it’s with a confession, other times it’s a problem he needs to talk out.
He knows there’s nothing in this world he can’t say to me.
” I watch a barrage of thoughts flicker and fade across his face.
“He probably feels a little sad or maybe sorry for me.” I expect it’s my expression that’s hard to interpret now because, putain de bordel de merde!
Whore of a brothel of shit—French swearing is so imaginative—or to put it another way, fucking hell! Why did I have to say that?
“Why?”
I rub my lips together as his head lifts, and those blue eyes hit mine.
“I told him he I knew how porn made him feel thanks to an experience I had myself when I was about his age.”
“With porn?” His brows give a tiny pinch. “What happened?”
I let out a breath that sounds like a laugh. “It’s ancient history.” And I don’t want to revisit it.
His fingers fold around my thigh. “I’m not sure I believe that,” he says quietly.
I tip my gaze to the beamed ceiling. “It’s nothing.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know that.” I also know I’m a grown-up now.
That it’s not supposed to bother me. “It really is just… stupid.” I give a shake of my head but, before I know it, the words spill.
“When I was thirteen, a boy at school asked me out. I was probably a late bloomer, and he was a bit older, and I said no. Probably, ew no.” Already, something inside me is tightening.
“He didn’t take the rejection well and he decided it was easier to tell everyone I was frigid rather than admit I wasn’t interested. ”
“Frigid. Applied to a child?”
“A teenager. By a teenager.” I keep my tone casual. Careless, even. “It became a bit of a nickname.”
“He gave you an unpleasant nickname.” There’s a world of darkness in his tone now.
“Didn’t you ever go to school?”
“My experience of the institution wouldn’t be helpful. You don’t have to tell me,” he offers again. “But you can trust me.”
“I know that. It just sounds so stupid,” I say with a discomforted motion, as though I can shake the memory off by squirming against these cushions. “Like I care what he said. Prim by name, prim by nature, right?”
“You aren’t at all prim.”
Maybe not to him. To him, I’m the woman who watched herself be fucked in a mirror.
And in public. The woman who let him take photos of us doing the same.
“For a while I was Frigid Prim, the Virgin Queen. See? Stupid. No alliteration, no imagination. And I was thirteen!” I feel suddenly angry. Angry on behalf of that little girl.
“How old was he?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen. To your thirteen. You weren’t much older than Felix,” he adds in a low growl. His jaw flexes, then he says something very uncomplimentary about Piers in French.
“Long story short, him and his mates thought they’d teach me a lesson. I was obviously insufferable.”
“You were a child.” His breathing seems to change, his fingers flexing against my leg.
“They didn’t hurt me,” I say quickly. “Not physically.”
For a long moment, he just stares at me as though trying to work out if I’m telling the truth.
“They pinned me by my arms and forced me to watch some truly awful porn on one of their phones.” Poking and goading and yelling that everyone was laughing at me.
“Horrible.” I give in to a shiver of revulsion.
“But it was over in minutes.” My eyes find his again.
“Not that I told Felix any of this. I just said that I’d viewed something that my brain wasn’t ready to comprehend.
That it had disturbed me, just like porn had disturbed him…
in some way, I guess. I’m sure he’ll tell you better himself.
When he’s ready. But if Felix was being protective, he was probably thinking of that and flexing his empathy. ”
“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
I lift my hands and drop them quickly. “It was years ago.”
“But it’s still in there.” He taps his temple.
“I still see the images sometimes,” I find myself confessing. “Hear their jeers. Ridiculous, really.”
“Primevère.” His fingers tighten, and I look his way. “An older boy reacted badly to being told no. He found the cruelest thing he could think of to hurt you. A word you were too young to even understand. But his insult wasn’t a diagnosis. Or the truth.”
“That’s…” Scary.
“You didn’t deserve that.”
“I know.”
“And you are the most sensual woman I have ever known. You could be brushing your teeth, and I’d find it deeply erotic.”
I pinch in a smile. “Pervert.”
“But you are so much more than that. Look at the person you have become. You chose a career that provides care to some of society’s most vulnerable members.
You’re funny, and you’re smart, and you are good.
So fuck that kid. And fuck that inner voice too,” he adds with a vehemence. “It’s not yours. Not anymore.”