Verneuil-sur-Avre, France

October 2011

"Are you sure about this, Vivienne? You are breaking my heart, ma chère."

I glanced at Pascal Janvier, a French count and Grand Slam winner, and rolled my eyes even as I laughed. He was France's favorite playboy given his perfect package of bloodlines, looks, wealth and celebrity status. We've become friends over the past few years after running into each other in the same circles and although he'd pledged his love for me multiple times, many of them in public view, I knew his heart was perfectly intact.

"All the more reason for the next woman to comfort you then," I said as we wound around a large, rounded shrub. The topiary garden was full of geometric shapes all arranged as one big maze and it had taken me three months since moving here to figure my way around it. "I'm sure there's going to be a long lineup."

"There always is but they're never the woman I want the most," Pascal said with a shake of his head, his arm, which mine looped through, pulling me just a tad bit closer to him. "You know I'm enchanted by you, Vivienne, and I'm crushed that you're leaving before I can make you mine."

Pascal was known for his dramatic declarations. He was so damn charming and handsome that he could get away with it as he had for years. He was normally the kind of guy that made me want to throw up listening to but he was a genuinely good man and one of the few I'd met who could make me laugh.

"I mean, think of what you're leaving behind. You have the Paris fashion circuit kissing your feet as one of its fast-rising couture designers. You have a castle," he said, pausing to sweep an arm across the view of the seventeenth-century French chateau that loomed over us in the background. It was resplendent in the low, romantic glow of the lights that spilled from the windows and the castle grounds. It was perfect for a fairy tale and maybe that was part of the appeal when I bought it six years ago. But it definitely did not have a happy ending. "And best of all, you have a prince charming who wants to sweep you off your feet if you'd just let him."

Pascal definitely looked like a prince charming with his light brown hair perfectly swept to the side and his face perfectly symmetrical in its beauty. He looked even more the part whenever he was in his military dress during formal state events. But while I could appreciate Pascal's princeliness, I ached for a man with short-shorn black hair, ice-blue eyes and a sharply-sculpted face that looked mean as hell. Oliver was all rough edges and while I knew they could scrape me raw, I still wanted them despite all reason.

I didn't know exactly what I would find when I returned to Cobalt Bay in five months but the only way I was going to find out was to get on a plane and fly home.

"As much as I love a good fairy tale, with a castle and a prince and all the fireworks, this is not my home," I told Pascal gently. "I miss my family and friends. I've been here too long."

"They say home is where the heart is," Pascal said. "Maybe I just need to convince you that your heart is here."

I had no doubt what he was going to do in the next second. There had been many times in the few years we've been friends that I'd seen Pascal consider it only to step back in the last moment and while I wasn't interested in him romantically, I was curious to know if another man's kiss would change anything for me. It didn't with Tate but that had been years ago and I was in a dark, painful place.

So I closed my eyes as Pascal leaned in, my lips parting just as his own pressed against mine. It started slow and tentative, as if he was cautious of having me bolt and run, and after realizing that I was kissing him back, he drew me in closer. The kiss deepened and I kept responding, if only to get myself there to a moment close to what I had with Oliver whose single touch could burn my blood.

Then Pascal slowly released me, his eyes bright with heat. But there was understanding in them. "As much as I want you, Vivienne, that kiss felt like a test. Are you trying to see if I could make you forget him?"

I knew Pascal had no idea who 'him' would be but he was experienced enough to understand when he was competing with someone. And he was very competitive so I decided to let him off now before he felt more obliged to prove himself.

"You can't which is why I'm leaving," I told him. "I'm not announcing it to the world but I wanted to tell you personally so you wouldn't be miffed at me."

"I might not be miffed but I'm still terribly heartbroken," Pascal said with a long sigh before slipping my hand over his arm again to resume our walk back to the main house where the party was still in full swing. "Promise you'll call me if the bastard disappoints you. I'll be on the first flight to take you back here."

I grinned. "I thought a prince charming only rescues princesses in a horse."

Pascal chuckled. "Mostly but you have to understand that in my case, I'm rescuing a jet-setting woman of the world. A plane is necessary—a private one even better."

And just like always, Pascal and I were talking and laughing again as we returned to the party. It was a small, intimate gathering to welcome Mauricio Cataloni into Vienne Couture. As demand for my gowns grew in the last couple years, a second designer had become necessary. Mauricio was a young talent I'd met in Milan where he'd been apprenticing at the Elie Saab workshop. It took me months to convince him to join my team and it was only until after Paris Fashion Week wrapped up a couple weeks ago that he was able to start. I never acknowledged it to anyone else other than Marg but the last six months had been somewhat in preparation of my move back to Cobalt Bay. Marg was going to oversee the operations of our Paris base and Mauricio would be the head designer here. I, on the other hand, will set into motion our plans to expand our brand into the US by opening a Cobalt Bay workshop.

An hour later, after having made several more rounds with different guests, I found myself escaping to the quiet of the balcony upstairs where I could watch without the obligation to charm and entertain. I loved this world and it loved me back so indulgently but lately, this fancy dance was starting to wear me out. Lately, it was starting to hit me that for the effort required, this just wasn't enough to keep me from being restless.

Not even a small empire is enough for a lonely heart.

And it was an empire of a certain respectable scale, and yes, complete with a castle. But it was still an empire I was only too eager to leave behind for a chance at the future with my past.

Someone looking at this might consider me royally fucked up for making this decision and I only had one thing to say to that—Since I'm the fucking queen, I don't have to explain myself.

I smiled in satisfaction at that thought.

Then my cellphone suddenly buzzed with a call from my brother.

It was mid-afternoon in California and while Stellan rang me often, this call wasn't his usual check-in.

A knot formed in my stomach as I stepped away from the party and slipped behind the gilded door of one of the upstairs sitting rooms. It was dark in the room with just the wall sconces lighting up the space and the draft made me shiver in my long, backless dress.

"Hey, what's going on?"

"I can hear music," Stellan said after a moment's hesitation. "Am I interrupting?"

"No, I stepped away. It's Mauricio's welcome party tonight."

"Right. Sorry, I forgot." Stellan sounded anxious and the knot in my stomach tightened. "I didn't mean to interrupt your evening—"

"I know you wouldn't so the fact that you did means this is an important call so out with it, Stellan."

That was a little snappy even for me but Stellan seemed preoccupied enough to have not noticed.

"I just thought I'd let you know that, uh... Oliver's uncle died. He had a heart attack," he finally said with a long sigh. "I know the bridges between you have long burned down but I thought I should let you know. He was the only family Oliver had left."

Not true—technically.

"How is he?" I asked, frowning as I imagined the kind of cold, empty despair that I'd seen settle over Oliver before when his family died many years ago. Uncle Bertrand had done his best by Oliver, trying to be there for him as a father-figure while also trying to run the family company without the required skillset for either job. I didn't blame him for the drastic measures Oliver had taken because Oliver had the drive to succeed and succeed fast whereas the old man had just wanted to keep everything from falling apart until his nephew was ready to take over.

Losing him would hit Oliver hard and there wouldn't be some big-eyed, naive-hearted girl to pull him back from the brink like I did years ago.

"You know Oliver when he's going through something like this," Stellan said grimly. "He just shuts down and you can't tell whether he's going to explode or just turn into stone."

Oliver was neither when he lost me but then, we were a bit of a special case.

"What are you asking me to do, Stellan?"

"Nothing."

"But you expect me to do something."

"I've seen how much you were hurting, Viv. I would never ask you to put yourself through that again."

"You're right, you would never ask," I said with almost a smirk. "You just know I would be compelled to act regardless."

Stellan sighed in exasperation. "I just called to tell you. What you do is up to you."

"Alright."

"What does alright mean?"

I smiled. "You'll just have to wait and see."

***

Cobalt Bay, California

October 2011

"Please make sure you call the realtor and close up the deal on my loft," I told my assistant, Janine, as we piled out of the town car. "And on your apartment. I need you settled in. Get whatever furniture you need. I've already emailed you a list of what to order for mine. Oh, and she needs to move up the viewing of those two warehouse spaces. I'm not waiting two weeks. I don't care if they haven't moved out of there yet. I'll use my imagination. We'll up the offer by fifteen percent max to sweeten it because if I like either of them, they need get the hell out of there, pronto."

"I'll call her as soon as I can feel my legs again," Janine said even as I could hear her pen scratching away on her folio as she trailed behind me.

I stopped and turned around in concern. Janine started working for me a year ago after she'd lost her husband to cancer. She'd been a librarian from Nebraska and she'd moved to Paris after marrying her husband who owned a bookshop there. She mothered Marg and I quite adorably and neither of us minded it, both of us having lost our mothers at a young age. She volunteered to follow me back to the US after I told her and Marg of my plans to return and, selfishly, I didn't give her time to change her mind, especially when our timeline was accelerated by five months. I needed her to keep my world together but more than that, I needed to see that she was holding up okay. I recognized my old self in her, wanting to keep busy to keep the pain and loneliness at bay. I wouldn't take that purpose from her until she was ready.

"I'm sorry. Of course you're exhausted after an eleven-hour flight."

"Not to mention roasting in this heat," Janine said before grinning at me. "Seriously, I'm fine. I just need to stretch my legs and get used to all this California sunshine. If anyone needs rest, it's you. Have you even slept since you told me two nights ago that we're leaving? Wait, that was Friday and it's now Sunday. I mean, Saturday here 'coz Paris is a nine hours ahead and—"

"Janine, I'm good. I could use a nap but I'm good," I interrupted her with a smile since the dear woman could sometimes ramble on forever. "Stay for a night and have dinner with us. Your hotel can wait another day. We have the best cook in the world and she's going to make it worth your while."

"I'm not sure it's a good idea to drag me to dinner," Janine hedged. "Your father's going to be shocked enough to find out you're home."

"I emailed him," I said as I put my arm around her shoulder and steered her back toward my father's Georgian mansion. As magnificent as it was, it wasn't quite as grandiose as my chateau back in France but it was home and I haven't been home in a long time.

"You know the only emails he reads are work ones," Janine said.

"I know but I didn't have time to field all of the questions I know he'd have so sending an email he'll eventually get to seemed the most prudent idea," I said flippantly. "Now, come on. Stellan's probably around for dinner, too. He'll take every opportunity he can find to enjoy Zenaida's cooking."

To say that my father was shocked was a bit of an understatement.

He was shocked in a good way, of course, but shocked nonetheless.

He gave me the longest hug I could remember him ever giving me and spent twenty minutes quizzing me on why I suddenly moved back to Cobalt Bay. And he knew it was sudden because I didn't ask for the jet or take more than two suitcases with me. Janine had arranged to have my other things flown out in a couple of weeks.

I didn't give a ton of details but I was honest enough to tell him the two major reasons—wanting to be home and also expand my line in the US. I suspected he somewhat linked it to Uncle Bertrand's death but he didn't ask outright. Thankfully, he was happy to just simply have me back that he didn't care so much as to why.

We were just about to dig into dinner when Stellan halted at the door, his raised brows the only evidence of his surprise.

I grinned at him. "What? You're not happy to see your baby sister back?"

Oh, he had a lot of questions but that didn't stop Stellan from striding over and wrapping me up in a bear hug. We caught up with each other during dinner, keeping the conversation light since Janine was dining with us. She'd met both Stellan and my Dad when they came to see me a few times in the past year but she still seemed starstruck by them. Or was it just Dad?

"I need to see him," I told Stellan when I caught him by the front hall just as he was leaving later that evening. I'd talked Janine into hitting the bed early and I had unpacked in my old room while Dad and Stellan hung out at the den.

Stellan scratched his head. "It's probably best to wait until the funeral tomorrow, Viv. It'll be a public setting and he'll be more subdued."

I raised a brow. "You make him sound like a wild animal."

"I'm glad he's never shown you that side of him but Oliver is like a ticking bomb when he's holding too much inside. You need to let him cool off before you spring yourself on him."

"You're not talking me out of this, Stellan, so you might as well stop trying," I told him patiently, crossing my arms. "If you won't take me to see him, I'll track him down at his old condo in case he still lives there. Or maybe I'll try his family's old house. If he's not there, I'll call people up until I find him. Your choice."

I could call or text him but for some reason I couldn't fathom, I wanted it to be a surprise.

"You're a handful," Stellan said with a sigh.

I beamed. "Thank you. Shall we go?"

Despite my bravado, my stomach was in a riot as I climbed into Stellan's electric concept car. I steamrolled through the last couple days since I got Stellan's call, intentionally not allowing myself the chance to think about my decision to leave.

Against my better judgement, I've imagined multiple times how it would be to see Oliver again after all these years. I knew it would eventually happen. After all, my moving to Paris was partially to preserve his presence in our lives despite the distance I'd been determined to keep.

Now, I had no clue what to say when I did see him.

I had no idea whether the anger would return, whether it would still hurt too much to be around him.

But whatever the outcome was, I was done hiding away.

"This isn't exactly what I had in mind," I told my brother, peering out of the window as we coasted along a sketchy stretch of the city with a line of rough-looking tattoo parlors, dives and biker bars. My stomach clenched with the beginnings of dread. "Is Oliver financially in trouble? I thought he'd been doing better than ever."

"Money's not what's haunting him, Viv, but he deals with it all the same," Stellan said as he pulled up in front of a two-story building with the name Mad Alley in big red letters on its door sign. "Let's go. Stick to me and don't talk to anyone. I'm not in the mood for a bar fight."

"Wish you'd told me this is where we were going," I said as I closed the top buttons of my dove gray dress shirt. I was just in dark skinny jeans, a tucked-in shirt with rolled up sleeves and black pumps but I knew it was a little too polished for a place like this. I gathered my hair and coiled it into a low bun under my hunter-green fedora. The glossy, vibrant red in it always called attention and I didn't want to have to fend off men who thought it was perfectly acceptable to touch a woman's hair without her permission.

"We can turn around if you don't want to go inside," Stellan said, studying me as I fussed about my reflection on the visor mirror.

"You can stay here if you don't want to go inside," I said before climbing out of the car. Outside, the music and chatter were louder but undaunted, I headed straight for the entrance. Stellan was right behind me and the door man saw him and waved us in without question.

"What's this place?" I asked my brother as I followed him through the crowd. It looked like a normal pub scene with large group tables and plenty of TVs showing sports events. The main screens were streaming a live MMA combat.

"It's one of Oliver's favorite haunts," Stellan answered as he guided me toward an elevator with two guards flanking it. Again, one of them tipped his head at Stellan and stepped aside to let us through. "He built it on a scrubland about six years ago."

"How come I've never heard of it?"

Stellan punched a button on the panel and sent the elevator down. "He doesn't directly own it. One of his smaller corporations does."

I'd run away years ago from the discovery of many of Oliver's unpleasant secrets and my stomach plunged at the thought that there was still so much more that I didn't know about him.

"Does he come here to drink?" I asked before I could stop myself. "Or meet women to—"

The rest of my question was drowned at the sudden roaring cheer of the crowd the moment door opened. I squinted through the dim, smoky lighting of what looked like an underground den filled to the rafters with people.

"He comes here mostly to do one thing, Viv," Stellan said as he pulled me behind him, weaving a path through the crowd until we found ourselves in front of what looked like a ring fenced off with cyclone-wire styled mesh.

The sound of bone crunching against flesh drew my eyes upward in time to see Oliver's fist make contact with the other man's rib side.

I gasped, my breath freezing in my lungs as I watched Oliver's ruthless attack on his opponent. He was shirtless and barefoot, his muscles gleaming with sweat in the poor lighting. The look in his eyes was pure savagery and every blow he delivered was powered with deadly intent. In all the years I'd known him, this side of Oliver had never shown itself to me. Sure, I'd heard of him being in fights and scuffles a few times but this man fought like violence was his very blood.

It didn't take long but it seemed like an eternal moment that I stood there watching a man so entirely different from the one I loved and married as he destroyed his opponent. I would've been chilled if I hadn't realized that for all his brutality, Oliver had actually neatly packaged the fight to end without delay. It was a mercy to his opponent who would've suffered more if Oliver had only cared to have a live punching bag.

"You okay?" my brother asked with a nudge to my side.

I finally exhaled the breath I'd been holding, my eyes still on Oliver as the referee held up Oliver's hand to the crowd's frantic cheering.

"Does he fight often here?" I asked Stellan.

"He used to fight in plenty of back alley and underground matches to make money. Blood and bruises were his business for a while," he answered.

"Why didn't you or the others try to help him?"

Stellan gave me a look. "Do you honestly think Oliver's the type to accept help let alone ask us for it? The guy's stubborn as hell. His pride must've been forged in hellfire too because it won't give no matter what."

"I know that."

Stellan sighed. "So we just gave him wide berth to do whatever he needed. Mad Alley as an area was notorious for hosting illegal street fights. People from all walks of life were drawn in. There was money to be made, even more if he could clean and package the sport to a wider audience. About six years ago he bought this land and built this place on it and gave it the same name. He only ever does exhibition fights now, when he needs to exorcise something."

I stared at Oliver from where he stood in the middle of the ring, his lips a grim thin line and his blue eyes icier than they'd ever been. There was no victory in this fight for him. "Did he fight after I left?"

"Almost every night for over six months," Stellan said. "We tried to stop him. He couldn't be showing up to business meetings with a bruised face or a concussion. But he was untouchable then. He fought like a goddamned demon."

When the light angle changed, I caught sight of the script that wrapped from below Oliver's heart and around his side. It was the verse that spelled my name and my chest tightened.

"I need to talk to him, Stellan."

"Not tonight, Vivienne." My brother's voice was firm. "I brought you here so you can understand more of him because for all your mad crush all those years, I don't think you knew Oliver as well as you thought you did. Which is why you got hurt. If you've come back for him, you need to know what you're getting yourself into this time."

But don't you see? It's already too late.

But I didn't say any of that because there was so much explaining that would need to follow it.

So I kept my mouth shut as I watched Oliver stalk off the stage from the corner opposite us. He caught a towel someone threw at him and wiped his face with it. There were people trying to get to him but they were just being told off by a couple of burly men who seemed like security hovering around his corner. Two attractive women threw themselves at his feet, instantly making me see red. But Oliver just gave them a polite nod, taking care to keep a good distance between them and himself. Then he went around them to continue toward the locker room.

I would be a hypocrite to say that I wasn't relieved.

I came back home thinking I finally understood and accepted some things about the man I married and that maybe this time, that would make a difference.

But tonight, I realized something else.

The path to the future merely starts with the past. Getting there means living with the present as well.

***

So, what do you guys think?

I know this is probably not the usual route a female lead will go to after everything but Vivienne is not meant to do the usual. She's not going to be someone who will sit and wait for a grand apology. But we'll see how Oliver reacts to it next week.

By the way, as an early-ish holiday present for you, Characters Magazine did an interview on Charlotte and Brandon on their magazine. Remember, I asked you guys to send in questions? Both the app and the magazine are free to view. They include so many more interviews and character profiles there so I hope you check it out. I got a real good chuckle out of reading the article. 

You can get the app from their website (both Apple and Android) www.charactersmag.blvnp.com

Hope you enjoy it!

XOXO,

Ninya

♪♪♪ Chapter Soundtrack: Beautiful Birds by Passenger feat. Birdy ♪♪♪

Do you remember when we were two beautiful birds

We would light up the sky when we'd fly

You were orange and red like the sun when it sets

I was green as an apple's eye

You said you loved all the songs that I'd sing

Like nothing that you'd ever heard

And I said I loved you with all of my heart

When we were two beautiful birds

Do you remember when we were two beautiful birds

We'd sing when the morning would come

You were silver and blue like the moon when its new

I was gold as a summer sun

One day you asked for a different song

One that I just couldn't sing

I got the melody sharp and the words all wrong

Those were the last days of spring

To build a nest we pecked feathers from our chests

Like a book tearing out every page

We weren't to know that these feathers would grow

In to a beautiful cage