“What’s happening in a year?”
“Greer and Max’s first wedding anniversary. I’m sure they’ll throw a big party and we’ll be expected to come.”
“I have a better idea. We’ll have one for them here. A picnic. Just the four of us. Waterskiing on the Hudson.”
“In whose boat? We can’t ask Fred or Tom.”
“We’ll rent one.”
Piper finished off the second half of her sandwich. “Maybe between both our businesses, we can make enough money this year to buy our own boat.”
“Yeah.” Olivia would love to prove to Luc she’d made her fortune.
“Come on. Let’s go see a man about a rock polisher.”
Olivia drained the last of her milk, then got up from the table. “Thanks for coming with me.”
“It’s all for one, remember?”
When she felt her sister give her a hug, Olivia lost it. “I disgust him, Piper.”
“No, you don’t. It’s the situation that shut him down emotionally. His fiancée committed the unpardonable betrayal by approaching his brother. When you came along and showed so much interest in Cesar, Luc thought he was being betrayed again and you received the brunt of his pain.”
“But Luc was the one who introduced us! He didn’t have to.”
“Of course he did. Sooner or later you would have found out Cesar Villon was Luc’s brother. When you were already angry with Luc and his cousins for what they did to us, how would you have felt about Luc once you found out he’d kept that information from you?”
Olivia looked at her sister through eyes drowning in tears. Since the answer was obvious, there was no point in responding.
“Luc was trying to make up to you for the bad time he and his cousins put us through. It was simply a ghastly coincidence that he found out your greatest wish in coming to Europe was to watch Cesar race in the Grand Prix.”
“But not all women racing fans are groupies,” she exclaimed before burying her face in her hands.
“Of course not. You just happened to fall in love with the wrong man. Max was worried for you, so he told Greer about Luc. When Nic could see you were starting to care too much, he confided similar fears to me. Unfortunately their warnings came too late.”
“How humiliating.” Olivia’s whole body shuddered.
“Don’t dwell on it anymore.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Mother and Daddy were right about me. I always have to learn everything the hard way.”
“I learned a painful lesson myself this last trip.”
Olivia’s head lifted. “What do you mean?”
“When I saw you drive off with Cesar after the wedding, I thought I’d try to get a proposal out of Nic. You know, so I could laugh and tell him sorry, wrong duchess. He’s such a know-it-all, I wanted to give him a hard time.”
“And?”
“It was a big mistake.”
They left the apartment and hurried out to their dad’s old Pontiac. Olivia got in the driver’s seat and started the car. Once they’d joined the mainstream of traffic she asked, “How big?”
“I guess you could say I made the worst faux pas of my life by getting him to try to come on to me a little bit. We’d been walking on the grounds. I asked him to show me where he used to play when he and Luc visited Max.
“He took me to a stream with an old waterwheel that had stopped working long ago. You remember how hot it was that day. I suggested we take a little nap together under the trees. No one was around.”
Olivia would have been scandalized if she hadn’t tried to do virtually the same thing to Luc on the Gabbiano. “Go on.”