Danielle Steel - Five Days in Paris

“I'm not coming back,” she said simply.

“Not that again.” He sounded annoyed this time. “Have you forgotten our contract?”

“There's nothing in it that says I have to stay with you, or follow you to the presidency. It only says that if I do, you'll pay me a million dollars a year. Well, I've just saved you a bunch of money.”

“You can't do that,” he said, sounding angrier than she'd ever heard him. She was interfering with the one thing he wanted.

“Yes, I can. And I am. I'm leaving for Europe tomorrow morning.”

She wasn't actually leaving for a few days, but she wanted to be sure he knew it was all over. He showed up in Boston the next day anyway, and as her mother had predicted, her father entered the fray with them. But she was thirty-four years old, she knew her own mind, and she was a grown woman. And she knew that nothing would sway her.

“Do you realize what you're giving up?” her father shouted at her from across the room, as Andy looked gratefully at him. To Olivia, it looked almost like a lynch mob.

“Yes,” she said quietly, looking straight at them, “heartbreak and lies. I've experienced both of them for quite a while now, and I think I'll manage fine without them. Oh, and I forgot, exploitation.”

“Don't be so grand,” her father said in disgust, he was a politician of the old school, and not quite as lofty as Andy. “It's a great life, a great opportunity, and you know it.”

“For you maybe,” she said, looking at her father with undisguised sorrow. “For the rest of us it's a life of loneliness and disappointment, of broken promises along the campaign trail. I want a real life with a real man, or alone if it has to be that way. I don't even care anymore. I just want to get as far from politics as I can, and never hear the word again.” She cast a sidelong look at her mother, and saw that she was smiling.

“You're a fool,” her father raged at her, but when Andy left their house that night, he was truly venomous, and promised her she'd pay for what she'd just done to him. And he wasn't lying. On the day she left for France, three days later, there was a story in the Boston papers that she knew only he would have planted. It said that after her recent, tragic accident, in which three members of her family had died, she had suffered severe traumatic stress, and she had just been admitted to a hospital with a nervous breakdown. It said that her husband was deeply worried about her, and although the article didn't actually come out and say it, there was the hint of an estrangement, because of her mental state. And the article was entirely slanted to sympathize with Andy for being saddled with a nutcase. He was covering his tracks nicely. If he said she was crazy, then it would be okay to dump her. Round one for Andy … or was it round two … or ten? Had he knocked her out, or had she simply run away and saved her own life while he wasn't looking? She was no longer sure now.

Peter saw the story too, and suspected that it had been planted by Andy. It didn't sound like Olivia, even after the short time he knew her. But he couldn't check this time, since it didn't say what hospital she was in. There was no way to find out the truth and it drove him crazy with worry.

Her mother took her to the airport on a Thursday afternoon a few days after she'd told Andy she was leaving. It was late August by then, and Peter and his family were still at the Vineyard. Janet Douglas put her daughter on the plane, and stood there until the plane took off. She wanted to be sure that she was safe, and truly gone. Olivia had escaped a fate worse than death as far as her mother was concerned, and she was relieved as she saw the plane swoop slowly overhead, on its way to Paris.

“Godspeed, Olivia,” she said softly, hoping she wouldn't come back to the States for a long time. There was too much pain waiting for her here, too many memories, too many rotten, selfish men waiting to hurt her. Her mother was happy knowing she had gone back to France. And as the plane flew out of sight, Janet signalled to her bodyguards, and walked slowly out of the airport with a sigh. Olivia was safe now.

Chapter Ten

As the month of August wore on, and faxes continued to roll in about the research on Vicotec, the tension between Peter and his father-in-law seemed to heighten. By Labor Day weekend, it was almost palpable, and even the boys had begun to feel it.

”What's happening between Granddaddy and Dad?” Paul asked on Saturday afternoon, and Kate frowned at him as she answered.

“Your father is being difficult,” she said quietly, but even her son could see that she blamed Peter for the tension between them.

“Did they have a fight or something?” He was old enough to understand, and his mother was usually pretty candid with him, although “fights” didn't usually proliferate in their family. But once in a while he knew that his father and his grandfather disagreed about something.

“They're working on a new product,” she said simply, but it was a great deal more complicated than that, and she knew it. She had asked Peter repeatedly to go easy on him. Her father had been worked up about it all summer, and at his age, it wasn't good for him. Although even Kate had to admit that her father looked better than ever. At seventy, he still played tennis for an hour every day, and he swam a mile every morning.

“Oh.” Paul was satisfied with her explanation. “I guess it's no big deal then.” He brushed off the multimillion-dollar trouble with Vicotec with an easy sixteen-year-old assessment.

They were all going to a big party that night to celebrate the end of the summer. All their friends were going to be there, and in two days they were all leaving. Patrick and Paul were going back to school, and Mike was off to Princeton. And on Monday they were all moving back to Greenwich.

Kate had a lot to do, closing her own house, as well as her father's, at the Vineyard. And she was putting some of her clothes away when Peter wandered in and watched her. The summer had never gotten off the ground for him. The double blow of nearly losing Vicotec and having to give Olivia up only moments after they'd met had been an agony for him straight through August. The worries about Vicotec had put a damper on things to be sure, and Frank's constant pressuring hadn't helped, but neither had Katie's constant clandestine involvement in what should never have been her business. She was too involved with what happened between them, too concerned about protecting her father. And there was no denying that what had happened to Peter in France had changed things. He hadn't wanted it to. He had been so determined to come back and pick up where he had left off, but that just didn't happen. It was like opening a window and seeing a view, and then boarding up the house again. He kept standing in the same place, staring at a blank wall, and remembering what had been there, even if only briefly. The scenery he had seen with Olivia had been unforgettable, and although he had never intended it to, he knew now that it had changed his life forever. He wasn't going to alter anything, and he wasn't going anywhere. He had never contacted her, except to call the hospital after her accident and get reports on her from the nurse in ICU. But he couldn't forget her either. And her accident had terrified him, just knowing she had almost died seemed like terrifying retribution. But why her and not him? Why should Olivia be punished?

“I'm sorry it's been such a lousy summer,” Peter said sadly, sitting down on the bed, as Katie put a stack of sweaters away in a box with mothballs.

“It wasn't that bad,” she said kindly, glancing at him over her shoulder from the top of a short ladder.

“It was for me,” he said honestly. He had been miserable all summer. “I've had a lot on my mind,' he said in an oversimplified explanation, and Kate smiled at him again, and then her eyes grew serious as she watched him. She was thinking of her father.