Page 70 of Under Her Protection

Leo's thumb moved once against her hand.

“About Lara."

"When did you meet her?” Leo asked, her voice steady.

"I met her in Zurich. I was twenty-six. She was twenty-four. I had been at my grandfather's bank for nine months and I had already fired three men who had thought my last name was going to teach me to say yes, and she had walked into a terrace party in a grey silk dress with her hair down, and she had looked at me across the pool and I had looked at her, and that was it. There was something irrevocable and powerful between us.”

"How long were you seeing her for?”

"Two years." Vivienne said

"What ended it?” Leo looked at her with curiosity.

"I did."

"How?”

"Not well. My grandfather had offered me the division he had built in the nineteen-fifties. The terms required me to move to Paris and to run it without distraction. Lara had offered me the terms in which I would not have needed to move to Paris and would not have run it without distraction. I chose the division. I wrote her a letter in the October. She did not write back. I have not seen her since. “

"And the letter?” Leo cocked her head.

"Was cowardly." Vivienne admitted something that had plagued her for years.

"I was young and I was afraid of what I was about to become and I could not afford, in my own head, to let anyone be adjacent to the becoming. I told her, on paper, in four paragraphs, that the empire was not a thing she was going to be part of, and I did not use any of the other words I should have used."

"Which words should you have used?”

"I am sorry. I am afraid. I love you, but I do not know if I am capable of this and the empire at the same time, and if I have to pick I know which one I am going to pick, and the fact that I already know is the worst information I have ever had about myself, and I would rather write you this letter than stand in a room with you and tell you to your face.”

A pause.

"That is a lot you missed out.” Leo said thoughtfully.

"Yes."

"You have been thinking about her a long time.”

"Twenty-five years."

"I have thought about her at Christmas every year, which is when she and I used to go to Gstaad.”

Leo waited.

"She was the one,” Vivienne said honestly admitting it to herself for the first time.

Leo's thumb was still on her hand.

“Or I thought she was at least. For many years I did. I think now I know, she was the one that got away. And that is more accurate. I don’t actually believe there is such a thing as the one.”

Leo looked at her and Vivienne felt things inside that she hadn’t felt in 25 years. All this time she had believed Lara was the one and yet here was her pulse picking up in a way it hadn’t since Lara. And the woman in her bed was someone new. Not Lara. And Vivienne, if she allowed herself to admit it, was feeling things for Leo.

Outside, in the courtyard was Beaumont's voice, distant, speaking low to Guérin, who had arrived early.

“What happened last night,” Vivienne asked. “What are you thinking about it?”

"I read it as a warning. Any shooter on that roof with an open sightline on the rue de Sévigné had five seconds of you on the pavement, and unless they were a very poor shot, they intended to miss. I will not tell you it was not a bullet. It was. I will tell you that the woman who ordered it was not, last night, trying to kill you. She was telling you she could if she wanted to.”

"That is worse."