The Affair - Danielle Steel Page 0,101
time she had really thought about it and wondered if they should try. “I know I don’t deserve you, Nadia. But I love you, I really do.”
“Harley and Olivia almost broke up recently. He actually left her for a few days.”
“Harley? Why?” Nicolas looked shocked.
“She did something she shouldn’t have fifteen years ago, and she decided to confess it to him, and he took it badly. Very badly. But he forgave her, and they’re working it out,” she said, thinking about them, and how happy Olivia sounded now.
“I’m sure whatever she did wasn’t as bad as what I did, but at least he forgave her. Could you take a lesson from him?”
“I think it just boiled down to the fact that they love each other. And I suppose we do too.” She looked at him helplessly standing in the front hall of their apartment, and suddenly it just seemed like too much work to fight him. Maybe Venetia was right and if they loved each other, to hell with what everyone thought they should do. If it went wrong again, they could still divorce each other, or leave the papers in place. Suddenly trying again didn’t seem like the worst thing that could happen to them. He made her laugh. She had never known another man who could have fun the way he did, or make love like he did, which she had been trying to forget for the past eight months. She hadn’t made love to anyone else since, and hadn’t wanted to. Greg was a very attractive man, successful, interesting, smart, had great taste, but he didn’t excite her. Nicolas did. “Why don’t you stay here this weekend, and we’ll see how it goes? I’ll send the girls to friends. I don’t want to get their hopes up and then disappoint them.”
“We won’t,” he promised her, and then crushed her against him in an embrace. “Oh God, Nadia, thank you…thank you…I’ll be a saint for the next fifty years. I promise.”
“That sounds incredibly boring.” She grinned at him. He knew what he had to do and not do. Now it remained to be seen if he could maintain it. “If you have another affair, I’ll divorce you so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
“I know,” he said. “I wouldn’t blame you. It will never happen again.”
And then she thought of something. “Are we going to have Pascale hanging around to visit her baby?”
“She’s not interested in the baby,” he said. “He’s going to live with his grandmother. I can go to Brittany to see him if you want me to. But I do want him to come to Paris for visits. He needs his father.” Even more so with a mother he would probably see very rarely.
“No,” she said carefully. “He’s your child. He can visit us here. I’m just not ready for that whole family.”
“Neither am I. I think I should see him, and I want to, but he’ll have a life with them, and visits with us if he’s a decent kid. Pascale isn’t part of it. She doesn’t really want to be part of his life, let alone ours.”
“That’s sad for him.”
“I’m going to keep an eye on him, and the grandmother loves him.”
Nadia nodded. It sounded workable. Nicolas was trying to walk a fine line between benevolent supervision from a distance, and participation to a degree that was comfortable but not overwhelming, which was all she could ask of him. They’d have to see how things developed as the boy grew. He might not even want to be with them, or he might fit in very well. Nadia respected what Nicolas was trying to do.
“See you this weekend,” she said with a cautious smile. She was nervous about it, like a first date. She had never had those feelings about Greg, the butterflies in the stomach and sweaty palms. But Nicolas always gave her all those feelings and more. He still did.
He kissed her one last time before he left. She stood in the hall for a minute after he was gone, wondering what she’d done, and if she was crazy, but it felt right to give him another chance and try. Much better than getting divorced, or trying to feel something for Greg that she knew she didn’t, and never would. Or for someone else she loved less than Nicolas.
She went back to her office to call Venetia and tell her what had happened. This was what her sister