Seduction Read Online Free PDF Page A

“You didn’t trust me enough to tell me you had magic, but you’ll follow this guy—this uncle who disinherited you and didn’t talk to you for eleven years—to the ends of the earth, is that right?”
    “Oh, think whatever you want,” Peter said.
    I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach.
    I busied myself with the pizza, which served as a substitute for talking since we really had nothing more to say to each other at that point. I tried to eat, but the conversation had made me so nauseated that I threw my piece back onto my plate.
    “Look,” Peter said, a little louder than he had to be. “I’m going to make something of myself, whatever it takes, okay? So stop lecturing me.”
    “I’m not lecturing.” I bristled. “I’m just surprised.”
    “At what? That anyone would think I was worth anything?”
    “Quit it. You know as well as I do that Jeremiah Shaw is going to use you.”
    “And how do you know that?”
    “Because he uses everyone!” I almost shouted.
    “So what?” People were staring now. He looked around and lowered his voice. “That’s what all business comes down to. I do something for you, and you do something for me. It doesn’t make anybody good or bad.”
    I was so mad by now, it was all I could do to keep from screaming. “Look, Peter, all I’m saying is that changing all your plans to do something that you can’t tell anyone about,even me or Hattie, doesn’t seem like the best way to go.”
    “Yeah, well, maybe you’re not my mom,” he said, his gray eyes blazing. “You’re just acting like it.”
    That did it. I walked out of there like my feet were on fire, and I didn’t look back.
    • • •
    His mom ! That was a low blow, as well as stupid, since neither of us even had mothers. They’d both died when Peter and I were children. Peter had been an orphan most of his life. I at least still had my dad, though I hadn’t seen much of him since I went to boarding school.
    Before then, though, for about ten years, I pretty much took care of things around the house. My father was never much for cooking or cleaning. Maybe that’s how I got to be the way I am.
    Sensible. Reliable. Mom-like.
    Arggh. How long had he thought of me like that?
    The worst of it was, I don’t think Peter was just being malicious. It’s not his nature. So somewhere in the back of his mind—or maybe in the front of it—he’d been thinking mom thoughts about me before now. Which meant that in some way, some subtle permutation of the truth, I really was mom-like.
    Oh, God, I thought. Let me die.
    But then, while rolling in my quilt like a shrieking, weeping cigar that night, I had a thought. It was such a strange thought that I even forgot to cry for a second or two. It was this:
    Why?
    That was all, just that one question. Why did I always have to do the right thing, follow the right path, counsel good advice? I mean, I could be as self-centered and foolish as thenext guy, couldn’t I? I could blow off my responsibilities like every other kid. I could do what I wanted for once, instead of what was expected of me.
    I didn’t have to spend my summer making gumbo and canning tomatoes while Peter went off to New York or wherever with Jeremiah Shaw. He was probably going to break up with me, anyway.
    For being like somebody’s mom.
    There are some things you just have to accept when they’re handed to you and then move on from there. If that was the way Peter felt about me, then he might not ever change his mind, no matter what I did.
    Unless I did something really radical.
    Maybe it was time for me to break away. From Whitfield, from Peter, from my own sorry self. There were wonderful places to see. Legendary places like Venice or Vienna or Hong Kong or New Delhi.
    Or Paris.
    The word caught in my throat. Paris.
    Yes. Paris.
    • • •
    So that’s how I came to be in the dump where I lived in the middle of what everyone told me was the most fabulous city in the world.
    As it turned