A Summer To Remember (Seasons of Love & Lust Book 1) Read Free Page B

“What about you? According to Jude, you’re thinking of spending the whole summer here. Isn’t that a bit unrealistic? I mean with the art gallery and your job?”
    “It is and it isn’t,” I responded evasively. “I haven’t made up my mind yet but I want to spend time with my girlfriends. Perhaps I won’t stay the whole summer, but I will definitely make the trip on Friday afternoons just to get away from the city. I’ve had it with Manhattan.”
    He snickered. “You haven’t been there long enough.”
    “It claustrophobic. I am used to trees and the open air. Jude and I have a great loft but I still get anxiety attacks sometimes. I just don’t think it’s for me, and now I have screwed it up by building my whole life there.”
    Paul watched me spray on the sunscreen and rub it into my skin. “Do you need help with your back?”
    “Yes, please,” I replied in my best helpless voice.
    He leaned over and untied the back of my bikini top, his touch sensual and warm. I felt myself grow damp between my legs and silently cursed myself. What a freakin’ cliché! A man who I had deep and intense feelings for as long as I could remember touched me and all of a sudden I was a pile of goo who couldn’t string two words together? I was a pathetic excuse for the modern woman!
    The spray hit my back like a dose of cold water, then his warm hands massaged the liquid into my skin. “You have to give the city a chance. I grew up in Connecticut too, and when I first moved to Manhattan, I hated it. I cursed Jude for getting me a job at the investment firm and all I wanted was the safe and comforting surroundings I grew up with. Little by little, the city that never sleeps has grown on me.”
    “You’re serious? You actually like New York?”
    He sprayed my lower back and massaged the liquid into my skin. “I love it now. Plus, I think about what if I had never taken the chance, what are the odds I would have met Ashley?”
    Fucking perfect Ashley Cartwright with her perfect name and her perfect WASP background.
    My family was the average American family—a regular Heinz 57. My mother was a quarter Creole, a quarter Scottish, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Welsh. My father had been adopted by a wealthy couple who were actually Scandinavian but he was actually half German, a quarter Finnish, and a quarter Norwegian. His father had been an exchange student and thus the reason why his Midwestern mother from Minnesota had given him up in the first place. She was about to enter graduate school and found out her ex-beau had left her with more than just a surprise goodbye before he’d moved back to Frankfurt.
    Paul and Ashley were so different and shared nothing but our society crowd, I wondered how they managed to get together at all.
    His background was mostly English on his father’s side with a touch of French Huguenot and Welsh in his family tree. The Branson family had called America their home since well before the American Revolution. Paul’s mother, on the other hand, was a first generation American his father had met in her native Netherlands. Although she was technically Dutch and had grown up there her whole life until she married Paul’s father and moved to the States, her mother was a German who’d relocated from Hamburg, fell in love with a Dutchman and the quiet city of Enschede.
    As far as what I knew about Ashley, the bitch could trace her family line back to the Mayflower—on both sides of the family tree. She was a rare breed indeed and it looked like Paul planned to hold on to her with both hands.
    Paul tied the straps to my bikini and handed me back my sunscreen. “I am almost out in terms of my beverage of choice. Can I bring you anything from the kitchen?”
    “Belvedere vodka and Perrier please. I’m watching my weight.”
    Paul grinned back at me, showing a perfect set of straight, even white teeth. “From where I am standing, you’re perfect the way you are.”
    “Thanks for the