Suddenly Last Summer Read Free Page A

member of the family in the hospital is enough.” There was a brief pause. “It will be good to have you back at Snow Crystal, Sean.”
    The reply wedged itself in his throat.
    He’d grown up by the lake, surrounded by lush forests and mountains. He couldn’t identify the exact time he’d known it wasn’t where he wanted to be. When the place had started to irritate and chafe everything from his skin to his ambitions. It wasn’t something he’d been able to voice because to admit that there might be a place more perfect than Snow Crystal would have been heresy in the O’Neil family. Except to his father. Michael O’Neil had shared his conflicted emotions about the place. His father was the one person who would have understood.
    Guilt dug deep, twisting in his ribs like a knife, because apart from the row with his grandfather and his wild fling with Élise, there was something else he’d never told his brother.
    He’d never told him how much he hated coming home.
    * * *
    “I ’ AVE KILLED W ALTER ! This is all my fault! I was so desperate to have the old boathouse finished in time for the party, I let an eighty-year-old man work on the deck.” Élise paced across the deck of her pretty lakeside lodge, out of her mind with worry . “ Merde, I am a bad person. Jackson should fire me.”
    “Snow Crystal is in enough trouble without Jackson firing his head chef. The restaurant is the one part of this business that is profitable. Oh, good news—” Kayla leaned on the railing next to the water, scanning a text “—according to the doctors, Walter is stable.”
    “ Comment? What does this mean, ‘stable’? You put a horse in a stable.”
    “It means you haven’t killed him,” Kayla said as she texted back swiftly. “You need to calm down or we’ll be calling an ambulance for you next. Are all French people as dramatic as you?”
    “I don’t know. I cannot help it.” Élise dragged her hand through her hair. “I am not good at ’iding my feelings. For a while I manage it, but then everything bursts out and I explode.”
    “I know. I’ve cleared up the mess after a few of your explosions. Fortunately your staff adore you. Go and make pizza dough or whatever it is you do when you want to reduce your stress levels. You’re dropping your h’ s and that is never a good sign.” Kayla sent the text and read another one. “Jackson wants me to drive over to the hospital.”
    “I will come with you!”
    “Only if you promise not to explode in my car.”
    “I want to see with my own eyes that Walter is alive.”
    “You think we’re all lying to you?”
    Her legs were shaking so Élise plopped onto the chair she’d placed by the water. “He is very important to me. I love him like a grandfather. Not like my real grandfather because he was a horrible person who refused to speak to my mother after she had me so I never actually met him, but how I think a grandfather should be in my dreams. I know you understand because your family, they were also rubbish.”
    Kayla gave a faint smile, but didn’t argue. “I know how close you are to Walter. You don’t have to explain to me.”
    “He is the nearest thing I have to family. And Jackson, of course. It makes me very happy to think he will marry you soon. And Elizabeth and dear Alice. And Tyler is like a brother to me, even though sometimes I want to punch him. It is normal for siblings to sometimes want to punch each other, I think. I love you all with every bone in my body.” The dark side of Élise’s life was carefully locked away in the past. Loneliness, fear and deep humiliation were a distant memory. She was safe here. Safe and loved.
    “And Sean?” Kayla lifted an eyebrow. “Where does he fit into your adopted family? Presumably not as another brother.”
    “No.” Just thinking about him made her heart race a little faster. “Not a brother.”
    “So you won’t be telling him you love him? Aren’t you worried he might feel a little left