Chapter One - Part One
© Gee Gee Masson. All rights reserved.
Chapter One — Linden Blossom
Part One: Eight Weeks
Celine Durand stepped out of the private clinic on Avenue Montaigne and forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.
It was not the air. The April air was mild and kind, sweetened by linden blossom drifting from the trees that lined the avenue, and it carried the faint, buttery warmth of a bakery somewhere behind her. Nor was it the light, though the afternoon sun lay gold and merciless across the pale limestone façades and made her squint. It was not even the low purr of a chauffeured Bentley gliding past toward the Chanel awning three doors down, its black paint so polished it held the whole street in its flank.
She had stopped breathing because of a single word, still echoing inside her chest, soft and seismic, and she had no idea what to do with it.
Pregnant.
Doctor Élodie Laurent had said it the way one says something irrevocable: gently, deliberately, her hands folded on the walnut desk as though she were presenting a gift she was not entirely sure would be welcome.
“You are approximately eight weeks pregnant, Celine.”
Eight weeks.
Celine’s heels struck the pavement in a brisk, automatic rhythm while the avenue swirled around her. Photographers loitered hopefully near the Dior entrance, cigarettes cupped in their palms. A cluster of tourists lifted their phones toward a couture window. A woman in an immaculate camel coat walked a tiny dog wearing a coat to match. Paris carried on entirely without her permission, indifferent and luminous, and Celine moved through it like a woman wading through warm water.
For days she had blamed exhaustion.
Then stress.
Then the food at the wedding celebrations in Dardavia: the slow-roasted lamb that fell from the bone, the pastries glistening with honey and crushed walnut, the clear, fierce raki that Driton kept pressing into everyone’s hands with enormous good cheer.
Instead—
She laughed once, under her breath, a small disbelieving sound that escaped before she could catch it. A passing woman in Valentino glanced sideways at her with polite Parisian alarm.
Instead, she was carrying Adem Berisha’s child.
The thought alone nearly tipped the pavement out from under her.
God.
Adem.
Her stomach twisted, and for once it had nothing to do with nausea. This was older. Deeper. Memory arriving uninvited and dragging everything in with it: humiliation, longing, and the fury she had been tending for weeks like a fire she refused to let die, because letting it die meant admitting how badly she had been burned.
Because if there was one thing worse than falling in love with Adem Berisha—
—it was loving him for years while being extraordinarily good at pretending otherwise.
Celine had made that performance an art.
❧
Especially since the night in Paris after Lira’s intimate civil wedding: a small, quiet ceremony held before Arben was sworn in, arranged largely to satisfy his party’s sense of political expediency.
Even now, walking down one of the most beautiful avenues in the world, she could recall every detail with the cruel precision of things one has tried very hard to forget and failed to.
Paris after midnight, glittering softly. The Seine a ribbon of dark silk, the bridge lights shivering on its surface. The city breathing out its night scent of warm stone and distant rain. Inside the car, the low murmur of Adem’s voice saying nothing of consequence, as if the silence gathering between them were not already combustible.
Her apartment overlooking the river lay on the far side of the city from the celebrations. She had invited him up for a nightcap, believing, with the peculiar delusion of women who know better and go ahead anyway, that she still had some scrap of control over herself where he was concerned.
Idiot.
The moment the door clicked shut behind them, the air changed. A pressure drop, like weather turning. Years of restrained wanting broke loose between them with a force that had frightened her.
And for one reckless, devastating night, Adem Berisha had kissed her as though he had been starving for her all along. As though every year of careful distance had cost him something he was only now allowed to name.
The memory could still weaken her knees on a public boulevard in broad daylight.
His hands in her hair, nothing tentative in them, holding her as if letting go was simply not a consideration. The roughness of his jaw against her throat. His voice, low and frayed, saying her name in a way she had never heard him say it. The taste of cognac on his mouth. The way he had looked at her afterwards in the dark, the river light painting his face in gold and shadow, as though she were something he had been searching for without knowing he was looking.
And then—
Nothing.
By morning, Adem Berisha had retreated so completely behind his composure that she had wondered, briefly and humiliatingly, whether she had imagined the whole thing. Professional. Polite. The perfect, maddening distance of a man who has decided that what happened will be treated as though it did not.
Cold.
As though the night had never happened. As though she had never happened.
The humiliation burned afresh, hot and exact, even here in the mild April sunshine with linden blossom catching on her sleeve.
❧
Which was precisely, she thought grimly, why she had behaved so outrageously at the grand Dardavian wedding in Korda.
The ceremony had been unlike anything she had ever witnessed. An entire nation holding its breath and then releasing it in one long, collective sigh of joy. Arben Krasniqi and Lira Berisha standing beneath the replanted walnut tree, the ancient symbol of Dardavian resilience, with lantern light falling over them like a blessing and music that seemed to rise from the earth itself: the reedy cry of the flutes, the deep heartbeat of the drums felt through the soles of her shoes. The newly elected Prime Minister, only days sworn into office, and the woman who was now the republic’s beloved First Lady had looked almost mythical, the kind of moment written into a nation’s memory and told to grandchildren.
Celine had danced.
With ambassadors who smelled of good cologne and spoke four languages.
With ministers who were surprisingly light on their feet.
With musicians who abandoned their instruments to pull her, laughing, onto the floor.
With half the eligible men in Korda, apparently, one magnificent turn at a time.
With anyone, in short, who was not Adem Berisha.
Petty?
Possibly.
Satisfying?
Immensely. At first.
Because every time she laughed, throwing her head back, letting the music carry her, letting some perfectly pleasant Dardavian diplomat spin her beneath the lanterns until her silk skirt flared around her knees, she had seen Adem across the courtyard growing steadily, magnificently darker.
Like a man watching something that belonged to him being handled without sufficient care.
The thought had sent something wicked and warm curling through her.
Until, finally, he left. He set down his glass with a controlled precision that somehow conveyed enormous violence, turned, and walked out into the night.
The bastard.
And then the hollowness had arrived. Immediate. Unwanted. The emptiness of a room after Adem Berisha leaves it, as though he takes some quality of the air with him, and the body registers his absence before the mind can catch up.
Realising that had annoyed her intensely.
It still did.
© Gee Gee Masson. All rights reserved.
