My Secret Valentine

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But she’d been a fool before. “You never talked about your family much.” He’d mentioned that his father lived in New York at the time, his mother in Monaco, that he rarely saw either of them and was an only child. He’d never actually admitted they were wealthy, but she knew from other things he’d talked about—prep schools, summer homes, winter homes, drivers and servants. She’d learned from Golda that his parents were self-centered and not fit to be parents, that the only fights they’d had over Justin weren’t to decide who got to have him but rather who had to take him. Other than a few disparaging comments about the family, as if neither of them were a part, they’d ignored them.

“They’re not exactly people you point to with pride and say, ‘That’s my mom and dad.’ Between them, my parents have been married eleven times and had plans to marry another dozen or so times. All my life one of them has been leaving someone or looking for someone else to eventually leave. My mother is currently married to an earl in London, though that could change any day. He’s about twice her age, rich as God and with any luck, she can force herself to stick around until he dies, leaving her with enough money to attract husband number seven. My father is living in Paris with his latest wife, Monique. She’s twenty-two, she eats nothing but lettuce, and when he brought her to the States on their honeymoon last fall, I went home from work one night and found her naked in my bed. She wanted to be ‘close’ to her stepson.”

Fiona couldn’t resist a smile at his very dry tone of voice, but it faded quickly. With the example his parents had set for him, the wonder wasn’t that he’d gotten cold feet about his relationship with her as soon as he’d left town, but that he’d been able to have a relationship with her at all. She tried to imagine stepparents coming and going with great regularity, or parents who took marriage vows so lightly, or fell in and out of love so easily. Her own parents had been married nearly forty years, and they were still deeply, passionately in love. They were committed to each other, their marriage and their family, and they’d passed on that same sense of commitment to their daughters.