Chapter 46
Elena
I felt my cheeks heating, remembering Chloé's breathless recounting of the rejection. "He said something about the age gap," I offered. "And that she'd find him boring."0.
"The age gap," Isabelle repeated, her tone making it clear what she thought of that excuse. "You're twenty-nine, Étienne, not fifty. And that girl is what, twenty-two? That's perfectly reasonable."
"Twenty-three," I confirmed quietly, watching his face.
His expression had gone carefully blank. "The age gap was part of it," he said evenly. "But more importantly, we have nothing in common. She's energetic and social and interested in experiences I have no desire to pursue. She'd be bored within a week."
"Or maybe you'd learn to loosen up a bit," Isabelle countered. "All you do is work and brood."
"I don't brood," Uncle Étienne said, but there was a hint of amusement in his voice.
"You absolutely brood," I said before I could stop myself. "You stand in your study with that glass of whiskey and stare out the window like you're contemplating the weight of the world."
His gaze snapped back to me, something flickering in his eyes. "I wasn't aware you'd been observing my evening routine so closely."
"It's hard not to notice," I said, my heart beating faster. "Your study is right across from my room. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I see your light on."
"And what do you do when you can't sleep?" he asked, his voice dropping lower.
"I watch you," I said honestly, because it was late and I was tired of pretending. "And wonder what you're thinking about. What keeps you up when the rest of the house is sleeping."
The silence that followed felt charged, electric. Isabelle looked between us with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"Well," she said finally, "on that note, I think I'll head to bed. Elena, darling, don't forget about that ice bath. And Étienne—try not to brood too much tonight."
And then she was gone, leaving us alone in the soft lamplight.
"You should go upstairs," Uncle Étienne said finally, his voice carefully controlled. "Ice that ankle before it swells."
"In a minute," I said, not ready to leave this moment. "Can I ask you something?"
He tensed slightly but nodded.
"Why did you really reject Chloé?" I asked. "Was it really just the age gap? Or was it something else?"
He was quiet for a long moment, swirling the whiskey in his glass. When he finally spoke, his voice was measured, careful.
"I rejected her because she deserves someone who can give her what she needs," he said. "Someone young and energetic who shares her interests. Someone who isn't already too set in his ways to change."
"That's not an answer," I said softly. "That's just another way of saying the same thing."
His eyes met mine, and for a moment I saw something raw there, something vulnerable that he quickly shuttered away. "What answer are you looking for, Elena?"
"The truth," I said simply. "Not the polite explanation, but the actual truth."
He set down his glass, his hands gripping the arms of his chair as if he needed something solid to hold onto. "The truth," he said slowly, "is that I'm not looking for a relationship. With anyone. I have responsibilities, obligations, a life that's already full. Adding someone else would be irresponsible at best and cruel at worst."
"But you take care of me," I pointed out. "You manage my schedule and my diet and my training and my emotional state. If you can do all that, why couldn't you do it for someone you were actually in a relationship with?"
"That's different," he said immediately, too quickly, and I saw panic flash across his face before he controlled it. "You're family. You're my responsibility. That's not the same as—"
"As what?" I pressed, leaning forward. "As a romantic relationship? Because from where I'm sitting, it seems like you're already doing all the work of being in a relationship, just without any of the benefits."
"Elena—" His voice carried a warning now.
But I couldn't stop. "You know everything about me. What I need, what I can't tolerate, how to read my moods. You make accommodations without being asked. If that's not intimacy, what is it?"
"It's duty," he said firmly, but his eyes told a different story. "It's responsibility. It's me fulfilling the obligations I took on when I became your guardian."
"Is that really all it is?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. "Just duty?"
He stood abruptly, moving to the window and putting distance between us. "You should go to bed, Elena. It's late."
Étienne
The next day, I stood beneath the colonnade, unable to look away from Elena asleep in the wicker chair. Her golden hair caught the afternoon light, and the technical analysis book had slipped from her fingers. Her eyelids were half-closed, hovering between sleep and waking, and my throat tightened with the urge to wake her before the sun burned her skin—but my feet wouldn't move. My hand tightened around my briefcase handle until the leather creaked, and I felt my pulse quicken in a way that had nothing to do with the video conference I'd just endured.
This was madness.
Five years of meticulous care, of tracking every detail of her life with the precision I'd once applied to calculating braking points and apex speeds. I knew her competition schedule better than my own board meetings. I could recite her nutritional requirements down to the gram—forty-five grams of protein per meal, carbohydrates timed to her training intensity, micronutrients calibrated for bone density and recovery. I understood her emotional thresholds with alarming accuracy: the subtle tightening around her eyes before a panic attack, the particular quality of silence that meant she was spiraling, the exact tone of voice that could pull her back.
I'd watched her morning stretches, sat through countless training sessions with my laptop open but my attention wholly on the way she moved. I'd learned to read microscopic shifts in her technique—a quarter-second delay, a fractional loss of height—and quietly arranged coaching support before Michel noticed.
I'd even grown accustomed to my heart rate becoming erratic when those amber eyes focused on me with that particular intensity she'd developed lately, as though she could see straight through the walls I'd built between duty and desire.
I was a fool. A dangerous fool who'd convinced himself this obsessive attention was merely fulfilling his obligations as her guardian. That monitoring her social media was responsible oversight. That the satisfaction I felt when she sought my presence was simply a caretaker's natural response.
But standing here watching her breathe, I couldn't maintain that fiction anymore. This wasn't duty. This had never been merely duty.