Free Four Seasons of Romance by Rachel Remington Page B

respect, support, and
commitment. The diamond ring glistened on its velvet throne as Catherine knew
she couldn’t decline. She might not have loved him the way she loved Leo—but
that same feeling led her astray with Michael. As for the other things she
craved—the love, the passion—she was willing to put those things aside because
they led to nothing but ruin.
    “Yes,” she said, clasping her slender fingers around his
steady hand as he slipped the ring on her. “Oh, yes.” 
    Catherine leaned in and placed her lips gently on his, but
she heard no fireworks, felt no familiar lightheadedness that usually came at
such moments. Even the violin music had ceased, and she heard only the metallic
scrape of knives against plates—the soundtrack of the nearby restaurant
patrons.
    She didn’t love Walter the way she loved Leo, but Catherine
was no longer a schoolgirl, and Leo was not coming back. She felt ready to make
peace with the dreams she had once harbored; she craved stability, and the wild
life of a brazen twenty-something in Philadelphia held no further appeal.
Catherine was now engaged to Walter Murray. They would settle into a tranquil,
comfortable engagement—just as tranquil and comfortable as their courtship had
been. Catherine’s life had changed in an instant, though she couldn’t shake the
feeling that it was the same.
     
    *
     
    Far across the Atlantic Ocean, Leo’s life was anything but
tranquil. In the last seven years, he had reinvented himself so thoroughly that
he sometimes didn’t recognize himself in the warped mirror hanging from the
wall of his Paris apartment.
    “ Bonjour ,” he
would say to the face staring back at him.
    “ Bonjour ,” the
face said at the same time, mocking him with a sad knowing smile.
    His relationship with Nicole had ended in early 1947. She
left to study art history at the Sorbonne, and they parted on friendly terms,
plans of marriage abandoned as their infatuation wore off. By then, Leo had
found considerable work in construction as post-War France was rebuilt. He
discovered many teachers on the bustling streets of Paris, gifted sculptors who
worked with him to refine his art. But, in truth, he spent more time perfecting
his racing skills than he did molding clay and plaster.
    By 1949, he was twenty-four and one of the city’s most
eligible bachelors, handsome, and unmistakably American with his shock of curly
dark hair and broad shoulders. The French women loved him—and he loved the
French women. He was always in a relationship—usually more than one—but none of
them eased his heartache over losing Catherine.
    As the abstract expressionist
movement took off in France, Leo’s sculptures became more avant-garde—the
beginning of his lifelong affair with the abstract. As a wave of industrialism
swept France, Leo also became fascinated with a different medium. He struck up
a friendship with an industrial worker who taught him how to weld, ushering in
a new era in Leo’s creative life as he worked with metal to make unique,
imposing, twisted art. His broken dreams’ brittle pieces were reflected in his
new sculptures’ jagged, hard, and rusted metal outlines.
    Leo ran a trade selling small pieces to tourists, and he had
a wealthy patron or two, usually an older woman bored with her stale marriage
and drowning in ennui. Leo lived the wild and chaotic life of an artist—an
artist with a latent dream of becoming a racecar driver. Eventually, he had
established a good enough reputation in Paris to make a living from his art.
    But he also struggled with long, dark spells of depression,
his growing drug use and insatiable sexual appetite limiting his creativity.
Leo spent long hours staring at the blank walls of his bedroom, waiting for
inspiration to come, and, had it failed to do so, searching for it at the bottom
of a bottle. The green absinthe fairy, who had been his muse in the early days
of his Parisian love affair, visited him less and less.
    By 1950, Leo