Pathways - Jeri Taylor [114]
“Why? Why is your mother asking you to do this? It isn’t fair.” He heard the petulant tone in his voice and stopped, swallowing, trying not to behave like a spoiled child.
Odile hesitated before answering. “I believe . . . that my father is not well. She has not come out and said so, but I have seen him. He has become thin.”
This blew away the head of steam Tom was developing. “Not well? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just my instinct.”
“That’s an archaic way of dealing with a problem. Why don’t they come out and talk about it? Why the mystery?”
“I think . . . they want to protect me.”
“That’s ridiculous. You suspect something anyway, only now you can’t get it out in the open.”
“That’s the way my parents are.”
Tom fumed to himself for a few moments, angry and frustrated, wanting to find someone to blame but knowing it mustn’t be Odile’s parents. This left precious few candidates, and Tom soon gave up and acknowledged the truth.
“I’m sorry, Odile, I’m selfish. I can’t stand the thought of your being that far away for a year. I don’t know what I’ll do.”
She picked up his hand and pressed her lips to it. “You are so sweet,” she murmured, and Tom vowed that he would not, under any circumstances, lose next year with Odile.
“Does the campus at Marseilles specialize in any particular area of study?” he asked, mind already nibbling at a solution.
“It offers all the course work of the Academy. But if there’s a strength, I would say it’s exophilosophy.”
This gave Tom pause. If she’d said any of the sciences, he’d be on firmer ground. On the other hand . . .
He put his arm around her, drawing her close as they gazed into the fire. “This is going to work,” he promised her. “We won’t be apart.”
And so it was that Tom Paris spent his junior year in Marseilles, concentrating on the study of exophilosophies, an area of his education in which, as he’d explained to his faculty advisor and his parents, he was woefully lacking.
No one was particularly fooled by this sudden interest in alien philosophies, but no one thought it could do any harm, either, and all remembered young love and how searing it could be. If these two wanted to be together, why not let them?
Tom hadn’t been in Marseilles a week when he discovered Sandrine’s, a waterfront bar and pool establishment which had been in continuous operation for almost three hundred years. It was an eclectic blend of the ancient and the modern, and populated with a colorful assortment of the town’s denizens.
Most enchanting, to Tom, was Sandrine herself. That wasn’t her real name, of course—every proprietor of Sandrine’s for the past three hundred years had taken the honorary name of its legendary founder, Sandrine Normand, who had established the bar in the troubled twenty-first century. She had created an environment that was clean, safe, and quintessentially French, in an era when those qualities were hard to come by. She was revered by her patrons, lived well over one hundred years, and died at work, making an aperitif for a wealthy horse breeder half her age who found her the most vital and appealing woman in all of France. She had presented him the drink, smiled and said, “A votre sante, mon cher,” and then keeled over behind the bar. The end was swift, painless, and elegant, characterizing Sandrine accurately.
Since then, each of the proprietresses had taken the honorary name of Sandrine. This one was sleek and blond, in her forties, with a worldly air that Tom found provocative. She was sexually bold to a degree that startled, but also tantalized, the younger man.
“You are tres beau, Thomas,” she would purr to him. “Those eyes