Page 96 of It's You
“Between you and me, I wish she’d spark with Julien.”
Jack looked into Tombeur’s eyes and noticed, for the first time, the flecks of moss green lodged in and among the fiery brown. Unusual. Jack realized he’d seen that unique eye coloring somewhere before.Recently.Where?
“Julien, huh?”
“He’s good stock. Your mama’s one of the best hunters I ever known.”
“Yeah. But my dad?—”
“Can’t win ’em all. He’s got a good heart. Used to have, anyway.”
Jack nodded, thinking of his mother’s smile in the snowy parka.
“He’s available, right?” Tombeur continued. “Julien?”
Sort of, thought Jack, averting his eyes.
“You got something to say, son?”
“I think he’s still confused. Grieving.”
Tombeur sat back, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “That was some nasty business with Natalia. Shocked all of us that she’d be so reckless.”
He remembered Julien’s words,You have no idea what you’re talking about
“Reckless? What do you mean?”
“Oh! You don’t know? You gotta come home more often. Natalia was all lit up on something that night. That truck didn’t hit her. She rushed it. Maybe she thought those big ’ole headlights were eyes and was charging for a kill? I don’t know. She got in with one of the packs north of here. Stopped showing up for work, left Julien with the little ’un for days on end. Only came back atPleine Lune. Finally did her in, whatever that stuff was. Awful shame about the little ’un, though. Motherless little thing, like my girls.”
The little ’un. Delphine.Suddenly, Jack remembered where he’d seen the unusual, moss-colored flecks. In the eyes of his niece, Julien’s daughter.
“Thank God for your mother. First Lela, then Julien’s girl. She’s quite a woman.”
Jack swallowed uncomfortably, looking down, running through dates and places in his mind. Jacques, Jeanette, and Jemma had been born within two years of each other. Then ten years later, along came Julien, about a year after Tallis first started working for the council.
Jack thought of Julien’s frustrated sigh.She doesn’t feel like a sister to me.
No wonder.
As impossible as it seemed to imagine, those eyes were like a red flag, and Jack’s heart processed the truth in vivid clarity. Julien was Tombeur’s son, and Delphine was his granddaughter. Jack fought the bile that rose in his throat at the realization that his mother had broken the binding four years before his father had. She had been unfaithful first. He wondered if his father even knew.
But Tombeur hoped that Chantal would spark with Julien. Did that mean he supported half brother-half sister binding? No. Tombeur was modern. He’d be against that. In all likelihood, Tombeur didn’t know Julien was his.
Jack sat back in his chair, leveling his eyes at Tombeur, deciding whether or not he should say anything.
“Quite a woman, huh?”
“Sure is.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “You see her much?”
Tombeur’s eyes looked down, and he sighed. “Just council meetings.”
“How about Julien? Ever see him?”
“Once a year, about. Never got to know him as well as you. Awful sorry how things worked out with Natalia.”
Jack nodded quietly. For how long had his mother and Tombeur carried on? It couldn’t have been long. They’d been discreet. And what was still between them? The questions swam around in his head, but with Darcy rejecting him and his father missing, Jack had enough on his plate. He decided to leave it alone for now.
