Fabienne was a survivor. She was born into hardship, from a long line of determined women. She was bold and fearless, cocky, and willing to fight for whatever she wanted. Brandon sensed that about her and admired her for it. She never complained about her early life, but he could sense that it hadn’t been easy. What struck him about her immediately was her indomitable spirit, and her stunning beauty. He was fascinated by her, and came back to the café where she worked to see her every day. When he walked her home one night after work, to the place where she rented a small squalid room, she told him that her father had been American, but she had never known him. He had gone back to the States before she was born, and her mother had never been able to locate him. She had no living relatives, but seemed undaunted by her circumstances, and was certain that she would have a career as an actress one day. He couldn’t help but admire her courage. She was the strongest, bravest, most beautiful girl he had ever met. She went to bed with him the second time he walked her home, and he was even more bewitched by her after that. He gave her a small gold bracelet with a heart on a thin chain when he left, and he was haunted by her when he got back to New York. He couldn’t get her out of his head. All the women he’d known paled in comparison to her. He had never been in love before and thought he was now. Just thinking about her was exquisite torture, and he longed to make love to her again.
Brandon’s father had died in the Pacific during the war, and his mother had died when he was in college. His grandparents had died long before. His father had been from a family with money. They were not enormously rich, but they were comfortable, and he had left his widow and only son enough money to live well on. He was from an old, respected family whose fortune had dwindled slowly over time, but there was still enough left for his widow and son to live in a decent neighborhood in a nice apartment in the East Eighties in New York, and for Brandon to get a good education at Columbia, and go to business school after that.
Brandon had made some wise investments, and had a strong entrepreneurial streak. He invested in a plastics company that did well in the ’60s. By the time he met Fabienne in Paris in 1970, he was making a considerable amount of money and living well. He was ambitious and intended to make a lot more. He had recently invested in a second company that had made a ridiculous amount of money on the hula hoop. It had been patented seven years before, and he had purchased a large share of the company that produced it. The hula hoop was cheap to make and had become an enormous fad, and had already made the company a lot of money. Investing in the company seven years later made Brandon a lot of money too, with their newest products and his other investments. He had a good head for business, and an instinct for what would sell, and what people wanted. He hadn’t made a single investment mistake so far.
His mother had never recovered from his father’s death during the war. She lived life in retreat, depressed, and died young herself. She had been widowed at twenty-six and died of ovarian cancer at forty-one, when Brandon was twenty-one. He had been surprised by how much of his father’s money she had saved, without ever working herself. She had been a constant presence in his life, and was a gentle woman, but being widowed so young, with a son to bring up alone, had left her shaken and scared for the rest of her days. She had been completely dependent on her husband, and eventually on the advice of her son. He tried to reassure her, but found he never could. She was a sad, frightened woman, in need of more support and protection than she was ever able to give him. He moved into an apartment near her during college, and visited her almost every day. Tormented by her anxiety, she was withdrawn and not given to overt demonstrations of affection. To the best of his knowledge, his mother never had another man in her life after her husband died, and she wasn’t a warm, affectionate person, even when her husband was alive. She was a dutiful, well-brought-up, genteel woman. Passion wasn’t in Brandon’s nature either, so his brief experience with Fabienne in Paris hit him like a tsunami. The girls he’d known and had dated during and after college were well bred, had made their debuts and gone off to college. They had none of the rough edges and passion that Fabienne exuded like lava from a volcano. She held nothing back, in bed or anywhere else. It was heady stuff for Brandon, who wasn’t demonstrative by nature, but he loved it in her, and it brought something out in him that he had never experienced before. What they had shared was unbridled passion, and he wanted more. He was certain it must be love. He had never felt anything as powerful for any woman before.