“Alhamdulillah,” I prayed softly.
“You could have died.” The pain on his face was more evidently etched than his scar.
I gulped. There was no denying that. “But that’s why I have you, my guardian gargoyle.”
His rough growl scratched over me as my support disappeared.
Reaching out and gripping the edge of the railing I’d almost gone over, I spun to meet his angry and disapproving stare.
“And if I wasn’t here?”
I licked my lips. “But you were, and that’s all that matters,” I informed him, looking down at my camera to check over it and make sure it, too, had come away from the momentary brush with death unharmed.
I was sure if he were standing in front of the laser and I had it turned on, it would register the rock-solid waves of rage that emanated off of him.
My lips pursed, the shock and adrenaline dissipating to leave only the raw reality of what Quinton clearly saw—and what I owed him much more than attitude for.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured quietly, dipping my chin and acknowledging my mistake. “I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking, obviously. I was only looking through the lens, trying to get the photos I needed, and I didn’t realize I was so close to the edge.” My apology earned me the slightest release in his tense expression. “Thank you… Thank you for saving me.”
His nostrils flared, and his eyes opened a bit wider.
Even though he’d been hell-bent on scolding me for my carelessness, it appeared as though my gargoyle hadn’t expected my thanks—and like he didn’t know how to respond to such a gesture.
Resorting to the familiar grunt that seemed an appropriate substitution for every emotion he was unsure of how to handle, he crossed his arms over his chest and sank a hip against the much larger stone rail along the front of the cathedral.
“Well,” he motioned with his hand in front of him to my laser and other equipment, “do what you have to do, then.”
My head cocked to the side. “What are you doing?”
His eyes whipped to mine and regarded me like he’d been turned into one of the stone gargoyles along this walk. “Watching you to make sure nothing like this happens again.”
A thrill went up my spine.
“It was an error. You don’t have to babysit me, Quinton.” I went through the motions of turning off my camera and packing it back up into its own bag.
When I was done, he was still standing there just as stoic as ever.
“Unless you’re trying to find a way to kiss me again.”
Red embers bared inside his eyes. “No need to worry about that happening again, Madame St. Claire.”
I huffed, hoping the show of frustration hid the disappointment that dropped into my stomach.
Though I’d rather not have another near-death experience, the comfortable hum through my body of both safety and desire, knowing he was near, made my heart pick up and my breathing unsteady for a very different reason as I set to work dialing in the laser.
“Slow day in the spy business?” I teased lightly, unwilling to let the few minutes of silence continue for the entire time we would be up here.
“Like your work, Madame St. Claire, mine, too, ebbs and flows. Data is searched, scanned, and collected, and then processed and acted upon.”
I hummed and bent down to adjust one of the tripod legs, seeing that it sat just a hair unevenly on the stone. In the corner of my eye, I caught his gaze following me—how it never left me. And how it seemed to eat away at the layers of my clothes and my skin, searching to see every single inch right down to my soul.
“Who were those children? In the park?”
I stood back up and wiped my hands on my pants, tilting my head to regard him curiously. I had full faith that the man in front of me could’ve found out the answer to that question very easily without me. Instead, he wanted to ask me.
Maybe Léo Baudin was right. Maybe Quinton just needed a good fight.
I hit the button to start the laser and stepped back so I could rest against the railing next to him, both of us facing the back roof and spire of the church.
“Orphans. And refugees.”
His eyes slid suspiciously to me.
“France has started the process—slowly and quietly—of repatriating orphaned or vulnerable children of French ISIS fighters in Syria,” I spoke softly, my heart squeezing again as I thought of their sweet innocent faces, knowing both everything and nothing of what they felt. “The conditions they live in over there… in the camps…” My stomach turned heavily. “Surrounded by filth and illness, relegated to squalor simply because their parents chose a radical and violent life…” I blinked rapidly to ward off the tears that threatened to spill.
They were just children.
Innocent.
Alone.
It was heartbreaking. And it was too close to my own heartbreak.
“Why them?”
He didn’t ask because he needed a reason. He asked because he heard in my answer that there was one—a reason we played for them and not some other orphanage or underprivileged group, though there were plenty in the city. He asked because there was a reason I dropped everything to bring a little light to their lives.
My eyes drifted shut for one long second during which I traveled back to my parents’ smiling faces. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t even them in person—only a photograph I’d been given later at the orphanage, one which trauma had committed to memory and necessity had forced me to relinquish the physical copy.
“I know what it’s like to lose both of my parents to terrorism, Monsieur Gargouille,” I answered with a dip of my chin. My eyes trained on my bare sandal-clad toes peeking out from the fringe of my patterned pants, as though I could actually see the narrow line I walked between revealing enough and confessing too much.
It was a narrow line we both walked delicately until we’d met in the middle, desire making us bend and quake and sway to either side, putting our precisely crafted, although very different, lives in jeopardy.
The narrow line wasn’t big enough for the two of us.
And yet, neither of us seemed willing to step back.
“I’m sorry, Esme.” His gruff response blew across me like the wind—comforting but not crushing as sometimes pity can be.
“They were killed in a car bomb in Pakistan,” I ran over the facts because that was all they were to me. “I was only six, and left behind with my neighbor, Ginger. She watched me sometimes while my parents worked, but she wasn’t prepared to raise a child. So, into the system I went.” I paused, watching the sunset bleed along the horizon. “I don’t remember them. I just remember me. I remember what it was like to grow up. So, that’s why I wanted to play for them.”
There was a long silence before his low rasp quaked through it. “I never knew my father.”
My head notched to the side to watch him as he spoke. Sometimes, I found, the expressions on his face were just as telling as what he said. “Not until I was an adult. Until I was old enough not to need a father.”
“Why come back into your life then?”
“To invite me into the life he lived—the life that had kept him from me until then.”
My shoulders dropped. Growing up without my parents had me face things I’d never wish on anyone. But equally, I had to wonder if it hurt differently, but just as much to have someone choose to not be a part of your life even when they could be.
“What you do now?” I murmured, hoping the breeze would carry it to him.
Quinton nodded.
“So you accepted? Hoping for a relationship with him?”
My question was met with a harsh laugh. “No. I turned him down. A relationship, other than a professional one, wasn’t part of the deal. My father is made out of the stone pillars of his work and its purpose. Anything else to him is nothing but, shifting and unstable. Too dangerous to get involved in.”
“Do you wish it were different?”
Another drawn pause.
“Maybe at one point I did. Now, I know why… the reason he is the way he is.”
I fought not to ask. I was afraid to know what would be a good enough reason to not be involved in the life of your child. I was afraid to know because I knew the reason was greater than this one instance. I knew the reason wouldn’t just be because of a child, but to separate yourself from anyone and anything you cared about.
But, when I studied the pained lines of Quinton’s face, I had to know. I had to know what doused him with such stricken determination it made me want nothing more than to clasp his face and kiss the bitter loneliness that he’d built underneath.
“And why is that?”
“Because it’s the only way to survive.”
I swallowed down my cry. Survive.
If I had a nickel for every time I’d been told I was a survivor over the years after what happened to my parents, I’d be a wealthy woman. It was only ever meant as a compliment, the highest praise for coming through something that could break a person.
But survival was a double-edged sword. The pieces of us that have the greatest ability to love are the ones that are the most vulnerable to hurt. Survival meant having to shed those pieces of you to stop the hurt, knowing you were losing the ability to love and be loved in the process.
Survival meant choosing to break yourself before letting life break you.
And I wanted nothing more than to confess the things I’d had to shed in order to remain unbroken.
My family. My life.
My identity.
My eyes fell. All things I couldn’t reveal to him, a stranger, and one whose purpose in life seemed to be the very thing that would rip the one I’d built for myself to shreds.
I played off his seemingly unfounded distrust of me, yet I harbored the same deep-seated distrust of him.
Distrust wasn’t conducive to desire.
But desire didn’t care.
Instead, I drew my arms across my chest and held on to the tops of my arms, holding inside the things I’d learned no longer to share.
“What happened to your mother?”
The conversation struck a chord, but those five words sliced through the string and sent it spiraling off in each direction, irrevocably broken.
“Your machine is done,” he grunted, keeping his eyes trained in front of him.
It took a second to process what he’d said and accept the washed stoicism on his face.
Stepping forward, I crouched, discreetly wiping the corners of my eyes with the ends of my scarf before tossing it over my shoulder and examining the readings on my screen.
It read with everything I needed.
And still, I felt like I’d learned nothing.
It was the first time I’d come away from this moment of the night, one step closer to creating the invaluable vault of data on the gorgeous cathedral, feeling like I’d accomplished nothing of importance.
All because I was still a million miles away from the man who stood right next to me.
“Is everything okay?”
I blinked and looked up to see Quinton standing in front of me, concern wiping away the chill on his face.
Realizing I’d been standing frozen, I licked over my dried lips, tasting a hint of salt where my scarf must have missed a tear, and rose up straight.
“Yeah, it’s fi—”
Warm hands cupped my cheeks, my breath locked inside me.
“Don’t lie to me.” There was a twitch on his scarred cheek, as though it recoiled from traumatized instinct at the mention of what disfigured it.
A single lie.
“What are you hiding?” He angled my head up to his. Searching. Always searching.
I could feel the warm wondering carry on his breath and caress my lips. I couldn’t stop the way I tipped in toward him like there was a magnet buried in the center of me drawn to the one lodged in the center of him.
“How much I want to kiss you.”
And at that moment, it was the only truth I could think of to tell him. It was the only truth I knew.
I wanted to kiss him more than anything.
Not for him.
Not for his past or his scars.
And not for mine either.
We were two similar strings pulled from two very different lives, and even though one more kiss would make everything more complicated… Even though it would twist and contort us in order to keep our secrets, I wanted to kiss him because kissing him was the knot.
It was the strength. The security.
The link out of loneliness.
Kissing him was the only way to tie us together.
My eyes drifted shut just as naturally as my lips parted, and I waited for his touch. And at the very moment when I swore on the very church I was standing on that I felt the faintest brush of his lips on mine, the bells of Notre Dame tolled, their low sonorous hum seeming to come from God himself signaling the end—the end of the day… and the end of this moment.
“You should pack up your things. It’s going to rain.” The words fell between the weighty gongs.
I gasped and blinked my eyes open just as a raindrop fell on the tip of my nose. A cold shot of reality which ricocheted through every cell.
Eyes wide, the empty space in front of me where he’d stood stung. I whipped around, searching for him and, even though he’d just spoken, he was gone.
Another fat wet drop hit my shoulder, and I looked up. Even in the evening sky, I could see the even darker outline of the storm clouds which had gathered.
As I rapidly packed my equipment, I felt the weight of the impending deluge as it hung in the air, just like what was brewing between us—a storm.
A storm that didn’t care what secrets, what obstacles, were in its path. A storm with clouds that sunk with desire, and a sky that darkened with the deepest need.
A storm that could destroy everything.
Quinton
I didn’t believe in magic.
But if there was ever a feeling that came close to some mythical spell, it was the desire of wanting someone who you shouldn’t have.
It was that feeling of wanting something so badly to be true, knowing it was impossible, and yet hoping there was still a way…
There was no way for me.
I lived outside the law. Hell, I lived outside of life. And Esme…
Esme was life itself.
She was color and laughter and passion and purpose.
My eyes drifted shut, hearing my golden gypsy humming in my ears even though I was on the other side of the city. She was in my blood, soothing it even at times like this when I had a task to complete. When I had a step to take toward retribution.
She was still there… the image of her body humming beneath mine, craving more pleasure and more pain. I could still feel the way her lush supple curves were crushed against mine, every inch begging for more. The way her face tipped up eagerly, waiting for one more kiss—one more taste of this drug neither of us expected to find.
It was that face which haunted me—the one I’d forced myself to turn and walk away from before I went too far down a road I might not come back from.
And it was that face… those curves… I sought every night as I fisted my cock and found release.
I never should’ve kissed her. I never should’ve continued to watch her after I kissed her. And even though I’d saved her life up there between the towers of the church, it felt like I’d sacrificed my own to do so.
I never should’ve let her light down into the dark, closed cage I’d shackled around my heart.
Because wanting her was proving to be more dangerous to me than her being a spy.
There is no room for love in this life, my father’s words echoed in my mind.
And like the clouds blowing across the sun on a summer day, the memories of my past—my fiancée pulled my desire out from under me and reminded me how easily it was for me to be fooled.
Sophie was everything I
could have wanted. And she was that way because that’s how she’d made herself.
Méchant had hired her and introduced her to my mother. Slowly, she’d not only sifted information about me from Maria, but she’d demurely planted the seed that she’d love to meet me.
I’d just started at Les Beaux-Arts and, while not really interested, I agreed to meet the girl in order to please my mother.
I’d been floored. And she’d been entirely false.
The very foundation of her had been a lie, and everything on top of that had only been a frosting of fabrications.
And on top of losing my mother along with half my face that night in the church, I lost trust in the thing that beat to keep me alive. And now, around Esme, it begged to be let out again.
It begged to believe her.
But the heart is the subtlest and deadliest spy of them all—the very best liar fooling you from the inside out.
A harsh sigh tore from my lips as I forced the gypsy from my mind. I needed to focus. I finally had something. I finally had the next piece of the puzzle within my grasp. Well, almost had it.
I glanced down at the small paper in my hand, left for me under the candle at the cathedral and written in a hand I’d only seen very few times. My father’s.
On the paper was a single name. George Villecort. The man who possessed the next puzzle piece.
It never ceased to surprise me how quickly and efficiently the Valois was able to acquire the right information given the right leads. Only days since I’d left my father with Estelle’s name and her connection to Hubert had they uncovered her lover—George Villecort, Hubert’s campaign and personal advisor.
Like Hubert, Villecort had a legitimate history and no stain on his record, and perhaps he’d never been that deeply involved in Méchant’s organization. However, he’d been Hubert’s advisor since his construction days, and before that, he’d been one of those close friends of the family whom Hubert referred to as ‘Uncle.’
Villecort may have never committed a crime in his life, but if there was anyone who knew about the link between Hubert and Méchant, it was the man who’d known Hubert practically from birth.
The Gargoyle and the Gypsy: A Dark Contemporary Romance (The Sacred Duet Book 1) Page 16