Icy Pretty Love

by L. A. Rose

  Cohen steps forward and shakes LeCrue's hand.

  There's a moment of silence. I find myself biting my lip. Please don't let him say anything mean or smug, please please please...

  He glances up. His eyes find mine briefly. I nod at him, smiling a little. He smiles back, tentatively, before turning back to LeCrue.

  "Thank you," he says. "But I refuse."

  Refuse?! After everything he's gone through to gain control of that company? Apparently I'm not the only one knowledgeable of Cohen's long-standing desire, because a gasp ripples around the room. I guess everyone here understands English after all.

  LeCrue's smile fades. "Refuse? What do you mean?"

  "I appreciate the trust you've placed in me." Cohen's gaze dips again toward the crowd behind them. He's not the type of person to enjoy speaking when there are this many pairs of ears listening. "But I can't accept your offer. Not because of anything you've done, but because of my own actions. I've lied to you."

  No. No way. There is absolutely no way in hell he'd pull this now. Cohen Ashworth could never be so...so noble.

  "Georgette Montgomery is not my fiancé," he says. "In fact, there is no Georgette Montgomery."

  I can feel myself going pink up to my ears. People swivel to look at me again, though this time their expressions are considerably less affectionate. I waggle my fingers in a feeble wave.

  "Her name is Rae," he says, slowly but determinedly. "She's a woman from the U.S. who was hired to act as my fiancé, in the hopes that you would see me as stable enough to buy your company. It was a ruse from the beginning. I'm sorry."

  I let out a tiny breath. I don't think I could have handled it if Cohen had added the little tidbit about where his father found me in the first place. Let them think I'm some fancy con artist. Hey, actually, that's not too bad of a thought. Rae Grove, the super-cool secret agent—

  Wait, what am I thinking? I look desperately toward the front of the room. Cohen, what are you doing?

  "So to all of you who enjoyed the thought that I was finally the kind of person whom a woman could love, I'm sorry to disappoint," he says. A few feet over, Jean's eyes are wide with shock. "Her time was purchased, not given. And I doubt any price could have been high enough to endure that time with me."

  His ironic smile is back, but nobody's joining in. My heart shreds itself a little. Okay, yeah, I've been paid to be here, but it's not like...it's not like I didn't enjoy any of it.

  "I'm clearly not the right man to steer your company in a new direction," Cohen tells LeCrue. "Your son, though, I've heard have some interesting ideas recently. You ought to talk to him about it."

  And then he turns. The crowd parts in front of him in a wave of silent shock. Except for one person. Annabelle stands in his way, hair a bit wilder than normal, a spot of shrimp sauce above her upper lip.

  "But that's impossible," she says in such a low voice that I can barely hear her. "Everything you said is impossible. I...I researched Georgette. She has a paper trail—"

  "You don't think I would have undertaken such a lie without assurances our tracks would be covered?" Cohen snorts, but then he blinks and shakes his head. "Sorry. What I mean to say is, it's not surprising you were fooled."

  Annabelle's head swings over to my direction. Her face is so wide open with surprise that I almost want to laugh. She'd never in a million years imagined she could be tricked like that.

  "Three cheers for honesty," a voice blusters in. It's Claude, holding up a new and unbroken champagne flute and looking utterly delighted. "I, for one, commend Cohen's forthrightness. I propose a toast!"

  No one joins in. Mr. LeCrue is standing still, his face growing gradually redder. Cohen walks forward, takes me by the arm, and leads me toward the door.

  "Do you know what you're doing?" I whisper. The silence is so overwhelming that I have to do it very quietly.

  "I hope so," he whispers back.

  And then we're outside on the lawn, a dark swathe of emerald in the moonlight. Cohen types something on his phone, and I know he's telling Geoff to come early. Which means he didn't plan this in advance.

  "Cohen—" I start, but before I can finish my sentence, he's kissing me.

  Kissing me hard, ferociously, as if his last reservations have finally been stripped away. All the tension he must have been holding back bleeds out of him in one passionate embrace. I immediately forget everything I was going to say. My world contracts and zooms in on the sensation of his lips on mine, warm and delicious.

  Finally he breaks away. I wobble a little.

  "I'm sorry," he says. "I needed that."

  So did I, though I hadn't known it. I clear my throat and I try to act like I'm at least somewhat in command of my faculties. "Cohen, are you sure you want to do this? You're throwing away everything."

  A little smile curves his lips. "Well, it's a bit too late to change my mind, don't you think?"

  He's got a point.

  He tilts his head back and gazes at the sky. "Purchasing LeCrue's company was always my father's idea for me. It was the step he wanted me to take, to prove to him...a lot of things. I never really stopped to consider why I wanted it myself. And when I finally did stop to think about it, I realized...I didn't want it after all."

  "Just like that?"

  "Just like that," he says. "I'm actually surprised at how easy it was. You spend years planning your life around one thing, and when you don't end up getting it, it's amazing how little it matters."

  He laughs. That fantastic sound. I want to make it my ringtone.

  I shake my head to clear it. "But you told them about me. Won't they be mad at you? Like, really mad?"

  "Probably," says Cohen. "But it's better than..."

  He trails off.

  "Better than what?"

  He gives a crooked smile. "Better than them all admiring me for being able to win the love of someone like you, when in reality I'm not the type of person capable of that at all."

  I swallow. "Okay, so maybe Georgette Montgomery might not want to hang out with you. But Rae Grove does."

  He brushes my cheek gently with the back of his hand, and then takes it away. "Rae Grove is getting paid for every minute she spends with me."

  That makes me so sad that the easiest thing to do is get angry. "What do you expect me to do, Cohen? Say, nah, forget the money, your company's been more than enough? Well, yeah, I've loved getting to know you, Cohen, and I've loved being with you, way more than I expected to, but I still need money to start my new life, so—"

  "Wait," he interrupts. "Say that again."

  "I still need money to start my new life, so...?"

  "No. The other thing." His eyes are wide. "You've loved this?"

  I throw up my hands. "Of course I have! It's been really fun! Going to the Eiffel tower with you, and riding the Ferris wheel, and getting scared in the catacombs, and getting to eat good French food with you...of course I loved it!"

  "But you've been with me."

  "Yeah, that was the best part!"

  My exasperated exclamation fades into silence. Suddenly I'm embarrassed. "Well, maybe not the best part. Getting to look out over all of Paris from the top of the Eiffel tower was awesome. And I've had some really good cheese."

  "Fair enough," he says, nodding. "I could never expect to measure up to some of the cheese here."

  "It's goddamn delicious cheese."

  "Yeah."

  The sleek black car pulls around the corner. We get in, one after the other, and the door closes. The car pulls away from the curb.

  After a while, Cohen clears his throat. "Your obligation is fulfilled, anyway. LeCrue offered to sell. You don't have anything left to do here."

  "What are you saying?" I frown.

  "You're free to leave, is what I'm saying." He props his elbow against the window and doesn't look at me. "You'll be paid the full amount, of course. But I won't hold it against you if you decide to go and start your new life a week early. Your work here is d
one, after all."

  "Don't be an idiot!"

  His elbow slips. My outburst surprised him.

  "I mean," I amend hastily, "I still haven't been to the Louvre. Only a true loser would leave Paris without going to the Louvre. That would just be embarrassing. And...I'd say your niceness lessons aren't done yet. I saw the way you snapped at Annabelle today. You clearly need a couple refreshers."

  A smile begins on his face. "Naturally."

  I stretch, yawning. "Basically, I don't see that my work is done yet. So I guess I better stay for the last week. There's no way around it, to be honest."

  "Ah." He nods with mock-seriousness. "Perhaps I should include a bonus in your payment to make up for the extra lessons. They weren't included in the original agreement."

  His hand falls, almost incidentally, to rest on my thigh. A familiar electricity begins to crackle within me.

  "Oh? And what would that be?" I ask with an attempt at casualness.

  When we get home, he shows me.

  ~13~

  Later, when we're lying in bed by ourselves, minus clothes, I roll over and tuck myself into the nook between his shoulder and his arm. "You know what I've noticed?" I murmur into his skin.

  "Hmmm?" The sound is low and comforting.

  "You haven't tried to go out once since I caught you at it. I thought I'd be waking up constantly to your sneaky ass trying to leave the apartment at four in the morning, but my sleep hasn't been disturbed once. You haven't just been extra careful about it, have you?"

  "As if I could get past you." He plants a kiss on the top of my head. "No, I haven't gone. I can't pretend I haven't felt the desire to, now and then, but it's more of a silent twinge than the roaring need it used to be. In fact, it's been fading for a while. That night you caught me was more my attempt to see if it was really something I still wanted in my life after all. The need's been fading, ever since..."

  "Ever since what?" I prompt.

  He kisses a burning line from my neck to my collarbone. "Ever since I found a new kind of high."

  "So you're addicted to me?" I laugh.

  "Completely."

  "Good thing you're getting some practice in going cold turkey, then, because in a week you'll—" I stop. What was meant to be a joke falls flat on its face.

  The quiet grows and grows until Cohen says, "Let's not talk about that right now."

  I want to ask, how can you be addicted to me when you're the one who insisted a relationship was out of the question? But I don't. "You're right. Let's talk about something else. Like what you're going to do now that you don't have LeCrue's company to work on."

  "Ah. Right," he says. "Who knows? Maybe I'll take some time off. Take a painting class. Discover my passion, like you said."

  I expect him to laugh sardonically, but he's not being sarcastic. My heart swells. I'm so stupidly proud of him.

  "If I'm going to spend my life building something, it has to be something I made myself," he says under his breath. "Something with my own mark on it. Not someone else's company shoved into my arms by my father."

  "Amen to that." I run my hand over his chest, admiring the slight grooves and lifts of his skin. "You could start a teddy bear company."

  "They could be teddy bears with really scary expressions that nobody wants to hug," he agrees.

  "And when you squeeze their paws, they insult you."

  "Parents will buy them for their kids as a punishment when they've been bad."

  "Hey, who knows? This could be the next Build-a-Bear."

  We both laugh.

  I let myself settle into the quiet rhythm of his breath. It's so dark and peaceful, yet I don't want to sleep. I want to savor every moment I get to spend here. As dumb as it sounds.

  About half an hour later, I whisper, "Hey Cohen? Do you think maybe we could stay in touch? After this week is over?"

  He doesn't respond. He's asleep.

  And eventually I fall asleep too.

  The next day, we go to the Louvre.

  Geoff drops us off outside. The curb is high, and Cohen takes my hand to keep me from tripping as I step out of the car.

  "Such a gentleman," I joke. The door shuts and the car drives up. "Racking up those niceness points, I see."

  "Ah. Yes. That's what it is," he says. "Definitely."

  The entrance to the Louvre, as it turns out, is underground. We walk through a gate set in the middle of tall fantastical buildings, embedded with sculptures of bearded men looking very serious, into a kind of courtyard. A long flat fountain bubbles in the middle of about a bajillion tourists. Beside the fountain is an odd glass triangle, rising high above the ground. A long line toward the triangle snakes around and around the fountain. As I watch, the group of people inside the triangle sink lower until they disappear. An elevator.

  "Sweet!" I say. "It's underground. Like Batman's house."

  Cohen raises an eyebrow as we join the line. "Batman's house was underground?"

  "Of course it was. Where else would it be? The Batcave, duh. Didn't you ever watch Saturday morning cartoons?"

  "Not really. My father thought most forms of entertainment were a waste of time. Other than opera."

  I clap a hand to my face. "Your dad made you listen to opera."

  "Fairly often, actually—"

  "Oh, you poor poor thing." I pat his arm. "No wonder you're so grumpy all the time."

  "Were," he says.

  "Were?"

  "I'm not feeling so grumpy anymore," he says. A kid running by bangs into his leg, and all Cohen does is smile at him. "I feel...free."

  "Freee as the wiiiind blooows," I start singing.

  Cohen winces. "I just told you I'm not in a bad mood for once. Don't ruin it."

  "Hey, there's a reason I didn't go into opera singing."

  The line snakes forward until we're finally inside the triangle. It descends into an enormous lobby with high ceilings and staircases going up every which way. I realize that the ornate buildings surrounding the courtyard must be part of the Louvre as well.

  First we go to the sculpture section to check out all the fancy Greek and Roman statues, many of which are naked or only have fig leaves to preserve their modesty. I observe critically that their junk must be pretty small for a fig leaf to cover everything, and Cohen conceals his laughter with a coughing fit as a few older patrons frown at us.

  "Look at that," I say, thumping his back in case he's actually choking on something and not laughing like I thought. "We've officially become the people who used to annoy you so much."

  "It's more fun being those people, it turns out," he gasps.

  I grin. "It's always more fun being the annoying person than the annoyed person."

  We proceed to the Ancient Egyptians, where I get totally creeped out by all the dead people wrapped in toilet paper.

  "Mummies," Cohen corrects.

  "I don't care what they're called, they're gross! I thought I got to see all the preserved corpse bits in Paris when we went to the catacombs. I signed up for fancy-ass paintings and marble fig leaves, not more dead bodies. This place is probably haunted as hell."

  Cohen wisely leads me away to look at some paintings.

  I don't know much about art. I don't know anything about art, really. The most art education I ever got was Foundation of Arts freshman year of high school, where we twisted pipe cleaners into pretzel shapes and Sam Miller smeared glue all over his arms, waited until it dried, then peeled it off and ate it. This is real art. This is...

  "Boring," I announce.

  Cohen turns to look at me. "What?"

  "This section of paintings. It's boring as hell. It's all just pictures of the same dude."

  "Jesus Christ," he says.

  "No need to get snippy. You're practicing being nice, remember?"

  "No, that's the 'dude'. Jesus Christ."

  "Oh. Right. Duh. I knew that. Anyway, my point is, why do we need all these damn pictures of him? One would have been enough."

 
"Well, during the Renaissance—"

  "Oh God, don't start with all that historical stuff. It makes my brain melt. What I'm saying is, none of this stuff is original. It's all the same dude with the weird yellow cheese behind his head—"

  "Halo."

  "Halo, yeah. And the plot twist is that sometimes he's a baby with a littler yellow cheese-halo and his mom is goggling at him with her weird curvy neck. I don't like it."

  Cohen opens his mouth, looks up and the paintings again, and closes it.

  "You know what?" he says. "I don't either."

  "You don't?"

  "No. I don't care about their historical significance. These paintings all look the same."

  "Finally, you're making some sense." I slap his back. "Let's go see the Mona Lisa."

  The Mona Lisa is mounted on a special wall in the middle of a big room. It's surprisingly small. I always pictured the Mona Lisa as giant, some huge twelve-foot monstrosity smiling creepily down from the wall, but the painting can't be more than three feet. We have to muscle our way to the front of the crowd to get a good view of her.

  The Mona Lisa is definitely not boring. At first I almost feel bad for her, stuck in the middle of this big crowd with all these people gaping and snapping selfies of themselves with her in the background, but she doesn’t seem to care. Her little secret smile seems to say that she’s above it all, that she’s got her own thing going on and she likes the fact that none of us know what it is.

  I shiver and pull back.

  “What is it?” says Cohen.

  “Nothing.” I shake my head. “It just feels like…she’s smiling at me.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re getting creeped out by the Mona Lisa, because—”

  “I’m not! It’s just…”

  One woman smiling to another, as if to say, Hey, I know what your life is like. I’m a girl and I’ve been there. I wonder if all the men standing around even know what’s going on.

  Her smile kind of reminds me of Annabelle’s, actually, even if she definitely doesn’t know what my life’s been like.