“I’m James Redmond. I think a few of you have heard of me,” he said. Juliet felt she may have heard that name somewhere, but she was at a loss for who the man was. She was a reasonably informed sixteen-year-old girl, but she hardly stayed abreast of the who’s who of American businessmen.
“This has been in the works for a while, but it only recently became appropriate for me to announce it. And I wanted to be the first to say something, so the fashion community didn’t hear it elsewhere first.” Here, he cleared his throat while staring over the heads of the “fashion community” to whom he was speaking. “I’ve been in many lines of business in the United States, but fashion is one area where I have no holdings. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure I know what I’m doing. Does this suit look okay?” He gestured to his obviously expensive but drab gray suit while chuckling at his own joke.
“So, to bring Redmond Industries onto the runway, I plan to purchase the two oldest houses in the game, the House of Capulet and the House of Montague. It’s been too long that they’ve been rivals angling for the top spot, so with my help, we’ll unite them under one glorious banner. By next year, this ball will be celebrating that moment in fashion history.”
The entire room burst into shocked gasps and murmurs. For just one second, Juliet’s eyes found Romeo’s and she saw in his face the same panic that surely showed on her own.
They’d both heard it: The American basically wanted to destroy their families. To him, he’d be turning the legacies of the houses into mere blips in the annals of American business. But for her and Romeo, it would be much more than just an entry on a ledger: It would be a death blow to their way of life.
Up on stage, beneath the silvery lights, James Redmond raised both his hands in the air to calm the vibrations of the crowd. “Please, please, know that there are still many threads to the story we need to tie together.” He grinned and added, in surprisingly good French, “Tout est possible.…”
CHAPTER 6
JULIET
“WILL YOU BE OKAY?”
Pierre had asked her that same question every minute since the James Redmond announcement. The look that accompanied the question turned her stomach the most. His wide-eyed and urgent concern seemed weak.
“Am I dripping blood from a severed limb?” Juliet said, loud enough to be heard over the music, loud enough that a cluster of partygoers plucking hors d’oeuvres off a passing tray turned to look at her. She felt instantly bad for the sharpness in her voice.
But Pierre laughed. He had nice enough eyes, when they weren’t infused with worry. She liked his hair, dark and floppy, as easy as he was. Pierre bore the air about him of a person who went happily into each day, never expecting chaos or turmoil. To her, that feature was by far the most irritating thing about him. “You have a dark sense of humor,” he said. “It’s very cute.”
If Romeo had made the same comment, it would have delighted her, but from Pierre’s lips—why were they always so shiny?—the words just made her cringe.
Juliet knew this wasn’t good news. Not at all. A person would have to be an idiot to not have seen how quickly her father and Romeo’s father, Jean Montague, had left the room, lacking all subtlety as they marched out, faces drawn, phones pressed to their ears. Being at a party to celebrate their companies’ future in the presence of a man who was the business world’s Grim Reaper defined irony. It may have been the first thing the Montagues and Capulets had ever agreed on.
Juliet’s main concern was Romeo. After the announcement, Rosaline had snaked her arms around Romeo as if she would protect him from the threat of financial and familial ruin. And Romeo hadn’t done anything to stop her. Juliet knew he couldn’t exactly push her away, but she felt he should demonstrate at least a gentle rejection. Turning away from her instead of smiling at her might be a start. But his body language would have convinced anyone, Juliet included, that he was enjoying his date.
“It’s bad news, though, for your family’s company?” Pierre asked, and now he tried to put an arm around her shoulder. Juliet’s arms involuntarily shrank into her sides. Why was it so easy for Romeo to be handled by Rosaline, when to Juliet, a touch from anyone else felt wrong?
“I suppose we’ll find out,” Juliet said. The party was still going on and most of the attendees had absorbed the news and continued with their joviality. It was different for her and her family, and probably for Romeo and his. Their families were their companies, and vice versa.
She wanted to talk to Romeo, to be alone with him behind the building, sharing a cigarette and making guesses as to how this all would play out. The news had left Juliet with a sliver of hope: If the Houses of Montague and Capulet were doomed by this outsider anyway, maybe it would also mean the end of all this silly rivalry that kept her and Romeo apart. She didn’t want to have this thought, and felt guilty as soon as she did. But if this threat could mean losing everything her family knew—their house, the family vacations, the ease of life that came with never really worrying about money—then she could have Romeo, couldn’t she? Hadn’t she said she’d give it all up for him? And she would, she thought, but having everything taken from her family was different from leaving it all behind, and she couldn’t feel good about her family’s destruction.
As a tray carrying foie gras tarts passed her line of vision, Juliet feigned wanting one, and moved closer to Romeo and Rosaline, who’d been joined by several lesser models. If she could get his attention, maybe she could signal to him to meet her outside. The building was old, with plenty of nooks and crannies where they wouldn’t be seen.
But before she could even reach the waiter, her father’s large hand wrapped around her upper arm. “Come, ma fille,” he said. “We need to leave.”
The car was waiting for them out front. Pierre, perhaps in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the family, was leaving with them. Fortunately, Henri put himself on the seat between Juliet and Pierre. He leaned close and whispered into Juliet’s ear, “Papa is looking afraid of the boogeyman, no?”
It was true. Their father, usually a stout and hearty man, was pale-faced as he got into the car. He may as well have been issued a death threat.
His phone rang and he pressed the button to answer, holding it tightly to his face. “Maurice Capulet.” Her father almost never got phone calls—he called you, you didn’t call him.
“Non, non,” he said. Then he was listening, promising to be somewhere the next day.
“Oooh, the Knights Templar,” Henri said under his breath with a snicker. He touched his Capulet signet ring to Juliet’s. It was a long-standing gesture to their bond. They’d seen a brother-and-sister pair do the same thing in a French cartoon.
“The boogeymen,” she said back, wiggling her fingers. The joke was one they trotted out whenever their father was tense or in a bad mood, to blame the shadowy organization for his woes. As kids, they’d even played a game wherein they were on the run from the Templars (and of course their rings gave them the power to hide). Still, the joke had started to send a worried shiver up Juliet’s spine ever since Henri’s overdose. When they’d found Henri (quite literally in the gutter), he’d been mumbling something about the Templars. The doctors had said he was probably delirious and acting out a game from childhood, but it still troubled Juliet.
“I think Papa must be feeling powerless,” Henri said. “And we know how he hates that.” Juliet couldn’t tell if her brother felt a wee bit vindicated by this. She was gripped for a moment by one of those bursts of love for her family. She wanted to hug her father and assure him it would be okay. She wanted to tell her brother that he’d regret rooting against the family, even if things had been hard for him lately. But the thoughts were hypocritical, too, since just moments ago she’d been fantasizing about the freedom that might come from her family’s failure.
Juliet shook her head. “Of course he feels powerless,” she said. “That man just announced he was going to take over our company and our enemy’s. To be reduced to the same lev
el as a Montague must kill him.”
She was desperate to ask Henri what he thought it meant, the companies being dismantled, maybe merging.
And that guilty thought came again, like a wave pulling her beneath the surface of things: What if a year from now the names Montague and Capulet meant nothing? Could that be exactly what she wanted for herself and Romeo?
CHAPTER 7
ROMEO
SCHOOL.
Romeo was the heir to a fortune and would one day preside over one of the world’s great fashion houses.
But he still went to high school.
He attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand, like every other would-be success-story teenager in Paris. It was the school of Paris’s writers, its scientists, its politicians, its names. Plus, it was in the Latin Quarter, the city’s educational bosom, which meant that there were plenty of places to buy “study aids,” as Benoit called them, from students paying their way through université.
Romeo could have bypassed school but he insisted on going. His father already thought he was incapable of being serious, so at least the day-in, day-out of school proved he had a discipline for something. And if he was going to go to school, it would be at Louis-le-Grand, not some remote boarding school far out of the city. (Even before Juliet, boarding school had held no appeal; all those women more or less trapped by the confines of a remote campus made them too eager. Where was the fun in that?)
However, even when Romeo thought he was doing the responsible thing, Jean Montague second-guessed the idea. Yes, the senior Montague, who had once read the definition of uptight and thought it sounded too playful, sometimes told Romeo that he could slide into the driver’s seat of the House of Montague now, and learn on the job rather than waste time in class. But his fears about his son’s character kept him from pushing Romeo to take the offer. Romeo knew these fears were due to the senior Montague’s knowledge of how he himself had first operated as heir to the fashion house. When Jean had stepped into the role twenty-odd years ago, his hard-partying ways and endless parade of women had almost bankrupted the company. Shareholders wanted someone fashionable running the ship but not someone whose romances and brawls outshone the actual fashions. The weaknesses had all been exploited and exposed by the House of Capulet, which seized on the faltering moment as a way to gain the upper hand in the Paris fashion world.
It had taken years—and, Romeo was sure, the threat of being disowned—for Jean to turn his life around. It helped that he had somehow landed the glamorous but grounded Catherine Delaise, a model-turned-designer. The aristocratic background of the Delaise name lent trust to the Montague name. Plus, Romeo’s mom was capable of that thing certain girls had mastered: making you feel adored but also just uncertain enough of their continuing adoration that loving them was like a drug. Juliet could be like that. Every meeting with her, even though there’d been too few for his liking, Romeo always felt certain she wouldn’t show. Then, when she did, it was better than any high he’d experienced.
It would be a lie to say that Romeo and his dad didn’t “get” each other. Before his father reformed for his bride (and his stake in the company), he and Romeo lived similar louche lifestyles. But one thing Romeo got that his father didn’t was that school kept him grounded, alert. Besides, after years of schooling with private tutors, Juliet had started attending Louis-le-Grand this year. Hate each other though they may, the Montagues and Capulets agreed on one thing: The best school in all of France was Louis-le-Grand.
Juliet’s arrival had changed the air in the school. She’d for so long seemed almost a captive in the fortresslike Capulet manse, and then she was free, among the other children of Paris, though she was dropped off daily in a dark car with even darker windows.
Romeo had dismissed her as a spoiled princess before their first fateful meeting, but she had still been a presence to him. To everyone, really. To be able to look away from Juliet Capulet was to be something other than human, honestly. She was bewitching. Even Benny, hardly eloquent, had once said of her, “She’s like magic, you know? You look and you look to try to figure out how she does it and finally you realize you’re just as happy not knowing.”
(Then he’d apologized. No Montague was ever to give credit to a Capulet.)
Now, Romeo pulled into his private parking spot. Most students took the Metro but he liked his freedom. And he liked to drive his black Lamborghini. On good days, he charged around the Arc de Triomphe a few times, gunning his engine just for the thrill. He may have wanted to be grounded, but he wasn’t above enjoying some of a Montague’s inherited perks.
Since Romeo had picked him up that morning, Benny had not stopped talking about the party the night before. Benoit wanted to know everything there was to know about Rosaline, Romeo’s pseudo-date for the evening. Romeo knew that his cousin had witnessed James Redmond talking about the takeover, but it was in true Benny style not to bring it up. He had a gift for avoiding anything too hard.
“Just tell me what her ass feels like under your hands. Does it have push-back?” Benoit was talking rapidly but his attention was split as he looked out the window toward the sidewalk, ogling the passing filles of the Sixth Arrondisement’s many posh schools.
“What?” Romeo wondered what his cousin was on today. Sometimes, he wanted to urge Benny to slow down, but he never knew if Benny would be contrite and actually listen or if he’d get defensive and go on a bender. In the past, it could go either way.
“Push-back,” Benny said, putting his hands out in front of his face and simulating squeezing. “You press your hand into it and it rises up to meet your palm. The mark of a firm derriere. You just want to bury your face in it.”
Romeo couldn’t help but laugh at the enthused expression that accompanied the crude joke. “My friend, the reason you don’t have a woman in your life is because you think of women in terms of body parts,” he said.
“What, are you a feminist now?” Benny asked, with real concern. He slung his Hermès messenger bag over one shoulder and slid the car door shut. “Is that what happens when you’ve been through all the women in Paris? You start looking out for their feelings?”
“Rosaline was … nice,” Romeo said, hoping to convey enough false bravado with his grin so that Benny could imagine whatever scenario Benny wanted to imagine. Rosaline was perfectly nice, and beautiful, but she lacked that je ne sais quoi—that Julietism—to make her what he needed.
“I’ll bet,” Benny said, in the wistful tone of a guy who lived through another guy’s dates. Which Benny did. “So, you worried? About that American fuck?”
Romeo looked at Benny. He’d not expected this. Was talking about Rosaline’s ass Benny’s, ahem, backdoor way of bringing this whole thing up?
“What? The Redmond guy?” Romeo tried to act casual. The truth was, he knew it was a big problem. He also knew he did not want to deal with the whole school eyeballing him like his entire family had just died. Still, he was prepared for just that to happen. No business, no money—if it really came to pass, he might as well be dead to everyone he knew. “No.”
He was lying, and about to elaborate on the falsehood.
But a bike that pulled up to the corner across from the school caught his eye. A Richard Pollock bike. A custom-built Mule with a set of shiny chrome exhaust pipes, stretched long like a woman’s legs; its vintage design contrasted with the Mule’s very modern speed. Romeo couldn’t help staring; the machine was a beautiful thing. He felt the way Benny probably did asking about Rosaline—like he wanted to know the exact feeling of the bike and its pleasures.
The rider hopped off and lifted the helmet from his head. It was … Jim. The dude who’d pulled Romeo and Juliet out of yesterday’s jam. What was he doing here? And how many exotic bikes did he have? Romeo thought the American had been exaggerating yesterday. That’s what those guys did. But no, here he was with a Mule.
A minute ago, Romeo had felt the same blasé indifference toward the day as he always did when he wasn’t going to
be alone with Juliet. Now, he grew instantly tense and sweaty under his just-rumpled-enough shirt (only the unwealthy fretted over being extra-pressed). Romeo was never tense and sweaty. But this guy knew about him and Juliet. And it appeared he was now attending Louis-le-Grand. So he’d be under the same roof, day in and day out.
Jim’s look of recognition was subtle. Still, to a loyal friend like Benny, it was enough.
“You know this dude?” Benny whispered under his breath. His hackles were already up. If he could fight on Romeo’s behalf, he would. Gladly.
“Yeah, a little bit. Through my mechanics,” Romeo said, hoping he was loud enough for Jim to hear, so he’d back up the lie. With another admiring look at the bike, Romeo added, to Jim, “Bike’s looking good, man. You got a second?”
Now Benny gave the bike an appraising look, then glanced at Romeo, as if to say, You need me?
“This guy’s got a vintage Triumph I’ve been meaning to ask about,” Romeo said. He didn’t know if it was true, but it sounded good. “Go ahead without me, Ben.”
Benny nodded and headed toward the main gates of the school. He looked back once as if to remind Romeo that he had his back if Romeo needed him. Romeo hoped he wouldn’t.
“What are you doing here?” Romeo asked, drawing himself to his full height. He was taller than the American, but Jim’s shoulders did that thing where they pressed into the back of his jacket. It wasn’t something he normally paid attention to, but Romeo was still feeling twitchy about the fact Juliet had leaned into this guy’s back less than twenty-four hours ago.
“You said you’d call, but I know how that works. Guys never call,” Jim said with a giant grin. Asshole looked like the spokesperson for the rare and ultrafast motorcycle he was leaning against. And Romeo wasn’t the only one who noticed. Every girl passing by did a double take. Girls Romeo had bedded looked from him to Jim like the new stranger in town might be exactly what they’d need to forget that Romeo had done them wrong. And for his part, Jim was just nonchalant enough to give them the most passing of passing glances. Dude had game.
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