Next to Me

by AnnaLisa Grant

  “I’m so sorry, Landon. I didn’t know…”

  “You knew what I wanted you to know. We’re not all that different.” Landon moves my unfinished drink away from me to the back of the bar and motions to the bartender that we’re done. He brings the bill and I sign it without looking. I don’t care how much we just spent. Dellinger has been free with his money thus far, there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t buy me a few glasses of liquid courage.

  Landon steadies me as I stand and we walk slowly to the elevator and back up to our room. I can’t walk too fast as the room begins to spin when I do. I’m coming down from my inebriated state and am transitioning into drinker’s remorse, regretting having drunk so much.

  “Crap! I left my room key on the nightstand when we laid down. I didn’t think to grab it when I came after you. Where’s yours?” Landon asks when he doesn’t find his room key on him.

  “It’s in my back pocket,” I tell him. My body is pressed face-first to the wall. “You’ll have to get it.”

  “Well, the night’s not a complete loss. At least I get to grab your ass,” he laughs.

  “Such a gentleman,” I tease.

  The door opens and Landon helps me inside. I flip the switch on the wall that controls several lights in the room. As soon as the room is illuminated,

  the picture of what happened in here while we were gone becomes clear.

  Our room has been ransacked.

  “What the hell?” Landon exclaims.

  “So I’m guessing this isn’t the result of you beating the shit out of my dad,” I say with a little bit of disappointment.

  “Uh, no.”

  I shake my head, sure of why our room has been completely turned over. “When did my father leave?”

  “We shared a few colorful words after you left, and then I kicked him out when I came to find you,” he tells me. “You think your dad did this? Why?”

  “Yes,” I tell him with absolute certainty. The fog seems to be clearing from my head. Nothing like a dose of reality to really kill the buzz you’re coming out of. “Because he didn’t believe me when I told him I didn’t bring the V Nickel with me. And he’d be right.”

  I pull my purse off my body and sit on the uncovered bed with it. I pull out a small, black velvet sack from my bag, open it, and turn it over. Onto the bed falls the last of five 1913 V Nickels Senator Dellinger has been searching for over the last, at least, ten years. I’ve had it in my possession since I left DC.

  “This is worth three million dollars. Wow.” Landon picks up the coin and examines it.

  “Yep. They weren’t supposed to put Liberty’s head on it. It was supposed to be the Indian’s head. They made five of them when the mistake was discovered and printing halted.” I stand up and go into the bathroom to get some headache medicine from my toiletry bag.

  “Are you ok, Jenna?” Landon calls to me.

  “I’m good. Just needed something for my headache,” I tell him when I’m back at the bed. I think about telling him that I’m going to change my flight in the morning, but decide that I won’t tell him at all. I’ll need to put some serious distance between us while I settle exactly what I’m going to do. I need to figure out when I’m going to leave Chicago and where I’m going to go and I won’t be able to do that with Landon near me.

  “We’ve got a lot to sort out tomorrow. Let’s get some sleep and approach it when both our heads are clearer.” Landon takes me in his arms and kisses the top of my head. “We’ll figure this out, Jenna. I promise.”

  We settle into bed and I find my happy place in Landon’s arms, thinking about how lucky I would be to have him by my side forever. He managed to grow up in an abusive home and break the cycle of violence to become the opposite of everything his father was. He’s kind and caring and generous. He’s done nothing but protect me and promise to never leave me. I take comfort in knowing I’ll be protecting him, Mercy, Spring, and the others, when I leave Chicago. If I’m not near them, Dellinger won’t be able to use them as leverage to make me do his dirty work. I may have the same skills as my father, but I spent the evening discovering that I’m nothing like him. And that makes me strangely sad.

  Chapter 14

  Landon pulls the curtains open and even with my eyes closed the light shining in is so bright it hurts.

  “Oh, my God... did we wake up on the sun?” I whine as I roll over and pull the sheets over my head. I slept hard, which was a combination of jet lag and gin and tonic. I wish I had drunk enough to forget about what happened last night, but I didn’t. I remember everything from opening the door and seeing my father, alive, to coming back to our trashed room after attempting to drown my sorrows.

  “Well, the sun is pretty bright at 11:00 am,” Landon says by way of explaining the blazing light coming in through the balcony windows. He sits by me on my side of the bed and brushes the hair out of my face. His fingers trail my jawline until his hand comes around and cups my face as he kisses my forehead. “It’s time to get up, beautiful.”

  “I smell coffee,” I whisper, still not able to use my full voice. I stretch and sit myself up in the bed, rubbing my eyes while they get fully adjusted to the light.

  “Breakfast! I ordered eggs benedict and French toast, although I’m pretty sure they just call it toast here.” Landon’s light laugh brings a smile to my face and for just the tiniest of moments this feels like something other than it is. It feels like Landon and me being together in the most permanent sense of the word. It feels like a honeymoon in Paris. It feels like forever.

  “Thank you. That was very sweet of you.” I pull myself out of bed and run through my morning routine of brushing my teeth and washing my face before I eat. After that, Landon and I enjoy a truly marvelous breakfast in almost complete silence.

  This morning, with my headache dissipating and the growl in my stomach being satisfied, my mind is reviewing the events of last night. There’s so much to think about. Aside from deciding when or if I’ll tell Landon that I’m going to change my flight home to today, I’m battling this gnawing feeling that there’s more to what my father told me. His wording, his phrasing, was off. Clearly I don’t know my father like I thought I did, but I still know him well enough and am confident he’s hiding something.

  “What it is?” Landon asks after about 30 minutes of silence and what I’m sure was me making odd I’m in thought faces. I’ve been replaying everything Dad said last night. Analyzing the tone, the verbage, even the delivery. I don’t think sending me here is all about Dellinger playing a sadistic trick on me.

  “What he said last night…the way he said it. Something just isn’t sitting well with me,” I tell him.

  “Of course it’s not sitting well with you, Jenna. Your father burst every bubble you had of him last night. Nothing about what he said should be ok with you,” Landon says. He takes another sip of his coffee and a bite of his French toast. It’s hard to avoid the look of elation with each bite. It’s the most heavenly French toast either of us has ever had. It reminds me of the morning Landon was waiting for me outside my apartment and I shared my croissants with him.

  “It’s more than that. When he asked me about the coin, even after his speech about how he tried to be on the straight and narrow, and how Dellinger can’t get his hands on the Nickel because then he wouldn’t need my father anymore, he asked me if I had the Nickel with me. He said ‘Did you bring it with you?’ He wasn’t concerned about the safety of the coin. He wanted to know where it was, if I had it on me. He offered to take it off my hands. He needs the coin,” I explain.

  “Do you think he’s already made a deal with Dellinger? Maybe he’s told him if he finds the coin he wants more money, and that’s the payout he was talking about. If Dellinger gets the coin from you, your dad won’t get the payment he’s counting on. Seeing you here, maybe he realized this was his chance to get it. I mean, it’s not like he could show up in Chicago and ask

  you for it,” Landon suggests.

  �
��That’s a possibility.” I sigh, feeling the weight of everything and having no idea how to relieve any of it. “I don’t know what to do. Despite the lies and deception, he’s still my father. I can only imagine what Dellinger would do if he knew Dad had been stringing him along all this time. I mean, Dellinger has used my father to collect hundreds of other pieces for him, but he has been psychotic about finding this coin.

  “Part of me wants to just give the coin to my father and let him decide what to do with it. It’s not like I’m going to have anything else to do with him. But the other side of me wants to give the coin to Dellinger and know that my father will pay for what he did to me and my mother.” It’s not like giving the coin to Dellinger would free me from him now that he’s found me, especially since Dad may face a real execution once Dellinger knows how my father deceived him. But, maybe it would buy me some time in between getting back to Chicago and determining when I would need to leave town. “Maybe I should get them together and threaten to split the coin down the middle. Then we’d find out who values it more. Better yet, I wish I had two coins. I would give one to each of them and let them figure out what to do.”

  “If you mean that, not the splitting the coin part, but the two coins…I have an idea.” Landon puts his coffee cup down and pushes himself away from the small café table where we’ve been enjoying our breakfast on the balcony. Circumstances being what they are, it’s sad that I can’t relish the fact that I’m eating breakfast on a balcony of the Shangri La Hotel in Paris in the shadow of the Eifel Tower.

  “What’s your idea?” I ask him with a wary eye.

  “I actually thought of this last night when you showed me the coin. I, well, I know a guy. Actually, he’s the reason Dellinger found me. Christie’s hired me to find an art forger and Dellinger has a Christie’s Frequent Buyer’s Card. Anyway, Christie’s sold a Van Gough and a Monet belonging to this guy, " Landon tells me, using air quotes with the each artist’s name. “He got almost a half a million for each. He would have gotten away with it if the woman who bought the Monet hadn’t had a friend challenge its authenticity. Turned out the friend had recently acquired the same painting in London earlier that year. Both pieces had to be evaluated again, so it took a while to get to the point where they needed me. From what I understand, the appraiser had a hell of a time deciding which one was real. Christie’s doesn’t like to involve the authorities if they don’t have to. It makes them look bad if they can’t spot a fake.

  “When I found the guy in Germany, we kind of hit it off, so we struck up a deal. I would tell Christie’s that someone else he crossed must have gotten to him first because I found him in the morgue, and the guy would owe me as many favors as I needed from him. He’s very good at what he does and I thought I might need him to forge some documents of identification for me when I found my mom.” I can see it still pains Landon to even mention his mother. It must be so difficult to have been searching for her for so long and have every overturned rock come up empty.

  “So what are you suggesting?” I ask.

  “You want two coins? Let’s make two coins.”

  “I don’t know, Landon. I was just talking. It sounds risky. What if they can tell it’s a fake?” I’m already nervous about what Dellinger is capable of. If we give him the fake and he finds out, I don’t know what he’ll do.

  “He is very good at what he does,” Landon says with confidence.

  “And he can do coins?”

  “He can do anything.”

  “Well…I guess it’s worth a shot,” I say. “Where is he? Is he in Paris?”

  “He’s in Versailles, about 40 minutes from here by train. If we leave now, we can be there within the hour.” Landon stands, a man on a mission.

  “Ok. Let me grab a shower first, though,” I begin.

  “We really don’t have time. I don’t know how long it will take him to make the coin, so we need to get there as soon as possible. We still have to get you a dress for tonight and be ready when the car picks us up at seven,” Landon interjects.

  “I’m not going tonight, Landon,” I say flatly. I can’t believe he would even remotely suggest I go through with this.

  “You have to go. Dellinger got you on this guest list. You’re going to have to make contact with the Ambassador to prove that you were there,” he tells me.

  “But Dellinger probably suspects that I have the coin already,” I reply. “What difference does it make?”

  “He probably does. But we don’t know that for sure. So, if there’s even the slightest chance that Dellinger thinks the Ambassador has the coin, you have to go tonight and make contact with him so Dellinger knows you were there. You can’t act like you’re on to anything they may be doing. Not Dellinger. Not your father.” Landon has joined me on my side of the table, crouching down next to me so we’re eye-level with each other. He puts his hand on my knee and the warm feeling that his touch brings courses through me.

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” I cover Landon’s hand on my knee with mine and lean my forehead against his for a moment before he pulls me to stand with him.

  “Out of curiosity…why didn’t you just use the coin as leverage when Dellinger cornered us in Chicago? You could have played that card and made a deal with him.”

  “After what I thought he had done to my family, I never wanted him to have it. I still don’t, but, now that I know it wasn’t all him, that my father willingly participated in Dellinger’s schemes, I’m not quite as adamant about it. I’d happily throw it in Lake Michigan if I could.”

  Landon nods, understanding what I’m saying, and doesn’t add anything to it. I throw my hair into a messy bun on my head and put on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Slinging my purse over my body, Landon and I walk out the

  door in less than 15 minutes and are on the train to Versailles in 25.

  “How do you know he’s going to be around when we get there?” I ask Landon about the mystery art forger whose hands I am placing the success of this plan in.

  “He owns a small antique store. Well, he doesn’t own it. The woman who took him in when he was a teenager owned it. He runs it now that she’s dead. He’ll be there,” he answers.

  Landon holds my hand the entire train ride to Versailles and I take the time to pretend that this is just a lovely vacation for the two of us. The ride is beautiful and it’s the first time I’ve been able to really enjoy the beauty of France.

  We walk the few blocks from the train station to the antique store and I stop Landon before we walk in.

  “I’m nervous about this,” I tell him. “Not nervous. I’m scared. I’m scared about this whole thing, Landon.”

  “Good. It’s the first time you’ve been really honest with me about your feelings. Now that you’re being real, I can protect you without arguing with you.” Landon kisses me quickly and then holds my gaze with his beautiful brown eyes. “Trust me.”

  I nod, making a conscious decision to trust him. I don’t know that I have any other options at this moment. At one point I considered emptying my bank account from here in France and finding someone who could do for me what Oz did in setting up a new identity, but I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing Spring or Mercy again. I want to leave them some kind of note before I disappear, however deceptive it may be. That was also the thought process that brought me to the conclusion that I would wait until Demi had her baby before I disappeared. I promised I would be there for her. I already let her down by taking off to Paris when she wanted me there when she told Jack. I can’t leave before I hold her hand in the delivery room and watch her bring her little baby into the world.

  A bell at the top of the door rings as Landon pushes it open. It’s a small store filled with things that would fetch far more in the States than what they’re being sold for here. I scan the shelves and tables wondering what kind of rich history some of these items have. Then it dawns on me that there are probably several reproductions of expensive pieces in here that this mystery man ha
s made himself to fool buyers. I sure hope Landon knows what he’s doing.

  “Je suis à vous dans un instant,” a man’s voice calls.

  “We don’t have a moment,” Landon calls back having understood the French phrase.

  A man who looks to be around our age and of average height, definitely shorter than Landon, appears from behind a curtain that separates the front of the store from the back room. He’s wearing jeans and a white dress shirt with the sleeves haphazardly rolled up and an open brown vest. His bronze hair is shaggy and he’s wearing wire glasses like John Lennon.

  “Holy shit! It’s Landon Scott! How the hell are ya, man?” The familiarity between the two is a little surprising. Landon said they had hit it off, but I didn’t have the idea that they were this friendly.

  “Hey Jace! You stayin’ out of trouble?” Landon asks as they give each other a firm handshake.

  “Never! Who’s your lady friend?” he asks enthusiastically.

  “Jace, this is Jenna. Jenna, this is Jace.” Landon motions between the two of us and I extend my hand to shake his.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I say.

  “Likewise. What brings you guys to Versailles? Honeymooning in Paris maybe?” Jace raises his eyebrows as a teasingly hopeful gesture.

  “No…not yet,” Landon smirks. There it is. That smirk. With all the intensity we’ve faced over the last several days, I didn’t realize how much I missed that sexy smirk of his. “I’m actually here to call in a favor.”

  “Absolutely. What can I do for you?” Jace doesn’t hesitate in agreeing to

  do whatever it is Landon is going to ask. Landon must have gotten him out of some hotter than hot water for him to be so agreeable.

  “I need a replica of a coin.” Landon looks at me and nods so I pull the coin from my purse and show it to Jace.