33
Charlotte looked at her ringing phone, eyeing the name on the display with trepidation.
Debra Hughes.
In other words, her mother.
She didn’t want to talk to her mother. Didn’t want to either explain why she wasn’t in Paris or lie and say she was still there. Didn’t want to hear her mother’s manic happiness or the melancholy brought on by another breakup, another lost role.
It was her mother’s face on the screen that finally forced her to pick up the phone. The photo had been taken during a particularly lovely lunch at the Getty Villa one afternoon when her mother had surprised her with a visit. They'd talked about the recently installed Renoir exhibit, books they’d read, family friends. There had been no mention of the man in her mother’s life. No bitterness over work or lack of it.
Charlotte had snapped the photo impulsively. At the time she’d only glanced at it, but later when she found it in her phone she realized it was one of the only candid pictures she had of her mother. Her dark hair framed her face in soft waves, and her full lips were turned up into a private smile. She was wearing little make-up, and while laugh lines fanned out from her eyes — lines her mother hated — Charlotte thought she had never looked more beautiful.
She picked up the phone. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hello there, stranger.” Her mother’s voice was low and hoarse like her own.
“Sorry I haven’t called,” Charlotte said, pacing to the window overlooking Boston. “Things have been a little crazy.”
“Is everything all right?” her mother asked. “When are you coming home? Have you put your father’s shop on the market?”
The questions got under Charlotte’s skin. They were spoken casually, as if leaving Paris, leaving her father’s work behind for the final time, was nothing.
“I’m not in Paris actually.” She knew she would come to regret telling her mother the truth, but it was a kind of revenge. The kind she regularly enacted on her mother, even as she hated herself for being so juvenile. It was the anticipated reaction she enjoyed. Knowing she could push a certain button and get exactly the reaction she expected.
“Well, where are you then?” She sounded angry. As if Charlotte had broken the terms of some unknown agreement by being somewhere other than where her mother expected her.
Charlotte turned her back to the window, leaned against the cool glass. “Boston.”
“What are you doing in Boston?”
There was no mistaking the disdain in her voice. Her mother hated the East Coast, had never understood Charlotte’s desire to go to school in New York or her eventual affinity for the city where she’d gotten her degrees.
“Something came up.”
Her mother’s throaty laugh sounded in her ear. “And by something I assume you mean a man?”
Charlotte’s face flushed, not because she was embarrassed to be in Boston with Christophe, but because her mother had so accurately called it.
“Not everything is about a man, Mother.” The statement made her feel even more humiliated. Now she was lying to her mother to save face. To avoid admitting that even Charlotte — paragon of reason — could be swayed by love.
No, not love. That’s not what the last few days with Christophe had been. It had been sex and even romance. It had been laughter and long walks filled with their easy silence.
But love was something else.
Wasn't it?
“Then why are you in Boston?” her mother asked, the sly smile evident in her voice.
“A problem arose with one of the pieces from the store.” It wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. “I had to come to Boston to take care of it.”
“I don’t understand.” Her mother paused, and Charlotte heard the clink of ice. It was only noon in L.A., but according to her mother, it was always five o’ clock somewhere. “I thought you were selling the shop.”
“I haven’t decided that definitively,” Charlotte said.
“Surely you don’t intend to keep it. What on earth will you do with a dusty antique store halfway around the world?”
Annoyance prickled Charlotte’s skin. Her mother was acting like the Galerie Duval was an irritating piece of detritus to be disposed of instead of her father’s lifework, the only real connection she’d ever had with him.
“It was my father’s work,” Charlotte said. “I’m going to take my time deciding what to do about it.”
She read the anger in her mother’s pause. “I don’t know why you would bother. He never seemed to care much about you. About your life and your work. But I suppose he’s a saint now that he’s dead.”
No more than you, Charlotte thought.
She took a deep breath, stuffing down her anger, something she was practiced at when it came to her mother. “I’ve never said he was a saint. But he was my father.”
“No one remembers that more than me.”
Charlotte wanted to be mad, to hold onto the anger that was the only insulation she had against her mother’s mercurial mood swings. But there was an undercurrent of sadness, of something like regret, in her mother’s statement. For the first time, Charlotte wondered if any of that regret was directed inward. If maybe the blame her mother had laid at her father’s feet over the years was a cover for the fear that she, too, had somehow failed their marriage. Personal feelings aside, Charlotte had always thought it an odd pairing: her father, only capable of showing affection to the inanimate objects he revered, married to her mother, a woman who needed attention above all else.
She looked down at the carpet in the hotel suite, tracing the plum and gray swirls with her eyes. “You were both young. I’m sure you both made mistakes. He wasn’t perfect — but he was my father. I just… I need some time to figure everything out.”
Silence greeted her from the other end of the phone, and Charlotte wondered if maybe she’d gone too far by speaking about one of the only subjects that was taboo to her mother.
“Fine,” her mother finally said. “But you could tell me if you’re in Boston with a man. Jake has left me, you know. You could at least keep me entertained.”
So that’s why her mother had called. Even when Charlotte had been a child she’d never been more interesting to her mother than when she was between men. The rest of the time, Charlotte could have set herself on fire and her mother would have calmly dumped a bucket of water on her flaming body while laughing coyly at her man of the hour.
“It's not my job to entertain you, Mom.” It had taken Charlotte a long time to understand the truth of it.
“Well, I hope you’re with a man,” her mom said. “A woman your age needs flesh and blood, not hundred-year-old furniture and paintings done by people long dead. You’re not getting any younger, you know.”
Charlotte sighed. “I’m hanging up now. I’ll talk to you soon.”
She was pulling the phone from her ear when she heard her mother call her name.
“Charlotte!”
“What is it, Mom?”
“I… I love you.” She suddenly sounded young and unsure. “And… I’m sorry about your father.”
34
"So we're all set for tomorrow then?" Charlotte asked.
They were lingering over espresso at Grotto, a tiny nook of a restaurant tucked below ground in Beacon Hill. Christophe hadn’t offered details about his afternoon, and she didn’t ask. She had so far avoided the questions about his profession. It simply didn’t matter when compared to the immediacy of the threat against her, the questions surrounding Baeder’s death and the possible location of Tucker’s Cross. But she knew he ran some kind of business, probably an illegal one, and she assumed that business required attention from time to time like any other.
“I think so," Christophe said. “We’ve learned all we can about Mr. Montoya through the cyber lab. We won’t know more until we speak to him in person.”
“I have to admit to being curious,” Charlotte said, dipping her spoon into the remains of the tiramisu that sat
between them on the gleaming table.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “It is curious.”
Christophe had gone back and forth with his associates in Paris, unearthing detailed background information about the man to whom Anna Muller had referred them. Even so, he seemed an odd person to have knowledge of something like Tucker’s Cross. A thirty-year-old research assistant at the Gardner Museum, he’d graduated from university in Madrid with a degree in Fine Art. He’d worked a series of small jobs for galleries in Spain before coming to Boston. The pictures they’d seen depicted Peter Montoya as a small man with dark hair and delicate, otherwise unremarkable features. The only thing remotely interesting about him was the fact that his aunt was Graciela Perez, a Spanish actress who had gained some notoriety in Hollywood fifteen years earlier as a Latina bombshell before more or less disappearing from the American movie scene.
“Do you think he’ll speak to us?” Charlotte asked.
“He’ll speak to us.”
She heard something hard in his voice, a kind of resolve that was a window into his world. She suddenly didn’t envy Peter Montoya. Didn’t envy anyone who might stand between Christophe Marchand and the things he might want.
A shiver ran up the back of her neck. She sometimes forgot that he was a dangerous man. That was a mistake. Whatever his business, it was clear that he was practiced in violence. More than that, he posed a unique danger to Charlotte. He was a man who would soak up every bit of her without regard to her well-being. Who would revel in whatever he saw in her that pleased him — until the moment when he found nothing pleasing at all.
Or that’s what she’d believed when they’d first gone to Vienna.
It had been easy then. She hadn’t known him. Hadn’t felt his touch on her skin. Didn’t know the tenderness with which he could kiss her. The passion with which he could claim her body. She didn’t know the particular softness with which he looked at her when he first opened his eyes in the morning. The way he brought her coffee in bed, sitting gently on the side of the mattress, stroking her hair until she came slowly awake.
Now she didn’t know what to think. Didn’t know who he really was.
The waiter returned with Christophe’s credit card. He signed the slip, then pulled out her chair and guided her out of the restaurant with the gentle pressure of his hand on the small of her back.
They emerged into the warm evening air. Boston’s Beacon Hill was lit with the old-fashioned lamps that dotted the sidewalks, and Christophe tucked her arm into his as they started down the street. It was a lovely part of the city, steeped in history and the stately brick buildings that had been home to Boston’s oldest and wealthiest families. The city’s traffic was a distant hum in the background, the air slightly salty from the harbor in the distance.
She leaned her head on his arm, trying to memorize the solid feel of him under her cheek, the scent that filled her with a heady combination of lust and affection and something more complicated that she didn’t dare try to name. The last five days had been a magical kind of interlude. Other than the occasional visit from Julien and the few times Christophe had left to take care of business, they’d been in a world of their own making. It was a world filled with long conversations about art and history. A world filled with lingering meals and long walks, with late night sex more erotic than any she’d ever known and lazy mornings marked by strong coffee and twisted sheets, desire still thick in the air.
She didn’t know what would happen next, but their impending meeting with Peter Montoya meant the end of Boston. She assumed it would mean the end of her and Christophe as well. She refused to let it sting. She’d known what she was getting into with Christophe Marchand. Had known she was just a passing infatuation. That he would eventually be onto his next acquisition. She was a big girl, and she had a life of her own in L.A. It was time to get back to it.
They turned onto a side street with a sharp incline and started up the old cobblestone. They were tucked away here, the street narrow, the buildings rising on either side. The street-lamps cast a soft glow, making the whole scene look like a landscape come to life. She sighed softly against his arm, and before she knew what was happening, he’d pinned her gently against the old brick of one of the buildings. His face was inches from hers, and she could feel the press of his body through their clothes.
“You sigh just like that when I sink into you,” he murmured. "Did you know that?"
She shook her head.
He lowered his mouth to her neck, inhaled, touched his lips to her neck. “It’s the loveliest sound. Like waves rushing softly onto the beach. Like the wind in the trees.”
She leaned her head back against the brick and closed her eyes, lowing herself in the warmth of his tongue darting out to touch the skin near her ear in the moment before he took her lobe in his mouth, tugged with his teeth.
“I like to watch my cock move inside you,” he said. “But I like to watch your face more. To watch your lips part as that lovely sigh escapes your mouth.”
His words were a whisper against her skin as he kissed his way along her jaw to her mouth. He was hard, his erection pressing against her belly as stopped at her mouth. She opened her eyes to find him looking at her, and a flood of wet heat bloomed between her legs. It was always like that with him. All it took was the sound of his voice, the touch of his lips, the knowledge that he wanted her. She would be ready then. Ready to feel him push into her without any preamble at all.
“Then take me to bed," she said, her voice huskier than usual.
He hesitated, looking into her eyes. She thought he saw everything then. That he saw all her loneliness and pain. That he saw every part of her, even the ones she tried to hide from herself.
He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “But then I have to stop looking at you long enough to get you home.”
She smiled, touched her lips to his. “It will be worth it. I promise.”
He groaned, pressing his lips to hers, plundering her mouth with his tongue as he pressed his cock between her legs. She snaked her arms around his neck, slipped her hands into the hair at the back of his head as she angled her mouth to give him better access. When he pulled away, they were both breathless.
“Let’s go.”
He took her hand, pulling her back onto the street.
35
He was nearly asleep when he heard the buzzing of his phone. He turned toward it quickly, not wanting to wake Charlotte, tucked into his side after a ferocious few hours of lovemaking. It was 2:32 a.m., and the name on the display read JULIEN.
He slipped out of bed and took the phone into the living room of the suite.
“What is it?”
“Sorry to call so late,” Julien said. “I made the inquiries you requested. It turned up some interesting things.”
Christophe glanced back at the bedroom door. The allure of Charlotte’s body, sprawled out and naked in his bed, was strong enough to make him want to put off any conversation about business.
“Can it wait?” he asked.
“Everything can wait.” Julien hesitated. “But you might want to hear this now.”
“Meet me in the hotel bar in ten minutes.”
He disconnected the call and went to the bathroom, gently closing the door. The light was harsh, but it was what he needed. If he was right, there wasn’t time to be sentimental — even about Charlotte Duval. And yet that’s how he felt. Like he’d been pierced in the chest with the tip of a spear. Not badly enough to kill him, but enough to weaken him. To open up an ache at the center of his body that was present when he was apart from her — and just as present when he looked at her.
She was too beautiful. Too gentle and graceful for his world.
He turned on the tap and splashed cold water on his face, then grabbed a towel and looked in the mirror as he blotted his wet skin.
“What are you doing?” he muttered.
His reflection offered no answer, but there was another voice inside
him. One who knew exactly what he was doing, even as he tried to deny it; he was falling in love with Charlotte Duval.
And that was the last thing either of them needed.
He dropped the towel on the counter and slipped into the bedroom. Charlotte had flipped onto her stomach, the sheet barely covering the pillowy rise of her ass. He looked away and pulled on his pants before he could change his mind, call Julien back, tell his second-in-command that he didn’t care what the fuck was going on in Paris. That nothing was more important than the woman in his bed.
He grabbed his shoes and shirt and left the room. He buttoned his shirt haphazardly in the living room, the lights of Boston glittering on the other side of the glass. Then he slipped on his shoes, picked up his wallet, and got into the elevator.
He took a few deep breaths as the elevator descended to the lobby. He wasn’t often afraid. He’d faced off with some of the most deadly men in France, in the world. He’d risked his life more than once, in some cases for nothing other than principle.
But he was beginning to realize the kind of brashness that had allowed him to face death so often in the past was a result of one simple thing.
He’d had nothing to lose.
He’d had nothing to lose, and therefore he risked nothing by engaging in his business, by facing fearsome men, danger, his own mortality.
Now he felt suddenly that he had quite a lot to lose. And even more now that he was under dual attack by the woman asleep in his bed, a woman he was beginning to doubt he would ever be able to let go, and by the assault she’d gently waged on his heart.
His soul.
What was more dangerous then: losing the woman who made him feel like he was breathing for the first time since he was a child? Or losing his heart, relinquishing control to that same woman? Becoming like his father who risked everything for love?
He pushed aside the question as the elevator doors opened on the lobby. He didn’t have an answer, and he didn’t want to analyze his suspicion that he might not like it when he found it.
Covenant (Paris Mob Book 1) Page 14