I disguised my disappointment with a forced smile. “I’ll be happy to come back in the morning if that’s better for you,” I said, already dreading getting back in my car.
“No need. My brother Marc is here. He’ll show you the documents and try to answer whatever questions you have.”
“I hope it’s not an inconvenience for him,” I said. I gratefully accepted a balloon glass and gulped a long sip of wine.
“Well,” she said, lowering her voice, “if I may speak off the record?”
“Of course.”
“Marc’s mortified by our family history. He wishes I hadn’t agreed to speak with you at all, but he’ll get over it now that you’re here. He’ll have to.”
I could barely refrain from rolling my eyes. For God’s sake, I wasn’t a gotcha journalist from some sleazy tabloid. “I promise I won’t bite,” I said.
“I hope you won’t take it personally. He doesn’t tell anyone the stock our mother came from, not that any of us mention it in casual conversation. I think it’s a burden on him, having a relative so well-known for perversions and stints in prison. It’s like having a murderer in the family.”
Don’t tell me I’m going to have to coddle some pampered rich kid with a conscience. “Times have changed,” I said. “Nobody holds a person responsible for crimes committed by a relative two-hundred years ago.”
“You know that, and I know that, but Marc has his own view of how –” She looked up and pulled her thin lips into a smile. “There he is! Come say hello, Marc. This is Sophie Quinn, the writer we were expecting? It’s her first time in France.”
I turned my head, following her nervous gaze to the other side of the room. What the hell…? My first instinct was to stop breathing. My second was to curse myself for not wearing a sexy dress and high heels.
Her brother – I assumed it was her brother, not a demigod or a jet lag-induced hallucination – leaned against the doorjamb wearing battered, hip-slung jeans and a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up. His eyes were an arresting sterling gray, his gaze piercing and direct. He was about thirty, a man in the prime of his masculine gorgeousness. And gorgeous he was, with a strong, straight nose and dark brows that sat low over his eyes. His thick, wavy brown hair hadn’t seen scissors in at least three months. Though his lips weren’t full, they had an aristocratic shape that gave him an arrogant expression. That arrogance was directed straight at me, along with a smirk I shouldn’t have found outrageously sexy but did.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. I was horrified to hear my voice quaver. My heart throbbed wildly in my ears.
“Pleasure,” he said, although his flat tone told me it was anything but.
And no wonder. I couldn’t have looked less professional or prepared. My blouse and knee-length skirt were rumpled after hours in transit, and only my manicure kept me from a complete grooming disaster. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” I said, taking a step toward him.
“Actually, I didn’t.”
After an awkward pause, he shook my hand. His forearms were lean but muscular, gold from the sun, with prominent veins under the skin. He squeezed my palm with a force that made me gasp and raise my eyes to his. Tension crackled between us, preventing me from looking away. His eyes were stunning, but it was the emotions in his gaze that transfixed me – awareness, annoyance, a flicker of recognition. But recognition of what? We’d just met, and I knew nothing about him except two things: he was the most criminally good-looking man I’d ever seen, and he already despised me.
He pulled his hand away abruptly and ran it through his hair. Dazed, I took a quick swig of wine and almost poured the rest down the front of my shirt.
Eleanor let out an embarrassed laugh. “What Marc means to say is, we’re happy to help. I’m leaving in a minute, so I’ll go and get the papers. We weren’t sure you were coming tonight so I put everything away.” She filled a wineglass and held it out to her brother. “Have a drink, Marc. For the love of God.”
Without a word, he took it and sat on the overstuffed sofa. When Eleanor left the room, I took a chair near the fireplace. Thunder exploded above the house, giving the situation an almost comic feeling of impending doom.
“Do you live in this area year-round?” I asked in a ragged voice. I sounded like I’d been screaming over loud music in a bar all night.
“No, I don’t.”
When I realized he wasn’t going to elaborate, I pressed on. “Is this your sister’s house?”
“My mother spent summers here. She died last fall. We’re just going through her things now in anticipation of selling the place.”
“I’m very sorry,” I said.
He flashed a brief smile but said nothing. Rain began to beat against the windows. I could hear Eleanor’s heels drumming back and forth over my head.
I swallowed hard. “So, you’re in London most of the time?”
“Paris,” he said.
“Oh? What do you do there?”
“I invest in technology companies, mostly in Europe and Brazil.”
“Any in the United States?” His mouth tensed. Okay, so I was firing a lot of questions at him. This is what I did for a living. What did he expect?
“Several. I went to university at Stanford. That’s where my investment career started ten years ago.”
“Did you like California?”
He raised his eyebrows as if surprised I’d asked. “I did, although my sister says I talk like an American now.”
My gaze dropped as he began to shake one bare foot. Olive-skinned, sloped at the arch, and perfectly formed, it moved slowly up and down with a hypnotic circular rhythm. The sight of it ignited a disturbance inside me, a restless wave that began in my chest and ended in my fingers, only to start again in a dizzying loop.
“And you, Ms. Quinn? What do you think?”
Startled, I glanced up. “Sorry?”
“Do I talk like an American? Being one yourself, you would know.”
My mouth went dry. Wasn’t I supposed to be the one putting him on the spot? I couldn’t think of anything to say – in fact, something about him made thinking impossible. “You’re not like any American I’ve ever met,” I finally answered.
“I’ll take that a compliment,” he said. “Though I’m not entirely sure it is.”
He smiled faintly, his eyes penetrating me to the core. Thanks, Katherine, I thought, squirming in my chair. What a miserable assignment this is turning out to be.
“So you’re here for the first time all by yourself,” he said. “It doesn’t make your boyfriend nervous, sending you off alone to meet perfect strangers?”
Now it was my turn to feel interrogated. “No.” Please drop it. Please don’t ask –
“Oh? Why not?”
Shoot me now. “Because I don’t have one. Um, anymore.” Pathetic. I had to get much better at lying.
“Long story?”
I gave him a subtle eye-roll. “Very.”
His faint smile turned to a grin. He looked positively pleased, and I knew why. It was instant payback for asking too many personal questions. Bastard. “And you?” I asked, turning the tables. “How does your girlfriend feel about strange journalists coming to your house?”
He pretended to ponder my question. “Girlfriend singular, or plural?”
“Either.”
Expression flat, he stared directly into my eyes. “It doesn’t matter, because you see, I’ve driven them all away.”
I was too taken aback to think of a snappy answer. “You work too much?” I asked, my voice thin.
His face darkened, making me shiver. “Oh, Ms. Quinn. If only it were that simple.”
“Here we are,” Eleanor said, saving me by bustling in with a leather binder. “This is everything. I’ll leave it here and Marc will tell you some of the history.”
“Great,” I said, trying to sound upbeat. “Thank you.”
“I doubt you’ll get through it all tonight, but you’re welcome to
come back tomorrow morning. I leave for Paris with my family in the afternoon.”
“You’ll get soaked going out now,” Marc told his sister. “Why not wait until the rain dies down?”
“I get poured on in London all the time,” she scoffed. “My car’s just outside.”
She shook my hand and thanked me for coming. “Don’t get up. I hope we’ll see you in the morning. Just drop by.” Without looking at her brother, she said, “Walk me out, would you, Marc?”
He stood and went after her, leaving his wine on the coffee table. I dreaded being alone with him all night, and it was obvious he felt the same way about me. I sat up straighter and took a long breath. I might not like it at the moment, but I’d fought hard for this job. If I couldn’t handle it, Katherine would find someone else to send around the world interviewing sickeningly good-looking and unsettling men. Surely I could endure a few hours by myself with the distant relative of a deranged sadist. I just needed to have a good attitude about it.
When Marc came back, his expression had changed. “My sister just told me I’m a terrible host,” he said with a boyish half-smile. “She insists I make you stay for dinner.”
I was grudgingly prepared for an hour of looking at manuscripts, but dinner? This day couldn’t possibly get any worse. “I appreciate that, but it isn’t necessary.”
“Yes, it is. I can’t let you think that bad manners are our stock in trade. First the Marquis de Sade and now his grandson seven times removed. I’m surprised you haven’t stormed out.” He picked up his glass and took a long sip. “I hope pasta’s okay. I wasn’t expecting to entertain tonight.”
Beneath his self-deprecating tone, I heard amusement, as if he were toying with me. He seemed to get a kick out of making me uncomfortable. “I won’t impose on you,” I said. “If my flight hadn’t been late, I wouldn’t have bothered you at all.”
“You’re not –” He winced slightly. “I’m sorry I’ve given you the impression that you’re imposing. Eleanor agreed to the article, after all. You’re just doing your job.”
Finally, a tiny bit of humility. “You aren’t obligated to show me the manuscripts,” I said. “The article will be different without them, but Sade’s life offers plenty of material either way.”
“Oh, but I am obligated. You don’t know my sister. She can be very forceful when she wants to be.”
“I noticed. But if it were up to you?”
“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be related to a criminal like Sade.”
Though he smiled, his eyes were somber. For the first time I understood what it must be like to live in the shadow of someone who wasn’t just famous, but scandalous. I could imagine the embarrassment it must cause Marc to be connected with such a vulgar history.
Is that what made him so prickly? Did he resent me for forcing him to talk about it? Or did he just like sparring with every woman he met, using charisma and manipulation to knock her off her game?
I turned down his offer of dinner one more time, but he stood his ground, refusing to show me the documents unless I agreed. He’d left me no choice but to give in. “All right,” I said, pushing down my anxiety. “Dinner and documents.”
“In that order,” he said. “Follow me to the kitchen.”
While I sat at the farmhouse table with my laptop, Marc threw together a meal using ingredients from the pantry and garden – pasta with garlic, fresh tomatoes, and herbs, and an arugula salad with sliced bell pepper. Bare feet brushing the floor, he moved with surprising grace for someone so tall and well-built.
“Sparkling water okay?” he asked, pushing his hair back from his forehead.
“Yes, thank you.”
He set down plates and sat across from me in one of the charmingly mismatched chairs. “Bon appétit,” he said, emptying the rest of the Bordeaux into our glasses.
I ate despite the pit in my stomach, a nervous, expectant feeling I could find no reason for. Though we made small talk about France and my work at Wanderlust, his eyes were so penetrating I could hardly look at him. Everything he said had an undercurrent I could hear, but couldn’t understand.
“You don’t seem like the sort of woman who writes about sadists,” he said, drizzling balsamic vinegar over his salad. “Are you?”
There was that slight smile again, and the same swooping feeling in my chest. “I’m a journalist on assignment. I write what we think our audience wants to read.”
“What do you know about my family?” he asked.
I swallowed a bite of pasta. “Just what my editor told me, which isn’t much, to be honest.”
“We’re very private people, but Eleanor wants to publicize the manuscripts before they go to auction. We’d like to keep most of our personal details out of the article, but anything related to Sade is fair game.”
“Not many people know the manuscripts even exist,” I said. “My editor didn’t until the auction house wrote about them.”
The tip of his tongue darted distractingly over the corner of his mouth. “Was the article your idea?”
“It was Katherine’s. The two-hundredth anniversary of Sade’s death just passed as you know, and sex sells, even to people who love to travel. Maybe especially.”
“Did you have to take the assignment?” he asked.
“I wanted to,” I said. “I’m going on vacation to Amsterdam while I’m here.”
The truth was that Katherine could have asked me to investigate killer snakes in the Outback and I’d have jumped at the chance. I would do almost anything to boost my career and escape from my ex-boyfriend, Trevor, whose incessant phone calls and surprise appearances at my apartment were wearing me down. I could still hear his voice blaring over the intercom as I stood at my door the night before my trip. “Sophie, let me in all right? I’ll wait as long as I have to! Christ’s sake, we gotta talk about this!”
Eventually he’d given up and left. Five days in Europe hadn’t seemed like enough time away, so I’d tacked on a short vacation in the hope that he’d be gone from my life when I got back.
“So, you don’t mind sifting through the past of a brute like Sade?” Marc asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “To me, this is an article about a historical figure. Our audience doesn’t want to read about the same old tourist stops. I wouldn’t come here to write about cathedrals unless there was a twist.”
I watched him twirl linguine neatly around his fork. His fingers were long and elegant, their movements mesmerizing. “I don’t think many people know about the chateau where Sade committed his sins,” he said. “It might be worth mentioning in your story. My father still lives there. It’s a crumbling old place but he’ll never give it up. You can practically still hear the screams coming out of the walls – not really, but it does have a lot of character. I trust you won’t print our address. I’d hate to have to entertain tour groups.”
He smiled. Time and the wine had lowered his guard just enough that I could glimpse who he was.
“I’ll mention the region where the chateau is located,” I said. “No more than that.”
“You’ll be going to the prison where Sade was locked up, won’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“The man spent almost half his life in jails or asylums. You’d think he’d have learned.”
“Half his life? How long was he free in between his –” A strange click interrupted me and the room went black. “What happened?” I asked.
“The electricity’s gone out,” Marc said. “It happens every time we have a storm. Stay where you are, all right?”
“I won’t move.”
I heard him get up and feel his way across the kitchen. Drawers opened and shut, their contents rattling. “I thought there was a torch somewhere,” he said. Eventually I heard the scraping of a wooden match. His square-jawed face flared into view as he held the flame to a candle, lighting one after another until the room was bathed in a wavering white glow.
“The perfect way to display my so
rdid family history, don’t you think?” he said, clearing our plates. “Maybe this will make it all seem a little more romantic.”
Grabbing the binder of documents from the marble island, he took the chair beside me. Jet lag and flashes of lightning gave everything an eerie sense of unreality. The candles created black shadows from the wineglasses and Marc’s profile, and for a second I had a strange urge to touch his arm. Something was wrong with me. I felt dizzy and my heart was fluttering, as if I were coming down with the flu. But then his fingertips brushed my wrist – so lightly he probably didn’t notice – and I realized with panic what the feeling was.
Lust. Chest-heaving, toe-curling, nipples-at-attention lust, for someone I couldn’t possibly have and who didn’t even like me. It was the kind of desire I’d experienced only in secret fantasies, by myself under the sheets with the door locked. No mortal man had ever provoked anything like it until now, in the middle of an interview for an important article. How stupid could I be?
If I concentrated on work, it might go away. Which I hoped to hell it would, or I was in deep trouble. Taking notes on my laptop as Marc spoke, I tried desperately to focus on his words.
“Sade’s papers were lost for a hundred and fifty years, until the 1940’s,” he said, angling his chair to face me.
I pinned my eyes to my keyboard. “How were they discovered?”
It was a convoluted story, made even harder to follow by the wine I kept drinking. During World War Two, Nazis ransacked the family chateau, the same one Marc’s father lived in now. When the family returned after the war, they found the library scattered with manuscripts that had been hidden for more than a century. They thought they were trash until they saw letters from French writers and politicians. “Not to mention the explicit musings about sex,” Marc said. “Those really grabbed their interest.”
Sex. The word sounded so precise and delicate against his tongue, I longed to hear it again. “I’m sure they did,” I said. “Go on.”
“They didn’t know what they’d found until my great-uncle came across a biography of Sade – months later, by chance – that confirmed his suspicions. He knew they were distantly related, but had no idea how much had been left behind.”
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