They hadn’t taken two steps when a high, piping voice stopped them.
“But first my fifty francs, no? Me, I have business I must attend to.”
Doc turned back, wrenching his attention away from his bedraggled, nearly naked fiancée to survey the boy. The youngster cocked his head and waited expectantly, his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his grubby shorts and a confident expression on his freckled face.
Malnourished, Doc noted in a swift mental list. Undersized for his age, which was about eleven or twelve. A faint scar on his chin that probably hadn’t come from falling off a bike. Tough as shoe leather, if the cocky expression on his face was any indication.
“Fifty francs?” Doc asked. “For what?”
“For fishing mademoiselle out of the sea.”
At Doc’s quick frown, the boy gave a little wave of one hand. “She wades ashore some distance from here, you understand, and I bring her to the hotel. Fifty francs is a small fee, no? For such a service?”
Reaching into his pocket, David withdrew his wallet and pulled out a hundred-franc note. “Merci.”
To his surprise, a white-faced, trembling Paige pushed his hand away before he could pass the bill to the youth.
“No.”
Her voice wavered and almost broke on the single syllable. His protective instincts soaring, David moved to take her into his arms again.
“No!” she repeated, backing away.
Sudden, swift fear curled in Doc’s belly. Although she appeared unhurt and had walked into the suite unassisted, something must have happened to make her shy away from him like that. Exerting immense control, he remained still. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Before I let you pay my debts for me, I think you’d better explain—” She swallowed and darted a quick look at Maggie’s bare legs and scantily clad body. “I think you’d better explain what you’re doing here, in this woman’s suite.”
Cursing to himself, Doc realized that he’d made a tactical error. He, the precise, flawless engineer, who always thought problems through step by step before acting, who never made mistakes, had screwed up. Royally. He’d let his concern for Paige drive clear out of his mind the fact that she had no idea why he was here, in “Meredith Ames’s” suite.
And he couldn’t tell her.
He met Maggie’s eyes in swift, silent communication and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, determined not to involve Paige in this any more than she already was. Still, the agent in him had to draw whatever she knew out of her.
“We’ll talk about what I’m doing here later,” he said. “Right now, you need to tell me what happened.”
“No, I think we’d better talk about it now,” she insisted, squaring her shoulders under the gray wool suit coat.
Despite himself, Doc felt heat spear through his belly as her small movement threatened to dislodge the thin strip of gold once more.
Rigidly he controlled the urge to reach out and tuck the folds of his jacket across her front. He’d seen Paige in less than she now wore, he reminded himself. He’d caressed and kissed her soft flesh a number of times in the past year. Not as often as he’d wanted to, but he’d deliberately held himself back. He hadn’t wanted to overwhelm her, to frighten her with the passion he kept ruthlessly in check. She was so shy with him, so delicate in her responses.
Yet seeing her there, with that barbaric band around her breasts and her eyes flashing a challenge he’d never seen in them before, he had difficulty remembering that this was Paige. Sweet, shy Paige.
“I can’t explain it,” he replied in an even tone. “Not now.”
Henri gave a small, derisive snort and lifted one red brow. “Me, I can.”
“Keep out of this, half-pint,” Maggie murmured, jerking at the back of his ragged, less-than-pristine navy sweater.
Doc ignored the two of them. “You’ll just have to trust me,” he said quietly.
When she hesitated, her eyes searching his with desperate need, he smiled reassuringly.
“Come on, sweetheart, we’ll sort this out later. Right now we need to talk about what happened.”
Ever afterward, Paige would wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t used just that tone with her, as though he were speaking to a recalcitrant child.
If he hadn’t assumed she would meekly comply with his soft but unmistakable order.
If she hadn’t seen the swift, silent communication between David, her David, and this sophisticated, elegant…female.
It galled Paige no end that she’d actually liked Meredith! That she’d come to her for help after losing her passport and her money. That she hadn’t wanted to contact David, because she hadn’t been ready to face him yet.
She was ready now. Jerking her arm out of his hold, she lifted her chin defiantly.
“I’d like an explanation, David. Now.”
He blinked, looking as surprised as if a pet kitten had suddenly arched its back and dug its claws into his hand. Over her head, he sent Meredith a quick, puzzled look.
When she saw the exchange, hot, fierce jealousy seared through Paige. It was emotion she hadn’t ever felt before where David was concerned. In its wake came another, even more shattering emotion. Pain. Pure, unadulterated pain.
She’d been right.
In those moments perched high above Cannes, in that little turnout, when she slipped her engagement ring from her finger, she’d been right.
She wasn’t woman enough for this man.
In her heart, she believed David, her David, had some logical explanation for being in this suite. In her soul, she knew he wasn’t the kind of man to dally with one woman while he was engaged to another.
But that quick glance, that unspoken communication between the two of them, told Paige that David shared a special bond with Meredith Ames. She was a part of his life Paige hadn’t known about, for some reason. A part of himself she’d often sensed that he held back. A part that, despite the fierce, searing kiss of a few moments ago, he still kept separate from her.
“Paige…” he began, once more in that placating tone she suddenly despised.
“Never mind! It doesn’t matter anymore.” Blinking furiously to dispel a sudden sheen of tears, she lifted her chin. “I’m sorry I arrived in Cannes early and disrupted your…your business conference. I’ll let you get back to it.”
Spinning around on her one platform heel, she limped toward the door. “Come on, Henri. I’ll get the francs to pay you from the American Express office.”
“Dammit, Paige! Wait!”
She flashed him a furious glance as he planted one big hand against the painted door and prevented her exit.
“Get rid of the kid,” he instructed Meredith tersely, then took Paige’s arm in a hold that wasn’t quite as gentle as before.
She started to resist, but one look at his face quelled her brief spurt of rebellion. She’d never seen David look so hard. Or so determined. Biting her lip, she allowed him to lead her a little way into the suite.
“Here, Henri.” Meredith shoved a bill into the boy’s hand and gave him a little push toward the door.
His birdlike black eyes darted from one adult to the other, then fastened on Paige. “I am often at the telephone kiosk at the corner of the Croisette and the Allées de la Liberté. The kiosk is my headquarters, you understand. You will find me there, yes? If you need me.”
Paige swallowed. “Yes. Thank you.”
He lifted his hand and rubbed the bill between his fingers. “I thank you, mademoiselle.”
With a wide grin and another quick glance at Meredith’s legs, he was gone.
For a long moment after the door closed behind the boy, no one moved. It was as though they were all measuring each other, mentally adjusting to the unfamiliar personalities that had just emerged.
David, as Paige might have expected, recovered first. His hand gentled on her arm, and his gray blue eyes shaded with concern as they swept over her.
“Sit down
, sweetheart, and tell us what happened.”
Mutely Paige sank down on a damask-rose satin settee swirling with ornate curves and exquisite detailing.
David sat beside her. Reaching out, he took her cold hand in both of his and began to rub some warmth into it.
Meredith curled a leg under her and occupied a rose-and-green patterned armchair.
Confused, hurting, and close to the tears she’d held at bay until this moment, Paige stared down at David’s large, square hands. Those blunt-tipped fingers had worked such magic on her body. Those palms had shaped her breasts and her waist and her future. Now she had no future. Not the one she’d envisioned with David, anyway.
With a fresh wave of pain, she tried to tug her hand free. David’s fingers suddenly tightened on hers.
“Where’s your ring?” he asked. His face subtly altered, taking on stark planes and rigid angles. “Did those bastards take it?”
She blinked, startled by the savage fury in his voice.
“Did they hurt you?”
“Did who hurt me?”
His jaw worked. “You can tell me, sweetheart. What did they do to you?”
“They?”
“Let her tell us what happened, Doc,” Meredith interjected.
The quiet words tore at Paige’s soul. If she’d needed any proof that the man she loved and the woman she’d admired during their brief encounter in the boutique shared a special bond, that casual nickname was it. She couldn’t imagine any of David’s associates at the engineering firm where they both worked calling him “Doc.” His impressive credentials and professional stature were such that everyone, from suppliers to the president of the firm, regarded him with a respect bordering on awe.
As chief of the technical library, Paige had been more than a little intimidated the first time she’d been summoned to David’s office. Especially since she’d overcharged his department by several hundred dollars for a publication he’d requested.
She’d been equally overwhelmed when he followed up that first meeting with several visits to her crowded little work center. So overwhelmed, she hadn’t even realized he was asking her to dinner one drizzly Saturday morning, until he tilted her chin and smiled down at her in a way that made her stutter in confusion.
Correctly interpreting that stammering reply as an affirmative, he’d picked her up that night. And the next. Shortly afterward, he’d begun a slow, measured courtship that left Paige simmering with anticipation for each new plateau in their relationship and aching with loneliness during his frequent business trips abroad.
With a slow sinking sensation, she wondered how many of those business trips David had taken with Meredith Ames. And just what their relationship was.
She glanced at the other woman now, cataloging her vitality, her glowing beauty. Paige’s hurt became a dull, throbbing ache.
“What happened?” Meredith asked. “After you left the boutique?”
“A limousine pulled up,” Paige replied, with a small, defeated sigh. “No, not a limo. A Rolls-Royce. It was sent for you, you know. The chauffeur called me Mademoiselle Ames several times.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“I tried to explain, but I was so surprised that my little bit of French deserted me.” She made a little grimace of distaste. “Besides, the driver was rather rude about it all.”
David’s hand tightened on hers. “Rude?”
“Yes. He practically pushed me into the back seat. Then there was a glass partition between us, and I couldn’t even talk to him until we pulled up at the marina.”
“What marina?”
“I don’t know. One of the ones along the Croisette.”
“And then?”
“And then he gestured toward the boat. Since he didn’t seem to understand me and I couldn’t get through to him, I decided to explain the situation to whoever was on the boat. But when I tried to walk up the ramp in these shoes, I fell off.”
“What?”
“You did what?”
The simultaneous questions jumped at her from opposite directions.
The swift, startled look that passed between David and Meredith set Paige’s teeth on edge. These two might not be lovers, but they certainly could communicate with an economy of words. A tiny, healthy anger began to nibble at the edges of her hurt.
She pulled her hand free of David’s tight hold and wove her fingers together in her lap.
“I fell off the ramp,” she repeated through stiff lips. “The gangplank. When I was walking up it, onto the yacht.”
“What yacht?”
“I don’t know. A big one. With white sides.”
“Did you see the name?” David asked.
“Or the registration number?” Meredith added.
“There were some numbers painted on the side of the boat. Three-six-one something.” Her forehead scrunched. “Maybe it was six-one-three. Or three—” Embarrassed by the disability that had dogged her all her life, Paige clamped her lips shut.
“Never mind,” David replied. “We’ll check all possible combinations. What happened after you fell off the gangplank? It’s important. Tell us everything, exactly as it happened.”
Gripping her hands together in her lap, she recounted the details of her unexpected swim in the Mediterranean.
“The tide swept me under the dock. There were so many boats berthed at the marina that when I finally surfaced, I didn’t know where I was. I could hear shouting some distance away. I thought I heard a splash or two, like oars hitting the water. But by that time, I’d started swimming for shore. I had to shrug out of my jacket, and I lost my purse, but I made it.”
David’s brows drew into a dark slash, but he didn’t interrupt.
“That’s when Henri came along,” Paige finished. “On his scooter. He saw me wading through the water and helped me to shore. I…I remembered that Meredith had told the saleslady to send her packages to the Carlton, so I asked Henri to bring me here.”
With a challenging tilt to her chin, she met Meredith’s eyes. “Other than David, you were the only person I knew in Cannes.”
David shifted beside her, drawing her attention back to him as he stared at her in some puzzlement. “Why didn’t you just come to me? You knew I was staying in this hotel, as well.”
It was here, the moment Paige had dreaded and worried about and cried over for weeks. She wet suddenly dry lips, unable to speak.
“Why didn’t you come to me, Paige?” A small frown etched across his forehead. “And you still haven’t told me what happened to your ring.”
In the small silence that followed, Meredith uncurled her long legs and rose. “Why don’t I go get dressed?”
Neither of the two people facing each other on the settee paid any attention to her as she moved across the wide, luxuriously furnished sitting room. The tall double bedroom doors closed behind her.
Paige ran her tongue along her lower lip, her whole being focused on the man beside her. She let her eyes drift over the strong planes of his face, storing up memories of the lines at the corners of his eyes, the slight bump in the bridge of his nose, the square chin.
“My emerald ring is in my purse, David,” she said slowly. “Which is resting somewhere at the bottom of the bay right now. I took it off before I arrived in Cannes.”
“Why?”
“Because I was going to give it back to you.”
He went completely still.
Her heart hammering, Paige searched his face. She thought she saw confusion, and hurt, and a sudden fierce denial, flicker in his intent eyes, but in typical David fashion, he didn’t express any of that. Instead, he sought to understand the root cause of the problem.
“Why?” he asked again.
Paige groped for some way to explain the feelings that had haunted her for weeks. “Because we have different ideas of marriage. To me, it’s a communion between two beings, an equal partnership, with nothing held back.” Her gaze flickered to the closed bedroom door.
“To you, it’s obviously something else.”
“I see. You think that I—”
He broke off as the door flew open and Meredith burst into the sitting room.
“I just went to draw the curtains and saw Paige’s little friend, Henri, on the sidewalk below. He’s talking to someone who looks very much like the chauffeur of the Rolls.”
“Hell!” David surged to his feet. “Stay with Paige. And lock the door behind me.”
In a few swift strides, he was out the door and into the corridor.
Meredith turned the dead bolt behind him and hooked the old-fashioned chain into the guard for good measure. Without speaking, she crossed the wide expanse of carpeted floor and flattened her back against the wall beside the open balcony doors. She peered out for long, tense moments, while Paige watched in growing confusion.
After a few seconds, Meredith shook her head in disgust. “I can’t see anything from here. The palm trees block the sidewalk.”
She came back to the grouping of graceful carved rosewood furniture and dropped into the chair she’d vacated just moments before.
“What’s going on?” Paige asked. “Why did David rush out like that?”
“We’d like to know who the chauffeur’s working for.”
“You don’t know? I thought…I thought the driver came to the boutique for you.”
“He did.”
“But you don’t know who he’s working for?”
Struggling to make sense of the confusing situation, Paige tucked a strand of limp white gold hair behind her ears. “Who are you?”
The tall, self-assured woman hesitated, then gave a small shrug. “I told you. I’m Meredith Ames.”
“How do you know David?”
“That’s something he’ll explain to you.”
Frowning, Paige stared at Meredith, then did a slow survey of the opulent suite.
“What do you do? For a living?”
Maggie stifled a groan. She hated having to perpetuate this deception on a woman she was coming to like, for herself as much as for the fact that she was Doc’s fiancée. Had been Doc’s fiancée. Whatever. But she had no choice, not if there was any chance at all that she could maintain her cover and salvage what was left of her mission.
Dangerous to Know Page 5