The woman ran up to them and reached for the baby. The paramedic said something quietly to her, and she leaned over and braced herself on her knees, breathing heavily.
The baby screamed a long wail and reached for the woman, nearly toppling out of the paramedic’s arms in her desperation.
“Ah,” the paramedic said and handed the baby off, but he convinced the woman and the children to go in the ambulance with them for a quick check-up.
The paramedics loaded the kids into the ambulance, leaving Dree and Augustine sitting on the cement together.
Dree’s coat was soggy. She asked Augustine, “She’s going to be okay, right?”
“Like I said, France has good social services. They’ll help the mother and child, and we have universal health care. They’ll all be taken care of.”
Dree held onto Augustine’s hand, and he pulled her to her feet. The tight skirt was not good for maneuvering and standing up. She wavered as she managed to stand because the dress bound her around her knees and her high heels were pretty high.
Augustine caught her around her waist again and held her against his chest to steady her. “You were amazing with her. I’m glad you were here to make sure that she was okay.”
They were lying to each other, right? So, Dree shouldn’t tell him that she was a nurse practitioner because that would be breaking the contract they had with each other.
Dree said, “You calmed her down so beautifully. It was a lot easier to make sure she was okay because I didn’t have to fight her.” Dree slipped her arms around Augustine’s tight waist. “You are going to make a good daddy someday.”
Augustine laughed. “Yes, someday. Come on. Sayyida is waiting for us at the entrance, and I know better than to keep her waiting.”
Augustine kept one arm looped around Dree’s waist as they retraced their steps back to the crystal pyramid in the center of the courtyard.
At the entrance, Augustine skirted the velvet ropes and the signs that said “Closed” in many languages and knocked on the glass door.
Over by the elevator, an oval of a woman wearing flowing layers of hijab fluttered toward the door and opened it for them. “You were supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago.”
Augustine laughed as they walked in. “I apologize for being late. May I present Dree Clark, who I vouch will absolutely not touch nor in any way molest your collections. Dree, this is my very good friend Sayyida El-Amin, who helped me facilitate a charity event here a few months ago.”
If Dree hadn’t been looking directly at Augustine, she would have missed the faint crease at the sides of his eyes and his sudden, slight confusion as expressed by the lines between his eyebrows and a small shake of his head.
He been doing that a lot lately, sometimes when they were talking, and sometimes like at the ballet last night when he been describing the music of the ballet as Mozart’s piano concertos.
She wondered what that meant.
Chapter Fourteen
It All Comes Back to Flicka
Maxence
The last time Maxence Grimaldi had been inside the Louvre, he’d watched his first love, Flicka von Hanover, dance at her wedding reception after she’d married his older brother, Pierre.
Everything was connected to Flicka that week. He’d seen her a few days before, and that had been a horrible mess.
Sayyida was saying something.
Maxence’s attention snapped back to her. He said confidently, “Yes,” even though he’d no idea what she’d said.
Sayyida stared at him. “I asked what time you’ll want to leave.”
“Oh, perhaps around one?”
“Fine. Text me on my cell, and I’ll let you out the doors, then, ‘Augustine.’” Her lowered voice made it clear that she didn’t approve of his alias.
“Thank you, Sayyida.” He took Dree’s hand and led her toward the spiral staircase that wound down into the lobby of the Louvre.
They descended, the bright Parisian sunlight streaming through the nearly seven hundred triangular panes of glass that formed the four-sided pyramid.
At Flicka’s wedding reception, he’d walked down these curling stairs, carefully placing each foot in the center of each step, as the man who announced the important people’s arrival bellowed his name across the lobby.
He’d attended the reception without a date, so his name had been announced alone, while everyone else was announced in couples. He’d meant it as a statement that he had found strength and serenity.
As he’d descended the stairs, he’d just felt pathetic.
Everything came back to Flicka, and he knew why she was on his mind.
Dree, who had a solid hold on his arm, swayed as she walked down the stairs.
Maxence placed his hand over her fingers that cupped under his elbow, making sure he could grab her if those high heels slid out from underneath her.
Dree was swaying so much because she was craning her neck to look at the transparent pyramid above them that appeared open to the blue Parisian sky and bending to survey the magnificent lobby below. The spiral staircase was built to allow people an excellent view of both the sky above and the entirety of the many levels of the Louvre that led to the different exhibition halls. The entrance had been controversial when first built because the hyper-modern steel-and-glass pyramid constructed in the middle of the ancient palace had seemed out of place. However, the effect of the open sky above and the cavernous lobby below reminded visitors that France had been a world power and had looted some of the most majestic artifacts in existence.
Maxence had many mixed feelings about France’s “glory” and the terrible effects from the colonial era he’d seen the past few years. His only, insignificant solace was the fact that his own family’s money came not from colonialism but from trade and allowing the world’s elite to gamble away their wealth in the casino.
They reached the bottom of the staircase, the soles of their shoes tapping the marble floor. Their footsteps echoed in the lobby.
Maxence turned to Dree and forced a smile onto his face. “What do you want to see first?”
She cocked her head to the side and looked up at him, hesitantly smiling in return. “What’s up with you?”
“Nothing, nothing. I’m just pleased to be back in the Louvre and seeing the collections in such a lovely, quiet environment. What do you want to see first?”
“Some paintings, I assume? I don’t know anything about art or artifacts or what’s-all in here that I’m supposed to see. You said you’ve been here a few times. Just take me around here and show me the stuff that people will ask me if I saw while I was here.”
“The Egyptian exhibit first, then, where we shall see some ancient artifacts from the dawn of civilization and a small blue hippopotamus. After that, art that includes the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Mona Lisa, because everybody has to see the Mona Lisa. It’s practically a rite of passage to fight your way through the crowd and take a picture of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Luckily, we won’t have to do the crowd part.”
Maxence steered Dree on the most efficient path to the Egyptian exhibit first. He’d been to the Louvre on many school field trips as a child and several times for charity events since. Thus, he knew his way around the labyrinth of exhibit halls, hallways, and staircases that sometimes bypassed floors and turned people around such that they became hopelessly lost.
Within minutes, they found themselves in the enormous room displaying the Processional Way of the Sphinxes, a line of the stone human-headed lions from Egypt. Several of them even had intact noses.
As they walked past the sphinxes on their tall stone boxes, Dree asked him, “Are you going to tell me what’s up with you?”
Maxence said, “There’s personal stuff floating around in my head. I don’t want to burden you with it.”
“I’m safe to tell, if you wanted to bounce it off someone. I don’t even know your real name, so it’s not like I could go and narc on you to your friends or parents or s
omething.”
Maxence laughed at that. “My parents are both dead, so I shan’t worry about you telling on me to them.”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up. I knew about your dad, but not your mom.”
“I’m not happy that they’re dead, but I’d only met them a few times that I can remember. I remember my mother being around more when I was very young, but they sent me to boarding school when I was five for kindergarten. I came home during the summers, but there were people there to see to my needs, not my parents.”
Dree stopped walking and tugged on his arm to stop him. “Your parents didn’t raise you? Then what’s even the point of having kids?”
Maxence did not feel the need to tell her again because he didn’t want her to know that. “Some people are different that way, I suppose.”
“Are you going to do that to your kids?” she asked him, and he would have described her expression as aghast.
“No, I’m not. The boarding school I attended, Le Rosey, kept me off the streets and provided a world-class education. I met my friends Arthur and Casimir there, who are closer to me than my brother. When there is a problem, I call them. When I dropped out of sight a few days ago, the pal—” He faked a coughing fit. “Police, the Monagasquay police called Casimir and Arthur rather than my brother. Le Rosey gave them to me, I suppose.”
“Sounds great.”
“I would never send a child there.”
“Oh. It was rough?”
“It was rough,” he agreed. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“You can talk to me. I would never tell anybody about whatever is messing with you. Beyond the fact that I don’t know any of your friends, I don’t tell on people, jerkface ex-boyfriends who turned out to be drug dealers not included.”
Maxence laughed again. She made him laugh. “Our exes seem to be giving us trouble this week.”
“Ah, you have ex trouble, too, huh? It seems to be going around.”
Maxence looked at the sphinxes and the hall. On a school field trip to see this very room at the Louvre when he’d been in the upper school, he, Arthur, and Casimir thought the world would be all right, and Max was already noticing Flicka von Hannover.
He said, “Everything seems to be reminding me of my previous girlfriend, Flicka. She was married in Paris just a few months ago. Her wedding reception for her family and friends was here.”
“Yeah, you said a friend of yours had held her reception here. I’ll bet that cost more than a cake from Smitty’s Grocery Store served in the church basement.”
“The lobby where we came in was set with banquet tables, a dance floor, and musicians. The seating, dining tables, and chairs, took up all the balconies and extended back into the exhibition halls. It was simply splendid. She did an amazing job planning it.”
Dree slipped her fingers down his arm and held his hand. “Regretting that you didn’t stand up and say something when the preacher asked if anybody knew why these two people should not be joined in Holy Matrimony?”
Maxence winced. “Actually, yes, but not for myself. It’s obvious that I was not Flicka’s first choice, and I would wager that I wasn’t her second choice or even her third.”
“It’s kinda weird, the way you talk about it like that. In America, two people date for a while, fall in love, and decide to get married. You’re almost talking about it like she had the church booked, so she lined up the guys in order and took the first guy in line, but there was a whole line of guys who wanted to lock her down. It sounds almost medieval or like Jane Austen.”
Max was shaking his head at her, but she was right. “I hang out with some old-fashioned people.”
“I grew up the old-fashioned way, too. Around the sheep farm, we sewed our own clothes, canned vegetables and berries from the garden for the winter, fed our leftovers to the chickens and gathered the eggs, and sewed our old clothes into quilts.”
That was not the old-fashioned way that Maxence had grown up, but he wasn’t going to tell Dree that.
She said, “I’m good at sewing and quilting. I was working on an appliqué top before Francis stole everything. I wonder what happened to it.” She turned back to him. “Anyway, Flicka.”
Maxence gazed around the room, inspecting the stolen artifacts. “She and I dated for about a year, quite a while ago. It was on and off, but I felt like we’d end up together. There was always an edge to our relationship for me, that the long-term was the point of it.”
“Oh, yeah. I get that. When I was first dating Francis, only the first couple of dates I felt like, hey, this is a date, and now it’s over. After a month or two, it seemed inevitable that I was going to marry him.”
“Yes, that’s it. Our relationship and marriage felt inevitable, but it wasn’t.”
Dree sighed and touched her chest. “Yeah, I get it.”
“When we broke up, it felt temporary. It felt like a break. She was too young, and I knew that when I first started going after her. She’s four years younger than I am.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“Oh. I’m twenty-five, so that’s five years.”
“At the time I dated her, four years was a large gulf. We stayed friends. We traveled together afterward with groups of friends. There were house parties where we were invited for a weekend or a week, and she and I would stay up talking to all hours of the night about what we wanted to do in life and how we felt the world should be. We were aligned on everything. It felt like we were still us.”
Dree’s naughty grin was hysterical. “Were you two having ex-sex at these house parties?”
Maxence rolled his eyes and then studied the ground. “When we were dating, she was too young for that. The only times I slept with her were after we’d broken up, when we traveled together in those groups and were working on charity projects together, during the last few years. For her, I think, it was an affectionate friends-with-benefits situation. I’m not sure who her first was, but I know it wasn’t me.”
Dree’s grin looked forced, but it looked like she meant it to looked forced. “Oh, ouch.”
“It wasn’t any of my business, and I didn’t make it any of my business.”
Dree raised one of her pale eyebrows at him. “For a guy who was raised the old-fashioned way, you’re pretty evolved.”
Maxence raised both his hands. “I try not to be an asshole.”
“An excellent life philosophy.”
“So, about a year and a half ago, Flicka was suddenly dating my older brother.”
Dree’s eyes inflated. “Again, ouch.”
“I’m not even sure how it happened. She puts on this charity benefit every year in London. The one year that I didn’t go, other people told me that she looked upset and was refusing to dance the opening waltz. She has an older brother who usually escorts her to things like that, but he was evidently not available that year. So, they said she looked upset, and my brother Pierre rushed in for the rescue.”
Dree rolled her eyes. “Of course, he was right there.”
“Yep, Pierre was right there, waiting to swoop in. I’m the one with the Galahad complex—”
“Like when you rescue buxom blondes who accidentally incite a riot at the Buddha Bar?”
“Precisely. It’s a hobby. Some people collect stamps, and some people watch birds. I collect women who need help, and I am always right there, ready to get my ass in trouble whenever there’s a damsel in distress who needs rescuing.”
Dree stepped forward, still smirking, and slipped her arms around his waist. “I’m kind of glad you have this little Galahad problem of yours.”
He settled his arms around her because as much as Maxence liked a woman on her knees with his dick in her mouth, this hug meant everything to him in that moment. Dree’s voluptuous body was a cushion of comfort. “I think I may have made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”
“Rescuing me? I know that I’m no prize like this Fli
cka chica, but I would hope that you wouldn’t think—”
“No, I don’t regret rescuing you, my silly little goose.”
“The mafia guy’s wife?”
“Not her, either. Simone just needed a little support and a ride to the airport. I’m glad she found me. Between Simone and you, I feel like a halfway-decent human being. Not entirely decent human being, but maybe half of one.”
Dree pulled back in his arms and looked him in the eyes. “Jesus, Augustine. What happened?”
Maxence gathered her back into his arms because he couldn’t bear to see the look in her eyes when he admitted this. “I think I left Flicka somewhere I shouldn’t have. I think I should have thrown her over my shoulder if necessary and taken her out of there, but she told me not to. She told me directly and in no uncertain terms to leave her there.”
Dree disentangled herself from his arms and led him over to one of the low benches where people sat to sketch the Egyptian artifacts. “What the hell happened?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I know that Flicka left my brother a few months after she married him. She obtained a divorce in Nevada in the US, but there is a great deal of controversy as to whether the divorce is valid in Monagasquay.”
Max couldn’t believe he was still saying Monagasquay.
Dree said, “A few months? That’s fast.”
“She was right to leave him.” Max’s mind recoiled. His mouth could not articulate what had happened, nor could he give voice to his horror at not being there to stop it or at least beating the living shit out of Pierre that night. “A few days ago, the day before I came to Paris and met you, Pierre sent me up to Geneva to try to convince her to reconcile with him. He told me it was all a misunderstanding and I should try to convince Flicka to return to Pierre and the marriage.”
Dree shrugged. “I don’t think avoiding divorce is a bad thing, unless there were some pretty extenuating circumstances.”
Maxence flinched inwardly. “There were extenuating circumstances. After I heard her side of what happened, I think she was right to leave him.”
Rogue Page 16