“So, you heard her out. No harm, no foul.”
“I don’t think she was safe where I left her.”
“Look, Augustine,” Dree said, shaking her head. “Did she get herself into another abusive situation? Some women like abusive men. It breaks your heart, and it has made me so angry at people sometimes. I don’t want to say more than that, because we promised not to tell each other the important things. There have been times when I’ve tried to counsel women not to go back to an abusive man, but I couldn’t convince them not to.”
“I didn’t say Pierre had abused her.”
“You didn’t need to. It was obvious.”
“I’m not sure what was going on with Flicka three days ago. I asked her to leave with me. I told her that if she stood up and walked out with me right then, I could get her to safety. She wouldn’t do it.”
Dree took both of his hands and held them, and Maxence held on as tightly as he could without hurting her. Everything about Flicka had been dragging him down for days.
He said, “I got word about where she was to her older brother. He raised her and has always protected her. Pierre knows where she is, too. Either Wulfram or Pierre could get her out if they wanted to or if she wanted them to. I don’t have the resources to order a rescue like that. Neither one of them has done it yet. The only thing I can figure out is that she told them not to or there’s some other reason why they’re not.”
Dree gripped his hands more tightly, and she looked straight into his eyes like this was a very important question. “Is there anything else that you can think of that you can do now?”
He ran his hand through his hair. “I could go back to Geneva and take her hand and walk her out of there.”
“You said you tried that before, and she said no.”
“But she might’ve changed her mind, or she might say yes this time. Maybe I can do something differently so that she’ll come with me this time.”
“I cannot tell you how many times I have said something exactly like that, how many times I thought that if I just argued longer or said something better, that they would leave an abusive man.”
“I don’t think she was in danger of abuse there. Indeed, where she was, she was safe from my brother, who is a damn sociopath. I’m just not sure what was going on.”
“So, just to clarify, she was not with your brother, the sociopath. She was somewhere safe from the actual sociopath.”
“I’m having trouble explaining, but I think she was being kept there against her will.”
“Was she in jail?”
“No, she was in a mansion on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.”
“Sounds like a pretty fancy place to be kidnapped to.”
“It did seem a lot better than the usual kidnapping prisons, like a rusty tanker ship out in the Mediterranean somewhere.”
“That seems oddly specific. Whose house was it?”
“The Mirabauds. They’re an old Swiss banking family.”
“Swiss bankers? No wonder they wouldn’t tell you anything. Swiss bankers never tell anyone anything, right?”
“Her ex-bodyguard, who guarded her since she was a little kid, was there with her. He was her older brother’s best friend. Her brother, Wulfram, raised her. Wulfram had legal custody of her since she was five and he was fifteen. I’m pretty sure Mirabaud was the guy she was in love with all her life. That’s why when we were dating, I never really had a chance with her.”
“She’s in love with her older brother’s best friend, the best friend of the older brother who raised her? Does this not scream daddy issues to you?”
“They even look appallingly alike: tall, blond, and Teutonic. The bodyguard looks a little more French than German, but not a lot.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Can this get any freakier?”
“And her bodyguard used to be Swiss special forces, like the US Navy SEALs.”
“So, that’s dude number three who has better resources than you do to get her out of there.”
“Oh, and my older brother Pierre, the one she married, was also Wulfram’s close friend when we were all in boarding school. They were roommates. She’s known him since she was five.”
“Wow, Auggie. This girl is nothing but a pretty bag of skin stuffed with red flags.”
Yes, that was Max’s favorite kind of woman. “This sounds crazy, but I think some Russian mafia guys were threatening her, either keeping her there or threatening her if she left.”
“Dude, you have a lot of problems with the mafia. I’m kind of nervous, just sitting here with you.”
“But if she was kidnapped, shouldn’t I get her out?” he demanded of Dree.
She stared at him. “So, your ex-girlfriend, the one who married your actual brother, threw him over and went back to her previous other boyfriend, and she’s staying with him in his family’s house in Switzerland, and you’re worried she was kidnapped?”
“She seemed scared.”
“Was she afraid of you because Pierre the sociopath sent you to take her back to him?”
Maxence mulled over the events in his head, still trying to figure out what was going on. “I don’t know. I know she didn’t want to go back to Pierre. She seemed happy to see me at first.” She’d thrown her arms around him, and he’d thought, for a moment, that maybe, something could happen between them.
Dree said, “So, again, and I’m going to ask you this seriously, is there anything else that you feel you should do now to help her?”
Maxence played it all over and over in his head. “I don’t see what else I could do, short of getting an assault rifle, which isn’t easy to do in Europe, and walking into that mansion in Geneva, shooting the place up, and dragging her out of there with me.”
Dree shook her head at him. “I think that’s your answer. Just to be clear, I think the whole getting an assault rifle and shooting up a mansion is a terrible idea, so I think you can’t do anything else right now. You said that you told people where she was.”
“And other people already knew. Pierre told me where she was and to go negotiate with her. At this point, her location is a pretty open secret.”
“Can you call the cops?”
“I called better people than the police.”
“Do you have any other way to contact her?”
“I don’t think she has a cell phone, but I could get word to her through friends.”
“This is obviously troubling you. Contact these mutual friends and get word to her that if she needs you to come back that she should tell these mutual friends.”
“Okay.”
“Do it now,” she told him.
Maxence pulled his phone from his hip pocket and texted his cousin, Maria-Therese, and some of their mutual friends, telling them to get word to Flicka that Maxence could be back in Geneva within a few hours if she needed him.
Maxence said, “It’s done.”
“If she told you to leave her where she is, shouldn’t you?”
“But what if I shouldn’t?” Maxence said.
“Maybe you should listen to her.”
Maxence nodded. “Right. I should. I should listen to her.”
“Good. Now show me this museum.”
Maxence walked around the immense Louvre with Dree Clark, showing her the various statues and art. He sneaked glances at his phone.
Maria-Therese texted back that she had texted with Flicka, and Flicka had said in no uncertain terms that she was to be left alone. She wanted people to know where she was, but she wanted to stay where she was.
Maxence was leaving in less than forty-eight hours to return to his other life on another continent anyway. Forgetting Flicka was impossible, but he needed to stop obsessing about her.
That hit home.
Maxence needed to stop obsessing about Flicka.
Beside him, Dree was hanging onto Max’s arm and staring at the Winged Victory of Samothrace, absolutely enraptured. “It’s so beautiful.”
He til
ted her head up and kissed her on her lips, savoring the kiss of the woman who had chosen to be with him. “You’re beautiful.”
She batted her eyelashes. “Augustine, I declare, you will turn my head. It’s not good for me. Now, take me to see this Mona Lisa picture that everyone loses their minds over.”
They walked through the Louvre, and then Dree darted over to see something. When Maxence caught up to where he thought Dree was, she jumped out at him and squeaked, “Boo!”
Before long, they were running through the Louvre like kids, hopping out at each other and tapping each other’s shoulders from behind.
This was not dignified, responsible, or mature.
Maxence hadn’t had so much fun in decades, since he was in fifth grade, he thought, and he told her so.
Dree teetered ahead of him toward an exhibition hall that Max knew was a dead-end.
Max side-stepped into a niche to hide because she had to come back that way.
Maxence Grimaldi, the sober and serious one, was standing in a Saville Row suit that was far too conservative for his taste, waiting like Cary Grant in To Catch A Thief to leap out at an hourglass blonde who was trying to evade him.
The reference to that particular movie amused him. He’d seen it dozens of times because he watched it when he was homesick. His grandmother was in it.
Dree tried to tiptoe past him, and he popped out of his hiding place and caught her around her waist, dragging her against his chest and kissing her. She was laughing too much for a proper kiss, so he let her go. She careened off through the exhibits.
She was having fun being chased, so Maxence strolled when she wasn’t looking, letting her outpace him for a while.
When he caught her again, Dree laughed at him. “In my job, which I can’t tell you, I constantly have to be on. There’s no playing around. There’s no silliness. You walk in, and everything you do has consequences from the first second you set foot in the—place. Running around like a lunatic with you was exactly what I needed.”
They did that some more, dashing among the galleries while being very careful not to jostle any of the exhibits or leave fingerprints on the glass cases.
They ended up in the gigantic room that was the Mona Lisa exhibit, where on regular days, hordes of people shuffled past it in a giant line that meandered around the room.
Maxence and Dree stood, hands folded, in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.
Dree leaned toward Max and whispered, “It’s really small.”
“It is,” he agreed.
“What’s so special about it?”
“The painting is flawless,” Max told her. “There are no brushstrokes.”
“Okay,” she said. “Have we admired it enough?”
“I think so.”
“Tag! You’re it!” She scooted out of the room, mincing on her high-heeled shoes.
She sprinted on her toes like Marilyn Monroe, all succulent rounds of feminine curves bobbling cheerfully. Maxence was thoroughly enjoying himself chasing her slowly so he almost never caught her, and thus the game would not end.
Almost never.
He caught her in a small alcove in Asian ceramics and kissed her until she melted against him. In Seventeenth Century European Paintings, he kissed her while he palmed her luscious, round bottom.
At one o’clock, Sayyida was waiting for them in the pyramid to let them out.
Maxence and Dree solemnly thanked her for allowing them to view the priceless treasures, though Max was sure they looked wind-blown and wiggling with giddiness as they left the Louvre, holding hands.
Oh, what a day.
What a perfect, exhilarating day.
And now, back to the hotel for the evening.
When they were walking across the courtyard toward the arch where a car sent by the hotel would pick them up, Maxence didn’t notice the five men triangulating their position, ready to strike.
Chapter Fifteen
Scuffle
Dree
Dree was ridiculously giddy with delight as she held Augustine’s hand and they hurried across the courtyard. A black town car was waiting for them on the street just beyond a medieval stone arch.
This was Paris as she had imagined it. Seeing everything in the movies and enjoying the experience with this amazing man made it perfect. Augustine was the icing on the cake. There’s always that joke that men want women to be a lady in the parlor and a tramp in the bedroom, but that silly cliché had a flip side.
When they were out in Paris, Augustine was gallant and efficient, and he’d stepped up when they’d had the emergency with that baby in the fountain. She’d instinctively counted on him, and he’d been right there to do what she needed.
And “in the bedroom,” wow. Not only was he good in bed, better than—ahem—anybody else, which considering Dree had been intimate with exactly one other guy wasn’t a huge sample size, but Augustine was a thousand times better. And she also had a feeling that she had only scratched the surface of just how interesting he was.
They’d only known each other a few days, so Dree was careful about thinking that she knew too much about Augustine. After all, she’d been with Francis for nearly a year and hadn’t figured out that he’d been using her to siphon narcotics out of Good Samaritan Hospital. Her instincts for what men were really like must be awful. Like, she shouldn’t trust her intuition at all. Maybe she should make checklists for what guys should do and be, because at Good Sam Hospital they had checklists for everything. The checklists had reduced medical errors by eighty percent.
Yes, a checklist.
After all, she’d made a checklist as a bucket list to organize the rest of her life. Why shouldn’t she make a checklist for what she wanted in a guy and what she should look for as red flags? First up for red flags: asking her for hospital narcotic supplies. Geez. Wow, she was stupid. She wouldn’t ever fall for that again.
Dree didn’t often get lost in her head. As a nurse practitioner working in an emergency room, traumatically injured patients and people in the throes of a heart attack were wheeled into her life every few minutes. Her immediate instinct was to respond and save their lives as fast as she could.
Thinking and dreaming were unusual for her, so it was weird that she didn’t notice anything was amiss until she and Augustine were nearly to the hotel’s black town car, just past the medieval stone arch.
The driver was holding the back door open for them.
Dree had made eye contact with him and smiled.
The man’s gaze tracked sideways, and his eyes widened.
Four men had converged on Augustine and her as they were walking under the stone arch, where they were partially blocked from the crowd’s sight.
The town car driver reached his hand toward them in a futile gesture.
Another vehicle, a white commercial van, coasted to a stop behind the hotel’s car. Its side door slid open. A white guy inside positioned himself in the door, but he didn’t get out yet.
A man grabbed Dree by her upper arms and pushed her toward the van.
Three white men swarmed Augustine.
Panic ripped through her, speeding her heart.
The sun brightened like a supernova over the cars.
And she started to fight the guy.
She stabbed her shoe’s stiletto heel backward into her attacker’s calf and drove it down into the top of his ankle, under the top of his boot. She was already swinging her elbow backward and caught him under his ribs, driving the air out of his diaphragm, as he reflexively reached for his bleeding foot.
The guy huffed all his air out of his lungs and reached to protect the soft area of his midsection, loosening his hold on her arm.
Dree might have looked like a ladylike little woman, as she was dressed in a curvy silhouette dress with girlie red-soled shoes. Anyone might have thought she was a vulnerable target, ripe for the picking, but Dree was a strong farm girl with a bushel of rowdy cousins and a nurse with a thorough understanding o
f anatomy.
Dree wrenched herself sideways and punched the guy in his face because she had been raised with older male cousins who liked to brawl.
His nose crunched under her knuckles.
Country life was not for the meek.
Dree grabbed the guy’s gray windbreaker jacket and jerked, spinning the wounded man around. When his back was to her, she kicked him in the butt with her sharp high heel.
He sprawled, probably scraping the heels of his hands and his chin on the cement. He scrambled to flee as she chased him a few steps.
Dree turned back to help Augustine because, again, she had aggressive cousins and they always fought in teams, as is fair.
The redheaded white guy who had grabbed Augustine first was already lying on the ground, out cold. Augustine was still grappling with the other two. He gripped one guy’s lapels with both fists and kicked backward, sending the other guy stumbling to the ground, gasping. Augustine yanked the one guy forward and drove the crown of his head into the other man’s face.
Blood streamed from the attacker’s nose, and his eyes rolled up in their sockets as he collapsed.
The last guy recovered from being kicked and, coughing, jumped at Augustine, knocking them both to the ground and closer to the white van on the street.
The guy in the van leaped into the fight, wrestled Augustine to his feet, and started forcing Augustine toward the van. Another guy scrambled out of the van’s passenger seat and joined the fray, grabbing Augustine’s arm so he couldn’t fight back.
Dree ran toward him, balling up her fists. No way. No freaking way.
Augustine was kicking and punching the guy with his free arm, his eyes wild and his gritted teeth bared.
The attackers had almost dragged him to the white van.
Dree was almost there.
Augustine saw that they were about to get him into the van, and he yelled a terrifying bellow, breaking his arm free of the guy hanging on it, and his arms were swinging wildly as he panicked. He pushed his heels into the ground, grabbed one guy, and hauled them both to the earth when Dree was almost to him, rolling over with the guy to put distance between himself and the van.
Rogue Page 17