The sunset blazed across the sky, turning the buildings to fire.
Maxence should be on his knees before a crucifix, praying the evening prayer of Vespers, giving thanks for God for the day and preparing himself for sleep.
Dree came into the living room, her blonde hair blow-dried in soft ringlets and wearing the red lipstick they’d bought the first day at Sephora.
That bright red of her lips commanded all his attention.
Dree was wearing tiny little gym shorts and a tight tee shirt, and she stopped and squinted, peering at him. “You okay?”
“Perfectly fine.”
He was falling, he was fallen, he was falling apart.
“Come here,” he told her, unbuckling his belt. “On your knees, pet.”
He gathered the silk of her hair in his fist and worked her over his cock, using her mouth. She looked up at him with her light blue, wide eyes and her lips around him, so abjectly his at that moment, and his orgasm soared through him.
He forced her to swallow it, and she complied.
Falling.
He was sitting on the couch, and he tucked himself back into his pants and buckled his belt. “Time for supper, pet.”
“Funny, I feel like I’ve just eaten a huge piece of meat.” She stood up and walked over to the supper tray that the hotel had wheeled into the room and lifted one of the silver domes, sniffing the dish. “What is that?”
“Duck.”
She sat down and frowned at the plate. “That is not poultry. It looks like red meat, like steak or mutton or something.”
“It’s definitely duck.” He came over and sat down on his side of the table, where he had ordered the scallops for himself. His legs felt a tad weak because, damn, that woman could use her tongue. Her lipstick was smeared on one side of her mouth, a delightful sight. “I would have thought that you might have been duck hunting.”
“Not a lot of ducks in the New Mexican desert, at least not near us.” Dree sat in her chair and poked at her meal before gingerly taking a bite, and then her eyes rolled up in her head. “They do not make food like this in New Mexico.”
Maxence sawed one of his scallops into bite-size pieces and speared a chunk with his fork. “It seems that my ex-girlfriend got married within the last day or two. I wasn’t aware of this until now.”
Dree stopped chewing and then swallowed hard before she said, “Is this the one who you were worried that she’d been kidnapped or was in danger?”
He showed her the picture Marie-Therese had texted to him. “She does not appear to be in distress.”
Dree took his phone and stared at it, then handed it back. “I thought she was married to your brother.”
“There was a sketchy divorce in Las Vegas.”
“Who did she marry?” Dree was holding a bite of her risotto on her fork, but she was staring at him and not eating.
“Her bodyguard, the man she was in Switzerland with.”
Her eyes got a little bigger. “The one who looks like her father-figure big brother?”
“Yes,” Maxence admitted.
“Oh.” Dree ate the risotto and chewed thoughtfully.
Maxence waited, eating his food that seemed to have no taste, which was very odd for the Four Seasons, until he could stand it no longer. “Go ahead. Say what you’re thinking.”
Dree placed her fork on her plate. “Look, we’re just together for a few days, and I have no ulterior motive. I swear to God, there is nothing behind this. I mean, this is fun.” She motioned between the two of them, indicating their relationship or just the sex games for all Maxence knew. “But we know it’s just for another day or two. We’re temporary.”
“Acknowledged,” Maxence said.
“So, I’m saying this as your friend, or at least as someone from the outside. Or, maybe I’m saying it as someone who is so grateful to you for fixing my life—”
“It’s just money. I didn’t do anything,” Max demurred.
“—and who doesn’t want to see you get hurt. And you did fix my life. If I hadn’t met you, I don’t know what I would have done. My plan was to crash on my sister’s couch and bum money from her, money that she doesn’t have, for bus fare and ramen noodles, and then she would be even further in the hole for Victor’s therapy money. I’m one of those people for whom missing a paycheck could have destroyed my life, and this was so much worse. So, you saved me, and I just want to help you. Your happiness means a lot to me.”
Maxence nodded, acknowledging what she’d said, though the sum he’d given her was still nothing to him. Guilt flooded him about that.
Dree bit her lower lip, and then she looked up and stared him straight in his eyes. “This girl never loved you,” she said. “I mean, she might have cared about you. I’m not saying she’s a psychopath or anything, but her heart was already taken.”
He stared at the chunk of scallop impaled by his fork tines.
“She’s married two different men,” Dree said, her voice quiet and gentle, “and neither one of them was you.”
The silver tines pierced the delicate, white meat of the scallop. A bead of broth slid down the side of the scallop’s flesh to the pool of cream sauce below it.
Dree said, “It’s not about you. It couldn’t have been about you because you’re exactly the type of man every woman should fall for. You’re kind and generous and fun, and damn, do you look fine. It’s about her. I don’t know what’s up with her, but she never loved you.”
Maxence nodded. He’d known that. Hearing it made it real, though.
“And she must be crazy, Augustine, because she doesn’t know what she had. You are amazing. Some perfect woman is going to come along for you, someone who’s in your social circle and who has money like you and who knows how to do all the things and what the red bottoms of the shoes mean, and she’s going to fall in love with you. That’s who you’re supposed to be with, not this girl who’s been leading you on for so long. You’ve got to let her go. You’ve gotta live your life the way you were meant to.”
The way he was meant to.
Maxence nodded again, slowly surveying the lavish suite at the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris. The pale blues and muted golds of the ridiculously ornate furnishings were how he had been raised but not what he had chosen.
Or tried to choose.
He should be on his knees in front of a crucifix right now, praying the Hours, but he could not bring himself to do it. He wasn’t embarrassed to do it in front of Dree. If she saw him pray like that, she might understand him better. She might leave him, which would doubtlessly be best for both of them.
But he would starve without her tonight.
He asked her, “What life do you think I’m meant to live?”
Dree shook her head, her blond hair bobbing as she did. His fist had tangled it in back. “That’s not up to me to say. I mean, I just got swindled out of everything I owned because I trusted the wrong guy. I shouldn’t be giving anyone advice, except that I am painfully aware you should not pine for someone who does not love you. I’m a mess because that’s what I did. I wanted his love so much that I let him steal narcotics from the hospital and everything from me. What should you do? That’s not for anyone except you to say, but I think you need to grab hold of it and do it. You can’t look back at that girl anymore. I see what it’s doing to you. Do you like me?”
Maxence rolled his eyes a little and then looked back at her. “Yes, I like you. I like everything about you.”
“And not just fucking my fat ass, right?”
He chuckled, and it felt real that time. “No, not just your ass, but you have a fantastic ass. I don’t think you should denigrate the quality of your ass in the slightest.”
“Then, if you like me, it’s killing me to see how upset this girl is making you. Just . . . don’t let it get to you. Let it roll off your shoulders. Live your life because it’s the only life you get. Take a deep breath and embrace today and embrace me, and don’t be sad about her.”
>
Max smiled at his funny little blonde. She was right, and he had the rest of his life to wallow if he wanted to. Right now, for this last day and a half, he had Dree in a hotel room in Paris. “You’re right.”
The chandelier overhead shone on the silver knife Dree pointed at him. “Now, you eat up those overpriced sea critters. You’re going to need your strength for tonight.”
His little blonde was a wise, wise woman.
Maxence ate his supper and considered all the deeply disturbing things that he planned to do to Dree Clark that night.
Because he needed to drive her wild so she would give him what he needed.
Chapter Seventeen
Spa
Dree
Augustine went to sleep.
Dree could not frickin’ believe it, so she sat on her side of the bed and stared at him until she could convince herself it was true.
They’d eaten supper and had a few glasses of wine, talked over some seriously silly things about Monagasquay and Monagasquayanois culture that Dree thought he must be making up—no real estate could be that expensive—and then they’d eaten the toffee-meringue thingies that Augustine’d had delivered that afternoon.
The toffee ones had crystallized-sugar meringue pressed on the outside and were perfection.
Then, they killed the rest of the champagne bottle and its champagne friend, mostly with Augustine grilling her about growing up in New Mexico.
She was supposed to be lying about everything, so she told him the truth because he wouldn’t believe it anyway.
Yes, rattlesnakes give birth to live babies. There is no such thing as a rattlesnake egg.
Yes, the little straw-colored scorpions are the most poisonous, not the big black ones, and the little ones glow in the dark under UV light. Checking a hotel room for scorpions with a UV light will show you something else you cannot unsee.
Yes, her cousin Levi had been an asshole, so they’d taken him snipe hunting. “The brown snipes are delicious roasted, but the white ones are poisonous if they bite you,” they’d told him, and then she’d planted a stick with a handkerchief tied to a long wire the night before. When they’d been snipe hunting for about an hour, she’d picked up the stick, and the dreaded, poisonous “white snipe” had flown at them. Levi had run away screaming like a dying rabbit. She’d run after him while holding the stick, so the poisonous white snipe had chased them for half a mile until she’d been laughing too hard to stand up anymore and collapsed on the desert floor. That was the story of how she’d gotten eighteen cholla spines in her leg, and thus her last tetanus shot.
And then, when she was tipsy with the bubbly wine, he’d dragged her into the bedroom and watched while she took off her gym clothes, slowly. She’d stood naked in front of him and tried not to look as nervous as she was. He’d told her to lie naked on the bed and inspected her with his eyes and his fingertips. He’d raked his teeth over her throat and shoulders and pinned her wrists to the bed above her head.
And then he’d given her one last kiss, smiled in the most evil way she had ever seen a man smile, and he rolled over and went to sleep.
He was still wearing that white tee shirt and lurid jammie pants, so she hadn’t even gotten a look at his dang back tattoo.
He wasn’t even snoring, so she couldn’t be annoyed by that. His breathing was even and deep like his soul was at peace with the universe.
Hers wasn’t.
Her soul wanted to shake him until he woke up and then ride him like a rented mule.
Instead, Dree lay on her side of the bed, naked as Sir requested, and fitfully dozed until late the next morning when Augustine finally stretched and woke up, blinking at her with a sleepy smile on his handsome face.
She wanted to slug him.
He said, “You have a spa day scheduled for today.”
Dree asked, “A what?”
“At the hotel spa.” Augustine stretched and fluffed his pillow behind his head. “We are to attend that charity ball tonight. Since leaving the hotel seems to attract unwanted attention, I thought you’d like to take the occasion to have your hair and makeup done and the other things girls do before they attend a high-profile event.”
“Wait a minute,” Dree said. “You didn’t say this was a ‘high-profile’ shindig.”
“They all are. Anyhow, I booked you into the spa for whatever you want. I do heartily recommend the massages here. I’m planning on a hot-stone massage because I think one of our adversaries wrenched my shoulder yesterday.” He rubbed his left shoulder gingerly.
“Let me see that.” Dree assisted him to a seated position, and then she manipulated his shoulder joint to assess his range of motion and level of pain. “Does this hurt? How about that? Nope, only that? It’s probably a mild sprain. Yep, massage and ibuprofen.”
“Thank you, Dr. Dree,” he said, smiling.
“Oh, I’m not a doctor.”
“But you are a—” Augustine grinned at her with one eyebrow raised.
“You are not going to trap me that easily, mister. I am a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and I am going to have a massage, and a pedicure, and other things that I don’t know what they are because I’ve never been to a spa before.”
Dree took fifteen minutes to decide which of her clothes she should wear to the spa, which seemed like a very upscale place. She didn’t want to wear any of the pretty and expensive clothes that Augustine had spent money on, because he should be the recipient of all that pretty. Finally, she decided on the black trousers and pink sweater that had miraculously been laundered and placed back into their closet.
Augustine had already gone somewhere. Maybe she’d see him in a sauna or something.
She followed the gold-plated signs on the marble walls through the hotel to the spa, where she was promptly told to take off her clothes and wear only a terrycloth robe around the place.
Okay, then. She could have thrown on her ragged ol’ gym clothes for that.
A very prim Parisian woman with chalk-white skin but black nail polish and lipstick handed Dree a menu of services with a flourish of her hand. Dree checked most of the boxes. Most of the spa services seemed to have nationalities, like the French Riviera sea-salt scrub, the Vietnamese kelp seaweed wrap, and the Chilean clay facemask.
Dree picked all the ones with exotic names because she was probably going to go back to Arizona and never be able to travel again, so she might as well have the Madagascar chocolate detoxifying foot rub.
Seven hours later, Dree inhabited a body that was smoother, satinier, massaged and defoliated, and far less hairy than her usual one. She should have remembered what a Brazilian wax was, but she would never forget again.
But at least she had gotten a hair cut-and-color out of the deal. The beautician had tut-tutted over her home-chopped hair and done a great deal of work to mend Dree’s panicked scissoring. Her blonde hair now had “moonlight baby-lights,” whatever those were, and curled softly around her face.
Between her scheduled treatments, Dree had been ordered to lie on a chaise lounge around the reflecting pool or in the sage-smudging meditation room, where attendants were pleased in a bored sort of way to bring her smoothies with weird vegetables in them, fruit essence waters that tasted like flat soda, or really expensive wine, but Dree was frantically texting people for more information because the news she had received was bad.
Very bad.
The texts began at about ten o’clock, which meant it was one o’clock in the morning back in Phoenix. Dree had just finished having her face scrubbed with salt, which was not as much fun as it sounded because salt stings when it gets into abrasions, like when your face is being scrubbed with sharp little crystals.
The first text that pinged Dree’s phone was from her work-friend at Good Sam Hospital, Caridad Santos, who must be working the overnight shift this week. Good for her. More money.
The police were here again, asking about you, last night about nine. A friend in HR said they have been here every
day. I am sorry, I did not know that they have been doing this. HR says that you were placed on administrative leave a few days ago and now you are fired. I am so sorry, all this just came down, and I do not know what to do. They told us that if you came into the hospital, we were to call HR to call the police. You should not have been fired because you had already put in to take off these days of work for that big trip with your boyfriend, the scumbag. I looked at the schedule, and your leave is extended for the next three days, so that cannot be it. I do not know why they are talking about the police.
When Dree read that, she sat down with her hand on her head. She didn’t even have a job to go back to now, and the police were looking for her.
Her sister Mandi had texted sometime during the night in Paris with the routing and account numbers of the new bank account she had opened up, and she promised Dree that no one else had any access to it.
Dree checked her own brand-new bank account.
She lost her breath at the staggering sum that had been deposited that morning while she’d slept.
That was not the number she and Augustine had agreed on. It was way too much, and she would have to give at least half of it back. He should not give her that much money. She did not need that much money.
Dree had never seen a bank account with that much money in it. She assumed that somebody who had been working for ten or fifteen years, maybe twenty, might have a retirement account with that much money in it, but that was three years’ salary to her.
Almost four.
Quickly, before Francis could find it and steal it, Dree transferred forty thousand to Mandi’s new account for Victor.
Dree stared at the dark, gilded ceiling in the smoky meditation room and waited for the manicurist to do her French-tipped nails.
Augustine had given her enough money for a financial cushion, but she did not know what it had meant that she had been fired from Good Sam. That was her job. That’s how she made a living.
Rogue Page 20