Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 92368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 369(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 369(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
When he looks up, he stops. Smiles. Shakes his head in amusement. My stomach has the audacity to flip.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he says, but he doesn’t truly seem surprised.
“Or maybe not,” I say. “Are we in the same hotel?”
“I’m at The Hotel Particulier Eighteenth. I arrived yesterday,” he says, then points to the same hotel as mine. Bumping into him isn’t such a coincidence then. It was inevitable. I want to ask other questions—what are you up to, how’s Paris so far, what’s caught your attention on your phone?
But I don’t have to ask the last one because he turns the phone to me. “Check this out,” he says, showing me a photo of Zach and his cousin David roasting marshmallows over a campfire. Out of nowhere, tears well in my eyes and I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s the travel. Or the jet lag. Or my need for caffeine.
Maybe it’s just that it’s a sweet photo of a happy kid, who does, indeed, roll with life’s big changes—mom to no mom, no dad to dad.
I swallow the tears, but there’s emotion in my voice when I say, “More, show me more.”
Finn gives a soft smile, then flicks to the next photo. An RV.
“And they’re not camping. They’re glamping,” I say, laughing as I accuse him.
“My mom’s idea, apparently. She said she endured enough of my father’s roughing it camping trips when Nick and I were kids. She’s not doing it now.”
I lean a little closer. “Confession: you’d never catch me camping.”
He lifts a skeptical brow. “Never?”
I shake my head then flick my hair. “I like my flat iron, my running water, and my soft pillows far too much. Also, coffee.”
“You can make coffee camping,” he points out.
“Or I can get it at a café,” I say as a yawn takes over.
Finn sets a hand on my back, his touch warm and confident. “Let’s get you a coffee, Jules.” He tips his forehead to the café with the red awning, where I was headed anyway, telling me he’s wanted to try this café since he arrived.
It’s just coffee. Colleagues do that all the time. “That sounds good to me,” I say.
But it doesn’t feel as good as his hand on my skin feels. Especially since it signals to anyone around that I belong to him.
Even though I don’t.
The first cup of coffee works wonders, but it tastes awful. “I think I need to learn the French word for mud,” I say, lifting the empty cup.
“The French are not known for their coffee,” he says.
“You’ve been here before, right? Paris?” I ask, since he said the city was wonderful at that lunch. A man like him, inking deals around the globe, probably speaks French too.
We’re sitting at a tiny round table on the sidewalk as fashionable Parisians stroll by. French words drift past my ears but mean nothing.
“A couple times,” he says, lifting his espresso. “But always for work.”
He’s quick to answer, and the subtext is clear—he never came here with his ex-wife or with another woman.
Don’t read anything into it.
“Do you speak French?”
He finishes his small cup, then sets it down, his green eyes sparkling. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispers.
A shiver runs down my spine. “I’m listening.”
“I can bullshit my way through any restaurant or store, and that’s about it,” he says.
This makes me unreasonably happy. I like that he doesn’t know the language. That he’s brutally honest about his lack of language skills with me, but that he tries to finesse his way through it. That fits him, swaggering through life, pursuing what he wants with guts and brain and charisma.
“So, sort of like how you bullshitted your way through playing the piano,” I say.
He leans back in the chair, looking smug in the best of ways. “I wanted what I wanted,” he says, owning his choice to pursue me relentlessly that night.
But in retrospect, does he wish we’d been unmasked? That we’d both had all the facts before we scurried off to the library?
Maybe it’s the jet lag that makes me want to ask. Or maybe it’s that no one knows us here. I feel like we’re in a bubble, and that bubble emboldens me. “Would you have talked to me if I wasn’t wearing a costume?”
“No,” he says, immediately. “I wouldn’t have.”
My shoulders drop. I knew that answer was coming, but I asked the question anyway.
“And I’m glad I didn’t know,” he adds in his bedroom voice—the one he uses when he tells me to spread my legs for him. “I wouldn’t change a damn thing about the tryst in the library. The night at my home. The afternoon in the restaurant. Not a single thing.” He pins me with a dark stare. “Is that clear?”
I shudder out a yes. “Crystal.”
“Good. But just in case, let me add this—I’m so fucking glad I had a mask on the night you played piano. Because you are the most sensual, responsive, exciting woman I’ve ever known.”