“We were talking about work,” Nora said, putting her cup down and waving the waiter over for more coffee. “So I’m thrilled you’re early.”
“See you later,” Zach said. He rose, leaned over the small round table and kissed her cheek. “Nico. Have a good evening.” They shook hands. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”
Zach left them alone and the waiter, who was also the hotel’s bellhop—he’d roused himself from the couch for the evening shift—cleared the table of everything but coffee, put down new silverware, and brought over a menu.
“You look different,” Nora said. She sat back in her chair and nodded approvingly. “Haircut.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “I needed one.”
“Looks nice,” she said. Understatement. He looked incredibly handsome with his hair tamed to short waves. He’d cleaned up for dinner—no work boots or dirty jeans. His shoes were suede and his jeans freshly laundered. The gray scarf and leather jacket were a nice touch.
“Your hair is…nice, too,” he said, repaying her compliment with all the suaveness of a man in his twenties. He sat down. “You haven’t eaten?”
“Not yet. I was waiting on you. I’m starving,” she said with relish, and truth. After her bath—and sex—with Zach, she’d fallen into a deep sleep. When she’d woken, it was almost evening. Too late for lunch. Too early for dinner. “Ever eaten here? What’s good?”
“I always get the boeuf bourguignon,” he said.
Nora smiled to herself.
“What?” He asked.
“Nothing. The friend you remind me of…he loves boeuf bourguignon. Are you a coffee snob, too?”
“I don’t know if I’m a snob,” he said, wrinkling his nose a bit. “But, you know, I wouldn’t drink Starbucks if you threatened me with the guillotine.”
“Don’t say that. I have a guillotine.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“Just a little one,” she said.
“You’re not joking.”
“It really is a very little one. It’s for threatening men.”
“You like to threaten men?” He didn’t sound horrified, more intrigued and amused, like he couldn’t imagine ever finding her threatening.
“I’m a dominatrix. Do you know what that is?” If she was going to tell him about Kingsley—everything about Kingsley; the good, the bad, and the kinky—she might as well start slow. If he couldn’t handle her being a dominatrix, he’d never be able to handle Kingsley being…well…Kingsley.
“You said you were a writer.”
Interesting. He seemed more wounded that she had possibly lied to him than that she beat up men for money.
“I do both. It’s not easy to pay the bills from writing alone. I needed a side gig.”
He nodded, as if that made perfect sense.
“Really? No follow-up questions? No who, what, when, where, why the hell are you a dominatrix?”
“What’s so wrong with being a dominatrix that you would have to answer all those questions? It’s not illegal in America, is it?”
“No, not really.” Now it was her turn to narrow her eyes at him. “You are a very interesting young man. Très intéressant.”
He made a face like she’d just said something très stupide. “What? No. I’m nobody.”
“You’re what…twenty-four? You run your own vineyard.”
He snorted the purest French snort, and the eyeroll he gave her should have been on the French flag. “Not by choice. If I had my choice, I’d be working for my father still.”
“You don’t bat an eyelash when I tell you I’m a sex worker.”
“You’re a beautiful woman. I think it’s a good job for you,” he said as he glanced over the menu again. The way he’d said it, it was like he was talking to a tall man and said, You’re seven feet tall, of course you play basketball. He didn’t seem to be pretending, either—pretending to be okay with who and what she was.
The waiter appeared before Nora could say anything in response. She ordered the Niçoise salad. Nico ordered only soup and coffee.
“Just soup?” Nora asked after the waiter had left. “What happened to boeuf bourguignon?”
“Not hungry.”
“You need to eat something more than soup.”
He glared at her.
Nora winced. “Sorry. Really. I’m not… I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘you need to eat more’ to anyone in my life before. I’m not motherly. At all.”
“I bring it out in you?” His tone implied he would not appreciate any further mothering.
“It’s not that. It’s…I feel protective of you. I don’t know you, but I…”
Her voice trailed off as she noticed Nico glancing away. His fingers toyed with his tiny coffee cup. “Nico?” she asked.
He smiled. “Makes me feel very…I don’t know, strange when you say that.”
“That I feel protective of you?”
He nodded.
“I don’t mean to make you feel strange.”
“It’s a good type of strange. I don’t know. I wish there was a word for that.” He smiled at her, drank his coffee. Abruptly he put his cup down and said, “You have to tell me why you’re here.” He leaned in closer, reached his hand, still warm from the coffee cup, across the table and touched her hand. “Please.”
She looked at his fingertips resting on top of her hand. He seemed to realize he’d gone too far, took his hand away. She could still feel the heat of it on her skin.
“Just promise me one thing, Nico.”
“Anything.”
“Please don’t hate me for what I’m about to tell you.”
He stared at her with a look of worry in his green-glass eyes. She waited for him to make his promise, but he didn’t. She appreciated that he was wise enough not to make promises he couldn’t keep.
“Why would I hate you?” he asked.
Instead of answering, Nora took a deep breath. She pulled her bag off the back of her chair. She’d hoped this could wait until after dinner. But it wasn’t fair to Nico to make him sit there and stew in his fear and uncertainty over what she had to tell him.
“Before I tell you, let me say again… I am sorry, Nico.”
He turned his head, smiled nervously. “You’re scaring me now.”
“It’s not bad news. I’m not the Angel of Death or anything. I just know something that I can’t, in good conscience, keep secret from you or the other person involved.”
“I can’t tell you to ignore your conscience. Go on then. Tell it to me.”
“It’s a long story,” she began as she pulled a file of photographs from her bag. “And I won’t go into the whole thing right now. But the short version is…someone came here on a trip and saw you, and when they saw you…”
“What? What did they see?” His voice was soft, scared. She hated herself for doing this to him.
Nora took another breath, opened the folder and took out the first photograph—the one of Kingsley when he was nineteen, the one where the resemblance between he and Nico was the most obvious. She moved the coffee pot and set the photograph on the table between them.
“Kingsley Boissonneault,” she said. “The man who saved my life. The reason I’m here.”
Nico leaned over the table again to get a better look. He could have picked it up but didn’t. Maybe he saw it right away. Maybe that’s why he didn’t want to touch it.
“Who is he? A long-lost cousin of mine or something?” Nico asked.
“You see the family resemblance?”
He shrugged that Kingsley shrug again. “I guess. I mean, we do look alike.”
“He was a few years younger than you when that picture was taken. Here’s one from when he was twenty-nine.” She showed him another picture of Kingsley. He was in profile in this picture, taken for the society page of a New York magazine. “Turn sideways.”
Nico slowly turned his head. Nora held up the photograph by Nico’s profile. “Your noses are twi
ns.”
“All right, so who is he?” Nico asked. “Don’t tell me I have a brother out there.” He laughed nervously, as if he knew what was coming and could make it go away by joking about it.
But it wouldn’t go away.
“Kingsley came here to Mozet twenty-five years ago. He was in La Légion. He’d been shot and he came here to recuperate. In May, twenty-five years ago. He was here for one week…thirty-eight weeks before you were born.”
Nico said nothing. He just stared at the two photographs on the table.
“You shrug like him,” she said. “Just like him. You have identical noses. Same jawline. Same build. You both love boeuf bourguignon and you are both coffee snobs. When you walked away from me today, you looked just like him from—”
“Stop,” he said.
Nora stopped.
She’d never heard a silence so deep as the silence of a young man’s heart breaking over a cup of coffee. The silence was so heavy, she couldn’t bear it longer than a minute.
“You and your father looked nothing alike,” she said softly. “There’s no way you didn’t notice that you looked nothing like him, like his side of the family. The doctor who delivered you would have noticed it. The private detective I hired found you because he showed around a picture of Kingsley, asking if anyone had seen that man. Someone thought he was you. That’s not a coincidence.”
That silence again. The longest, coldest silence.
Then, Nico spoke.
“My mother went into labor early with me. Too early,” he said. “It had snowed that day, thirty-six centimeters. A record. It almost never snows here. We have no plows. My father—my real father—couldn’t get the car out of the garage, and the ambulance couldn’t get to the house. He carried her, half a kilometer down the driveway to meet the ambulance on the road. He hadn’t stepped in a Catholic Church since he was a little boy, but he prayed that day. He prayed out loud to Saint Nicolas. My mother said she’d never heard him pray out loud before. She didn’t even know he prayed at all. He prayed to Saint Nicolas because he said that was the only saint he remembered. The doctors helped her, saved me… I was born six weeks later, healthy, because of him. That was my father. This man…” He picked up the photographs only to toss them carelessly aside. “He’s nothing to me. Nothing. Rien.”
And that was it. Nico walked out of the dining room just as their food came out of the kitchen.
By 8:14 P.M. she was back in her suite. Zach looked up, surprised, as she walked into the room.
“Well?” he asked.
“That,” she said, “could have gone better.”
Chapter Eight
They went to bed early that night. Zach read a novel and she lay on his chest thinking, thinking…doing too much thinking, until he closed his book and set it on the nightstand.
“You can’t be surprised,” he said. At her request, they hadn’t talked about Nico and his reaction.
“No, I’m not surprised.”
“You have to give the man some time.”
“I thought he’d have questions. You’d think he’d want to know something about Kingsley.”
“He will. Eventually.”
Nora snuggled closer, trying to absorb as much of Zach’s warmth as she could. She’d felt cold all evening like she was getting ill. It was the guilt weighing on her.
“He doesn’t even know he has a baby sister yet.”
“You blew his world apart tonight. You did it to me, once. Eventually I thanked you for it. He will, too. Someday.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” she said and kissed Zach’s lips. She rolled onto her side and he rolled against her, holding her until she fell asleep.
She woke abruptly at the jarring blast of a telephone. A real telephone. The kind with wires and a bell that ripped both her and Zach from their dreams. Nora fumbled for the black handset on the bedside table.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded confused and groggy, even to her own ears.
Heavy breathing. Then: “It’s me.”
“Nico…” She lay back on her pillow, hand on her forehead. According to the glowing numbers on the clock by the hotel phone, it was three in the morning. “Are you all right?”
“No.”
“Where are you?”
“Le Chien Noir. It’s across the street.”
She’d seen the building from the hotel window. It was a bar. Not that she could judge him. That’s how she might have handled the news as well.
“Stay there,” she said. “I’ll be right over.”
He hung up and Nora put the phone back on its cradle.
“Nico?” Zach said.
“He’s at a bar across the street.”
“Ah, getting plastered—the final stage of grief.”
“I thought that was acceptance.”
“You accept the loss. Then you get drunk.”
“I’m going to run over and talk to him, make sure he’s okay.”
“You want me to come—”
“It’s fine. Go back to sleep.” She started to get out of bed, but Zach grabbed her arm gently. With the curtains slightly parted, she could see the outline of him in the dark, the outline of the worry on his face.
“Be careful. You represent the man who may try to replace his father. He might lash out, try to hurt you, in order to hurt him.”
“He won’t hurt me.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know him.”
She kissed Zach on the lips. “I know him.”
Nora dressed quickly. She threw her hair into a loose knot at the nape of her neck. The cold barely touched her as she ran from the hotel to Le Chien Noir two doors down. She found Nico alone behind the bar, pouring a glass of wine for himself.
Nico saw her at the door, lifted his glass in a mocking toast.
“Nico? Are you all right?” she asked, approaching him cautiously. The bar was empty but for the two of them.
He shrugged, lazily, drunkenly. “I’ve been better.” He smiled at her. Bad sign. He shouldn’t be smiling.
“You own this place, too? A vineyard and a bar?”
“A friend owns it. She gave me a key.”
“She? Girlfriend?”
“Non. Just a friend. Like your friend. Zach.”
“I’m having sex with my friend Zach.”
Nico’s eyes widened. She wasn’t sure why she’d said that so bluntly, so coldly, but her instincts were telling her to put some distance between them.
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe not like your friend.” He picked up the wine bottle and pulled the cork out again, poured more into his glass, filling it to the brim.
“You want something?” he asked. “What’s your poison? Isn’t that what they say in America?”
“Only in movies. And no, nothing for me,” she said. One of them needed to stay in their right mind.
“Your loss.” He tipped the glass back and took a long, deep drink. His hand was unsteady, and a few red drops of wine sloshed out when he went to set it back down.
“Maybe you should call it a night. As it is, you look like you’re headed for one hell of a hangover.”
“You forget that I’m a vintner. I know all the secrets.” He leaned close to her and whispered, “If I stay drunk forever, I’ll never get a hangover.”
“Or you could let me drive you home. How about we do that?”
He surprised her by crossing his arms on the bar top and dropping his head down onto it. It was the posture of a man who had given up. Nora couldn’t stop herself from reaching out, putting her hand on his head, running her fingers through his hair. He had the softest hair she’d ever felt in her life.
“That feels good,” he said. “Never stop.”
Nora laughed softly. “Your accent gets thicker when you’re drinking.”
“I speak perfect English,” he said.
“Yez, pair-feect Englissss.”
He raised his head, stared at her. She put her hands back in her lap, then decided
she had better sit on them before she started playing with his hair again.
“I wish you weren’t so beautiful,” he said.
It was Nora’s turn to shrug. “You and me both, buddy.”
He laughed. She wanted him laughing. No man laughed with his friends in a bar and then walked away and threw himself off a cliff. She hoped.
“Why do you wish I wasn’t so beautiful?”
“I want to hate you,” he said. “It’s very hard to hate a beautiful woman, especially one who knows exactly how to scratch your head.”
“Even when she ruined your life?”
He made a sound, almost like a laugh. Almost. Not quite. “If my father dying didn’t ruin my life…”
He didn’t finish the thought, didn’t have to. Nico picked up his glass of wine, looked into it like he was trying to scry his future, then set it down again without drinking any.
“I called my mother.”
Nora wanted to ask what she had said, decided silence was a better tactic.
“I said, ‘Do you know a man named Kingsley Boissonneault?’ That’s what I asked. And after, she was quiet for a long, long, long time. Then she said…uh, she said, ‘I’ll come tomorrow. We’ll talk about it.’ ” He picked up his glass and this time he did drink from it. He put it down, looked at Nora. “So I guess that’s that. He’s my…ah.” He couldn’t even say it. “I remember once…I think I was six? My parents were fighting, the only way they ever fought.” Nico lowered his voice. “Very quietly. All in whispers. Kids, they don’t listen so much when parents scream, but they listen real good when parents start to whisper in another room.”
Nora knew that was true.
“I was coming down the stairs. I heard them whispering. I sat there on the bottom step outside the kitchen and listened. My mother, she said, ‘He’s old enough to know. If he finds out, and we haven’t told him, he’ll hate us.’ And my father, he said…”
Nico blinked. His eyes were red but there were no tears.
“He said that he wouldn’t let anyone come and take his son away from him,” Nico said. “I had, uh…I forget the English word. Des cauchemars. Bad dreams? Scary dreams?”
“Nightmares,” Nora said.
Winter Tales: An Original Sinners Christmas Anthology Page 6
