by Susan Napier
But she had done it all alone, while at every turn she had been confronted by couples of one kind or another…lovers oblivious to those around them, husbands and wives bickering in the blazing heat or strolling hand in hand, parents running after their children, mutual companions sharing a good time…
And now, with late afternoon drifting into evening, she was feeling defiant.
She picked up her bag and checked herself in the mirror one more time, spinning to watch the multi-panelled silk and gauze-chiffon skirt swirl and cling around her long thighs, and adjusting the strap on the filmy black camisole top that daringly showed off the exquisite, embroidered, French lace, strapless bra she wore beneath—all bought in an expensive fit of madness the previous day.
Then, at the last minute, just as she was going out the door, she snatched up a lightweight wrap to throw across her bare shoulders, a security blanket in case her courage failed her.
She walked across the street and straight into the interior of the narrow, rectangular bar, exchanging a casual ‘bonjour’ with the pair behind the high, polished counter. The object of her obsession had skewed his seat against the dark-panelled wall and now sat facing out into the room, one elbow on the table, jeaned legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, so Veronica confidently chose the small table for two diagonally across from him, turning the chair sideways to sit down with her back against the opposing wall.
He took a swallow of his beer, frowning down at his newspaper, seemingly ignoring her when everyone else had turned to watch her settle at her table, but she had seen—and felt—the lightning-swift appraisal he had accorded her when she had crossed the periphery of his field of vision. A woman as tall as she was always attracted at least one look.
His eyes were dark. She added that to the list of things she knew about him, her gaze going quickly to his right hand to also tick off the fact that he wore no wedding ring. A little of the nervous tension holding her spine rigid relaxed, and she crossed her legs, slanting them aside in what Karen had informed her during their short time in London together was the most slimming of poses.
When the waitress sauntered over Veronica was ready with her order. She would have actually liked a thirst-quenching beer, but didn’t think that that would project the image she was looking to create—although: ‘I’m having what he’s having,’ might have been an ice-breaker. However, at the moment he appeared to be more granite than ice. Whatever he was reading in the paper was putting a scowl on his face. It wasn’t L’Equipe, which she had seen him reading before, but the French equivalent of scandal-mongering weekly tabloid, so it probably wasn’t simply a matter of his favourite tennis player being knocked out of a tournament.
‘Un Kir, s’il vous plaît,’ she murmured to the waitress.
The chilled glass was placed before her a few minutes later accompanied by a friendly burst of rapid French. Veronica spread her hands, palm up, with a rueful smile.
‘Excusez-moi, mais je ne comprends pas,’ she said carefully, in her phrase-book French.
‘Ah! Anglaise,’ the girl instantly pounced on her accent.
Veronica shook her head, setting fiery sparks dancing in the graduated layers of red-brown hair falling thickly down to her shoulders on either side of her central parting.
‘Nouvelle Zélande,’ she said, hoping a European might find that exotic, since in the intimate confines of the small premises the man across the way would be able to hear every word she said, even if he was ostensibly not listening.
Veronica took a delicate sip of her drink, enjoying the crispness of the white wine mingled with the sweet tang of crème de cassis. She looked brazenly at her quarry.
At close range his face was a series of bold lines, his sun-kissed olive skin fine-textured and smooth except for the bloom of dark re-growth along his jaw. His arched black brows were lowered, sensuous lower lip pushed out as he brooded into the dregs of his beer.
Eyes fixed on his face, she took another hasty sip of liquid courage, and the stem of her glass clicked loudly as she put it down a little too hard on the table.
His long, thick lashes flew up and she suddenly found herself pinned by a fierce black look. Even if he had been studiously ignoring her he had obviously been aware of her concentrated stare.
She didn’t make the mistake of smiling. She sensed that was what he was expecting her to do, and didn’t want to give him the opportunity to snub her even before she had got to open her mouth, so instead she simply held his gaze coolly, her wide grey eyes drifting slightly out of focus as if she weren’t really seeing him at all, but absently thinking of something—or someone—else.
She might not be very experienced at seduction—her ex-fiancé had been very conservative in the bedroom—or have the advantage of her sister’s spectacular beauty, but she was intelligent and well-read, and she knew that there were more subtle ways to tease a man’s interest. Some of the most famous, and infamous, seductresses in history had been women who had more wit than beauty. Attraction started in the brain, after all.
She saw his eyelids flicker and his lower lip tighten. Her lack of reaction had disconcerted him, disclosing a dichotomy in his nature. He might not want attention, but neither did he like to be ignored, she decided. He was used to it being his choice as to whether or not he interacted with people.
He leaned back in his chair, picking up one foot to rest the heel of his high-end athletic shoe on his opposing knee, his pre-stressed designer jeans whitening along the seams at his crotch, his thighs splayed towards her in a stark display of male insolence.
Was he partially aroused already, or just more generously endowed than the classical male? she wondered naughtily, mentally comparing him to all the nude statuary she had perused in the last few days.
Now she allowed herself a small, reminiscent smile as she toyed with her drink, her pale fingers sliding delicately up and down on the long stem of the glass.
He picked up his paper from the table and snapped it open in front of his face with a sharp rattle, but Veronica noticed with a small sizzle of satisfaction that he was holding the top of it just below the level of his eyes. He was covertly observing her, just as she was studying him.
Her lashes lowered, and she saw a tiny teardrop of condensation weeping down the outside of the curved bowl of her glass. Acting on a primitive instinct, she chased it back up to the rim with her forefinger, lifting the captured little pearl of liquid away on the tip of her finger and inspecting it before placing it inside her mouth and sucking off the distilled droplet. She noticed the side of the newspaper crinkle under his tightened grip, and, alarmed by her own boldness, she polished off the rest of her drink in a single toss of her head and ordered a second Kir.
Almost immediately, he signalled for another beer.
Veronica almost fainted with nervous relief. He wasn’t just going to get up and leave! Although at this rate they were going to drink each other under the table before they said a word to each other, she thought with an inward gurgle of amusement.
For a while she was content to sit and bide her time, listening and occasionally being drawn in by the general comments about the heatwave and the state of the city that the Patron periodically offered around the bar—in heavily accented English to Veronica, Spanish to the waitress and French to the man barely pretending to read his newspaper, who replied with concise, but perfectly amiable comments in both of the Romance languages.
How appropriate…the whispered thought brought a husky laugh to Veronica’s lips, the unusually deep voice, which had often embarrassed her as a teenager, suddenly an advantage as it drew dark eyes snapping to her face.
This time she was ready for him. She let her laugh die to a natural throaty chuckle as she held his gaze, picked up her drink, and walked the three steps to his table.
‘Parlez-vous Anglais?’ she asked, her resonant voice warm with the remnants of laughter.
He tilted his head back to look up at her and folded his arms across his chest,
the open paper lying forgotten across his splayed knees.
‘Non!’ The uncompromisingly curt answer was delivered like a flung gauntlet.
His eyes weren’t black, as she had first thought, but brown, like the darkest of dark chocolate, the best and most expensive kind…intense, slightly bitter at first but delivering the most delicious sensory thrill.
At the moment they were veiled and enigmatic, not giving a hint as to his thoughts as he waited to see how she would handle the flat rejection.
‘Oh.’ She sank into the chair on the other side of his narrow table. ‘Je ne parle pas bien française.’
Her trusty little French phrase book was tucked in her purse, but tonight wasn’t a night for going by the book.
He shrugged, pushing out that sullen lower lip to indicate his unspoken contempt. Trying to look unruffled, she took a leisurely sip of her drink. She knew he spoke some Spanish, but that was no help as far as she was concerned.
‘Italiano?’ she tested, although she only spoke a basic word or two herself.
His stony expression didn’t change. ‘Non.’
‘Hmm…’ She eyed the angle of his chin, and understood that he was going to stick stubbornly to French, whatever she said. But she could be stubborn, too. It was one of her greatest strengths…and her biggest flaw, according to Neil, her ex-fiancé.
‘Te reo Maori?’ she threw in mischievously, seriously doubting that he would be of the minority speakers of New Zealand’s second language, especially when he didn’t even speak the first—English.
Or did he?
She detected a dark glimmer in the back of the brown eyes as his mouth compressed. Was that a tiny quiver of amusement at the down-turned corner? She felt a surge of elation.
She decided to let go of her security blanket and allowed her wrap to slide from her shoulders, turning to drape it across the back of her chair, her twisting movements drawing attention to the whiteness of her lightly freckled shoulders against the blackness of the chiffon top.
As she turned back she almost blushed to feel the nervous rise and fall of her breasts, cupped in their luxuriant nests of embroidered tulle, against the sheer silk. Every breath felt like a wanton act of provocation.
And naturally he looked…he was a man, after all…with a thoughtful expression that was somehow more stimulating than a leer, and Veronica was thankful for the strategic pleats of tulle when she felt the tips of her breasts begin to tingle and harden into betraying little points.
‘Russian? Icelandic?’ A slight breathlessness made her voice even more husky as she resumed their game.
His gaze fell back to his newspaper and for a shattering moment she feared that she had overplayed her hand. She looked around for inspiration, glancing over at the owner of the bar, who had been following the progress of their encounter with frank interest. To her chagrin he grinned and gave an expressive shrug, as if to indicate the hopelessness of her case.
‘Sprechen Sie Deutsches?’
Veronica’s head whipped back to find the chocolate-brown eyes waiting for her, banked with a taunting amusement, the roughly folded newspaper wedged down the side of the table.
The wretch!
‘Nein,’ she said, giving him look for look. ‘Je parle anglais seulement,’ she stressed, admitting her language deficiency with a defiant tilt of her chin.
A slow, sexy smile trawled across his mouth.
‘Je suis désolé,’ he said, placing a mocking hand across his heart.
She understood that, but chose to turn his mockery back on him: ‘Et je suis Veronica,’ she replied pertly.
He laughed and inclined his head. ‘Lucien.’
Effervescent emotion bubbled up inside her. She offered him her hand across the table. ‘Pleased to meet you, Lucien.’
‘Enchanté,’ he murmured, and she shivered as she felt the warm slide of his palm against hers, his thumb caressing up over her knuckles, his breath warm on the back of her hand as he lifted it to his mouth, holding her gaze as his lips brushed lightly over her skin.
It was a ridiculously over-extravagant cliché of a gesture, as they both well knew, but it still made Veronica feel hot all over, and when she disengaged her hand she wrapped it quickly around her glass in a vain attempt to cool off.
Noticing that his beer-glass was almost empty, she tried to buy some more time by ordering another round, but he protested when she tried to get herself another Kir and she became even more flushed at the idea that he thought she was drunk. But no—by word, gesture and helpful translation from the bar-owner, she divined that he was changing her order to a Kir Royale, and putting it on his own bill.
It was, she discovered, made with champagne rather than still white wine, and was an altogether more superior drink. Judging from her peep of the Champagne label on the bottle that the barman had discreetly turned away to pour, it was also a great deal more superior in price. Her dark-haired companion, then, was obviously not a poor man…something she had already deduced from the expensive labels on his casual clothes.
The champagne went immediately to her head, and banished her former nerves and with them any remaining doubts about the wisdom of what she was doing. You didn’t need to speak the same language, she discovered, in order to have a good time—in fact, in some ways it was more liberating not to have to make sense!
The language differences made deep conversation impossible, but neither of them was in a mood to be serious, so over the course of the evening they invented their own way of communicating. Across the twin barriers of language and a mutual reluctance to touch on personal subjects, they established the important basics: the fact they were both single, over twenty-one, and currently alone in Paris—she in need of a knowledgeable guide to the best places to be in Paris on Bastille Night, and he…well…her feeble French wasn’t up to questioning his motives even if she had wanted to. It was enough that he found her an entertaining diversion from whatever it was that had had him brooding darkly over his newspaper.
When her stomach gurgled an embarrassing message, he paid their shot at the bar and whisked her around a few corners to the Brasserie Bofinger, where they sat on plush banquettes under the spectacular art nouveau glass dome, and gorged themselves on oysters and champagne. He was amused at their pantomimed tussle over the bill and sulked at her iron-willed insistence on paying it with her credit card, but, catching the devilish gleam in his eye, she suspected he was putting on a great deal of his outrage, and that he enjoyed messing with her head, much as she had enjoyed toying with his expectations, playing to the hilt his role of volatile and moody, but ultimately charming, Frenchman.
At times during the rest of the magical night she had reason to suspect that he might not even be French, and that he definitely understood more English than he was letting on—but neither mattered, for the mystery was all part of the fun.
All that mattered was that he knew Paris—inventive enough to slip them past hotel security for a peek at a glittering masquerade ball and persuasive enough to talk them into the exclusive nightclub of her fancy.
He was also strong enough to muscle their way through the crowds and quick-thinking enough to rescue them when they emerged from the Métro at the Bastille, where they had agreed to say their farewells, to be caught up in a furious scuffle between a flying wedge of riot police and a rowdy mob of political protesters intermingled with drunken youths looking to encourage the fight.
‘Luc!’ she cried as she received a stray elbow in the kidney that almost knocked her to the ground.
‘This way!’ Lucien yelled in her ear, hooking his powerful arm around Veronica’s waist, swinging her away from the moving wall of riot shields and flailing batons, and ducking and diving with her amongst the fleeing crowds being herded away from the centre of the action.
Cutting left down the rue de la Bastille with several dozen others, they ran past the familiar long red awning of Bofinger and right at the next corner, Lucien’s arm falling away to grab her hand, and Ve
ronica blindly trusted herself to his lead, breathlessly running helter-skelter in her flimsy sandals at his side, past the rows of parked cars, and tooting traffic, quickly outstripping the other scattering runners who slowed when the police turned their attention to easier prey. She began to laugh helplessly, for the sheer absurdity of it: Veronica Bell, budding businesswoman and long time goody-two-shoes, on the run from the cops through the night streets of Paris!
They cut left again, and suddenly they were in a place she recognised—the open-sided pedestrian arcade surrounding the Place des Vosges, their running footsteps on the stone paving echoing off the vaulted ceiling. Lights were on in some of the apartments in the seventeenth-century, red-brick buildings facing out onto the square, but the restaurants and cafés and art galleries in the arcade below were closed. Here the shouting and the tumult seemed a long way away, little traffic turning through the square, the park gates locked and the fountains turned off, the neatly clipped row of linden trees around the edge of the park casting ghostly shadows onto the crushed white walkways inside the iron railings.
‘You spoke English,’ Veronica accused, tugging at his hand as she slowed down, her chest burning, her free hand pressing against the slight stitch in her side.
She gasped as a police car slid past the end of the square and Lucien spun her behind one of the square pillars that supported the arched ceiling of the arcade, backing her up against the cool stone, his hands sliding around her back to protect her silk top from the roughened surface as his body pressed her deep into the inky shadow. Their panting breath intermingled and she could feel the rapid beat of his heart kicking against her breast and the fear and excitement tangled up inside her until she had to struggle to think.
‘Back there,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘I heard you—’
