by Ally Blake
No, a man who’d seen what he’d seen and done what he’d done was not for the likes of light, bright Evie Croft.
As if he’d conjured her out of thin air, Evie hustled through the door in a whirlwind of noise and light and energy.
“Oh, hi,” she said, her wide, dark eyes taking him in.
Her legs were long in tight, torn denim and studded black boots. Dark hair streamed over the shoulders of her shiny red jacket and she looked luscious and warm, loose-limbed and effortlessly sexy.
Then she took another step and tripped over nothing. Like a fawn bumbling through a forest, snapping twigs and alerting every hunter within hearing distance she was coming their way.
Armand clenched his jaw so tight he swore he heard a tooth crack. “You all right?”
“Super,” she said, fixing her hair. “Nice trip? Sure was. I’m here all week. Try the veal.”
Despite himself, his mouth twitched. He wiped the evidence away with a hard swipe of his hand.
Before he’d even met her he’d believed her a sitting duck. He still did.
What he hadn’t known about then was her knack for self-deprecation. The serious gumption ticking away behind her ribs. The startling scope of that brain behind those big Bambi eyes. Or how fast that particular collection of attributes would reel him in.
“Did you take care of that urgent thing you suddenly remembered you had to do?” she asked.
“Not quite.” Not even close. “What about you? Thought you’d be at the restaurant with your friends.”
“The Yum Lounge, you mean?”
“I refuse to say those words in that order.”
“Spoilsport.” Her eyes narrowed. “They could be your friends too if you put in the tiniest effort. But alas, you are who you are.”
The fact she realised it, and accepted it, when those who were meant to be his biggest supports had struggled to do the same, only made her more damn endearing.
“Anyway, I know you haven’t eaten all day, so I brought the feast to you.”
And now she’d brought him food.
Evie filled the silence. “No need to thank me. It was completely self-serving. The longer you go without eating, the grumpier you get, and this is a really small room. Sit. Eat. You can go back to brooding afterwards.”
Without further ado, she placed a couple of linen napkins she’d clearly stolen from the dining room and laid them out as a tablecloth, then tipped a bunch of pastries—sweet and savoury—and whole fruits into the middle.
She then nabbed a couple of cushions from the couch and tossed them on the floor. She kneeled down on one, the low lamp light catching the side of her face. Those deep, dark eyes. Full lips gently pursed as she hummed under her breath. Not a single worry line marring her pale skin.
Like a moth to a flame he pressed away from the desk, pulled up a cushion and sat. Cross-legged. As if he was in preschool. Before he could demur, the scents curled beneath his nose and his hunger got the better of him.
He picked up a mini-quiche, paused with it near his mouth as he said, “Thank you.”
She passed him a serviette then smiled at him with her eyes, her mouth full of chocolate croissant.
“I don’t brood. Just by the by.”
She chewed. Swallowed. “You’re kidding, right?”
He waited.
“You sit at your desk and frown at those papers all day long. I bet the farm you were doing exactly the same for the few weeks before I got here.”
She lifted onto her knees and bent over the table to get another chocolate croissant the same time as he reached for one. When he pulled his hand away she grabbed it, turned it over, plonked the croissant within it. Then went back to grab another for herself.
The feel of her hand wrapped around his, even for the briefest moment in time, burned like a brand.
Armand had been brought up in a family who showed affection through patent family pride. They were not huggers. His work in the military and later private security had hardly changed that.
But Evie was a hugger. A toucher. And it wasn’t flirtatious. Not always. Not with everyone. Though, despite knowing how very different they were, there was something there—interest, intrigue, whatever one might call that glowing filament of fascination that burned between them.
He acknowledged it, but he would not act on it. Too many people he’d let past the outer shell had paid the price.
“Eat,” Evie insisted. “Before I start turning into one of my granddad’s lady friends, clucking about him not looking after himself.”
“I’m eating,” Armand growled.
“Good. Because whatever you were thinking about just now, you’ve unlocked another level of brooding,” she said around a mouth full of pastry.
Armand leaned over the table to get a mini-pie. And looked up to find Evie’s face close to his. Closer than it had ever been.
He’d never before noticed the spot of pure gold in her left eye. Or the freckle beneath her right. He was close enough to spot the pastry crumb stuck to her bottom lip. Before he even felt himself move Armand reached out, held her chin in his hand and used the edge of his thumb to wipe it away.
The flake fluttered to the table but his hand remained, cupping her chin.
Her skin was velvet-soft, and so very warm. Exactly as he’d imagined it would be.
Because, dammit, he had imagined. The feel of her, the taste of those sweet lips. How it might feel to wake up to that smile.
Her top teeth bit down on the spot where the crumb had been, looking for more crumbs. Or to ease the sensation where contact had been made. Either way she left a liquid sheen in its wake.
Eyes glued to her mouth, Armand once more grazed his thumb over the spot. Her smooth lip tugged against his calloused thumb. Heat swarmed through him in a sudden rush.
His eyes lifted to hers to find them huge and gleaming. A pulse beat by her temple.
This was no filament of attraction; it was a wildfire.
Armand dropped his hand away.
Evie’s instant intake of breath was loud in the loaded silence. She opened her mouth to say something, but Armand held up a hand.
“Eat,” he said.
She frowned. Paused. Then nodded.
And so they ate.
When she went for a third chocolate croissant Armand shoved a bowl of strawberries her way.
She shot him a look. A smile. A glimmer of challenge. Before she chose a strawberry and ate it whole. He’d never seen a person smile so widely with a mouthful of food.
Looking at her, you’d never know she’d lost her job and been under investigation for embezzlement a week earlier. She’d have no place to live a week from now. Her problems, as he knew them, weren’t small. And yet it didn’t show.
She left them outside the office door and got on with getting on.
While he—older, wiser, having been through so much and come out the other side relatively intact—brooded. Not unlike an infamous French beast, best known for shutting himself away in his impenetrable castle, believing himself cursed.
Enough was enough. He could do better. Be better.
Armand stood, brushed himself off.
“So soon?” she asked.
“We are no closer to an answer now than I was the day I arrived. So we work.”
“Armand,” Evie said, from her spot on the floor. “Despite the occasional sidestep into whimsy, I am serious about this job. Whatever problem there is, I will find it. You will believe in me enough to recommend to Jonathon that I stay on.”
She looked pure in the half-light, innocent and unspoilt, but the things she was saying between the lines were not. She was setting boundaries. Telling him she felt it too—this gravity drawing them together. But her job was her number-one focus.
It should have been a relief.
When Evie slowly reached out and grabbed another croissant, Armand unexpectedly felt laughter bubble into his throat. “How can you fit any more in?”
“It’s sustenance,” she said. “Now, stop watching me eat and go put your brooding to good use. We have work to do.”
Armand nodded once more and went back to his desk.
And even while his awareness of the woman on the other side of the small room had deepened into a constant warm glow, the letters on the pages, the numbers in the columns, the tangled concepts were suddenly sharper, clearer.
Whatever was wrong with Jonathon’s deal, Armand would unearth it. For that was what he did. That was who he was.
Whether on a battlefield or in a boardroom, Armand was a man who protected his own.
* * *
Several hours later Armand sat forward, fisting his knuckles into his eye sockets.
Even with the new clarity of purpose, he felt no closer to finding the reason for Jonathon’s concern bar a few items the tax office might wish to look at, but he wasn’t working for them.
He looked up to find Evie pacing along the back wall, stretching out her shoulders and bouncing on the balls of her feet like a prize fighter warming up. Her hair had been piled up into a messy bun, her huge headphones were tucked over her ears and she mouthed the words to whatever song was playing.
As if she felt him watching her, she glanced over.
She stopped, hunched as she tipped the headphones backwards till they hung around her neck. And even in the semi-darkness of their cave he knew her cheeks had pinked.
“Sorry, did you say something?”
Armand shook his head.
“Anything I can do?”
“How much do you know about finance law?”
“Not a lot. But I’m a quick learner. How much do you know? Between rescuing little girls, brooding and learning multiple languages, I can’t see how you manage to do anything else.”
“I managed. Law and Economics at university with a side-note in Art History.”
“Well, that’s kind of random.”
“Not when your family run a series of art auction houses.”
“You’re one of those Debusseys? I know as much about fine art as you know about debugging, but even I’ve heard of them. Of you.”
Armand bowed with a flourish.
“Why aren’t you over in Paris doing this kind of thing for them?”
He’d spent the past year doing just that and it had sucked the life out of him. Or so he’d thought.
“Long story.”
“I’ll bet.” With a smile she grabbed her laptop and sat cross-legged on the couch.
Armand stood; the crick in his shoulder and the ache in his legs felt good. Great even. As if his whole body was grateful for the chance to be of use.
He gave his desk a quick tidy and picked up his briefcase. “Evie.”
“Hmm?” Evie balanced the laptop on her knees, finger scrolling quickly over her mouse, gaze like a laser on the screen.
“It’s well after six. Time to go home.”
“Can’t.”
Something in her voice flipped a switch in Armand’s gut. “What have you found?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing. Maybe something. I didn’t want to say until I was sure. A thorn. Or a knot. I can’t tell which. Either way I’m snagged, and I’d like to keep going while I’m on a roll. Is that allowed?”
“It’s encouraged. But you haven’t had a break in hours.”
“I’m all good.” She shot him a quick glance before looking back at her work. “You don’t have to stay. If you have somewhere to be.”
“I have nowhere to be.”
“You sure? No TV show you’re desperate to binge-watch? No woman—or man—waiting for you back home?” She said it like a throwaway line but he could tell her gaze was no longer focused on the screen.
“No woman—or man—awaiting my return.” He couldn’t believe he was about to ask this. “Do you need to call anyone?”
“Me? No! No.”
“Will Zoe worry?”
“Zoe will not.” She shot him a glance. “She’ll be on the phone to Lance—the army boyfriend who is moving in any day now. Her place has very thin walls.”
“Is your desire to stay here due to a desire to keep working or to give them space?”
“Both.”
He had nothing to say to that. His entire reason for being in the country was a severe case of avoidance.
He picked up the phone, called down to the restaurant and discovered the chef was French. It was a few moments before he realised Evie was watching him, her fingers now still, her gaze on his mouth.
“Oui,” he drawled, agreeing to the chef’s suggestion. “Et le poivron rouge, champignons, olives. D’accord.”
When he rang off, he cleared his throat. “Dinner will be here in fifteen minutes. I should have asked if you have allergies.”
She put the laptop onto the coffee table and stretched her arms and legs out in front of her. “I can eat anything. Except mushrooms and olives and red something. Peppers?”
Armand baulked. Until he saw the smile at the edge of her mouth. The muscles around his eyes tugged, creaking from under-use. “You speak French?”
“Not a jot. I’m just good at seeing patterns.”
“Patterns?”
“Patterns—patterns everywhere. In sounds, in texture, in numbers, in code. I’m not sure why. Or how. My grandfather says I always lined up my jelly beans in coloured rows as a kid. And I took to knitting like a duck to water.” She motioned to the knitted hat hanging on the hook on the wall by her desk. “My brain is simply wired that way. You?”
“Are you asking if I see patterns? Or how my brain is wired?”
“Whatever you’d like to share. We have fifteen minutes to fill, after all.”
Armand moved deeper into the room. “What would you like to know?”
Evie’s eyes never left his. “I’d built you up in my head as this strong, silent type. I had no idea it would be that easy!”
Armand stopped, crossed his arms.
“Fine. Okay. Here’s a question: I get that your skills and knowledge are wide and varied, but what makes you the one Jonathon called in to do this job when you clearly know nothing about the kinds of technology that are his bread and butter?”
Trust her to cut straight to the quick. For the answer was complicated. A mass of thorny tangles and dark alleys and the kind of moments in a man’s life only the very oldest of friends could understand. And forgive.
“We’ve known one another for a long time.”
“Since university.”
“How did you—?”
“His autobiography. I was rereading it last night and saw he studied Economics in France. I’m clever that way.”
Armand scoffed. “You’ve read that schlock? More than once?”
Evie blinked. “As have you.”
When he didn’t respond she turned towards him, tucking one leg beneath her, leaning her elbow on the back of the couch, her head dipping into her palm. “On the train. A couple of weeks back. I think it’s what gave me the impetus to look into career opportunities here when my last job went belly-up.”
She’d watched him on the train. Just as he’d noticed her. Days ago. The knowledge settled, sliding into the dry cracks inside him like the first raindrops after a drought.
“Then you are my fault,” he said.
“Completely.” A grin spread slowly across her lovely face, like a sunrise in fast-forward. “Which explains how you know him but not why he came to you. Why he trusted you.”
“Are you always this impertinent?”
“Are you always this obstructive?”
Armand breathed in. Breathed out. This woman.
He sank down onto the armrest of the couch. “My family—”
“The Debusseys of Paris,” she said swishing a hand across the sky. His mother would like that. Would like her.
He tucked that thought away, nice and deep. “The very same. Despite the fact we have been in the business of art for generations—curation, auctioneering, patronising and owning—I did not go into the family business, instead joining the Légion Étrangère.”
“The...strange legion... You were in the French Foreign Legion? Still waters, indeed.” Her eyes ran over his suit, all the way down to his handmade loafers and back up again. Then, “On purpose?”
This time as he smiled the muscles around his eyes tugged not quite so hard. As if they were warming up. “That’s how it works.”
A beat, then, “I might be mistaken, but I always had the sense it was a bit of a renegade unit, filled with murderers and thieves, men running from the law. Called on to intervene in the world’s most dangerous hot spots at a moment’s notice. While wearing berets.”
“You are not far off. Any man may enlist, running from the law or otherwise. Bar those who’ve committed blood crimes and drug crimes.”
She held up both hands, palms out. “I stand mistaken. Sounds like a lovely bunch of guys. You said any man...”
“No women.”
She rolled her eyes. “Why am I not surprised?”
Armand went on to explain why. “The factors as to why are multiple: history; biological stamina. The men need to concentrate on the mission at hand, not concerning themselves with the safety of the women—”
But Evie held up a hand to stop him. “Spare me. And look around this place when you next get a chance. Tell me how many of the people working here are female and then explain to me what that has to do with biological stamina or the Safety of The Women.”
Touché.
“So Armand Debussey of the art-loving Debusseys of Paris, how is it that you came to join this band of ne’er-do-wells?”
Till that moment the conversation had been light. Easy. For it was that time of night when the sky turned soft and voices gentled. Where words spilled readily as the last vestiges of daylight faded away. It was the time of night when soldiers had to be at their most diligent. When shadows could be men and men shadows.
