She looks up at me, and her voice comes out trembling. “What do you think would happen?”
The look in her eyes. The tremor in her voice. I have to stop pushing and pressing. She’s going to graduate school. She has no room for a long-distance lover.
But this stupid organ in my chest is galloping out of control. I try to talk back to it. For fuck’s sake, it’s been four hours.
But what if four hours is enough?
Enough to know?
Enough to feel?
Enough to try to stay in touch with a woman going to business school halfway around the world?
Exactly.
I must focus on goals. Hers, and mine. She doesn’t need a man distracting her from her studies and scholarships with nightly texts. And I don’t have the wherewithal or the means to travel to New York to see her regularly.
I dig down deep, then answer with my brain. “We’d fall for each other and it would mess up our lives. That’s why we’re going to do something else.”
Her brow knits. “What would that be?”
I grab her hand, lead her into a café, order two espressos, and ask her for the book from the store. The Paris photo one.
“You’re taking it back,” she says with a pout, clutching it.
“I would never do such a horrid thing. I have other plans for it.”
She proffers it from her bag and slides it across the table to me.
I ask for a pen, and she hands me that too.
I write inside.
Someday when I run into you again, because I know I will, we’ll have more than one perfect afternoon. We’ll have endless time.
I turn it around and show her.
Her expression shifts. A lone tear streaks down one cheek, then another.
But she seems to collect herself, because she straightens her shoulders and says ever so softly, “I believe in that someday.”
10
Marley
I look at my watch.
He looks at his.
There is no more time.
But I want to squeeze every last second out of this fantastic afternoon. I walk with him to his hotel, where he hands the porter a few euros and the man brings him his bag from bell check.
Reid turns to me. We stand in the tiny lobby with music playing softly in a romantic language. I can’t make out a word, but I know it’s a sad song, a story of lovers torn apart.
“Come here,” he whispers.
“I’m already here.”
“I want to give you my last name. I want to know yours too. But if I do, I worry I’ll spend all my time googling you.”
“I know that’s all I’d do, so we probably shouldn’t.” I swallow down the stone in my throat. “This is crazy. How is this possible?”
With a smile, he shrugs, then says wistfully, “French kisses?”
I smile back, full of melancholy too. “Your French kisses.”
“Our French kisses.” He cups the back of my head, then lowers his voice. “You have to know I want to say screw responsibilities. I want to say I’ll see you tomorrow. But I’m not going to say that.”
I shake my head, my throat tight. “You can’t say that. I can’t either.”
“And you shouldn’t. But today is making me believe in something else.”
My heart speeds up. “What’s that?”
“That if we both believe in happiness, we’ll find it. We’ll remember this day fondly. And if it’s meant to be, we’ll find each other again.”
I love the thought, but how can that happen? “How? If I try to find you, I won’t be able to do the things I need to do.”
“Don’t try now. Go to grad school. Somehow we’ll meet again.” He whispers in my ear, “And when I see you again, I won’t get on a plane. I’ll take you home with me.”
I bury my face in the crook of his neck, wondering how I went from being afraid of heights to being afraid of falling in an entirely different way.
I let another tear fall, then I pull back, fasten on a smile, and tell him the full truth. “And when you ask, I’ll say yes.”
We leave the hotel. He hails a taxi, and it’s here far too soon.
Everything is ending far too soon.
But somewhere deep inside, I keep hoping it’s only the beginning.
Especially when he gives me one last kiss.
Then we say goodbye.
11
Reid
London
A month later
I don’t think about Marley.
I don’t let my mind wander to the lovely American woman with the freckles.
I refuse to let my thoughts stray to her soulful eyes, her lush hair, her winning smile.
And I do not under any circumstances consider her warm sense of humor, her wryness, the way she teased me coupled with the ways she didn’t tease me. My God, the woman was so open, so heartfelt.
I’ll never meet someone like her again.
But I don’t think about that whatsoever.
If I did, I’d be a sad sack.
And I’m not. At all.
I have work to do, a business to build, and contacts to develop.
And that’s why when I go to New York for a project, I don’t look her up.
How could I?
I don’t know her last name.
Sure, I could search all the Marleys in New York in business school. But there are many business schools in New York, and surely many Marleys. So if I did that, I’d have to punish myself with no more football, no more books, no more chocolate.
I’d have to ask my best mates to take away my man card.
She was a moment in time.
And only that.
And as I once read on the back of a book jacket I designed, “Some relationships were meant to last for a lifetime. Some for a day.”
My chest punches.
What a stupid saying.
I should have asked for her name, her number.
I should have done any or all of the above.
Except I won’t and I can’t.
After a meeting, I walk through the Village, past the NYU business school.
Is that where she went?
No idea.
But just in case, I give myself an hour.
One hour to sit.
To think.
To hope.
It’s insane in many ways.
Not to mention completely pathetic.
But I can’t seem to stop.
I don’t want to stop.
I want to see her. And walk up to her and say, Let’s do that over.
But when sixty minutes pass and there is no Marley, of course I resign myself to the cold realization that what happened in Paris was meant to be one perfect afternoon.
Nothing more.
And over the next two years as I travel back and forth to New York and make contacts and network with American designers on shared projects, including a fella named Lucas, I force myself to move on from Marley.
I even date.
It’s horrid, but so it goes.
12
Marley
New York
Two years later
I survive.
I survive two years of business school.
I make it through the toughest classes of my life.
And I survive missing the man I spent the most magical afternoon with.
For a while, I didn’t think I would.
I was certain I’d break down, fly to London, and knock on all the doors of all the design firms.
But I didn’t.
We made an agreement.
That we’d rely on fate.
That serendipity would have to bring us back together.
So I didn’t look for him, and while I wasn’t searching, I found something else in two years of classwork.
Myself.
My goals.
My dreams.
And I might even know what I want to do.
Someday I want a shop that become
s one of many. I plan to open a boutique that women flock to and love, and then I’ll open more.
But first I need to start with a basic J-O-B.
I’m offered jobs at banks and accounting firms.
But I turn them down.
Because I can’t stop thinking about something I said in Paris.
I’d probably do something where I could talk to people. Maybe work in a shop.
I’m still drawn to that.
When I’m offered an entry-level job at a lingerie shop with the potential to move up, I jump on it.
It might not sound like a sexy offer for a business school grad, but it works for me. It’s a chance to learn the ropes.
And I’m determined to find my way.
I do that every day for the next year, figuring out how to run a business, understanding what it entails, and helping customers every day.
A woman named Olivia comes to the shop once a month or more, and we chat about travel, life, and lingerie.
“My fiancée has a thing for lingerie,” she tells me in a whisper on one of her visits. “But then, so do I.”
“Sounds perfect that you both love it,” I say, then I show her some of our new styles, and she oohs and ahhs.
As I ring her up, we chat more, and she asks me if I plan on going back to Paris anytime. I sigh, a little wistfully. “I hope so. I’d love too. I spent the most wonderful day there.”
She studies my face for a few seconds. “Did you fall for someone in Paris once upon a time?”
I startle, surprised. Am I that easy to read? Maybe I am. “Something like that.”
“Then I hope you find your something like that again,” she says, and as she turns to leave, she offers a smile and says, “Maybe you’ll find him again.”
“Maybe I will,” I say but I’m not sure I believe that.
So I focus on other matters.
The store, my skills, my work.
I become friendly with my boss, even more so when she falls in love with her best friend, and it’s reminiscent of how I felt in Paris. Fine, she’s known this guy for ten years and I knew Reid for five hours, but those five hours marked me.
They marked my heart, and I kept them close.
The memories are as sharp as they’ve ever been.
I’m not a nun. I haven’t held out for him, because that would make me foolish. But I haven’t met anyone who makes my heart trip like that man did.
Which feels infinitely silly when I let myself break it down like it’s a business problem. It seems like math ought to defy the probability of that happening.
But nothing about that day seemed like math.
And it has stayed with me.
Maybe it always will.
One day as I’m helping Peyton plan the next season’s looks, a British man walks into the store. He’s older, in his fifties, and he’s charming as he buys a nightie for his wife.
“Thank you two lovely ladies so very much,” he says when he leaves.
I sigh. “I love British accents,” I admit to Peyton.
“You do?”
“I do. I met this guy once in Paris for a day. He was British, and ever since then, I swear I perk up when I hear an Englishman. Like I’m hoping it might be him.”
She smiles. “Maybe someday it will be.”
I shake my head. “That won’t happen.”
“You never know . . .” she says, letting her voice trail off. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know his last name. I only know where he lives and his profession.”
“You could try googling him.”
I have tried. I’ve punched in every permutation of “Reid” and “London” and “design firm.” But I’ve found nothing. I wish I had one more detail. One more clue. Something else to add to the search string. Something that would lead me to him.
But there are none.
That night when I’m home alone, I open the book and read his inscription.
Someday when I run into you again, because I know I will, we’ll have more than one perfect afternoon. We’ll have endless time.
I trace the words.
Then I close the book and send a thank you to the universe that I had that moment.
That’s all it’ll ever be.
I look at the napkin drawing one more time, hoping I’ll find his name. His number. A secret message. But I’ve turned it over a thousand times, and it’s only a drawing.
And a memory of a moment, a small slice of time.
The most wonderful moment I’ve ever had.
One I miss terribly.
In the morning I wake up with a start, a tingling sensation in the back of my mind. Déjà vu. Like when you see an actor and can’t place him until you remember he was the third guy on the left in episode seventeen.
It’s there.
One more detail.
I was in Paris for a bike race with my team. We placed third.
Reid said that to me.
Will it be enough?
I swallow nervously, grab my computer, and send a wish out to fate.
Anticipation builds in me as I google “bike races in Paris” during the time I was there.
And I find one.
My heart speeds up. It races like a locomotive along the tracks as I scan the names of the teams, then the members.
And I gasp.
Because there it is.
Reid Martin.
My whole body is tense, alive with possibilities.
I drop the name into google, and I gasp in a whole new way.
He’s a designer.
And he lives in New York.
I spend the morning trying to figure out what I’ll say when I email him at work. But I don’t plan what to say if he walks into the shop that afternoon.
I am speechless.
13
Reid
I check out a florist on the Upper East Side.
I pop into a jewelry store in Murray Hill.
I stop by a lingerie shop in the Village.
It’s getting to be a habit with me.
But it’s one I can’t break.
I haven’t broken it since Lucas asked me to set up shop with him in New York a few months ago. We’d already been working together on a number of projects, and most of our clients were in the city. It only made sense to pack up my bags and follow the business.
That’s what I’d been building toward for the last few years in London.
I didn’t move here to find her.
I moved here for business.
Yet looking for her has become a hobby.
Perhaps I am a stalker.
Or maybe I’m just a guy who can’t quite give up.
I give myself a deadline.
I tell myself that I’ll allow myself three months of checking out shops, of looking for her in person, since I’ve had no luck finding her through online searches. I simply don’t have enough details.
Instead, I check out places she might work.
I’m like a detective chasing down clues.
But I’m reaching the end of the line.
Until the day some of my business partner’s old friends show up at a coffee shop and tell me I must come along to a lingerie store.
What are the chances it’ll be hers?
But it’s my last chance, so I take it.
And then I see the face I’ve been dreaming of.
14
Marley
I’m seeing things.
There is no other explanation.
There is no other reason.
I can’t possibly be looking at Reid.
Reid Martin, who I’ve been composing an email to in my head all morning.
He looks just as handsome as he did that day, if not more so.
“It’s you,” he says in a whisper laced with disbelief.
“It’s you,” I say, trembling, unsure too.
Because when your wildest dreams come true, you still don’t believe them.
After all, he could be married. He could be involved. He could have thought we were foolish.
“How are you?” he asks, the most pedestrian of questions, as he walks over to me, wonder in his eyes.
“I’m great,” I say in a voice that hardly feels like my own. It’s like I’m talking from within a dream. “And you?”
“I’ve never been better. Literally.”
“You look . . .” My voice trails off. It’s choked with emotion. I don’t want to let on that I’ve dreamed of this magical moment. But I can’t fake it.
“You look real. You look like all I’ve wanted,” he says, taking the leap first.
It unlocks my heart. It unlocks everything I’ve stored up since I met him and we spent the most magical day together. “I missed you.”
“And I made a promise in Paris.”
“What was that?” I ask, my voice pitching up.
“That if I found you again, I’d make sure we spent a lot more than five hours together.”
I beam. Like the sun is shining inside me. I look at my watch. “What do you know? I have no place to be and nothing but time.”
His smile matches mine as he takes my hands. “Have dinner with me tonight. And tomorrow. And the next day.”
15
Reid
That night
That part about feeling like a kid in a sweet shop?
That’s nothing compared to a man waiting for a date with the woman he can’t get out of his head.
I never believed in the one who got away till I met her.
Till I let her get away.
I had my reasons at the time.
They made sense in my head.
And I knew, too, in my heart that we weren’t a possibility. There was too much between us then.
Now?
I’m determined to make sure the woman I’ve been searching for doesn’t slip through my fingers.
Your French Kisses (Boyfriend Material Book 4) Page 4
