Léo lifted his glass. It seemed Bunny had hidden depths—not everyone was willing to leave money to an employee, and not all employees would use that money in tribute. Léo felt oddly warm at the thought.
“To your Mrs. K., then. May her adventures continue.”
Chapter Three
HE was going to kill his phone.
The shrill sound—who picked that stupid ringtone anyway?—would not stop. Or rather, it had stopped twice, and then started again immediately. He knew only one person who was stubborn and annoying enough to ring three times in a row without leaving a message, interrupting the most delicious dream about a handsome, wealthy Frenchman who flirted with him.
Ben emerged from his cocoon of pillows—bless the Fairmont and their generous pillow allotment—and snatched the phone from the bedside table, swiping at the screen.
“What?” he snarled.
“Rise and shine! Why are you wasting the morning? The internet says you have a beautiful day there, and you should be making the most of it—or at least soaking up the sunshine by the gorgeous rooftop pool the hotel website boasts about. Isn’t there a DJ up there?”
Ben shoved the pillows behind him and leaned back, sliding down in the bed a bit. “How do you know I’m not already by the pool or sightseeing, only to be interrupted by your inability to leave a damn message?”
His best friend, Danika, laughed. “I just know, Benji. Now tell me all about your first day in Monaco.”
“I wish you’d stop calling me that. My name’s not even Benjamin,” Ben grumbled, and squinted at the other side of the bed in the low light. Was that a piece of paper?
“Sorry, Ben-e-dict. Seriously, what was your mother thinking? Benedict. Nobody in Australia is called Benedict.” Ben was only half listening as he wiggled in his nest of pillows, trying to reach the paper without having to move too much.
“Aha!” He snatched it up triumphantly.
“What? Ben, are you even listening to me?”
“Not really,” he said, scowling. It was too dim in the room with the drapes closed to read the paper. Damn upmarket hotels with their fancy blackout curtains. He shuffled back toward the bedside table and flipped on the lamp.
Then froze.
“Oh my fuck.”
Memory flooded in.
A handsome, wealthy Frenchman.
Flirting.
With him.
Plying him with astronomically expensive champagne.
Buying him dinner.
Sipping a digestif with him on a moonlit terrace overlooking the ocean.
Walking him back to his hotel.
Kissing him….
What the fuck did I do?
“Ben! Benedict! Answer me right now, or I’ll call hotel reception and have them check on you!”
“I’m here,” he said numbly.
Dani sighed heavily. “Thank God! You can’t just swear and then go silent like that when you’re on the other side of the world.”
“Sorry.”
Silence. Ben stared at the note in his hand, at the perfect penmanship so unlike his own scrawl. The neatly spaced words.
“Ben?” Dani’s voice was quiet. “What’s wrong?”
Ben swallowed. “I don’t know.”
“Oh-kay. Are you hurt?”
Ben assessed. Aside from being thirsty, he felt pretty good. No hangover, probably thanks to Léo feeding him. “No. Not hurt.”
“Sick, then?” Dani was starting to sound impatient, now that he’d told her he was okay.
“I’m not sick. Sorry, Dani. I think I might have done something stupid, but I’m not sure.”
Pause.
“Not sure if you did it, or not sure if it was stupid?”
Ben blinked. “Both, actually.”
“Well… stupid things on holidays usually involve alcohol, drugs, or sex. I know you don’t do drugs, ever, so that’s out.”
Ben sighed. “I met this guy.” The silence drew out, and he frowned. “Dani?”
“I’m here. Wow. I thought it would be alcohol.”
He chuckled. “It was.”
Dani gasped. “Did someone get you drunk and take advantage of you? Do you need a doctor? Are you somewhere safe?”
His heart warmed. If he said the word, Dani would leap on a plane and come to his rescue, he just knew it. “I’m fine, Dani. I’m in my hotel room, alone, and….” He shifted experimentally in the bed, just to make sure. He remembered Léo kissing him good night and leaving, but it didn’t hurt to be certain. “Nobody took advantage of me.”
“Then you better start talking, Benji, because I’ve got a whole lot of questions and no information.”
Ben sighed again. “Okay, but let me tell it all before you start giving opinions.”
“Fine.”
“I was having ice cream at the Café de Paris—”
“The place Mrs. K. told you to go?”
“Yes. Amazing, by the way. The ice cream was incredible. Anyway, I’d just finished, and these guys walked across the square to the casino.”
“Hot guys, obviously. OMG, were you in an orgy?” Dani squealed.
“No orgy. And never say OMG again. And is this letting me tell it?”
“Sorry.” She didn’t sound at all apologetic, so Ben let his silence linger for a long moment. “I swear, I’m sorry! I won’t interrupt.”
“Okay.” Ben took his time describing the sensations of utter lust and insatiable curiosity he’d felt, knowing Dani wouldn’t understand if he just said he’d followed the men (and gone back to the hotel to change clothes) for the hell of it. She knew him too well. She was mostly silent, only chuckling a little as he related what an utter moron he’d been when Léo had introduced himself in the Salle Blanche. Ben would have chuckled himself, but he was too busy cringing over his shocked reaction to having the man he’d been searching for approach him.
She outright laughed when she heard that Ben had called Léo both a con man and a member of the Albanian mafia—oh, and a magician. He sidetracked slightly to wax lyrical over the champagne, taking a moment to remember the taste of it on his tongue, nothing like the champagne he was used to avoiding.
She made intrigued noises when he told her about Malik and Karim, and a mixture of impressed and derisive ones over the whole “I don’t need a reservation” scenario.
“We sat and talked over supper for two hours, Dani. I can’t remember the last time I talked to a stranger for more than two minutes. Or anyone other than you.”
“What is supper, anyway?” Dani asked. “Is it dinner? Or is it like a postdinner thing?”
Ben laughed. “I looked it up. In this context, it’s a light meal late in the evening.”
“Oh. But do you have dinner as well? Or is it like a late dinner?” Dani’s tone had that edge of curiosity that meant she’d fixate on this until she had an answer.
“I honestly don’t know,” he told her. “I just popped my supper cherry last night, remember?” He paused. “Please forget I said that.”
“It was kind of yuck,” she agreed. “Okay, so this incredibly hot man with oodles of sex appeal has bought you champagne that you never even dreamed about, whisked you off for supper in a fully booked restaurant, and connected with you well enough that you were able to talk for hours. This sounds kinda like a movie.”
“There’s more,” Ben said gloomily, depressed at the thought that his life could be a rom com. Knowing his luck, there would be a nasty twist and it would turn out it was all for a bet, or that he’d inadvertently seen something top secret and Léo was an assassin sent to silence him. “I don’t want to die before I see Italy.”
To her credit, Dani only hesitated for a second before their brains synced and she got it. “You’d know if you’d seen something worth being killed for,” she pointed out. “Or Léo would have killed you already. Let’s face it, you wouldn’t exactly be hard to murder.”
“Hey, I work out!” he said indignantly. “I’m strong. Nurses have to
lift things all the time. I have lean muscle.”
“I know, I just meant— Wait. Let’s talk about that later. Tell me about the ‘more’ you mentioned.”
“What more?” Ben was still morosely contemplating the possibility that Léo had slipped some kind of slow-acting poison into the champagne, and that the best drink of his life was actually going to kill him. I don’t even regret it.
“I summarized your amazing evening, and you said ‘there’s more.’ Tell me about the more,” Dani insisted, dragging him out of his fond reminiscence of the champagne that cost more than his first car.
“Oh. Well, we were still in the restaurant, and the waiter came and asked if we wanted a digestif.”
“What’s a digestif? And if you tell me you didn’t have to look it up, I won’t believe you.”
“I didn’t, but only because I asked Léo. It’s an after-dinner alcoholic drink. It’s supposed to help you digest. Get it? Digestif.”
“Why can’t they just call it an after-dinner drink?”
Ben let his head fall back against the pillows. “How the fuck do I know? I only learned about it last night, and I’d already drunk two-thirds of a bottle of champagne by then.”
“Fine. Continue.”
Ben pulled the phone away from his ear and glared at it, then reluctantly put it back.
“Did you just make a face at the phone?” Dani asked.
“Yes. Anyway, I said I’d never had a digestif before, like the completely unsophisticated dolt I am, and Léo said in that case, we should go back to the Salle Blanche and have our digestif on the terrace. So we did. On a moonlit terrace overlooking the ocean.”
“Whoa! Léo has some smooth moves.”
“Right? So I’m full of great food and alcohol—I don’t even want to look up how much the digestif cost, because it was some kind of fortified wine, but no wine I ever drank tasted that good—and I’m sitting on a terrace with the sound of the ocean not far off, with this guy who breaks the hotness meter, and I’m thinking the night can’t get better.”
“And…?”
“And I didn’t want to chance everything going downhill, so I said I wanted to go back to my hotel.”
“Ben!”
“Not like that,” he assured her hastily. “I didn’t say it like that, and he didn’t take it like that.”
“Humph.” Dani wasn’t usually a prude—she had more one-nighters under her belt than he did—but she’d made him promise before he’d left that he wouldn’t do anything risky when she was too far away to come to his rescue. Just in case. “So then what?”
“He walked me back to the hotel. We went the long way around, and… it’s hard to describe. From the square where the casino is, the Fairmont is down a really steep hill. So the best way to access the hotel is from the rooftop pool area. And he stops me beside the pool, which is softly lit and quiet, and he put his hand on my face….” Ben drifted into a daydream. Léo’s kiss had been both fiercely hot and lazily sexy. His hands had been firm on Ben’s body, wandering up and down his back, brushing over his arse… and he was a hell of a kisser. Just enough tongue, not sloppy or too dry. It was the kind of kiss Ben could get lost in, his awareness of details blurring until everything was heat and mouth and hard body against his, silky-soft hair under his hands, floating away on lust…. He’d come out of it unsure how much time had passed and which way was up.
Dani cleared her throat, dragging Ben back to the present, his face hot and his dick half-hard. “Right, so he kissed you in a romantic setting… and by the sounds of it, knocked your socks off. Then…?”
Ben coughed lightly, suddenly embarrassed. “Well, then the alcohol must have hit me, because I was kind of unsteady. Maybe I took a step back, and he had to grab me before I fell in the pool.” Dani’s laughter was totally expected, but Ben almost didn’t care, because Léo’s arms had been as strong as steel and yet so gentle as he snatched Ben back from the edge of the pool. Am I gushing like a Disney princess? I am. Crap.
“Sure,” she said between chuckles. “It was the alcohol.”
“Anyway,” Ben soldiered on, “he walked me up to my room. And it really was the alcohol, because I made a complete arse of myself.” He glared at the note still in his hand.
“What do you mean? What did you do? Trip over your own feet?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, the carpet was lumpy! Anyway,” he drew the word out, “I didn’t trip over anything. He walked me up to my room, waited until I opened the door. I asked him in… to translate something in the hotel directory.”
“I thought everyone spoke English in Monaco? Well, apart from the doormen at the casino, obviously. But the Fairmont is a big hotel. Didn’t they have an English trans— Ohhhhhh. Right. To translate.”
Ben’s cheeks burned, even though Dani was half a world away and would probably have encouraged the action had she known about it beforehand.
“So he came in, and he had this little smile, and I knew he knew I didn’t need anything translated, but I was feeling kinda loose and I didn’t care.” He winced a little at the memory. In retrospect, Léo’s attitude had been rather indulgent at that point, not that of a man who was panting with lust for him.
“Because of the alcohol, and the fact that he was majorly hot and the whole night was like a fairy tale.”
“Right. But then I throw myself at him—maybe kind of literally—and he kisses me, and it got really hot. Like, really hot.” He paused. Even as a nurse, he hadn’t known body temperature could go up that quickly purely because of a kiss and some groping. Léo hadn’t been just indulging him then. There had been some actual panting, and not all from Ben. “And then he tells me to get into the bed, and I’m all hell yeah, so I strip and get under the covers.”
“This isn’t going to be a tell-all, is it?” Dani interrupted. “Because I thought we stopped doing that years ago.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Ben said glumly. “I’d pretty much just gotten settled in the bed, and he walks over, kisses me on the forehead, and tells me he’ll see me for lunch. Then he left.”
“He left?” Her incredulity was a balm to his ego. “He left guaranteed sex with a drunk tourist?”
“Hey!”
“Ben, what part of my sentence was untrue?”
Ben ran it back through his mind and sighed because it was all true. “Fine. Yes, he left guaranteed sex with a drunk tourist.”
“That’s really kind of sweet,” Dani tried to console him. “He knew you’d had too much to drink, and he didn’t take advantage of that. And wait, did you say lunch?”
“Yep,” Ben told her, slightly cheered by her perspective. It was sweet, damn it. Léo had to kind of like and respect him, or he wouldn’t have bothered, right? “He actually meant it too. I found a note on my bed. That’s why I swore before, by the way.”
“He left you a note? Oh man, has this guy got the moves. What does it say?”
Ben lifted the paper again. He’d read it about a dozen times already, but still the sight of Léo’s handwriting made his stomach flip.
“It says he’s not sure if I’ll remember about lunch, and so he’s leaving the note to remind me. One o’clock in the hotel foyer.”
“I can’t believe he wants to see you again.”
“Danika!”
“Well, come on. You were a complete dork. And I mean, if he’s as good-looking as you say, and obviously wealthy— Hey, you’re in Europe.”
Ben blinked. “Yeah. And have been for a while. You know this, you helped me plan the trip, remember?”
“No, I just mean, they have a lot of paparazzi in Europe, right? Who like to take pictures of wealthy people? Especially the good-looking ones. I wanna see if I can find his picture. What’s his name again?”
“Dani—”
“C’mon, I’ve got Google open. Don’t pretend you think this is creepy when you once hid in actual bushes to get a look at one of my dates.”
Ben sighed. He had done th
at. “Léonard Artois.”
“How do you spell that?”
“What makes you think I know?”
“Never mind, I’ve— Holy fuck!”
He smiled smugly. “Told you.”
“Crap, Benji, you know I love you more than life, but this guy is… holy fuck.”
“I know. Don’t call me Benji.” He contemplated the note. Superhot, sweet, rich… could a guy like that be real? “Maybe I shouldn’t go to lunch.”
“Holy fuck!”
He frowned. “You’ve already said that.”
“No, I’m reading his Wikipedia page.”
Ben dropped the note and sat bolt upright. “He has a Wikipedia page? What for?”
“For being hideously gorgeous and wealthy and a playboy loved by the paparazzi.”
“I’ll call you back, I need—”
“No fucking way. I’ll tell you the good bits. Right. Léonard Khalid Artois. Twenty-nine years old.”
“I thought he was older,” Ben murmured.
“He doesn’t look older,” Dani said, obviously leering at photos of Léo.
“No, but he seems… I don’t know. Mature. Sophisticated.”
“Did you know his mother is a princess?”
“What?”
“Well, the daughter of a Saudi prince. That makes her a princess, right? But his grandfather’s not in line for a throne or anything, unless about nine thousand people die in a really short space of time.”
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” Ben slumped back on the pillows and stared at the ceiling. Léo’s mother was a princess.
“Not kidding. I’ll swear on anything you want.”
“Fuck me.”
“No, honey, you don’t like girls, remember?” Dani’s smirk was evident in her voice, and if she’d been there, Ben would have thrown a pillow at her.
“What else?” he asked grimly.
“Well, the French side of the family is pretty much as exalted as the Saudi side. Like, they can trace their ancestors back for lots of hundreds of years. He’s got an older brother who works with their father doing… wow, that’s a lot of businesses and industries. Basically, they’ve got lots of fingers in lots of pies. Property all over Europe, especially in France, and quite a few of them belong just to your honey, not the family.”
The Bunny and the Billionaire Page 3
