They lay down on the couch together, as he gently ran his hands down her long lean body, and then slipped them under her sweater and touched her breasts. She arched at his touch, and he pulled her sweater off and admired her. She had a beautiful body and he had never wanted a woman more in his life.
She was wearing a skirt that slipped easily down her legs and she didn’t object when he took it off, and then gracefully she stood up and pulled him with her. She led the way to her bedroom and he followed her willingly, admiring her bottom in a black lace thong, which was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. Everything about her excited him. She peeled away his clothes as he removed the rest of hers, a black lace bra and the thong, and she’d been wearing stockings with garters beneath her skirt, which he hadn’t expected. She was a woman of surprises and mysteries, and at last they lay naked in her bed, and he couldn’t keep himself away from her. He wanted her so desperately that he was inside her moments later, and she guided him expertly through what pleasured her and tantalized him to heights he’d never dreamed of until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he sounded like a lion when he came and she came with him. She lay in his arms afterward, sated and pleased.
“That was nice,” she whispered to him and kissed him, and he looked amazed.
“Nice? You call that nice? Don’t ever try ‘fabulous’ on me, it would kill me….You’re the sexiest, most fantastic woman in the world.”
“I’m happy you think so. You’re pretty unbelievable yourself.” She lay pressed against him, and he was aroused again within minutes. And it was even better the second time. After that, she rolled out of bed and put on a pink silk dressing gown, and went out to the kitchen. He followed her there, naked, as she set out the crab and the rest of the food for him, and poured the last of the champagne into two glasses. She set out a feast for him on her kitchen table, and they ate and talked and laughed and kissed, and Tom had never been happier in his life, and neither had she.
* * *
—
Valérie and Tom stayed in bed at her apartment all day Sunday, until they had to dress for the dinner at Marie-Laure’s. They were the last to arrive, with a suspiciously peaceful, love-dazed aura about them that the others noticed immediately.
Dinner at Marie-Laure’s was casual and more chaotic than their welcome dinner at Valérie’s, but Valérie had no children and had had time to get organized. Marie-Laure had been cooking all day, while keeping an eye on her children.
The atmosphere was warm and friendly, and Paul had fun playing with her sons. He was as big a child as they were playing video games. The Team of Eight was there, Gabriel had skipped Sunday dinner with his children to be there, and Bruno Perliot was happy in their midst. He helped Marie-Laure in the kitchen, mostly as an excuse to be with her. She was wearing tight jeans and high heels, and a white sweater that showed off her figure. She looked younger and much less serious than she did in the office, and Bruno was bowled over when he saw her. Everyone was in good spirits. Gabriel, Paul, and Bill had brought the wine, Stephanie and Wendy had brought dessert from Lenôtre, and Tom and Valérie brought the box of chocolates they had bought at Le Bon Marché the day before. Bruno had brought her an enormous bouquet of red roses.
Marie-Laure had fed the boys before the guests came and she put a movie on the TV in her bedroom for them after they roughhoused with Paul for a while and she introduced them to everyone. The children were a lively bunch, but they shook hands with everyone politely before they disappeared into her bedroom to watch the movie. Bruno could easily imagine how busy they kept her, as he remembered his own three boys when they were young. They’d been a handful for two parents, not just one. And Marie-Laure had said before that their father hardly ever saw them. He had taken a job at a hotel in Morocco and rarely came to Paris, only about once a year, and he had no time to have them visit him, so she managed on her own.
She had bought several roast chickens, and made pasta. There was bread and cheese and wine, and a casserole she had made. The food was plentiful and simple, less sophisticated than Valérie’s hachis parmentier, but everyone had second helpings and the conversation was lively. Bill and Bruno spent some time talking while Bill told him about the hospital where he worked, and the problems they had with the gangs, which wasn’t a phenomenon they encountered in Paris. But they had other problems. At regular intervals, Bruno went to check on Marie-Laure to see what he could do to help her.
Stephanie and Gabriel were glued to each other for most of the evening, and Wendy, Valérie, and Marie-Laure were worried about her. She had gotten very deep into the relationship, and they had each warned her of the dangers with married men in France who never got divorced. She would be giving up a marriage and radically relocating her career, and bringing two children with her, if she moved to France for him, as they both said she was going to. And custody of the boys might be complicated if Andy opposed their moving to France.
“Think it through carefully,” Valérie warned her, as they put the cakes and pastries on platters. None of them wanted her to get hurt, or to dive into it blindly.
“I haven’t said anything to my husband yet,” she admitted. “I’m not going to until after Gabriel leaves San Francisco. I don’t want any major drama while he’s there.” Valérie told her she thought it was a good decision. No one commented on the aura of intimacy between her and Tom. They were both single adults with no kids, and no commitment to anyone else, which was very different from Gabriel and Stephanie’s situation, with spouses on both sides, two little boys on hers, Gabriel’s four children and however they would react to it even though they were older, and Stephanie’s medical career and all that practicing in France would entail. They were playing Russian roulette and inevitably someone would get hurt, even if only the spouses they were leaving. There was the potential for some real damage there, although they both seemed to be in denial about it. In Tom and Valérie’s case they were free agents and the only people involved, with no great risks, although they had careers six thousand miles apart.
Paul and Wendy spent a long time talking that night about Doctors Without Borders, and it was obvious how much Paul had loved his time with them. Wendy found the stories fascinating. Bruno only had eyes for Marie-Laure that night, although he was very polite and talked to everyone, but it was obvious that she was the reason he had come.
The evening ended at midnight. They all had to work the next day. Bruno carried the two youngest boys to their beds for Marie-Laure before he left. Tom went home with Valérie. He was staying with her for the rest of the week. That afternoon he had invited her to stay with him in Oakland when she came to San Francisco, and she accepted. He warned her that the apartment was a little beaten up and not what she was used to, but she decided to take her chances. She liked the idea of being at his home with him for the month.
Their three weeks in Paris had brought all of them together with the speed and intensity of shipboard romances. Strong friendships had been formed, great passions and deep affections. Most of them hadn’t known each other three weeks before, and now they were either lovers or fast friends. And surviving a tragedy together had forged memories and bonds they would never forget.
Chapter Twelve
Everyone was in good spirits the day after Marie-Laure’s dinner party. It was two weeks after the school shooting, all the victims had been buried, and the press had finally shifted their focus to other things, although the city and the world would never forget.
There were administrative meetings at the COZ that morning, and a new training film for hostage situations that they wanted to evaluate. But it looked like it was going to be an easy day, until eleven o’clock that morning, when Bruno called Marie-Laure on her cellphone and told her that there was a hostage situation in another school. It was exactly what they’d been afraid of, a copycat situation inspired by the first one. He told her the school and the address. The CRS and the SWAT tea
ms were already on their way.
She reported it to the others, and two minutes later they were out the door and in the van. The school was in the fifteenth arrondissement, in an ordinary neighborhood, part commercial and part residential. All eight of them looked grim, thinking of the losses of two weeks ago, and now it was happening again. The wounds of the first one were still fresh.
They left the van a block away, walked to the scene, and stopped at a cluster of police who told them that Captain Perliot was waiting for them in the bus he used as a command post. Marie-Laure knew now that it was armored, and the windows were bulletproof. Bruno was somber as they hurried up the steps into the bus.
“We got a call telling us it was happening, and the phone lines are cut in the school. No one has heard gunshots, and we haven’t been contacted again by the hostage taker. He said he has a bomb and he’ll blow up the school if we go in. We don’t have enough information yet to risk it.” He was dreading another slaughter like two weeks before. They had brought even more troops this time. The street was already filling with ambulances and rescue vehicles when a call came in, patched through from the central police line. The caller sounded young and cocky, and Bill had the odd impression that he was drunk.
“Nice response, guys. I’m impressed. You had everybody out there in nine minutes. The kids are all okay. They’re having a dance party in the gym. I scared the shit out of the teachers, but no one got hurt. I used to go to school here. The teachers are all jerks.” And with that, he laughed and hung up. Someone waved from a window they believed to be in the gym, and suddenly they could hear music blaring as the face disappeared. Bruno looked like he was about to kill someone.
He sent the SWAT teams in with orders to hold their fire until they saw evidence of weapons or a shooter aiming at them, and then shoot to kill. In less than a minute, the building was swarming with police, the riot squad, and SWAT teams, as all the children and teachers were brought out unharmed, looking mystified. They had no knowledge of what had gone on, except that someone had announced over the PA system that there was no school today, and there was a dance party in the gym. And they’d discovered the phone lines were down. Loud music had gone on, there had been no evidence of guns or bombs. There were no hostages, and no one was harmed.
It was a prank, which the police had taken seriously. They couldn’t do otherwise, given recent events. And the culprit had disappeared. No one was able to identify him. They hadn’t seen him, only heard his voice on the PA system. There were five hundred students and seventy-five teachers milling around the street, while the SWAT teams continued to comb the school and found nothing except an empty bottle of wine and a vodka bottle in the gym.
Two hours later, the school was considered clean. The students had been sent home by then, and the press were having a field day with the embarrassment that an allegedly former student had made fools of the police.
At two o’clock, Bruno withdrew his troops, and everybody left. It was all over the news by that afternoon, and it set a dangerous example to others. Several youths in the area had been caught and brought in for questioning, but they turned up nothing.
“At least nobody was hurt and nobody got killed this time. I’d rather be made a fool of than go through the other nightmare again, when it was real,” Bill said and they all agreed, but Bruno had been in a fierce mood when he left the scene. A joke like that cost the taxpayers a fortune and threw down a challenge that other idiots were likely to follow. And if they’d seen him and assumed he was about to fire on them or blow up the school, he might have been shot and killed. It had been a crazy, irresponsible thing to do, and it had jangled everyone’s nerves.
They left the office early themselves. And Wendy and Stephanie started packing that afternoon. Wendy had to buy another suitcase for the things she’d bought while she was there. And Stephanie had bought a mountain of things for the boys, more than for herself.
They were still talking about the prank the next day when someone glanced at the TV they kept on in the office for breaking news, and Marie-Laure frowned as she saw a scene that caught her attention. A church had been blown up in Rome. No group had claimed responsibility for it yet, but it was believed to be the act of terrorists. A man had come into the church dressed as a priest, and had exploded a suicide vest, killing forty-seven people, injuring nineteen, and destroying one of the oldest churches in Rome. That one was not a prank, it was the real deal, and a reminder to them of the harsh dangers of the world they lived in.
They all stood listening to the news reports, and it was another wake-up call that they were fighting a war against an insidious unseen enemy who killed children, destroyed churches, and terrified citizens in every country. It was the new wave of how wars were fought. The Italian police were not sure yet if it was the work of one madman, like so many other similar incidents these days, or a planned attack by well-trained terrorists. Either way, people were dying in every country from incidents like this.
“At least it wasn’t in France this time,” Marie-Laure said, sounding tired. Bruno called her that afternoon and said the same thing to her. They still had no leads to who the prankster was the day before. No one had noticed him when he slipped into the school, and they didn’t even know if he had left the building with the other students. He obviously was or looked like a kid himself and knew the school well. He’d gotten away with it, but it was a dangerous game to play, and people could have gotten killed or injured if Bruno had reacted hastily and ordered his men to storm the school. He was glad he hadn’t or the press would have crucified him.
* * *
—
The rest of the week was uneventful, and on Thursday night, all eight had dinner together. Gabriel looked depressed that Stephanie was leaving, even though he was going to be with her again in two weeks, which seemed like an eternity to him. Stephanie was excited to see her boys, but nervous about facing Andy. For four weeks it was almost as though he didn’t exist, and now she was going home to be his wife for six weeks until she told him that she was leaving him. And then she would have to start the process so that she could practice medicine in France. She had suggested to Gabriel that he meet with a lawyer and set his own divorce in motion, and he said he was going to wait until he came back from the States too, which made Valérie uneasy, even if Stephanie believed him.
Tom was unhappy to be leaving Valérie, but she had a lot to do in the next two weeks, to leave her PTSD counseling programs in good order. And Tom was going to do a major cleanup of his apartment to get it in decent shape for her. She suggested that an exorcist might be in order, and he said he was thinking about a bulldozer and a Dumpster. Either way, they both had work to do. And the Americans were all going back to their jobs for two weeks until the French team arrived and they were with them for another month of meetings and tours.
Bill was going to London the next day for a last weekend with his daughters, but after that, he wouldn’t see them until July, which seemed like forever to him. His life was a wasteland when he was far from them, and the time in Paris had given him four wonderful weekends to share with them, but he’d have to live on the memory of that now. They would be lonely months for him until July.
And Wendy wanted to face her situation with Jeff, but she hadn’t figured out how to do it, when, or what to say. She was afraid she would fall in love with him again as soon as she laid eyes on him, which was what had always happened before. She didn’t know if she had the guts to leave him, but she wanted to try. She had gotten some perspective in Paris and was determined to act on it, if she could.
Marie-Laure was having dinner with Bruno the night they left. She had been startled when he asked her, and Valérie reminded her that she had been right. He was crazy about her.
Paul said Paris would be dead without their American friends. He reminded Tom to get ready to show him all the best bars and nightclubs in San Francisco. They were going to
have a ball together, but Tom was considerably less enthused about the project a month after he’d first suggested it, now that Valérie would be living with him. Paul hadn’t fully absorbed Tom’s transformation yet, but the others had. They had all changed in the last four weeks, more than they could have imagined. It had been an extraordinary month, working with the French emergency services, and now they had a challenge to match when the four Parisians came to San Francisco. It was hard to imagine that they could provide as much for them to do in their own city, it wasn’t Paris, but they promised to try.
* * *
—
When the flight took off from Charles de Gaulle Airport on Saturday morning, they left with heavy hearts, and looked down at the city they had come to love that had given them so much, and thought of the friends they’d left behind.
And on Sunday, Bill fought back tears when he said goodbye to Pip and Alex. He promised to call them every day, as he always did. They clung to him and when his flight left Heathrow three hours later for San Francisco, he was already counting the days until July.
Chapter Thirteen
As soon as they came through Customs in San Francisco, reality hit Stephanie right between the eyes. Andy was standing there, looking tall and handsome in jeans and a sweatshirt, and as usual, he hadn’t shaved, but somehow it looked right on him. Ryan and Aden were jumping up and down next to him, so excited they could hardly contain themselves, holding signs they had made for her. Aden’s read “Welcome Home, Mom,” and Ryan’s “We love you, Mommy.” Her heart did a flip and she had tears in her eyes as they flew into her arms, and she picked them both up, one by one, careful not to crush their signs. Seeing them brought home to her how long she’d been gone. Everything at home had seemed so unreal to her in Paris. She felt so far away, like a different person there, and she had to be the old person, or pretend to be, now that she was home. She could hardly remember who that person was. She’d been focused on a new life in Paris, and now she had landed squarely in her old life with both feet.
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