Seven Nights To Surrender

by Jeanette Grey

  “Yeah.” She frowned, patting her side as if to touch the purse that wasn’t there. “Four years living in this sketchy part of Brooklyn, and I come to Paris to get robbed.” She dropped her gaze away from his. “Mom warned me about it, too, you know. Told me Paris was full of thieves.”

  Her expression was growing more and more unhappy. God. She really didn’t know how to guard her emotions at all, did she? Nothing like the people he’d once surrounded himself with. The ones who would’ve looked at such naïveté with contempt. Here and now, it sparked a tenderness inside him that was new. He wanted to wipe the frown from her lips—or better, kiss it off. He wanted to know what had put it there in the first place. Neither reaction made sense.

  So instead of touching or pressing, he steered the conversation onto safer ground. “Is it just you and your mom?”

  “Pretty much. My dad’s . . . out of the picture.” And oh, but there was a minefield under there, based on the tone of her voice. She crossed her arms over her chest. “How about you?”

  Speaking of minefields . . .

  Before he could try to find a way around talking about the train wreck that was his family, they rounded a corner, and he let out a breath in relief. He craned his neck and pointed. “Look. Those banners up ahead?”

  Kate followed his gaze, rising up onto tiptoes. Easily distracted, thank God. “Yeah?”

  He reached out to grab hold of her hand and nearly got lost in the softness of her skin. He licked his lips and swallowed. “Come on. We’re nearly there.”

  The crowds of tourists were more overwhelming right around the museum, though not as bad as they would be once July hit. Letting him interlace their fingers, she quickened her pace, falling into step as they weaved their way along the sidewalk. The great walls of the place finally gave, and he dragged her along through the archway.

  “Don’t we have to go in through the Pyramid?” she asked, sounding breathless, evoking the famous entrance to the museum.

  He twisted to look at her and winked. “Would I lead you any other way?”

  They emerged out into the stone courtyard. He let go of her hand to throw his arms out wide. Ta-da. “Your Pyramid, madame.”

  Pei’s Pyramid. It was a glass and metal structure, located at the center of the courtyard, housing the main entrance of the museum. His mother had always hated it, but he’d never really minded the thing. Besides, it was in all the guidebooks, and in high school French textbooks. Tourists typically wanted to see it.

  She stood there staring at the monument for a long moment before scrunching her face up. “That is both so much cooler and so much less impressive than I expected.”

  Well, at least she was honest. He threw his head back and laughed. “Welcome to international travel, my dear.” He dug in his pocket for his phone. “You want a picture?”

  “Actually, kinda. Yeah.”

  “Stand over there.” He motioned her to stand where he had a good view of her and the Pyramid. The sky was a bright, perfect blue, and it brought out the red in her hair. Her photo smile wasn’t as arresting as her real one, but he’d take it anyway. “Say ‘fromage.’”

  He snapped the shot, then held it out so she could see. He expected the requisite look of embarrassment all girls gave him when he showed them images of themselves, but instead she simply nodded. “Nice composition.”

  It made him pause. She had been planning to spend her day sketching, had been swayed by his offer to take her here of all places, so the comment shouldn’t have surprised him. But his estimation of her rose. When she looked at something, she looked deeper. Saw more.

  The idea of wandering around a museum with her suddenly took on a whole new kind of charm.

  He glanced at the picture again before flicking back to the camera app. “Easy when there’s a pretty lady in the frame.”

  She cast her gaze skyward and was just starting to move away when he caught her arm.

  “What?”

  “One more.”

  “The one is plenty,” she argued.

  “One more for me.” With that, he reeled her in, wrapping his arm around her shoulder. It was a cheap ploy, but he couldn’t resist the chance to get her close. Her scent wafted over him again. He took a second to breathe her in, to really feel her against his side before he held his arm out for the selfie, shooting his own best ladykiller grin at the lens.

  Her laughter sounded more indulgent than charmed, but he could work with that. “Does this move usually work for you?” she asked.

  He pressed the button on the screen to take the shot. “Better than the tour guide offer, even.” He snapped his teeth playfully near her ear. “Because this one gives me an excuse to touch you.”

  Making a show of mock-growling at her, he gave her one rough squeeze and let her go. She took only a half step away, but the loss of her left his ribs cold. He mentally shook his head at himself.

  Before he could give in to the urge to tug her back in, and without a pretext this time, he turned his attention to the screen. A pang fired off inside him. They looked good together. Like a real, happy couple—the kind he’d been taught didn’t exist. Her eyes positively danced, her smile as wide as her face.

  And so was his. Not a thing about his expression was forced or fake. The contrast alone made his throat tighten. This wasn’t one of the usual selfies he took with girls. Not one of the awful pictures snapped on the courthouse steps. Or the others. The ones from before.

  His hands curled into fists, and he had to forcibly relax them.

  Shutting that line of thought right down, he turned off the screen of his phone. “You’ll have to tell me where to send them later.”

  Oblivious to where his mind had gone, she raised a brow. “Ah, now I see your game. You want my email address.”

  “Yes,” he said dryly. “It’s all been a clever little ploy so I could subscribe you to all sorts of mailing lists for natural male enhancement.”

  She arched a brow. “Am I going to need that?”

  Nicely played. “Not if you take me home tonight.” He threaded his arm through hers. “Come on. The masterpieces await.”

  “Are you sure we’re still even in the museum?” Kate spun in a circle, looking around in awe. “How can this place be so huge?”

  The vaulted archways seemed to soar above her, and the ceilings were almost as gorgeous as the paintings. The whole place smelled of art somehow, even though the works were all hundreds of years old, the oils dry and the varnishes cracking. The figures within the canvases glowed with how masterfully they’d been rendered, and something inside of her felt like it was glowing as well.

  She’d thought the Met had been amazing, the first time she’d been there. But she’d had no idea. No clue.

  She finished her slow circle, coming around again to face the center of the room. To face Rylan. He stood there, arms crossed over the expanse of his chest, gaze hot and heavy on hers, and a tremor coursed its way down her spine.

  Then again, she’d also never wandered around the Met with a man like him by her side.

  To think, she’d been worried when she agreed to let him take her here. She hated being rushed through museums, and she’d been resolved to take her time. But Rylan had stood by patiently as she looked her fill, had been waiting to take her hand at the end of each set of paintings. Big, strong fingers curled firmly around her palm, and the warm, male scent of him mingled with the wood and polish of the gallery to make her head spin.

  Swallowing hard, she checked herself. He was practically a stranger—it shouldn’t be so easy to fall into step with him like this. And yet she felt more comfortable with him than she had doing this with any of her other friends. Definitely more comfortable than she ever had with Aaron. Maybe because he was a stranger. There was no point pretending to be anything she wasn’t. She never had to see him again if she didn’t want to. So she had nothing to lose.

  Catching her eye, he tilted his head toward the next room, a silent invitation, asking he
r if she was ready to continue. She nodded, moving into his space again. The heat of his hand seeped into the base of her spine, but she didn’t flinch. Ridiculous, how quickly she was getting used to all these little touches. What had it been? A couple of hours?

  A couple of amazing hours.

  They’d seen a bunch of the highlights already. The sweeping statuary of Winged Victory, which had been so much bigger and more imposing than she’d expected. Tiny, lovely Venus de Milo. And much to Rylan’s frustration, they’d even stood in line to see the Mona Lisa nice and close. She’d shoved him when he’d asked with that odd mixture of amusement and derision if she was satisfied. She’d known going into it that that particular piece had a tendency to underwhelm, but she hadn’t cared. She’d seen it. In real life.

  In her head, she was rearranging all her plans for the week she had left in Paris. She had to come back and spend a whole day here alone with her sketchbook and her pencils and pastels.

  “You are having a total art-geek-gasm, aren’t you?” he asked, releasing her so she could get closer to one of the paintings.

  At this point, they were in one of the more remote galleries, one he’d insisted they make the time to visit, full of big, classic pieces done up in vivid colors, depicting scenes from legends and myths. None of it was what she’d really come here to see, but she found herself getting lost in them all the same.

  She was about to tell him as much when she glanced over at him, and he had that expression on his face again. It made her pause.

  She didn’t have any illusions that he was here for any reason other than to humor her. He was going above and beyond as far as the amount of time and energy she expected any guy to put into a pickup, but it was still a pickup.

  Only, he kept looking at her like this. Like somehow, despite his worst intentions, he was seeing more than just her breasts.

  She let a grin curl her lips as she turned her attention back to the walls. “It’s amazing.”

  “It gets even better.”

  Hard to believe, but how could she resist?

  “So the thing that really gets me,” he said over his shoulder as he meandered forward into the next gallery, “about European museums is the scale.”

  She followed, craning her neck as she passed through the archway and—wow. He wasn’t kidding. The whole room was full of paintings that stretched from floor to ceiling. The canvases must have been twenty feet tall, some of them maybe double that in width.

  “Holy crap.” In awe, she turned, trying to take in everything. She pointed to a painting at the end of the room. “That one is bigger than my apartment back in New York.”

  It might have been a tiny studio apartment, but still.

  “Don’t see this kind of thing in museums in the States, huh?” he asked.

  He was standing behind her now, his breath warm against her ear. It felt . . . nice. But not nice enough to distract her from trying to memorize the images surrounding her.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it, anywhere.”

  She stepped forward, away from his heat and toward the painting on the opposite wall. He let her go, walking backward to perch on the bench in the center of the room. He sat with his knees spread, his elbows on his thighs. She turned her back to him, but she couldn’t help but be aware of him—his presence that felt so unreasonably large in such an enormous room.

  “That used to be one of my favorites,” he said, gesturing at the canvas she’d been drawn to.

  “Oh?” It was arresting, the composition and the arrangement of the figures drawing the eye in. Bringing her hand to her mouth, she read the placard beside it. “Zeus and Hera?” She took a step back and tilted her head.

  The two figures were seated in a garden, staring into each other’s eyes. A smile colored the edge of Zeus’s lips.

  “They look happy.” His shrug came through in his voice.

  Really? The king and queen of the Greek gods weren’t exactly known for their perfect marriage. How many people had died on account of their fits of jealousy and pique? She furrowed her brow. “Not exactly how I usually think of them.”

  From behind her, he chuckled. “No. Not usually.” He paused, then added, “I think maybe that’s why I liked it so much.”

  She hummed, asking him to elaborate.

  “It was just a reminder. No matter how awful things were between them most of the time, they still had their moments. Their good times.”

  A sour taste rose in her throat. “Doesn’t change the fact that he’d knocked up half the pantheon.”

  If her mother hadn’t fallen for all the good times with her father . . . If the good times with Aaron hadn’t blinded Kate . . .

  “And the better part of the mortal realm, too,” Rylan agreed, a wry twist to his tone. “But still. I always used to like to imagine that at one point they were like this.”

  “Used to?”

  He chuckled wryly. “We all have to grow up sometime.”

  They were silent for a minute as she tried to take the whole thing in.

  When he spoke again, it echoed in the space. “The first time I ever came here, I was . . . maybe eight? Nine?” A shade of memory colored his voice. “A few years before my parents got divorced.” He cleared the roughness from his throat. “My mother brought me to this room, and I remember finding this picture and not being able to look away from it.” He gave a little rueful laugh. “My sister gave me so much shit for ignoring all the giant battle scenes to look at two people who weren’t even naked or anything.”

  Kate glanced over her shoulder at him. That was . . . kind of a lot of information, actually, considering how evasive he’d been while they’d been trading histories earlier. Turning back to the painting, she cast about for something to ask him more about. Not the divorce—not with the way that topic always brought her own hurts to the surface—though she tucked that away for later. After a moment’s indecision, she landed on, “You came to Paris when you were a kid?”

  “The whole family did. My dad’s work had us doing a bunch of travel.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Finance stuff. Very boring. And a very, very long time ago.”

  She frowned. “It can’t have been that long ago. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven. Don’t try to tell me nineteen years isn’t a long time.”

  He made it sound like a lifetime. For her it nearly was.

  “Believe me, it’s a long time. I’m only twenty-two.”

  “That’s not so young.”

  She considered for a moment. “It’s old enough.”

  “Old enough for what?” Suggestion rolled off his tongue. His flirtation made her bold. “For knowing better than to be taken in by men like you?”

  “Men like me?” His tone dripped with mock offense. “Men who take you to beautiful museums.” He was off the bench and at her side again, pushing her hair from her face. “Men who want nothing more than to show you their big, huge—”

  She made a noise of half laughter, half disgust and shoved him off.

  “Paintings! I was going to say paintings.”

  “I’ll bet you were.”

  “I was.” He held his arms out to indicate the whole of the room. “Do you like them?”

  And she couldn’t lie, not even a bit. She spun around another time, nice and slow, taking in everything. As she twisted back toward him, something inside of her softened. All the innuendo and playfulness had fallen from his lips, and he was simply standing there, waiting for her opinion.

  Looking for all the world like he actually cared what it would be.

  Impulsiveness took her close to him. “I do.” And this was stupid. But she did it anyway—leaned in and pressed the quickest, lightest kiss to his cheek. “I love it. Thank you.”

  He grinned as she danced away before he could reel her the rest of the way in. “Does that mean you’re ready to agree for me to walk you home?”

  A little thrill shot through her. How nice would that be?
He’d been trying so hard, and she’d enjoyed every minute of it. After months of being on her guard, nursing her bitterness, it was tempting to just let go. To say yes for once. He was funny and smart, charming and gorgeous. She could do a lot worse. But she wasn’t entirely sure she couldn’t do better.

  And besides. She’d never known it could be so much fun to watch a guy work for it.

  She started toward the exit from the gallery, a little bounce in her step. “Let’s start with you walking me to dinner.” Glancing back at him, she smiled at the look of smug satisfaction on his face. “No promises for after.”

  “I would never dare to assume.”

  “And it had better be something good.” She slowed down so he could catch up, and she didn’t bother to stop him when he moved to interlace their fingers. She’d already let enough of her inhibitions go, lulled by the ease of his smile and his touch. Why not accept this, too? Especially when it felt so good. “Off the beaten path. Nothing I could find in a tour guide.”

  “Don’t you worry.” A sly grin made his eyes sparkle, and his hand squeezed hers. “I have just the thing in mind.”

  chapter THREE

  “I have to admit,” Kate said, licking at her thumb.

  It was distracting, watching that little pink tongue. “Hmm?”

  “This is not what I expected.”

  “What can I say? I’m full of surprises.”

  And he’d had a feeling she would enjoy being surprised like this. Instead of going to whatever cozy, intimate bistro she’d probably imagined her Lothario would take her to, they’d stood in line for almost an hour at the best little crepe stand in Paris and ordered galettes from a man who’d made them right in front of them. Eggs and onions and mushrooms and spinach, all wrapped up in a buttery crepe for her. Ham and cheese for him, and a final one with Nutella and banana clutched in his free hand for dessert. He was still holding out hope she’d let him lick it off her, but it was starting to matter less to him.

  He was having too much fun. Ambling around the Latin Quarter. Eating crepes with a pretty girl. He took a big bite and swallowed it down.

  “So what did you expect?” he asked, nudging her with his shoulder.