“Of course.”
“Meet me there. By our statue.”
“Our statue?”
He smirked and nodded. “Our statue.”
“We’ve never been there before.”
“Nope. But we’re going tomorrow.” He leaned in and kissed her once more, lightly, on the mouth. “And you’ll know it when you see it.”
She remembered looking at the garden on her map, before it had been stolen from her. The place was huge, its sculpture legendary. She could spend half the day trying to figure out which piece he happened to be thinking of.
“And you’ll know I didn’t when I’m two hours late.”
“Not going to happen. And anyway, as we’re proving tonight”—he tweaked her chin—“I can be a very patient man.”
“Ha.”
He dropped his arm and turned, but then he paused. “You’ll meet me, then?”
She knew the answer in her toes. Her lungs fluttered as she filled them with breath.
This might be insanity. Might be folly of the highest order, and a distraction she couldn’t afford. Her smile wavered. Still, she nodded. “It’s a date.”
chapter FOUR
It didn’t seem to matter how long he’d been living like this, or how late he’d been up the night before. Barring the worst kind of jet lag, Rylan snapped awake at seven every morning, alert and blinking and ready for somebody to start barking at him.
Sighing, he forced himself to relax and sagged against the headboard, scrubbing a hand through the mess of his hair. He looked around at his surroundings, at the pale light streaming in through the curtains. The four gray walls and the bookshelves and the sheer quantity of stuff he’d managed to accumulate over the course of the past year. There were noises out on the street, but in here it was blissfully quiet. It was just him in the apartment, same as every morning.
Well, most mornings. He chuckled to himself as he slid his palm down his face. The few occasions he did bring someone back with him—the even rarer ones when they spent the night—they usually weren’t barking at him. Not his scene, thank you very much.
No, his scene was pretty art students, apparently. Pretty art students he could have had in his bed right now, if only he’d been willing to give up the pretense of what kind of life he was leading here in Paris.
Roommates. She’d wondered if he had roommates.
He groaned and shook his head at himself. He probably should have just been upfront about things with her. There hadn’t seemed to be much reason to, though. She hadn’t even told him how long she was going to be in town, but it wouldn’t be more than a week. Two at the most. Why rock the boat? She wanted her charming bohemian adventure, replete with shitty hostels and smelly, backpacking roommates? He wouldn’t spoil it for her.
He wouldn’t spoil it for himself. She hadn’t known what he had to offer, and she’d kissed him anyway. She’d chosen normal¸ ordinary him. No one else had ever done that before—he’d never given them the chance to.
Besides. He really didn’t want to see the look in her eyes once she knew. He typified everything charming bohemian types abhorred. Shallow, rich, lazy. Hollow.
To distract himself from that whole train of thought, he grabbed his phone from his bedside table. Sure enough, there were a handful of alerts. He scrolled through them with disinterest. A couple of things from his broker, and one from his father’s crony. McConnell. He deleted that one without even looking. The one from his sister he gave a cursory glance, but really, he shouldn’t have bothered. She had only one thing on her mind these days, and it was nothing he wanted any part in.
He wasn’t going home, no matter how many guilt-tripping emails and phone calls they all laid at his feet. Not now. Not after . . . everything.
Maybe never.
With a sigh, he turned off the screen and set his phone aside. He threw off the covers, rolling over to the edge of the bed and levering himself up to sit. He had until late afternoon to get his shit together, and he basically had nothing to do. Still, it wasn’t as if he was going to be able to get back to sleep. Resigned, he arched his spine and stretched his arms up overhead, then gave his bare chest a scratch. Flicked his thumb against the ring that hung from the chain around his neck. Finally, with a yawn, he rose and headed over to the wardrobe in the corner, where he plucked out a T-shirt and tugged it on. Between that and his boxers, he was decent enough.
It was somehow even quieter out in the main rooms of the apartment, and not the good kind of quiet. More the kind that had him out in cafés and museums and, well, anywhere else, most days. Ignoring it all the best he could, he made a beeline for the coffee machine and got some espresso going.
While the thing was grinding, he wandered over to the window and looked down at the world below. He liked the look of Paris in that post-dawn glow. The first commuters were already out, grabbing their croissants and heading to the Metro, but the tourists were still asleep, and the air smelled of bread instead of exhaust. It was peaceful.
This apartment was supposed to be peaceful. His mother had explicitly told the designer that. He turned around, though, and forced himself to really see it, and it made his teeth grate. It set his bones on edge.
Japanese screens and modern art and artisanal vases filled with single fake buds had nothing to do with peace. They had to do with showing off.
With creating a nice little space to drag the douchebags you were fucking back to, while your husband was home in the States robbing the company blind.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Rylan stormed his way back over to the espresso machine before he could put a hole through something useless and priceless. He poured the coffee into one of the dainty little china cups the place was outfitted with and slugged it down. It was bitter and it burned in his throat and he didn’t care.
He needed to get out of there, and not just for the afternoon. For a few days, at least. Maybe for good. He set the cup in the sink for someone else to deal with later and braced both hands on the counter, breathing in deep.
When it struck him—a solution so obvious, so perfect—he couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him earlier.
Without bothering with anything else, he stalked back to his room for his clothes and his phone.
He had planning to do.
The glare from the sun was almost blinding as Kate spilled out of the cathedral, blinking hard against the sudden onslaught of light. She fumbled at her side for the new bag she’d picked up at a random stall that morning and kept tucked close against her body all day. Winding her way through the crowd milling around the exit, she managed to lay her hands on the cheap plastic sunglasses she’d bought from the same vendor and slid them up her nose. Vision thus shielded, she cast a glance up and back.
Notre Dame Cathedral, real and in the flesh. Well, stone. It was another sight to cross off her list of must-sees, and she was glad she’d made the time to check it out. The stained glass had been as beautiful as promised. The arching ceilings and tile.
It hadn’t been as much fun as the Louvre, though. None of the places she’d visited on her own had been.
Frowning to herself, she slipped her way between the clusters of people milling about the square, scanning until she spied an open bench. She made for it and plunked herself down, resting her purse in her lap and looking around. There were so many things to see, so many people to look at, languages to hear. Rylan would probably have had an interesting comment about them all.
Rylan. She’d see him in a couple of hours, provided he showed—and that she could follow his cryptic directions to their meeting spot. Part of her wished she’d gotten his number, that she could ask him to meet up with her sooner. But no. It was better this way. He was good company, sure, but nothing worth getting attached to. Even if he wasn’t just after a one-night stand, everything about him screamed casual.
It also screamed confident in bed. And didn’t that send a shiver of anticipation up her spine?
A lonely nigh
t in a room with a bunch of other people who’d shared none of her compunctions about having intimate relations around strangers had made her rethink her prudishness from the night before. No, she wasn’t usually the type to sleep with people she didn’t know, but she was on vacation, and he was gorgeous, and she just knew. He’d know his way around a woman’s body. He’d live up to the promises he’d whispered in her ear and pressed against her lips.
Later.
For now, she had come to Paris with a purpose, and this was it. Opening up the main compartment of her bag, she drew out the sketchbook and pencils she’d brought with her for the day. She was still pissed about having lost a brand-new book the day before, but she was grateful, too. Fresh pages could be replaced, if for a small fortune. Near-full books? They were priceless, for the story that they told.
She flipped through the one in front of her for a moment, watching as faces and scenes and still-life illustrations flew by. She’d been slowly filling it over the last couple of years, and she’d been proud of it—proud of all the things she’d made in her final semesters of school.
And yet, looking at it now, all she could hear were the words her mentor, Professor Lin, had said in their last critique session.
“Mastery of every style, Kate. It’s an impressive thing.” Lin had tapped her fingertip against the frames of her glasses. “But unless you make a style your own . . . it’s all just imitation.”
A sour pit opened in the bottom of Kate’s stomach. She’d played with so many different styles in this book. There were faithful renderings, near-perfect photorealism. Fauvist color studies and gestures intended to capture movement. Impressionistic smudges decorated a few, and she’d even ventured into abstraction. By and large, they were good, she’d concede. But they could have been done by anyone. They could have been done by fifteen different someones.
You had to have a voice in art. A vision.
And that was the quiet secret of this trip, the one she hadn’t dared reveal to anybody before she’d gone.
It was her last-ditch hope that she could find a vision of her own. One she could take to graduate school with her.
She had to stop herself from crumpling the page in her grasp. If she couldn’t find it, she’d have to settle down. Take the corporate job she’d been so, so lucky to land, and go sit in a cubicle for the rest of her goddamn life, surrounded by gray, fabric-covered walls. She shuddered. Soullessness and stagnation and the only thing her father had ever let her believe she’d be good enough for.
She’d spent her whole life trying to prove him wrong. But deep down inside, sometimes, she believed him.
Not today, though. Not here.
Squaring her shoulders, she skipped past the rest of her completed sketches, turning to one of a handful of bare white pages and lifting her gaze to the city around her. Paris had something so vital to it, an energy and a romance. The city felt like she wanted her paintings to look, and if she could only capture that . . .
Maybe she’d have something worth fighting for.
Kate’s first sign that time had started flying on her was the angle the sun made with the horizon. She sketched it in behind the cathedral’s tower, then frowned to herself. Absently, she flipped to her first study, and yup. The sun had been a lot higher then. She went instinctively for her crappy little flip phone, but the thing had kept resetting itself to New York time, and she didn’t trust it.
Crap. How the hell did she ask a stranger for the time?
Frowning to herself, she turned to the person sitting on the other end of the bench. “Pardon?” she asked.
The man turned around, giving her a quick up and down before smiling and rattling something off in French.
She’d known this phrase, back a half dozen years ago. “Quelle . . .” What . . . Shit, what was the word for time again? In frustration, she tapped her empty wrist.
The man laughed. “Trois heures et demie. Three thirty.”
“Thank you.” She corrected herself. “Merci.”
He said something else, but she was too busy stuffing her things into her bag, a little pang of regret beating inside her chest. She’d needed just another fifteen minutes or so to play with that last sketch she’d been working on. Three times, she’d drawn the same basic view of Notre Dame, the first with an eye for accuracy, and the second with a quicker hand. That last one, though, she’d felt certain she was onto something. There’d been a different quality to her line work, a life to the planes of stone. It had felt better than the other drawings. Better than any of her work had felt since she’d graduated.
But she’d have to sort it out another time.
The Tuileries Gardens were only a handful of blocks away, but her sense of direction had never been good, and worse, Rylan hadn’t exactly given her a cross street. She might need the whole hour she had left to figure out where she was going and find the statue he’d told her to look for. What the hell had he even meant by that? Our statue?
She snagged a Wet-Nap from her purse and took a quick swipe at getting the charcoal dust off her fingers before she stood. With a little nod of her head toward the guy who’d given her the time and a wistful glance back at the cityscape, she slung her bag over her shoulder and headed off in the direction she was pretty sure she was supposed to go.
To her surprise, she even turned out to be right.
Feeling a little more confident, she slowed her pace as she entered the garden. She was smart enough to keep her eyes peeled and her bag clutched to her chest as she combed the pathways, but the bulk of her attention was on any hunk of granite or marble or bronze she happened to cast her sight on. They were all gorgeous, all epic in their scale and in their subject matter, but not a one of them screamed me and Rylan at her.
As she searched, despair coiled up tightly behind her sternum. Rylan had seemed so genuine, but if he’d really wanted to see her again, he could have given her something more specific than some twenty square blocks to scour. Or maybe a phone number. An email address. A last name. Anything that might help her out right now.
If he didn’t show, or if she couldn’t find him . . . well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d been disappointed by a guy. Not even close. But that didn’t prevent it from stinging.
In the distance, the obelisk that marked the western end of the gardens loomed, and she slowed her pace. It had to be four thirty by now. How long would he wait? Was it even worth doubling back and looking for anything she might have missed? Dropping her arms in resignation by her sides, she turned in a circle, looking for anything that might give a clue.
When she spied something even better. Much better.
A single, choked peal of laughter caught in her throat as she spied him, all messy dark hair and clear blue eyes, dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans that fit him to a T. And held loosely in one hand, a rose the color of a garnet.
Rylan.
And behind him was a bronze. A Rodin—it had to be. A bigger-than-life-sized statue of a man and a woman in a passionate embrace.
It was cheesy. Tacky. Swiftly approaching tawdry, even. But as her feet drifted forward, leading her toward him, all the doubt squeezed out of her heart. He’d made her smile so many times in the day and a half since they’d met. He’d made her body come alive, and worse, he’d seduced her with art. If that wasn’t worth a shot . . . then she didn’t know what was.
chapter FIVE
According to Rylan’s usual game plan, his expression should have been a sultry smirk. But as Kate approached, a real smile stole over him instead, one that made his lips stretch and his cheeks tight.
Who the hell did he think he was fooling? If he’d been following his typical playbook, he would have taken the girl home last night, and there wouldn’t have been a second encounter. A second—oh, Christ, this was a date. Apparently, the rules had all gone out the window the second Kate had been completely underwhelmed by his charm.
She wandered toward him with her hands folded in front of her and a flus
h to her cheeks that said she’d been running to try to find him. She was a couple of minutes late, and he had to admit he’d been starting to worry. All that concern was evaporating now, though. Her hair was loose today, the long waves of it framing her face and shining in the sun. She still wore tennis shoes, but she’d paired them with jeans that hugged her hips, and a shirt that dipped low in the neckline and that . . . was smeared with charcoal?
She stopped short a couple of feet away from him, raising a brow and pointing. “Is that for me?”
He’d nearly forgotten the flower he’d bought on his way to the park.
“What, this?” He twirled it back and forth between his fingers. “Nah. Random homeless person gave it to me while I was waiting. Think he thought I was getting stood up and wanted to soften the blow.”
“Sorry. I lost track of time.” She narrowed her eyes. “Though it didn’t help that somebody didn’t exactly give me the clearest of instructions.”
“Somebody miscalculates from time to time.” With that, he held out the rose and drew her in¸ tugging at her hand to pull her close. And hell, but he hadn’t been playing this up in his head. She felt as good against him as she had the day before—better, maybe.
Today, she hadn’t just gone along with his cajoling. Today, she’d decided to come to him. To seek him out.
Swallowing down the fierce, sudden burst of pride within his chest, he darted his gaze across her face. Raised his hand to her cheek and rubbed away a sooty smudge. He found it unaccountably endearing. “Let me guess. Busy day drawing?”
“Yeah. I got a lot done.”
“Good.” Did she even know how amazing that was? All his wasted days, and she spent her vacation making things. And then she had stopped—had probably run here if her breathing was anything to go by, because he’d asked her to. His heart gave a squeeze behind his ribs, and he cupped her jaw, taking pains not to grip it too firmly. “I’m glad you came.”
“Me, too.” But she averted her gaze as she said it, like she was embarrassed to admit it.
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