by J. D. Fox
It wasn’t the fact that Genevieve had probed into his business affairs; Olivier knew that he had overreacted to that, at least on the face of it. She had obeyed the letter of his rule— a rule he had only put in effect because of how strange things were going to become between them the morning after they’d had slept together. If he hadn’t had sex with her, would he have made that rule? But then he reminded himself that part of why he had had sex with her, to begin with, was because she had been asking questions she had no business knowing the answers to. He had wanted to distract her, and indeed, it had been a diversion for them both.
But had she been playing him all along? Olivier growled to himself at the memory of finding out that Clinton, his new business partner, had been Genevieve’s fiancé before she had come to work for him. If Clinton did intend to double-cross him, what better way to ensure his success than to have an inside agent? He just couldn’t believe that there was no connection between the two situations. Olivier had hired Genevieve soon after he had started the process with Clinton, in the interests of developing his and his daughter’s English as well as giving Mathilde a motherly figure.
“Beh, arrête ça,” he muttered to himself, rising from the table to gather up and clean the dishes from breakfast. Until he found out where Genevieve had gone and what she was doing, it was pointless to continue speculating one way or another. He would just have to wait and see, and in the meantime, there were still loose ends for him to tie up before he met with Clinton.
Olivier stepped into his office, leaving the door open so that he could hear Mathilde call for him if she needed anything. He resented the fact that Genevieve wasn’t there, but he reminded himself that even if she wasn’t being harmed or up to no good she would have had the night off, and it wasn’t technically time for her to be back on the clock. Olivier opened up the documents that would be finalized in the next day or so and began reading them. There was a version in French for the government in his own country and their records and another version in English for the American government; Olivier had his work cut out for him to make sure the two were basically the same. He turned his attention to the task, keeping one ear open for his daughter and another for the sound of any kind of notification on his phone.
He had just started to relax into his work when his phone chirped from his pocket, letting him know that he had a text message. Olivier fumbled with the device trying to get it out, almost dropping it on the floor. He saw that the message had come from one of the friends he’d enlisted to find Gen: Je l’ai trouvée. Elle est à Rouen. Olivier scowled at his phone angrily. What was his au pair doing in Rouen? That was where Clinton had said he would be staying; there was no way that it was a coincidence. Olivier replied, telling his friend to give him the full details, and began to formulate a new plan. He would have to tell Mathilde about Genevieve, but if she had betrayed him, as he suspected, it would be much, much easier to explain to the little girl that he had dismissed her nanny because Genevieve had done him some kind of harm.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Genevieve woke up on the couch in Clint’s room just after seven in the morning with a headache throbbing in her temples. She glanced over to where her former fiancé still slept, on the bed nearby, and smiled wryly to herself; she had managed to wake up before him, which was good. In fact, it was vital to her plans.
She scrubbed at her face and found her phone on the floor nearby where she’d plugged it in to charge. It had been too late to call Louis when she’d gotten what she needed, and her phone had been nearly dead, so she’d decided to sleep a little bit until the time came for her to make her exit. As Gen took stock of everything, she unplugged her phone and checked to make sure she still had what she needed.
It had been a risky proposition, coming back to Clint’s room with him, and Gen had known it. He apparently had expected to get her into bed with him, and while there was part of her that had been tempted, more of her mind rejected the idea. How could she possibly sleep with the man she was sure had landed her parents in jail? Then, too, she had to admit that after her tryst with Olivier, her standards were much higher, and she was reasonably confident that even the regretful, needy Clint wouldn’t meet them.
Gen swallowed a chuckle at how easy it had been, in the end, to keep her ex at arm’s length. They’d stopped at Monoprix just before it was set to close and bought up a couple of bottles of wine that Gen knew were decent. She’d led Clint, half-drunk and already murmuring what he wanted to do to her, back to the hotel, and with the help of the front desk agent got him up to his room.
Finding her bra, Gen rose to her feet and got ready to get out of the room as quietly as possible so as not to wake Clint. She needed to get to Olivier as soon as she could because she had important information for him; some things that would, she hoped, change the way he approached the business he was about to enter into with her ex. She slipped the bra on and made sure her clothes were straightened, checking her phone one last time. She’d had lousy reception through the night, but she’d managed to get some things saved from pictures she’d taken.
Clint groaned and turned over in bed and Gen froze, waiting to see if he would wake up. He didn’t, and she smiled to herself again at the memory of getting him to go to bed without what he had wanted from her. It had been a near thing, and in the end, she’d had to let him get to first base— but he had gotten no further with her than that, in spite of his charms. Clint had sobered up a bit by the time they got to the room, but Gen had poured the wine and he’d quickly gotten right back at his previous level of inebriation; not so drunk that he was sloppy, but certainly enough to be indiscreet.
“So you’re here for business, to get a partnership off the ground,” she’d said, sipping her wine as slowly as she could to keep her wits about her as much as possible, “but you keep putting off telling me anything about it.”
“Right now, I’m focused on convincing you to come back to the States with me,” Clint had replied. Gen had chuckled a bit at that; partly because she knew she was not going to be going back with him no matter what he said, and partly because it was almost laughable how confident he was.
“Well, maybe if you’d be a little more open with me about things, I might get a better idea of why I should,” Gen had said. She wanted to see how much she could get Clint to tell her himself. The idea of snooping through his phone and computer was partly backup and depended heavily on knowing what to look for.
“What do you want to know?” Clint had poured himself more wine, and Gen had kicked off her shoes, wriggling her toes and stretching her arms over her head as if she was almost ready to get into bed.
“Just what the situation is, basically,” Gen had replied. Clint offered her more wine, and she finished off what was in her glass, with every intention to nurse the second installment as slowly as possible.
“Well, on the surface it’s just a partnership,” Clint had said, shrugging. “Lots of people in the US are interested in doing some stuff with their money here, and the people investing on this side can get returns based on how that money is moved around.” Gen had nodded; this was what the paperwork she had seen from Olivier had shown.
“So if that’s what it is on the surface, what is it underneath that?” She’d taken a sip of her wine to make it seem like she was drinking more eagerly than she was.
“It’s a little shadier than that under the surface,” Clint had said, grinning at his own pun. “But I can’t reveal too much; not even to my future wife.” Gen had rolled her eyes broadly at that.
“I’m not going to get married to someone who doesn’t trust me,” she’d said playfully. She’d inched a bit closer to Clint too, drawing him in to maintain his interest.
“It the end of the day it’s just a lot of moving things around,” Clint had said dismissively. “Of course, some people on my end are going to be shadier than others…”
“Of course,” Gen had agr
eed.
“But overall it will work well...while it lasts.”
“How do you know it’s not going to last?” Gen had raised an eyebrow at that. “Or how long it will last?” Clint had chuckled.
“It isn’t designed to last,” he’d said. “It’ll hold up for a few months… half a year at most. And then it will fold.” That was new information to Gen, and she filed it away in her mind. How much did Olivier know about this part of the plan? It was impossible to know.
But Clint didn’t want to say anything more about his plans after that, and Gen couldn’t risk tipping her hand by badgering him any more aggressively. So instead, she had played along while he got drunker and finally let him kiss her, his hands moving over her body, his breath hot and heavy with wine. But she had managed to stop things short of getting naked and well before anything had progressed beyond over-the-clothes groping. Clint had ended the night passed out on the bed, and Gen had been free to do a little snooping while he was out of it.
As she made her way down the stairs towards the lobby in the bright light of morning, Gen reflected on what she’d found. She’d waited until she was sure that Clint was asleep, and had gone into his computer first, reasoning that he was unlikely to have changed the password since the last time she’d been around him; he’d never been all that intensive about security. She’d put in the password she knew he liked to use— his middle name followed by the month and day of his birthday and then the street number of his first apartment. It had worked, and that had been when the anxiety set in. Gen had worked to look through what Clint had on his computer as quickly as possible, knowing he could potentially wake up at any moment.
What she found had shocked her a little, but at the same time, she had thought that it was more surprising to find out that she could still be shocked. Gen reached the ground floor of the hotel slightly out of breath, with her head still throbbing, and closed her eyes for a moment against the vertigo. She’d managed to capture some emails back and forth between Clint and a few of his buddies outlining what they planned to do with their business partnership, and then— acting on impulse— had gone further back, interested in seeing whether her suspicions about his involvement with her parents’ disgrace had any merit.
She’d gathered her evidence from the computer and saved it onto her phone, carefully doing what she could to remove any trace of her intrusion. Then she had found Clint’s phone and tried looking for anything else she might find on there, struggling with his passcode for a few attempts before she managed to get the right combination. That had been trickier, and it was hard to send text messages to herself without leaving evidence that she’d done so, but finally, Gen had worked something out that she hoped wouldn’t put Clint on alert. And at the end of it, she’d seen that her phone was almost dead, and set it to Airplane mode so it would charge faster before falling asleep.
As she emerged from the lobby, Gen realized she had never taken it off of Airplane, and that she would need to call Louis to come and get her from somewhere else in Rouen. She took her phone out and set it back to its normal setting— and all at once a deluge of missed calls and voicemails came in, all of them after midnight. And all of them, when Gen checked, had come from Olivier. Her heart beat faster in her chest as she struggled to understand what it could mean; was her soon-to-be former employer worried about her? Had he had a change of heart about firing her? She left the hotel in search of somewhere reasonably quiet where she could check the messages and find out what was happening.
“Madame Coltrane?” Gen looked up absently at the sound of her name and saw a man dressed in jeans, work shirt, loafers, and a light scarf. He had short brown hair and some slight stubble on his cheeks, but he was more stylish in his way than Clint had been. Gen thought absently that almost all of the French men she encountered were, no matter how hard he might try.
“Oui, c’est moi,” she replied. “Comment puis-je vous aider?”
“I need for you to come with me,” the man replied in slow, accented English. Looking around in consternation, Gen spotted a few other men, equally nondescript, converging on her location. “I am a friend of your employer, Monsieur Laurent. He wished us to find you and bring you to him.” Gen looked around again, considering the possibility of shouting for help, but realized that there wasn’t much point in it.
“Can you show me some proof that you are truly a friend of Olivier’s? And that you’re working in his interest?” Gen crossed her arms over her chest and stared into the man’s eyes, her heart thudding.
“I can,” the man said simply. He took out his phone and Genevieve saw the message he had brought up; the number listed was definitely her boss’, and the message— in French— was clear.
“Then I guess that I can come with you,” she said, feeling the weakness in her knees. What had happened overnight? She took a deep breath and thought that, at least if Olivier was planning on meeting with her, she would definitely have a chance to show him what she had found out about Clint. But would he listen to her any more than he had before? She could only hope.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Olivier tried to contain his impatience as he waited for Genevieve to arrive, knowing that there was still too much he didn’t know. Finding out that his employee was in the hotel of his business partner had set off alarms in his mind, but at the same time, he had felt relief at the knowledge that she was safe, at least. But swirling through his sleep-deprived thoughts was the possibility that it had all been a setup all along; that she had appealed to him intentionally, and become his au pair with an ulterior motive set in place by her fiancé. That she’d met with him the night before seemed to confirm it.
He hadn’t even known that Clinton was in the country yet, but his investigators had figured it out. They had found out that Monsieur Humphries had a guest with him at the hotel he had taken a suite in, and a little more digging uncovered that Genevieve had been that guest. Olivier reasoned that he could talk to his driver, Louis, later about his part in the situation, but he didn’t think that Louis was involved other than by virtue of being transportation. He hadn’t thought to call his driver or ask about it, because he hadn’t imagined that Genevieve would be meeting with his business partner.
But now, knowing what he did, Olivier’s first reaction was anger. He took another slow breath, and his phone chirped, notifying him that he had a text message. Olivier took the device out of his pocket and saw that the message was from Aurelien; On arrive. They were almost to the building, and he would have to be ready to confront her. He reminded himself that he didn’t know what Genevieve had been doing with Clinton. She could have just wanted to catch up with her ex, for all he knew.
Her words echoed in his mind, though: that she thought that Clinton had been involved in her parents’ disgrace, that she was suspicious that he was going to try and pull something in his deal with Olivier. But had that just been misdirection? There were just too many coincidences, too many connections between Genevieve and the man he was doing business with.
His friends ushered Genevieve into the room and Olivier’s simmering anger rose to a head just at the sight of her, elegantly dressed and clearly coming from a night out that had a romantic element to it. The thought of Genevieve running off to have sex with his business partner only increased Olivier’s rage, and it took him several heartbeats to master himself. Screaming at her wouldn’t accomplish anything, even if Olivier thought it would probably feel good to vent his spleen.
“Veuillez nous excuser,” Olivier said to his investigators, nodding at them to leave. He’d had Genevieve brought to an office he used from time to time to do business, not wanting to have this confrontation in the house, where Mathilde would hear it. “Merci pour votre aide.”
“De rien,” Aurelien said blandly, and Olivier thought to himself that it was easy for the man to say that it was nothing considering how well-paid for his troubles he was. Olivier turned his attenti
on back onto Genevieve as his helpers left them alone, closing the door behind them.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Olivier felt like he was acting like though he were her father rather of her boss, but he didn’t even give Genevieve time to respond. “Have you been acting in Clinton’s interest all along? Is that why you took the job?” Genevieve shook her head.
“Listen to me,” she said firmly, taking her phone out of her pocket. “Hear me out, please. Are you going to be meeting with Clinton soon to finalize the deal here?”
Olivier shrugged. “You tell me; you should know,” he said tartly.
“If you are still planning on going through with things on this end, you need to know some things,” Genevieve said.
“Why in all hell should I believe anything you are going to say to me?” Genevieve sighed and shook her head.
“Why would you ask me what I have to say for myself if you had no intention of listening to it?” She raised an eyebrow and Olivier had to admit, begrudgingly, that she had a point.
“I want to hear why you were in Clinton’s hotel room,” he said firmly.
“How about this: let me tell you the full story, from the beginning, and then you can ask questions,” Genevieve suggested, and it wasn’t difficult for Olivier to imagine how she had become as successful as she had in her career before; her voice was firm, commanding and conciliating, all at once.
“Fine, tell your story,” Olivier said, almost hating that he was giving into her.
“Clint ended things with me as soon as my parents started to go down,” she explained. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, because pretty much everyone was abandoning me, and I figured it was par for the course.”
“So how did you come to be my au pair?” Olivier crossed his arms over his chest, maintaining his gaze on her.
