“‘Kay.”
When Dree emerged from the bedroom, she was wearing slim, black trousers and a snug pink sweater she’d selected at the department store. Her medium-heeled boots made him wonder what he could hook the heels over for leverage.
Maybe his shoulders.
“Take your coat, pet,” he said.
“Yes, Sir. Um, one more thing, Augustine, Sir.” She held out his Patek Philippe watch. “Take this back. It flops around my arm. I’m afraid I’ll hurt it.”
“It’s your insurance,” he said, not moving. “For payment.”
“I don’t need it,” she said. “I trust you.”
He shrugged and took the offered watch, buckling it back on his left wrist where it belonged. The lack of its familiar weight had made his arm feel odd.
“Could I ask for something, Sir?” she asked him.
He nodded, aware of her body language. Her shoulders were slumped, and she was holding her hands together in front of herself.
Max did not like this. It appeared she was being forced to do something or was somehow very distressed.
Someone had gotten to her. Someone was bribing, blackmailing, or threatening her.
From the desperation that was practically flowing off her, a threat seemed most likely.
Maxence assessed the options.
His own older brother, Pierre, was the most obvious candidate.
Estebe Fournier, the mob boss whom Maxence had pissed off a couple of days earlier, was also a good possibility.
Minor prospects included Max’s uncle
Dree sighed and pressed her lips together for an instant before she said, all in a rush, “Could I please get an advance on what you offered me?” Her eyes darted everywhere except meeting his gaze. “Just, like, a quarter of it? Of the first offer, not the second one.”
Maxence waited and watched her.
She licked her lips, and she finally made prolonged, desperate eye contact with him. “My sister needs money for Victor’s therapy now. If you can advance me a quarter of it, I’ll do anything you want, absolutely anything, for the initial amount, not the second one where you said you’d double it.”
“Anything I want,” he said, more savoring the sound of it than confirming with her. “Everything I want.”
“Yes,” she said.
He stared her down. “You know what I want.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Absolute obedience.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“In everything.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And your body is mine for these few days. I touch you. I decide everything about you, what you wear, what you do, and when you are allowed to come. You don’t touch yourself, no matter what. Understand?”
She hesitated, but she nodded. “Yes, Sir.”
Maxence nodded. “Done. Where do you want the money sent?”
Dree looked away and then back at him. “That’s it? Done? I can just change the conditions of the agreement?”
Maxence shrugged. He knew a good deal when he saw one, not that he had any intention of giving her merely the first amount he’d offered. Max was going to make sure his little bunny was all right when she left him. “Everything can be negotiated and renegotiated. What account should I wire the money to?”
Dree checked her phone. She walked over to the desk and, still warily keeping an eye on him, wrote a series of numbers on a piece of the hotel’s stationery. “Here.”
Maxence used his phone and online banking to transfer one-quarter of the agreed-upon amount to the routing number and bank account she gave him. “There, it’s done.”
“It is?” She sat down on the couch, breathing hard and with her hands holding back her hair. “She has the money?”
“Yes,” Maxence said. “It may take a few hours, but my bank’s generally good about transferring, even on a Sunday night. I imagine it should post sometime tomorrow morning.”
“So, it’s done,” she sighed. “Okay.”
“We need to work on your negotiating skills,” he told her. “You gave too much away. You gave up both your collateral that I would pay you and the increased rate for the higher level of services.”
“It’s not services,” she said, fretting. “I would have done that anyway. That’s on my bucket list. It might not be an actual line item, but the meaning of the whole thing is to try everything in the world and not to be afraid.”
He felt a slow smile growing on his face. He did want to try everything with this woman and show her the world.
“Besides,” Dree said. “I’m not a businessperson. That’s not my field of work at all. After this, I won’t ever have to negotiate again. My whole career is to give people what they need, not to take everything I can.”
He blinked, feeling the impact of that statement. Over the centuries, his family had taken everything they could, and they’d been excellent at it.
Maxence had been feeling his way toward a different kind of life. He was just genetically unsuited for it and spectacularly bad at it, no matter what his intentions were.
But such navel-gazing wasn’t on the agenda.
He checked his watch. The steel hands on the blue and silver face showed it was after nine-thirty. If they didn’t hustle, they would be late for what he had planned.
“Let’s go,” Maxence said, turning away.
A small tug on his elbow caused him to turn back.
Dree was standing there, and she lowered herself to her knees and reached for his belt.
Maxence stepped back. “Not now, pet.”
“But, don’t you want a—” She swallowed, and he liked watching her throat work above the neckline of that soft pink sweater. “I mean, shouldn’t I—”
He ran one finger down her jaw and lifted her chin. A delicate shiver ran through her, and at that, he almost unzipped his pants and shoved his cock down her throat. “Not now, pet. Stand up and get your coat.”
She licked her lips. “Yes, Sir.”
He liked it when she called him “Sir” much more than he should, and he had trouble looking away from her glistening pink lips where her tongue had licked them.
Later.
They walked out of the hotel and onto the busy Parisian street, lined with trees and stone planters. Blue and white Christmas lights sparkled among branches of the trees and showered from the sides of the hotel’s overhanging roof.
“Oh,” Dree said as they emerged into the winter fairyland of millions of points of light in the night.
Maxence smiled at her reaction. He’d seen Paris’s Christmas decorations so often that he hardly noticed them. “Paris is the City of Light, yes? Christmas is amazing here. A lot of Europe decorates for Christmas, especially if I may note, the more Catholic parts of Europe. Catholicism has a more exuberant celebration, while places like Germany are more austere.”
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, looking around as they walked. “New Mexico and Arizona are less wintry, of course. The tourists don’t wear coats at all because it’s maybe fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and they laugh at us for putting Santa hats on the cacti.”
Maxence repressed a chuckle.
They passed storefronts decorated with hundreds of evergreen boughs and wreaths, planters of Christmas trees, and oversized, sparkling statues of toys and wrapped presents. People in the crowd stopped to take pictures or admire, and some passed by on their way to more critical engagements.
They crossed one of the bridges festooned with thick evergreen garlands and covered in dark red Christmas balls.
She was trotting to keep up with him.
Maxence shortened his stride to allow her to keep up and checked his watch on his wrist. They had seventeen more minutes to get there, which should be just enough, barely.
At every intersection, they were blessed with green traffic lights and walk signals.
They walked on for a while. Dree looked around at the Christmas trees glittering with lights and illuminated piles of enormous presents
, and Max watched her.
Paris was a pedestrian city, and crowds of people strolled on the wide sidewalks at all hours of the day and into the wee hours of the night. They had to push past knots of tourists as they made their way through the people-jammed streets of Paris. Parisians hurried to their homes or destinations, considering it was well after nine o’clock at night.
They turned a corner.
The Eiffel Tower blazed gold ahead of them. The spire soared into the air, filling the sky over them.
Dree stopped and drew a breath. She slipped her hand in his and stared at the tower’s graceful curves, lit against the shimmering Parisian night.
Maxence glanced at his watch, and the minute hand clicked over to straight-up ten o’clock.
They’d made it.
The Eiffel Tower lit up, sparkling with twinkling lights, and then colors ran up and down the steel girders.
Dree hopped back. “Oh, my!”
The light show on the Eiffel Tower shone gold, red, and green for Christmas at first, the colors zooming over the structure and rotating around the tower as the lamp on top glowed into the night. The Christmas colors blended into each other, then blue and purple joined the mix.
At one point, the colors paused while the top shone red, the center portion white, and the base was lit with bright blue because Vive le France, and then the light show resumed.
Dree clapped her hands and made little squeals of delight the whole way through, and Maxence watched her.
He could not drag his eyes away from her rapture at the beauty and wondrousness.
Max was enthralled.
That’s where the problem began.
A man such as Maxence—a man who should have professional bodyguards protecting him at all times but who had ditched them yet again—should never let his guard down, not even to watch a pretty young woman enjoy a beautiful experience for a few minutes in the crisp Parisian night.
Especially at night.
As the Eiffel Tower settled back down to a steady golden glow and the show ended, Max took Dree’s hand and led her back toward the hotel. He took a slightly different route than they’d walked on the way there. He knew security measures and applied them as he could when he was in Europe, which was where many problems occurred.
Dree chattered on about how she’d loved the lights and how perfectly choreographed it was. She kind of skipped beside him, doing quick chasses as she talked.
He said to her as they strolled, “You should see Paris in the springtime. These planters and those window boxes,” he pointed to the windows tiling the tall buildings, “overflow with flowers. You can smell the blossoms everywhere, and the whole city smells like flowers.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I missed it,” she said, trotting to keep up with him.
“Maybe you can come back in a few months,” Maxence said and regretted it. He was already forgetting that not everyone lived the same extravagant, limitless lifestyle he did, and he’d been back from the field for less than a month.
That was not good.
“Well, probably not,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know. Ain’t no big thing.”
Maxence was looking down at Dree, enjoying her happiness and carefree banter as they neared the Pont de l’Alma bridge to cross the Seine River, the nearest bridge to their hotel. The other bridges would be out of their way.
Taking the same route to and from destinations is not good operational security. Any sort of predictability is a liability.
The streetlamps on the bridge were decked with yet more evergreen boughs, red ribbon, and white pinpricks of light. As they neared the slender crossing, four men standing on the wide sidewalk ahead of them caught Maxence’s attention.
Dree had so distracted Max from his usual vigilance that he hadn’t noticed them standing there, not walking, not talking to each other. They all had odd silhouettes that suggested lumpy weapons hidden under their clothes. Their alert, quick movements as they examined people crossing the bridge meant that they had not suffered a lapse of operational security.
None of them had necks.
Maxence recognized one of the men’s profiles as Michael Rossi, who was Pierre’s favorite commando for particularly dirty work.
Max grabbed Dree’s hand and whirled her back to walk the other way. This was not the time to brief her on who his older brother was and why he might want to kill Max this week. Max’s knuckles were still bruised from punching him just a few days before.
He was assuming Pierre had sent them. The list of suspects was short but not singular.
Dree teetered on her heeled boots as he sped up. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Problem,” Max said. “Keep up.”
As he dodged between people standing still or wandering on the wide sidewalks that lined the sides of the street and towed Dree behind him, Max slid his arms out of Arthur’s long coat that he had been wearing, thus changing his silhouette. He concentrated on dragging the outside of his left foot near his pinky toe to change the way he walked. No one could keep up a gait affectation for long. If Max had wanted to maintain it for any length of time, he’d have needed to put a rock in his shoe or something. However, he could modify the way he walked for a while and thus elude surveillance in the short term.
“Are we going to see something else?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “A different bridge.”
He held onto her hand as she skipped and ran on her toes beside him. She was struggling to keep up, and this was no time for recriminations that he should have told her to wear the trainers. He was at fault. He’d liked the look of the boots on her shapely legs.
Max risked a glance behind them as they hurried down the road beside the River Seine.
The crowd of people dressed in hats and coats milled near them, but farther back, a disturbance parted the flow of the masses.
Maxence reached around Dree and hauled her into his arms, holding her under her back and knees. Her arms tightened around his neck. “Oh, my!”
He asked her as he ran, “Can you see if anyone is following us?”
She looked back over his shoulder, and her fluffy hair tickled his face. “There’s a lot of people back there. I don’t know.”
Max dodged down a small street. A copse of trees wasn’t strung with Christmas lights, providing a dark niche and cover. He dropped Dree to her feet, shoved her behind himself, and patted down Arthur’s clothes and the coat he carried for any hidden weapons but was disappointed. British intelligence spies were supposed to have all sorts of cannily hidden weapons. Why the hell didn’t Arthur have a stiletto or a garrote literally up one of these sleeves?
As Maxence watched, the small commotion in the crowd passed them by. Michael Rossi and three other large men were swept along by the multitude, craning their necks and peering into the Christmas lights and alleyways.
None of them spied Max and Dree among the dark trees.
He let them get farther up ahead and then waited, watching, but there appeared to be no one surveilling from the rear position.
Max let out his pent-up breath. “Come on. It’s safe now.”
“What’s going on?” she asked him as they walked.
This time, he didn’t let his guard down as they pushed through the crowd. “Just some people I didn’t want to talk to.”
“Dude, I don’t want to talk to my swindling ex-boyfriend, but I’m not going to sprint through a crowd to avoid him.”
“I really didn’t want to talk to them.”
She giggled. “I thought you were going to screw me up against one of those trees in the shadows, there.”
Maxence faltered as he walked but continued. “I didn’t think that was an option.”
“I said anything. I meant it.”
His sweet little blonde might have an exhibitionist streak. How enchanting. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
After a longer walk, they arrived b
ack at the George V Hotel without further incident. The doorman seemed suitably bored, as if no one distasteful had tried to gain entry.
That didn’t mean anything, of course. Pierre’s commandos wouldn’t come in through the front. They’d be disguised as staff and walk into the kitchen area through the underground garage.
When they were back in their room, Maxence locked the door and stood in place, considering the unsuitable locks for several minutes.
A small hand touched his back. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, of course.” He left the front door and hung Arthur’s long coat in the closet.
She followed him. “What happened back there?”
He leaned against the wall and watched her for a moment. “Am I supposed to lie to you?”
Dree pursed her lips, considering this, and then she said, “I guess I shouldn’t ask that.”
Maxence nodded.
“Can I just ask you if you’re a criminal? It won’t change anything. Were those police?”
“They weren’t police, and I’m not a criminal,” he told her.
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
She leaned in. “Was that the mafia boss whose wife you helped?”
He laughed. “No. That was someone else.”
One side of her mouth lifted, not in a smile but in alarmed dismay, like she was about to ask something but hesitating. Finally, she asked, “How many people are trying to kill you?”
Maxence laughed. “I don’t even know. A month ago, I would have said essentially no one, just the usual random rabble who chose kidnapping for ransom as a career path, but nothing personal.”
“And what changed?” she asked, still watching him.
Everything. “If I tell you that, you’ll know everything about me.”
“Well, so don’t be specific, then.” She sat on the couch and eased her boots off. “Is it something you did?”
“No. Let me say this: a relative is dying. There are inheritance issues.”
“Oh!” Dree said, her eyes lighting up. “When my grandma died, my mom and her brother had a falling-out like you wouldn’t believe. Grandma gave each of them half of her property, which is adjacent to our sheep farm. Uncle Marny lives over in Cayuga Valley, so what was he supposed to do with half a parcel of land far away from where he farms chile peppers? Momma wanted us to buy it at the going rate, but he asked for five times that because it was the only plot of land for sale for five hundred miles and it was adjoining their property. They finally came to a price, but Momma and Daddy still won’t speak to Uncle Marny at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Is it like that?”
Rogue Page 10
