pulse hammered a protest. She lifted a hand to his chest, whether to hold him off or draw him closer, even she didn’t know. His lips moved closer.
“Stay with me tonight,” he murmured.
This was the handsomest man in the world talking to her. Mariel’s heart did a shaky back flip. Lust struggled with common sense, which reminded her that she didn’t even know his name. And that he might well be in the enemy camp. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, her heart protested, but common sense told her she couldn’t be certain that he was Michel’s enemy.
“I think I should get out,” she murmured, half to herself. “Driver—” she called, but the stranger put his fingers to her lips to silence her.
“Where will you go?”
“Home, of course.”
He shook his head. “Without your handbag? Where are your keys?”
“The landlady will let me in, and I have a spare key hidden.”
“What besides your keys was in the bag?”
She was trying to remember where she had left the bag. She ran over those moments in the office—she had been picking up her bag when she noticed the open door of the secret office. And she had gone to close the office door. Had she left the bag on her desk, or taken it with her and dropped it in her scuffle with the stranger?
If she had left it on her desk there was just a faint possibility that Michel might think she had left her bag behind when she left for the night. If she had dropped it in his secret office…
She shook her head. “Just what you’d imagine. My credit cards, money…address book, phone numbers—everything.”
What a fool. And all because she had fallen for a face in a photograph. If she hadn’t had complete brain collapse and decided to print that photograph, none of it would have happened. She would probably have been out of the office before the man even arrived.
Haroun watched her. He was aware of too many contradictions. Why was Michel Verdun chasing a lady of the night with an armed man in tow? What had she been doing in his office if she wasn’t there at his invitation?
“And what of this man? When he finds your handbag with your address—will he make you a visit?”
Mariel shivered. Not before she had gathered her belongings and disappeared, she hoped. She had money in the flat. She would take her things to a hotel and phone Hal for instructions.
He noted the shiver. “What were you doing there?” he demanded.
She looked up at him through ridiculously long lashes, her eyes wary, challenging, but still somehow seductive and, as he expected, parried. “What were you?”
He laughed and lifted a hand, palm facing her, in a sign of surrender. “Eh bien, d’accord!” he said. “We ask no personal questions. Do you think the gun was for me or for you?”
He was looking at her with a devil-may-care glint in his eyes and tilt to his lips that made her heart kick again. She pressed her own lips together and lowered her head.
“I don’t know. You can’t have tripped the alarm, because I turned it off. Maybe he’s had something new installed I don’t know about.”
His eyebrow went up. “You are familiar with his operation?”
“No personal questions, remember?”
“When you saw me, you said, It’s you. And then, Michelle is sick, so if you don’t mind briefing me—”
He looked at her enquiringly, but she only shook her head. He frowned in thought. “Michel!” he exclaimed, looking enlightened. “Ah! I imagined Michelle was a girl you replaced, but you meant—Verdun himself. You thought I was there to meet Verdun, you were playing for time, is that right?”
She pressed her lips together and looked at him. Everything about him seemed to have a glow. His dark eyes, his waving hair, his warm skin. His whole being.
When she made no answer he went on thinking aloud. “And yet you were there to…”
He paused invitingly. They were driving further away from her own arrondissement as they talked. She came out of a kind of daze to realize she was still half lying against the upholstery and he was still bent over her in intimate closeness. Mariel pushed the stranger aside and sat up with a small tug of regret for the loss of the sensual little cocoon she had been inhabiting.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Would you mind paying…?”
“No emergency funds tucked into the top of your stocking?” he asked with a teasing smile, his finger tracing designs on her knee as she pretended not to be affected by the chills charging through her blood and reproved him with a look. “But no—no stockings at all.”
“I’ve got to go home,” she repeated. She leaned forward and murmured the name of a landmark near her apartment, and the driver pulled into a turn with an easy shrug.
It would be safe enough as long as she didn’t let the stranger know her exact address, and she wouldn’t be there past tonight anyway. The stranger wasn’t a man who would feel the loss of fifty francs, not if he was calling Le Charlemagne home.
“And are we never to see each other again?” he continued, in a tone that wrenched at her heart.
Of course he didn’t mean it. And neither did she—it had been just a crazy moment when she thought she had fallen in love with the photograph.
The photograph! Mariel bit her lip. She hadn’t thought about that….
“What is it?” he murmured, noting her sudden change of mood, the delicious way her white teeth caught her lower lip as she looked at him. “You have changed your mind? You will come with me?”
Should she warn the stranger about the fact that Michel had been sent his photograph? But she knew nothing about him or his motives, another part of her argued. She couldn’t tell him about the photo without exposing some part of her work. Suppose the stranger were actually in league with Michel, but double-crossing him? She now had to engage in damage limitation, and keep from Michel any clues as to who she was working for and how and what information she had been getting. She had to avoid anything that would confirm a suspicion that Hal Ward had got access to his top-secret computers.
For all she knew, the whole thing had been a setup. Maybe Michel had been clocking her visits for weeks. Maybe he had sent the stranger to pretend to be breaking in, too. Then followed it up with a raid, forcing her into the same camp as the stranger, making him an ally.
But still she felt guilty, not saying anything.
“Anyway,” she murmured aloud, “it’s all your fault I’m in this predicament.”
“C’est vrai,” the stranger replied, with a warm look. “So it is up to me to take care of you, no?”
And always that devil in his eyes, a look that made her shiver with delight. In a life with him you’d always be laughing, her heart suggested.
“I don’t think it works that way,”
