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,” she said mildly.
“Si,” he contradicted her. “Tu verras.”
And she did see, sooner than either of them could have expected. On his way to the landmark she had named, the taxi driver took the usual route along the street where she lived, and as they passed the small, charming nineteenth-century building with blue shutters and blue wrought iron, she saw a car parked right in front of it. She sat up with a jerk, staring across the stranger’s relaxed body out the window. Michel’s car, she saw, as they drew close enough to read the plate.
A man sat at the wheel, smoking. He glanced over into the taxi just as the streetlight illumined the interior.
“Dieu!” Mariel murmured, and to recover from her unprofessional behaviour—she should never have stared out the window like that—tilted her head as if to kiss the stranger.
His arms instantly encircled her and he looked delighted. “Ah, you have had a change of heart, ma petite,” he observed, his lips close and parting hungrily.
“That’s one of Michel’s operatives in that parked car back there,” she whispered, her mouth barely an inch from his. With extreme reluctance, since she liked being right where she was, she lifted her head to peer through the back window.
“Is he following us?” the stranger asked from beneath her, amusement still threading his voice. His closeness tickled her throat and made her yearn.
The car stayed where it was. “No,” she murmured. “Do you think someone is right in my fl—?” she began, then gasped as, one hand on her back, the other on her head, the stranger pulled her down.
Suddenly he was kissing her, with an expertise that exploded into sugared sweetness all through her body. Sensation seemed to arise from nowhere to engulf her, drowning her so that she could not resist.
There had never been a kiss like it since the beginning of the world, Mariel thought dreamily, letting herself sink down against him. She thrilled as his arms tightened possessively around her, his kiss becoming hungrier, more demanding.
Her hands went to his face, her fingers slipping around his neck, as all her blood sang with delight. It was the kiss she had dreamed of, a kiss to die for, her fogged brain murmured, her body promised. It was the cake she could both have and eat.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of kiss.
“Et maintenant, mes enfants, où irions-nous? La Tour d’Eiffel?”
They surfaced to discover themselves in front of the monument Mariel had named, the driver calmly slipping a Gauloises between his lips as he tolerantly watched them over the seat back. The meter was still ticking.
The stranger smiled, touched her lips with a tender finger, and murmured, “Verdun’s car was parked at your address?”
She nodded.
“Well, then, you can’t return there, it is too dangerous. You must trust yourself to me now.”
Since for the moment she really could see no other option, Mariel was silent. The stranger lifted his head. “Le Charlemagne, s’il vous plait,” he said again.
With an expressively Gallic shrug, the driver lifted a cheap plastic lighter to his cigarette, flicked it to flame, drew deep, tossed it down onto the seat beside him, put the car in gear, and set it rolling.
“You really live in Le Charlemagne?” she asked, even more curious now about his reasons for breaking in to Michel’s office.
The stranger misunderstood. “Yes. There is little reason for Verdun to know my face, even if he saw me long enough for recognition, which I am sure he did not. The office was, in any case, nearly dark. So I think we will be safe enough there.”
The thought of the print of the photograph she had dropped somewhere surfaced in her mind. She wondered what Michel would make of it. It was proof that someone had broken in to his computers, but he must be wondering why anyone would have taken a hard copy.
“In spite of our no-questions policy it may be that the time has come for us to move on a step in intimacy,” the stranger remarked, interrupting her train of thought. “What is your name?”
She hesitated. “Emma. What’s yours?”
“Emma,” he repeated. “A charming name. And I am called…Fred.”
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