The woman was fumbling with keys for the iron-barred security door to the building. Her aim for the lock left much to be desired.
When she dropped the keys for the second time, Maxence scooped them up, picked out the key, and twisted it in the lock.
The whole door clicked as bolts retracted, and Max breathed a sigh of relief that this was indeed her address. He did not particularly like standing on this road in the dead of night, illuminated by one streetlamp, when other people were moving in the shadowed parts of the rutted street.
He opened the steel door inside the security gate, and they were inside a hallway illuminated by a bare bulb in the ceiling. The woman leaned against a wall and stared up at him. “You haven’t run away yet.”
“Why are you so worried about that?”
“Tonight is the first night of the rest of my life,” she said with a heartbreaking choke in her voice. “I don’t want to fuck it up.”
He reached for her again and pulled her into his arms, feeling the delicate narrowness of her waist and the softness of her flesh. He shoved her up against the wall and kissed her hard. Her mouth opened under his, and she ensnared him again with her arms and one leg. This time, she had a wall behind her, and he ground upward with his thigh, rubbing her.
The blonde moaned, and it was a soft and sexy sound that tightened his groin. He growled, “Where are the stairs?”
She flopped her hand toward the hallway, and he reluctantly lifted himself off her far enough that she could slip out and lead him to yet another locked stairway door that he navigated the keys for.
Max held her tiny hand while they climbed the three easy flights of stairs. She was so intoxicated that she’d had trouble walking from the nightclub to the cab, but she managed the stairs all right.
The blonde was definitely drunk, but she’d navigated the stairs well enough. He knew she was going to be on him like a vine as soon as her door closed.
His dick felt heavy and pulling in his tuxedo pants.
He did not have sex with women who were too drunk. He didn’t like a dead lay in the slightest, anyway. There was nothing exciting about a woman who didn’t scream his name and flay the skin off his back with her fingernails.
An image of her scarlet-painted fingernails drifted through his mind again, and he needed to adjust himself through his pants pocket because his underwear was dragging on it.
But anyone who could climb stairs unassisted and without tripping was not dead drunk.
He considered that thought.
She wasn’t dead drunk.
Had she been faking it?
And why?
Wariness crept into his mind.
He wasn’t afraid of the tiny blonde. He was pretty sure he could snap her slender neck or wasp-waist if she attacked him, but she might be leading him into a set-up.
Lots of desperate people trolled the Parisian bars, looking for an easy mark to isolate and rob. Some of them were organized enough to lure a man to a second location with a honeypot trap.
The neighborhood was the red flag.
Blue-painted door, yellow stain on the white paint down the hall, charcoal gray industrial carpeting under his black formal shoes, a man shouting behind one of the doors, the rustle of the blonde’s clothes as she walked beside him, the sour smell of humid mold in the walls.
The blue paint on her door was peeling. One of the three locks spun when he twisted the key, broken.
Maxence pushed the door and let it swing open.
Inside the room, the darkness was silent and still. Pale light from a window touched square objects with gray lines.
If conspirators were hiding in there, they were doing an excellent job of not moving, speaking, or breathing.
Maxence flipped on the light switch by the door without walking inside.
Just a bedroom, done in blue, white, and yellow. The air smelled fresh enough, a mild hint of lemon and lavender.
