He touched her hips and turned her, pulling her backward to sit on his leg. He folded her in his arms. “Come here,ma petite chérie.”
“Why do you keep calling me little and petite and stuff. I’m five feet six.”
“You’re little to me.”
She rolled are eyes. “That’s because you’re a giant. What are you?”
“One hundred ninety-three centimeters,” he said, aware it was a ridiculous number.
“Uh.” Dree pulled out her phone and tapped it. “Six feet four. Nice.”
“But, this problem of yours. We’re okay here for now. I don’t know what you’re going to want to do after Thursday, but you’ll have enough money to start over someplace else, if you want to.”
“I need to think about what I’m going to do.”
“Do you want to talk it out?”
“Not really. Not yet, anyway.”
“I’ve made arrangements for us to be let into the Louvre at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ll spend the day there, where no one else can get in, anyway. Even if there is something wrong with the police officer, and even if he does know that you’re in France, though I don’t think you saidFrance,I don’t see how he could be able to find you in the next few days.”
Dree nodded. “That’s a good point. France isn’t in the Phoenix PD’s jurisdiction. I’m not even on the same continent.”
“We’re safe here,” he said, praying that it was true. “We’re safe here.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Louvre
Dree
Dree did not get sex last night.
What the hell?Augustine riled her up all day and all evening, bringing her so close to orgasm without going over the edge that her head had been spinning all the time—a thing he called “edging” and that she called “not freaking fair what the hell are you doing.” After she’d called the police, there had been champagne and an amazing, delicious thing called a Merveilleux de Fred that she would have signed away her firstborn to eat more of, and then Augustine had simply said, “Time for bed.”
What?
She couldn’t even freakingthinktoday.
Augustine had insisted she wear a body-hugging sheath dress she’d found at one of the shops on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and one of the pairs of sexy red-soled shoes they’d bought at a small shop that sold only those shoes. The crowds had been especially thick while they’d shopped, as the crowds also were where the car let them out near the entrance to the Louvre.
The vast courtyard looked like a football field of concrete and fountains with a glass pyramid sticking up out of the center. Antique-looking buildings enclosed three sides of the center space. The building looked like it had been a palace, which Dree knew that it had been, and a fortress before that. She liked to read, so she had learned about it at some point.
Fountains gushed water into the air, which fell into large rectangular pools. “Oh, the fountains are on.”
Augustine said, “It’s been a mild winter.”
The chill in the air scratched Dree’s cheeks. “You call this mild? It’s, like, fifty-five degrees or something!”
Augustine laughed at her. “Yes, all of thirteen, centigrade. We shall all freeze to death. You haven’t traveled anywhere actually cold like the Andes or Nepal, have you?”
“No, but Nepal is on the napkin, so I have to, someday.”
“Excellent. The crowds aren’t too bad today. Usually, the admission lines for the Louvre fill this courtyard from the entrance back to the street. Luckily, since this is the day the Louvre is closed for cleaning, it’s quiet.”
If this was a quiet day, Dree would have gone out of her mind on a typical day. She didn’t mind chaos. Chaos was the natural environment of the ER where she worked, especially since it was primarily a pediatric ER. Shethrivedon bringing order to crazy situations.
But an enormous crowd all huffing and breathing each other’s air and pushing each other with their bodies was an entirely different situation that she was glad she was not in.
