Almostnever.
He caught her in a small alcove in Asian ceramics and kissed her until she melted against him. In Seventeenth Century European Paintings, he kissed her while he palmed her luscious, round bottom.
At one o’clock, Sayyida was waiting for them in the pyramid to let them out.
Maxence and Dree solemnly thanked her for allowing them to view the priceless treasures, though Max was sure they looked wind-blown and wiggling with giddiness as they left the Louvre, holding hands.
Oh, what a day.
What a perfect, exhilarating day.
And now, back to the hotel for the evening.
When they were walking across the courtyard toward the arch where a car sent by the hotel would pick them up, Maxence didn’t notice the five men triangulating their position, ready to strike.
Chapter Fifteen
Scuffle
Dree
Dree was ridiculously giddy with delight as she held Augustine’s hand and they hurried across the courtyard. A black town car was waiting for them on the street just beyond a medieval stone arch.
This was Paris as she had imagined it. Seeing everything in the movies and enjoying the experience with this amazing man made it perfect. Augustine was the icing on the cake. There’s always that joke that men want women to be a lady in the parlor and a tramp in the bedroom, but that silly cliché had a flip side.
When they were out in Paris, Augustine was gallant and efficient, and he’d stepped up when they’d had the emergency with that baby in the fountain. She’d instinctively counted on him, and he’d been right there to do what she needed.
And “in the bedroom,”wow.Not only was he good in bed, better than—ahem—anybody else, which considering Dree had been intimate with exactly one other guy wasn’t a huge sample size, but Augustine wasa thousand times better.And she also had a feeling that she had only scratched the surface of just howinterestinghe was.
They’d only known each other a few days, so Dree was careful about thinking that she knew too much about Augustine. After all, she’d been with Francis for nearly a year and hadn’t figured out that he’d been using her to siphon narcotics out of Good Samaritan Hospital. Her instincts for what men were really like must be awful. Like, she shouldn’t trust her intuition at all. Maybe she should make checklists for what guys should do and be, because at Good Sam Hospital they had checklists for everything. The checklists had reduced medical errors by eighty percent.
Yes, a checklist.
After all, she’d made a checklist as a bucket list to organize the rest of her life. Why shouldn’t she make a checklist for what she wanted in a guy and what she should look for as red flags? First up for red flags: asking her for hospital narcotic supplies.Geez. Wow,she was stupid. She wouldn’t ever fall for that again.
Dree didn’t often get lost in her head. As a nurse practitioner working in an emergency room, traumatically injured patients and people in the throes of a heart attack were wheeled into her life every few minutes. Her immediate instinct was to respond and save their lives as fast as she could.
Thinking and dreaming were unusual for her, so it was weird that she didn’t notice anything was amiss until she and Augustine were nearly to the hotel’s black town car, just past the medieval stone arch.
The driver was holding the back door open for them.
Dree had made eye contact with him and smiled.
The man’s gaze tracked sideways, and his eyes widened.
Four men had converged on Augustine and her as they were walking under the stone arch, where they were partially blocked from the crowd’s sight.
The town car driver reached his hand toward them in a futile gesture.
Another vehicle, a white commercial van, coasted to a stop behind the hotel’s car. Its side door slid open. A white guy inside positioned himself in the door, but he didn’t get out yet.
A man grabbed Dree by her upper arms and pushed her toward the van.
Three white men swarmed Augustine.
Panic ripped through her, speeding her heart.
The sun brightened like a supernova over the cars.
