Tristan stretched his heavily muscled arms overhead and folded them behind his neck, bowing farther backward in his computer chair. “Done. Nothing more to do for a few hours. Supper?”
Supper at his favorite restaurant and a peek into his life here in Monaco, where he called home? “Yes, please.”
Anjali and Jian had their own plans to stay on the boat that night. Colleen refrained from teasing her friend about them making the beast with two backs.
Jian was still recovering from broken ribs and having been beaten up just two days before, and he mentioned something about needing to tell the story to the other staff on the yacht.
Colleen managed to find a sundress among the few clothes she had left, and Tristan emerged from his closet wearing a midnight blue three-piece suit tailored close to his athletic body that caught the blue in his eyes and made them all the more startling.
Hot damn.
Colleen and Tristan walked along the quay in the warm summer night, a raised sidewalk built on landfill running around the harbor. The streets around the port were even named with the wordquayinstead ofstreetoravenue:Quai Albert 1er, Quai l’Hirondelle,andQuai Rainier 1er.
Monegasques and tourists crowded the sidewalks as tightly as the New York sidewalks that Colleen had seen on television, while supercars screamed by on the narrow, winding street just inches away. The occasional déclassé Maserati zoomed past, but it was at the back of the bunch.
Despite how built-up Monaco was, once one turned off the main streets, backstreet restaurants and shops occupied the ground floors of shorter buildings just a few stories high, while people lived in apartments on the upper floors.
Tristan’s favorite restaurant was at one of these cozy, non-touristy cafés. Tristan showed Colleen inside, shook the maître d’s hand, and was shown to a table.
The menu was all in French, and it didn’t have prices.
Colleen felt very much like a desert-dwelling hick. She laid the menu on her plate that was flanked with too much silverware. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
Tristan glanced at her over his menu, his intense blue eyes curving at the corners as he smiled. “We’ll go over the menu together. I want you to enjoy tonight and thoroughly experience it, princess.”
Colleen ended up getting a creamy dish that she couldn’t pronounce and didn’t know what was in it, but it was absolutely delicious.
Afterward, she pointed to her scraped-clean plate. “You can see I hated it.”
Tristan smiled. “Let’s take a walk. I want to show you Monaco.”
The Monte Carlo casino was built like a palace, an exquisite showcase of wealth and beauty, and nothing like the tacky flashbulb-covered casinos that Colleen had seen,again,in movies and on TV because she’d never actually been there.
She’d never actually beenanywhere.
When she got back to Phoenix, whenever that was going to be, she needed to see more of the United States, too. She needed to see the real things, not just generic stock footage on TV.
Colleen had lived in Arizona her whole life, and she’d never seen the Grand Canyon, or Meteor Crater, or the Petrified Forest, or the sky islands of southern Arizona. She’d only seen pictures when her friends had gone there.That,she needed to rectify.
In a gilded blue-and-white room of the Monte Carlo casino, Tristan laid a few chips on red at a roulette table, and Colleen snuggled up against his side like a Bond girl. Slot machines rang in other rooms while the gamblers laughed and chattered over the roulette wheels and poker tables.
Over at one of the doors leading in, the crowd bubbled like they were fermenting, and the tenor of their voices rose with excitement.
Tristan glanced over the heads of the crowd in the direction of the fracas, smiled and waved, and then went back to watching the roulette wheel.
Colleen elbowed him. “What’s the commotion?”
Tristan smiled down at her. “A friend of mine from high school just arrived. He’s coming this way, so take a deep breath and prepare yourself. No matter what happens, he’s a nice guy, and his wife is a feisty little sweetheart. As a matter of fact, I helped him rescue her from kidnappers just a few months ago. It doesn’t look like she’s with him, though.”
She fixed him with a stare. “That seems to be going around, and you seem to always be around when it happens.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny anything. Here, he is.”
Another extremely tall guy pushed his way out of the crowd, and Colleen glanced up at him.
Several unusually burly guys just happened to be standing nearby. They turned their backs to the new guy and surveyed the people pressing closer to them. The three bodyguards wore earpieces in their ears, mics clipped to their lapels, and sunglasses even though they were inside a casino at night.
The new guy, however, was the type of gorgeous male that made Colleen stumble backward a step. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, and his sculpted bone structure was the natural ideal that plastic surgeons envied but could never really copy. He was a movie star and a model and a demigod, and he was somehow standing next to her.
