His expression softens. “Oui.”
“What I’m saying is that I’m not looking for a long-term or even a short-term anything. I had no intention to….” I sigh. “You’re my first one-night stand.”
He raises both eyebrows, looking smug. “I am?”
“It’s just….” I flush. “You came and talked to me…and you’re handsome, so….”
Now, he smiles wide. “You think I’m handsome?”
I roll my eyes. “Please. Humility doesn’t suit you.”
“I thought you were—and still do think—charming and stunning. You stole my breath away. I had to talk to you.” He looks at me sheepishly. “I’m not a saint,oui?”
“I’m sure you’re not,” I reply dryly. Especially, considering how he dirtied me up in his hotel suite.
“I’ve had a few one-night stands since my marriage ended. Only outside of Paris…France, really. You were an exception. With you, I broke my rules.”
My breath catches in my throat.
“And now I’m ready, it seems, to break more rules.”
He shrugs off his scarf and throws it next to his beer bottle.
Warmth builds in the pub, tempting me to shed my coat, but I don’t dare get comfortable. I have to leave soon—before I say yes to something I’ll regret.
“You want to have a secret affair.” The words comeout harsher than I intended—but I think they convey how I feel about being a mistress to a wealthy older man. This isn’t a book or a movie. This is my life, and I don’t want to be anyone’s dirty secret.
“Not secret but discreet,” he corrects.
I let out a long exhale. “That’s semantics.”
“Maybe so. But it doesn’t change facts.”
“Gustave, it feels…diminishing.” There, that’s the truth. “Like I’m a character in a Zola story, doomed before the first page turns.”
He tilts his head and gives me that panty-melting, charming smile of his. “If you insist on Zola,chérie, you must know that I refuse to play the doomed aristocrat. I want the role with all the kisses.”
I appreciate his effort at banter. But it’s not enough to pull me out of the conflicting emotions tearing at me.
“I don’t know, Gustave,” I finally admit. My voice cracks on the words. “I don’t know.”
For a moment, he’s silent.
“You don’t have to know,chérie, not right away. I understand.” He’s disappointed, I can see that, but there’s something else there as well…hope, I think.
His hand finds mine, warm and steady, an anchor against the storm inside me. “I wish that we could date like normal people. I could take you out to dinner and then to my apartment, where we could talk, make love, and get to know one another.”
I’d like that, too. Very much.
Too much.
“But I’m only here until the end of July, Gustave. I have to go back to Philly after that.”
“Maybe when I’m in the US then….”
He trails off, and I know he’d feel safer in another country with a woman than he does in Paris, where he doesn’t know what scandal will knock on his door, his son’s door.
I did do my research on Gustave.
