The taste of acid floods my mouth. My hands shake. I can’t believe it—can’t fucking believe she’d do this. Betray me. I can’t….
Hell, I can’t breathe.
“Send her in,” I say, my voice raw.
The door opens, Tara steps inside like sunlight spilling where it doesn’t belong—hair in a ponytail, her brown eyes wide with…something…panic? She’s in a summer dress and her face is as pale as the beige linen she wears.
She looks shaken, but when she sees me, relief flashes across her features.
“Gustave.” She crosses the room quickly, her voice unsteady. She frowns when I stay seated behind my desk. I wave a hand to a chair across from me.
She sits, and I can see her discomfort.
She knows!
“I…Simone came to the Louvre.”
“Not surprising.” I keep my expression cool.
I’m breaking inside. Angry. But she won’t see anyof that. I amComtede Valois. I know how to take care of leeches like her.
She sighs. “She knows about us?”
“Everyone does.”
Her eyes are wide then. “What?”
I can barely hear her. The sound of my own pulse fills my ears.
I turn my phone that’s on my desk around so she can see it.
The screen glows with the headline, my name in bold beside hers.
She stares at it, frowning at first, then she picks it up and reads through the article. Her French has improved; she can pick up some of it, I’m sure. And even if she can’t, the photograph should say it all.
“Do you see what you’ve done, or do you want it translated into English?” I fling at her.
She sets my phone down. “I…they…how did they get that photo?”
“According to the article,yousent it to a journalist.”
“Dios mio!” Her hand flies to her mouth. “No…no, Gustave, I didn’t?—”
I laugh bitterly, and that shuts her up. “Don’t lie and insult both of us.”
She reaches for my hand across the table, but retreats when I sneer at her. She looks so small and lost that I want to comfort her.
I get up because I’m unable to sit any longer.
“I swear on everything I am, I didn’t do this. Gustave, please?—”
She walks up to me, tears rolling down her cheeks.
She steps forward as if to kiss me, to make it right the only way she knows how—to close the distance, to reach me through touch.
But I catch her wrists before her lips can find mine.
“Don’t,” I bite out. “Don’t touch me.”
