“J’ai envie de toi,” she said against his skin, along the right side of his neck. She hoped she’d said it with all the longing and desire she felt. Hoped that somehow, underneath it, he could feel the other thing—the bigger thing—she wanted to say waiting just beneath the surface. Waiting for sometime later, sometime in the future, when she would be ready to make promises again.
He held her tighter, dipped his head close to her ear. Let her feel what all that French did to him.
“Jesus,” he breathed. “I haven’t been learning any more French.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve built a few model trains.”
She laughed and pulled back to look at him. “Really? You’ll have to show me.” She frowned dramatically and added, “Le train. Not much of an effort there.”
He kissed the word from her mouth.
“I will show you,” he promised. And then he added, seriously, “I’ve done some other things.”
“I can tell.”
She could see it in him, those things. She could not quite articulatehowshe could see them, because he looked the same: the clothes, the coiled tension, the care he still took with his movements.
But she could see them. In his eyes, or in the set of his mouth. Something.
It was ineffable. Untranslatable.
She said, “You look so good. Tu es si beau.”
He gave her a specific smile. The Versailles one. Grudging but earnest.
“You have no idea how you look to me,” he replied.
“How?” she said, and he took her face in both his hands, a more complete holding than he’d done that last day in the Marais. He looked at her for so long.
Not memorizing, though.
Not looking as though he was getting ready to say goodbye.
He was looking at her as though he was making a promise.
“A city of light,” he said. “A tower of gold.”
He bent his head and kissed her. Long and full of promises she knew he would never break.
“Like Paris,” he said, when he took a breath, and then he kissed her again, before adding something else. A final, perfect set of things, maybe the only things she ever wanted a man to promise her, ever again.
“Like yourself. Like the woman I love. Like Layla Bailey.”
Epilogue
Fine, she was right.
They were at the airport too early.
Griffin stood, alone, before the sparsely populated gate, frowning at the screen that said it was still ninety minutes to boarding, and suppressed a sigh.
If he was honest, he didn’t really need the confirmation of the time. After all, barely ten minutes ago, when he’d made it out the other end of security, Layla had been waiting to wave her lit-up watch in his face, her smile smug.
“Told you we were leaving too early,” she’d said, and he’d grunted back in acknowledgment, too nervous to say much of anything else. But he liked the way she shuffled her feet in something like victory. “I’m a travel expert!”
Fucking cute, her braggy little dance.
