“Your breakfast is on my room tab,” he said.
And then, for the second time in a single morning, he turned and left her alone.
Chapter Six
He’d forgotten his fucking sunglasses.
Outside, the Paris morning had turned bright. Clear-blue-sky bright, no sign of the gray clouds that had hovered over the courtyard he’d sat in to wait for Layla Bailey. He paused outside the hotel’s doors, fighting with himself about whether to go back up to his room to get them.
But if he did that, he might run into her again.
So, no fucking sunglasses.
He took his phone out of his pocket, squinted down at the screen, where he’d mapped directions to the spot Michael had texted him to meet. Ignored the way his fingers still felt shaky. Memorized the route: a half mile from here, a few turns down streets where he’d have to look for the dark blue signs stuck to the sides of gray-white buildings, not always easy to find. Those signs had been a real pain in the ass while he walked last night, if he was honest. Form over function, that was the situation with those signs.
He put his head down and started walking, not even really having to try at tuning out the unfamiliar surroundings.
What the fuck was he going to say to Michael?
He didn’t know if he could admit to the full truth of what happened during his fleeting meeting with Layla. Bad enough that the woman had no idea what she’d said to rattle Emily MacKenzie enough to have doubts; worse that Griffin himself was rattled enough just by sitting across from her that he’d fled the scene after barely ten minutes, not getting the specifics of her promise to fix it, not even getting her fucking phone number so he could find out when she had.
The thing was, she’d put her hair up. The russet-brown mass of it, streaked through with lighter strands, gathered at the back of her head. A loose swoop at the front that kept falling over one of her muddy green-brown eyes. She wore tiny pearl-drop earrings in her lobes. If they were a gift from the ex-husband and she was wearing them here, to this week of events, that would be the most psychotic thing Griff had ever seen.
He supposed he had no room to judge.
But hedid, he thought, as he crossed another street. He did judge her. He judged whatever she didn’t remember about last night, that she said things likeBrides get nervouseven though he could tell she didn’t mean a fucking word of it, that she never once looked away from his face.
He made one more turn, and now it was a straightaway to his destination—a relief to walk faster, to be a blur to everyone else on these sidewalks. He stepped off a curb, passing someone who trailed the smell of cigarettes. He didn’t care for that, but he’d already learned last night it was part of the perfume here. Cigarette smoke, urine, car exhaust. Occasional butter and sugar.
He wondered if that server at the hotel ever brought out the promised croissants.
If Layla Bailey was still sitting at that table alone.
He stepped into a dark, cool corridor of stone arches, and paused. Behind him, sun-drenched Paris streets he’d walked through and not really seen. Ahead of him, his destination: some kind of park, but not any kind of park he’d ever seen. A cream-and-green tile of effortful perfection, boundaried by black wrought iron and trees trimmed into unnatural, elegant little cuboids. Surrounding it all, a great square of old redbrick buildings topped with steep blue-gray roofs and bolstered at the bottom with arches like the one he stood beneath.
He didn’t like the look of it. Too fussy, too pretty.
Under here, beneath the arch, where the stone was stained dark and marred by the occasional stripe of graffiti, Griffin could pretend he was in a little dungeon of his own making. He should text Michael and tell him to meet him here. A more fitting location to recount that conversation with Layla, and anyway, no need for sunglasses.
Tonight will happen, she said, but he wasn’t sure he believed her. Mostly, she still had that dazed, anxious look in her eyes.
A burst of rapid, laughing French startled him—a small pack of teenagers passing quickly by, jostling him slightly. He could not text Michael to come under here. Too dark, too depressing. Too on the nose.
He stepped into the sun, squinting as he crossed toward the park’s entrance. A sign on the fence: STOP AUX RATS. It gave him a little satisfaction to see it. Rats, in a perfect-seeming place like this.
Good.
Griff found Michael easily in the still-uncrowded space: He sat on a patch of grass, his jacket beneath him, his shoulders slouched. It was a sorry-looking state of affairs, a grown man sitting on the grass like that. The sun shone on the exposed skin of Michael’sreceding hairline, and Griffin hated the way it made him seem even more vulnerable.
He strode over, watched as Michael plucked listlessly at the pristine grass, oblivious to everything around him. Griffin had to announce his arrival.
“Michael,” he said.
Michael lifted a hand to his brow and looked up. No sunglasses, which meant Griffin could immediately see hope in his friend’s still-reddened eyes.
“How’d it go?” he said.
Instead of answering, Griffin tipped his head toward one of the park’s outer edges. “We gotta go sit on one of the benches. I can’t manage the ground today.”
