Chapter Six
I’d gone way past second thoughts and all the way to sixth and seventh before we even reached the restaurant. This must be how Cillian landed all the big advertising contracts. He found an unusual angle and persuaded the other person that it was in their best interests to go along with it. And I’d fallen for it. Pretend we didn’t know each other and simply start again? Yeah, right? How ludicrous was that?
One glance at where Cillian was taking me and all those thoughts coalesced into one massive hell no. Guy Savoy was the most exclusive, and therefore, the most expensive, restaurant in Paris. I’d never been, and I’d had no inclination to do so. I assumed it was all tasting menus and making foods that weren’t remotely flower-like look like a rose. Foie gras and sweetbreads when I was more of a simple steak man. Actually, even that was pushing it. Nine times out of ten, I’d settle for a burger.
And it wasn’t just the venue, it was like being catapulted back to a time where I’d let Cillian shepherd me wherever he wanted to go, too grateful for the breadcrumbs of his company to make any complaints about it or to tell him I’d rather go somewhere else. Well, I’d left that person in London, and there was no way I was turning back into him. “No!” I said, coming to a grinding halt a few meters from the door. “Because I already know how this will go.”
Cillian turned with a frown. “How what will go?”
“This!” I waved a hand at the restaurant, the doorman discreet enough to pretend he hadn’t noticed our approach. “I’ll order food I don’t like because it’s the best of a ridiculously complicated menu, and while I’m trying to convince myself it’s not that bad, you’ll be on the phone and I’ll have no one to talk to. I may as well have stayed home and eaten the microwave dinner for all the enjoyment I’ll get out of the evening.”
A multitude of emotions flickered across Cillian’s face, like he couldn’t decide which one to settle on. “I don’t have a phone.”
“Pfft… right? Like you didn’t go out today and buy a new one.”
“I didn’t.” He held his arms out to the side. “Check if you don’t believe me.”
An unshakable conviction about being proved right had me stepping forward without considering whether it was a good idea. He obviously thought he could call my bluff. Well, I’d show him.
I realized my mistake as soon as I lay hands on him, warmth seeping through the silky fabric of the suit, and Cillian’s hard muscles beneath the fabric making my palms tingle and a certain part of my anatomy sit up and take notice.
My instinctive reaction was to let go and step back. Yeah, he’d love that, wouldn’t he? His new phone going undetected just because I didn’t have the balls to go through with what I’d started. It was for that reason that I ignored my traitorous body’s reaction and gave him a good going over.
His left jacket pocket was first, my search revealing nothing but a hotel keycard. The right jacket pocket only contained an opened pack of mint chewing gum. “Fresh breath,” Cillian said with something that sounded suspiciously like amusement. “Very important on a first date.”
I shoved the chewing gum back into his pocket with more force than it required and moved onto his trousers where my search unearthed his wallet and, as my fingers moved too close to the swelling behind his fly, a sharp indrawn breath that said he enjoyed being pawed far too much for my liking.
“I told you I don’t have a phone,” he said when I finally ran out of places to search and stepped back.
“Fine,” I conceded. “I believe you.”
An awkward standoff followed, with the two of us eyeing each other. It was Cillian who finally broke the silence. “So… what I’m getting is that you don’t want to eat here. I thought you liked this type of place.”
I stared at him, aghast. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“You not saying anything to the contrary. But then”—he let out a sigh—“you didn’t say anything about a lot of things.” He took a few steps away from the restaurant. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere else. Your choice.”
“Really?” There was no keeping the disbelief out of my voice. “I thought you’d booked a table.”
Cillian shrugged. “They’ll give it to someone else when they realize I never showed up. It happens all the time. It won’t be a big deal to them.” He hooked his arm through mine, the gesture not intimate enough that I could raise a complaint without making myself look ridiculous, but bringing me close enough to trigger a cascade of unwanted feelings. Feelings that were supposed to be dead. But then, if they were, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I would have stood my ground and told him to get lost.
If Cillian noticed my sudden silence, he didn’t comment, seeming happy to carry out a one-sided conversation about the previous times he’d visited Paris.
“Have you ever brought anyone here?” I asked as I steered him left down a side street.
Cillian pondered the question for a moment, appearing momentarily perplexed. “No.”
I lifted a disbelieving eyebrow. “I don’t care if you did.” A blatant lie if ever there was one, but I had pride. And I’d rather know if he’d brought a string of men here over the years. It would make it easier to walk away when he fucked up again. Maybe that’s why I’d agreed to this, to gather ammunition to make myself feel better when things invariably went to shit.
Cillian shook his head. “I’ve never been the romantic getaway type.”
“You don’t say,” I drawled. “I can’t say I noticed.”
“I should have taken you away,” he said, his voice quiet.
“Where?”
“Barcelona. Milan. Here. New York. Amsterdam. Anywhere where there was something worth seeing.”
“We were only together for six months,” I pointed out. “If we’d gone to all those places, you’d never have gotten any work done.”
“Maybe not, but we might still be together.”
I tried to visualize the scenario he’d painted and just couldn’t. “It wouldn’t have mattered where we were. You’d have been on your phone, and I’d have been left to my own devices.” I tugged Cillian through a doorway before he could argue, the next few minutes spent being shown to a table by a smiley waitress and furnished with menus. The place I’d brought Cillian to was more of a cafe than a restaurant, his suit looking completely out of place amongst the relaxed clientele. He didn’t seem unduly bothered, though, as he perused the menu. Feeling my eyes on him, he lifted his gaze and offered me a smile, something lurching in my chest. “Have you been here before?”
I nodded. I had. Enough times that I didn’t need to check the menu to know what I wanted to order. “This is one of Laurent’s favorite places to eat.”
“Your friend who likes to kiss you?”
“My friend, who is so supportive, he was worried for me, and did what he thought was best at the time.”
Sensing blood in the water, Cillian’s eyes narrowed. “Why was he so concerned?”
The timely return of the waitress to take our orders saved me from answering. “The food here is great,” I said quickly once she’d departed, determined not to let Cillian resurrect the previous topic of conversation. Because, the one thing I had to cling on to was never having admitted how deep my feelings for him had run. It was possible he’d worked it out from my decision to put so much space between us, or from me blurting out the previous day that it had taken me a while to get over him, but I didn’t feel there was anything to be achieved by laying it on the line.
By the time the food arrived, Cillian had remembered his other mission of pretending this was a first date. “Tell me about yourself,” he said, chin propped on his hand as he gazed across the table, brown eyes sparkling, and a small smile on his lips.
“You already—” I stopped myself for two reasons. If I was going to refuse to play this game, the right time would have been back at my flat when he’d first started it, and because it wasn’t true. Cillian and I had skipped all the niceties of getting to know each other and gone straight to fucking. He might know exactly how I enjoyed having my cock sucked, and what made me come quicker. But beyond that…
So, I told him about my upbringing in Oxford with one brother and one sister, before I’d moved to London for work. I told him how I’d gotten into data analysis, Cillian doing an excellent job of pretending interest when I went off on a tangent and enthused about the simplicity and beauty of numbers. And I told him about my time in Paris so far, the things I’d seen, and what impressed me about the city.
Cillian shared amusing stories of the escapades he and his brother had gotten up to when they were growing up, their similar ages meaning they’d hung out together more than siblings with a larger age gap might. I found out about the early days of him setting up the advertising agency, the trouble he’d had getting a bank to lend him the start-up money making me see his work ethic in a whole new light. He told me about an early advertising campaign that had gone badly wrong, and how it could have been curtains for the agency had he not handled the fallout so well. I didn’t mind that the conversation had strayed to work when it was telling me so much about the man himself.
The conversation flowed so freely that I was slow to recognize that we were the last two left in the cafe, and that the staff were cleaning up around us. “We better leave,” I said, “before they throw us out.”
“Yeah,” Cillian agreed, his obvious reluctance heartwarming. Even as I thought that, I warned myself against being swayed by it. I didn’t know how Cillian had pulled it off, but this really had felt like a first date. One that had gone so well, it would be all too easy to forget about our history.
“We should get separate cabs,” I announced once we emerged out into the night air. “Your hotel is in the opposite direction to my flat.”
“Not a chance,” Cillian insisted. “What kind of date would I be if I stuck you in the back of a cab and simply waved you off?”
“A practical one.”
Cillian laughed, but it didn’t deter him from flagging a single cab down.
No doubt he had plans for us. Plans that involved inviting himself into my flat, so the evening could reach its natural conclusion. And I’d be lying if I claimed to be mad about that. I hadn’t had sex since that fateful day in Cillian’s office, so it seemed apt that we’d pick up where we left off. At least this time, it would be in a better location.
The brief journey passed in a companionable silence, Cillian’s thigh warm against mine. He’d already announced his intention to pay the fare, just as he’d done with the meal, so when we drew up in front of my building, I jumped out. Cillian got out, but bent to say something to the driver, presumably for him to drive off, before following me over to the door of my building.
“I had a lovely time,” he said when he reached me. “Thank you for agreeing to come out with me.”
“’Thank you,’” I gently mocked. “So formal.”
He smiled. “I’m practicing being a gentleman.”
“You weren’t one already?”
“No… I don’t think I was.”
The amount of introspection in his tone had me searching his face. He stared steadily back, the seconds stretching for long enough that I decided to seize the bull by the horns and speed things up a bit. “You should come in. We can…” I trailed off as Cillian started vigorously shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “I’m a gentleman, remember?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
He leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to my forehead, the skin continuing to tingle long after he lifted his lips. “Sleep well, Finn.”
It was only once he’d backed away that I realized the cab still idled at the curb, the instruction to wait rather than to go, meaning he’d had no intention of coming inside. I watched as he climbed into the back again. He lifted a hand in farewell, and then he was gone, leaving me puzzling over the rather abrupt end to the night. That was two nights spent with him that hadn’t ended the way I’d expected.
The lights in the hallway of my building always stayed on, meaning I had no problems seeing the ginger cat sitting right in front of my door like he’d been waiting for me to return home. I regarded him warily as I drew close. “The kind man isn’t here, if that’s who you were hoping for. You need to find his hotel.”
The cat stared balefully up at me, apparently in no hurry to move. “He likes cats. I don’t. Especially not mangy looking ones with half a tail and one ear missing.” The cat’s response to that was to wind itself around my legs and meow as I fitted my key in the door. “You can’t come in. You should be glad I’m not throwing you out on the street. You can thank Cillian for that.”
Despite my speech, I expected him to dart between my legs. Because, since when do cats do what they’re told? Instead, he just watched as I opened the door and walked in. I turned back to see him sitting as good as gold on the mat, a twinge of conscience plucking at my chest. “Fine,” I said after a few seconds of our gazes being locked together. “You can come in tonight, and then tomorrow, you’ll need to find somewhere else.”
The cat trotted in obediently like it understood every word, which was ridiculous when he was a French cat and I’d spoken English. While he set about sniffing everything in sight, I took my coat off. “You see, the thing is,” I said to the cat, “that I barely recognize this new version of Cillian, and I don’t know how to feel about that.” I searched through my cupboards until I found a can of tuna, the cat making a beeline for me as soon as the can was open, its meows increasing in volume as I dumped half of the contents of the can onto a plate. “Obviously, he’s on his best behavior and that won’t last. But it’s still messing with my head because this Cillian… Well, he’s even more attractive, and I can’t tell you how dangerous that is.”
I set the plate down and the cat tore into it like it had never eaten before. “You can have the rest for breakfast before you go back out on the street. Even I’m not mean enough to throw you out without giving you something.” I watched him eat for a while, surprised by how relaxing it was. “The mistake was not going along with Laurent when he pretended to be my boyfriend. Cillian was walking away. I was the one who made him come back.”
The cat glanced up at me as if to say “too late.”
“Yeah, I realize that,” I argued. “It’s way too late. But none of this changes the fact that I was never over him, that I was just fooling myself I was.”
I was still mulling over the night’s events when I went to bed. I’d only been there ten minutes when the door creaked open. There was a soft pad of paws across the carpet, and then the mattress gave slightly, a warm, furry body curling up right next to me and purring so loudly it made me smile. I reached down and petted him, surprised by how soft his fur felt. “What happened to your ear?”
In news that would surprise no one, the cat didn’t answer. “If he asks me to go out with him again,” I said. “I’m going to say no. I need to call a halt to things now before I’m dragged back down the rabbit hole I worked so hard to crawl out of. Before I start believing that there’s a chance of him changing.” Yeah, it was melodramatic, but in my tired state, I didn’t care. I fell asleep with my fingers buried in the cat’s fur.