Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
The party is being held in a villa set far behind high walls, set up above its own, private cove.
Some of the guests arrive by water, ferried in from the grand yachts that clutter the harbors all along the South of France.
I can see them coming in, the running lights of the smaller crafts like sleek lanterns on the water, as I walk with my mysterious not-date in the silence—hushed and complicated—that has sat with us the whole way here from his villa.
Though, of course, it might not be his villa at all. It is entirely possible that nothing he’s showing me actually reflects who he really is.
I don’t know why I’m so sure that’s not true. That it is his villa and it does reflect him and that I somehow know more about the cipher of this man than I should.
Because this is what foolish women do, I tell myself sternly. They make up a man in their head and then expect a living, breathing, actual man to be the man they made up.
Except in my case, I never expected the living, breathing, actual man. I never wanted a living, breathing, actual man—I just wanted the idea of him.
I’m not sure why his unexpected appearance has made me foolish all the same.
And yet somehow, walking along the path marked with candlelight to beckon us in from the dark, I cannot bring myself to parse the mysteries within mysteries that make up the man playing Luc Garnier. Not any more than I already have.
Every step feels like surrender. Or maybe it’s the gown I’m wearing and the way it flirts with me as I walk, teasing and taunting me, reminding me that all this time that I’ve been playing the private detective… I’ve been a woman, too.
I am a woman, and he is a man, and as we walk together in the sultry night, I find I am less and less interested in what other things we might be.
It’s something about the night itself, I think. The bright, golden burn of the day has faded and I can feel the press of the night against my skin, weaving in and around the mask I wear. Both feel more like sensual caresses. The mask is like a reminder, with every breath, that this is all a game.
And that maybe I should consider playing, for a change.
We do not touch, this man and me, but we walk side by side, and I’m certain that I can feel a kind of humming heat from his body. To match the humming in me. As if being this close to him is like straying into some sort of electromagnetic field.
As if he does not simply have expectations about the role of gravity in his life, but exerts his own gravitational pull.
I can feel it pull at me, the same way this gown I’m wearing moves over my skin.
It feels like a becoming.
As we approach the villa, all its doors and windows thrown open wide and the softest, most golden light beaming from within, I understand in a flash that I have fundamentally misunderstood all the glamour I thought I’d been adjacent to before now.
Or perhaps it’s just that this is simply a higher level. Maybe the highest level possible.
We walk into a kind of atrium, open to the stars above. Staff move like dancers, anticipating needs and meeting them before they can be expressed. Everything is exquisitely wrought, but the effect is comfort and ease.
If cozy shopped at Chanel.
And it is immediately apparent that everyone in the room exists on the same level that Luc does.
They are all instantly recognizable, not by name or face—as those are hidden—but by the way they hold themselves.
The way they move. Even the timbre of their laughter and how it rolls around them, and up into the night.
“You look as wide-eyed as a sacrificial lamb,” Luc says from beside me, and there’s no pretending now that there is not that sardonic note in his voice. Or that it does not work in me like fire and longing. “Why not simply offer yourself up as prey and be done with it?”
Without meaning to—or, possibly, fully meaning to, what with the humming and the dress and his exquisite, arrogant beauty—I move closer to him. “Prey?” I laugh. “In what way am I prey? ”
“You must know that you are far safer the more bored and nonchalant you act.”
He looks down at me and I can see something glittering there, wild and yet still unreadable in the depths of that gaze. As if there really are things he wants to tell me, but can’t.
You are delusional, I chide myself—but I still see it.
“With you?” I dare to ask.
“You are never safe with me,” he shoots back, but then he catches himself. Or maybe the roughness in his voice and that stark look in his eyes once again makes his stomach drop the way mine does.
Straight into the heat that blooms lower down.
“And yet,” I say quietly, “I am not afraid. Should I be?”
“Never afraid.” Again, that roughness in his voice. Again, that look so stark it hurts. “God help us both, but never that, I hope.”
And for a moment we both look at the scene all around us, all that is bright and shining and there to be marveled at. Though all I see is that look in his eyes.
All I feel is that heat.
“These are the sort of people who like shiny new things,” he tells me after a moment, and there is no reason that it should sound like he is murmuring sweet nothings.
Or why my body should respond as if we are alone somewhere—though I am fairly sure that his does, too.
That I am not in this alone. It’s a heady sensation, one I can’t make sense of.
“What they like most is to get their fingerprints all over them.”
I remind myself that I can’t stand here, staring up at him even in the heels they gave me, because he’s so tall and commanding that a lesser woman would simply swoon.
“Spoken by someone who sounds as if he’s spent a great deal of time in the villa much like this one.
Where did you leave your fingerprints, I wonder? ”
Next to me, Luc seems to vibrate with what I would call a kind of fury if he were a different man. Or possibly concern, if he was a completely different kind of man. And the way he looks down at me, I have absolutely no doubt that it’s concern for me.
But that makes no sense. That is not at all the sort of thing I inspire. Not in anyone.
Not ever.
And besides, I remind myself, I don’t actually know what kind of man he is. No matter what I might feel. No matter what I might have imagined in that glorious freestanding tub, with only the quiet around me and the Mediterranean gleaming in the distance.
No matter what the dress tries to whisper to me as I move, as I breathe. As the domino mask presses into my skin just enough to feel like a touch.
Maybe his touch.
“Stay close,” he tells me, forbiddingly, and yet it is somehow compelling.
Then he forestalls any commentary I might possibly have by reaching over and taking my hand.
Our fingers lace together as if we’ve held hands a thousand times before and it’s a muscle memory. His hand is so big that mine almost seems to disappear in his grasp, but with every breath, I can feel the tug of the places where our fingers intertwine.
And I can feel that tug everywhere .
In my breasts, my nipples hardening. Between my legs, not only in the sensuous way my thighs brush when I walk but deep between them, where I can feel the heat of his palm against mine.
I’m too hot, though the night is cool. I get hotter with every breath, until it feels as if I’m breathing into a corset when I know the bodice of this gown is not nearly that restrictive.
And when he hands me a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing staff member, I know I ought to refuse. I never drink on the job, and despite the Cinderella games I let myself run away with earlier, this is a job.
He is the job whether he hired me or not.
And besides, I already feel as if I might be internally carbonated already.
But I take the glass anyway and I click it to his, our eyes seeming to meet and cling the way our hands still do. I take that first sip, not sure why the simple fact of him watching me do it makes me feel as if that stern mouth of his is all over my body.
Maybe it’s right at this moment that I finally accept it. This thing I’ve tried so hard to pretend hasn’t been happening all along.
Maybe it’s finally time for me to face facts.
Whoever this man is, and it matters less the harder my heart beats against my ribs, I want him.
“Annagret.” My name is like a song on his lips. “Annagret, this is not the kind of place that wants its mysteries solved.”
I suspect that’s true. But what I say, in a tone like his, is, “I think you are the one who does not want his mysteries solved.”
His eyes look anguished behind his mask. I forget that we are in a crowd. I see the ache in them. I feel it in me. I feel it where our hands touch, like we are connected by so much more than a mere clutch of fingers.
“Me most of all,” he agrees.
And my breath gets tangled somewhere in my throat.
But the moment ends in an abrupt shower of laughter that comes too close and turns into coy introductions from people with shrewd eyes behind masks and very familiar silhouettes. They pretend to ask questions, but are really just playing games.
Because that is what people like this do. It is all they do. They dress up in masks and laugh as if they care for nothing.
I remind myself that the man beside me, who dropped my hand when we were swept up into their orbit, is one of them.
I am sure of it.
And I like the comfortable life I’ve built for myself. Every bit of it comes as a result of my own hard work, and I take pleasure in both the work itself and the life it affords me. We had none of this growing up, and I had the smallest slice of anything we did have.
I couldn’t have imagined a place like this back then.
Or a day like this.
Yet still, in my head, I try hard to make a distinction between him and them. Something he helps along by seeming to find what’s going on around us somehow distasteful himself.