Chapter One #2
He lifts his head from the laptop screen and stares back at me, and something seems to leap there between us. Somewhere between his inscrutable gaze and the odd sensations chasing around inside me. Challenge, I tell myself. That’s all.
His mouth does not seem to move, and yet I’m sure there’s a hint of a smile there all the same. He lifts a finger and makes a languid circle in the air above his head, taking in not just his office— my office, damn it—but the broader Miravakia Investigations office all around.
“Do you lack comprehension skills?” he asks me. “I would think that a surface level requirement for a private investigator, Ms. Alden. How have you managed to remain employed—by me—for so long?”
Once again, I’m certain that I can see some small hint of a smile, not quite there on his face. Some lurking knowledge in those eyes of his that he is fully aware of what he is doing here.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” I say, very quietly, because the shocks keep coming and coming inside me, and I’m not certain why I’m finding it hard to breathe.
Temper, I tell myself. It has to be temper.
“I beg your pardon?”
He sounds filled with the upper-class affront of a man of means and authority, exactly the way he would if he really was Luc Garnier.
But he’s not.
Because despite how real the figurehead seems to me, I know he’s a figment of my imagination.
I shouldn’t have to remind myself of this.
“This office belongs to a very powerful man,” I tell him.
What I want to say is that I know perfectly well that he’s not Luc Garnier, because I made Luc Garnier the way I made everything else in this office, and, indeed, this office itself.
I made him up in my own head and I put him onto documents, then put his name above mine everywhere, so that people would finally treat me as if I was more than a secretary.
I did these things. He’s mine . This man is an impostor at best, and I don’t want to think what might be worse.
“I don’t know who you are, but if I were you, I would rethink whatever experiment this is that you’re doing and leave before I have to get the authorities involved. ”
I don’t know what I expect from him. Maybe…some acknowledgment of the real situation here? Or at least for him to drop the character he’s playing. To show by even a fleeting expression that he knows he’s playing a game and that I’ve caught him doing it.
But instead, the man behind the desk who is absolutely not Luc Garnier pushes back.
He takes his time standing, and once again, I am struck by his sheer and astonishing perfection.
It really shouldn’t be possible. I’m not sure where on earth he could come from, because not even the most gilded reaches of the highest echelons of Hollywood could produce something like this.
He looks like a carving of my wildest fantasies, brought to life. Every line, every inch, everything about him is mouthwatering in a way that is so overwhelming that I’m tempted to just…find it funny.
No single human should have this much wildfire charisma and that he does and is clearly a con man is a sort of whiplash I suspect might take me a very long time to sort through.
But that will have to happen after I get rid of him.
Something that’s difficult to think how to do when he takes up all the air in this office, and maybe all the air in all of Manhattan, too.
Standing, he’s even taller than I imagined.
But I notice other things now, like the broadness of his shoulders, that suggest something more than he appears.
If I were to see him anywhere else, I would think that he was aristocratic.
It’s in the way he holds himself, as if expecting that genuflection might break out at any moment, and it’s best to be prepared.
He absently smooths down the front of his lapel, a gesture that I have seen many attempt to ape and only some pull off.
It’s a gesture born of many, many years of wearing perfectly tailored suits, cut and sewn to the wearer’s specific measurements.
Men who don’t wear suits often, or only wear suits of a lower standard, can forever be found smoothing down the front of them, trying to make them hang correctly.
The way this man smooths his lapel is less about securing a proper fit and more an unconscious confirmation of the excellence of the suit in question, and therefore also of himself.
It is the equivalent of the way a regal woman might minutely adjust her crown, and I doubt he’s even aware that he does it.
The moment I think that, it bothers me, because I know it’s true of this man. He has that kind of gravitas. And it makes me wonder who on earth this man really is if he can pull that off. This gesture I might normally expect to see on, say, a king.
Con men are good at the suggestion of a gesture, but not all the stateliness and breeding that makes it unconscious.
I hate that I can see the difference.
It makes no sense that a man like this should be here, trying to run a con like this.
He stands by the desk, and studies me as if he has all the time in the world and no fear at all that I might call security. It makes me want to call them immediately, but it also makes me curious.
Why isn’t he worried?
Who is he?
But I remind myself that what matters is that I know who he’s not.
“I really must insist,” I say, in the calm, sure voice I use when things go awry on a job. “You can’t be in here. I think you know that.”
That voice usually produces immediate results, but not today.
He smiles, then encircles the desk, and watching him move does not help anything at all.
It’s far too… Liquid, almost. There’s an ease to the way he holds himself, and while he doesn’t slouch, he very much gives the impression that he has high expectations of gravity and expects them to be met.
According to his demands, even.
And I don’t know what’s happening inside of me. Temper, maybe. That same electric kind of shock, but over and over again. And it’s as if something in me is echoing the way he moves, liquid and low.
He rounds the desk and thrusts his hands into the pockets of that suit, marring all those perfect lines and yet somehow making it all…better.
Suddenly I’m aware of his body in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever been before.
Of anyone’s. Not even my own.
I’m suddenly fascinated by things like sinew . The interplay of male muscle across a set of shoulders. In the way a man can be almost too beautiful to behold while, individually, all those particular features really ought to be too much.
On him, they make a symphony.
And that’s not getting into that long, hard expanse of his chest, his narrow waist. And the way he cuts through space like a deadly, elegant weapon.
He stops directly before me, and I suspect we both know it’s so I have to tilt my head back, and look up—and up and up—to meet his gaze.
I can see the glint of something there. But that’s all it is. The merest glint of what I think is the truth, though I’m not sure I can trust myself to know what it means.
“I,” he says, very deliberately in that low voice that brims over with authority—all of it unearned, “am Luc Garnier, the owner and chief investigator of this firm.”
I laugh at that. Actually laugh, though it makes my skin feel tight and my whole body even more… strange than before. That electricity winds its way around inside of me and gathers weight, as if I might tip over into hysteria, or possibly even tears.
It’s the strangest feeling and somehow, I think his knowing gaze is to blame.
“You are not,” I retort.
And this impostor leans in close, until I realize that I’m holding my breath. He still comes closer and if I was a fanciful sort of woman, I might imagine that he is leaning in for a kiss—
I can even feel his breath on my face.
But he doesn’t kiss me.
Instead, his lips curve into a smile.
“Prove it,” he says.