“Most definitely not by blood,” he says, reaching across and brushing my bangs away from my eyes. “But, hey, now I know.”
“Now you know what?” I ask, keeping so still, my skin tingling from the contact of his fingers brushing against my forehead.
“What you taste like,” he says.
The way he says it hits me deep in the gut, in a way I’d never felt before.
In a way that scares me to death.
I clear my throat. “Well, now you know. So you better not try that again.”
“I won’t,” he says with a shrug, as if it doesn’t bother him. He looks toward the door. “We should get going if you want to start on that cake.”
With our eyes peeled for the farmer and the eggs cradled in our arms, we leave the coop and the farm. We leave it completely different people from the ones who first stepped in.
At least, it feels like my entire world has changed. I’m not too sure about Blaise. As we walk back down the narrow road, he seems so at ease and casual about what happened, about kissing me like that, out of the blue.
Me, I’m just a mess. Of feelings and emotions and hormones, I guess. A deadly cocktail.
I can’t believe that just happened.
I just had my first kiss, with Blaise.
And I don’t know how anything will ever be the same again.
But when we get back to the villa, and I’m a nervous, blubbering mess inside, he says he’ll leave me to work on the cake, and then he’s off, joining the others at the river.
I might not ever be the same again, but it’s obvious in his eyes it’s like the kiss never even happened.
Maybe it’s for the best.
God, I hope I find a way to pretend that it never happened too.
CHAPTER SIX
SERAPHINE
“What are your plans for tonight?”
It takes me a few moments to register that those words are not only being spoken but being spoken to me by my cousin.
I glance up at Blaise. We’re in the boardroom along with three interns Gautier hired yesterday, going over posters and images of past ad campaigns and comparing them with the sales data.
I look to the employees, but they aren’t paying us much attention; they’re totally engrossed in their work, as marketing and advertising students usually are when they have to fight for survival.
Still, I can’t answer like I normally would—a.k.a. “None of your fucking business.”
“I’m having an exciting evening at home with a glass of wine,” I tell him with a fake smile pasted on my lips. “And you?”
He stares at me for a moment, his dark eyes flickering with unknown thoughts, and for that moment I’m brought back in time to when we were teenagers. In some ways, he’s barely changed. He’s still a smart-ass, still quietly observing one moment and cutting the next. Always so calm and composed, unless you really got under his skin. And how I wanted to get under his skin.
He never let me.
But so much time has passed since then, and we are different people now. He still has that height and the broad shoulders and cutting jawline and the dark hair that he often swoops off his forehead with fancy hair products. I swear his lips have gotten even fuller. But when I look into his eyes, I don’t see the person that I knew, which tells me that perhaps I never knew him at all.
“Probably going to see a movie,” he says. “Alone.”
My brows come together. “Is this your way of inviting me to a movie?”
He grins at me but there’s no warmth in it. “I wasn’t inviting you anywhere. Just making small talk so that the interns here don’t think we’re all unsociable monsters at this company.”
At that, the students all look our way, and I know they’ve been listening this entire time.
Blaise probably has a point, too, but I’m not about to tell him that. Besides, it’s almost time to go home, and I actually do have plans, quite the opposite from what I told Blaise.
Ever since I got back from Bordeaux, I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out how to proceed with what I’ve discovered. Google is your friend for only so long, and it’s hard to know who to trust when it comes down to it. I need someone I can absolutely rely on, who will keep all this a secret, who’s a professional and will do everything I ask of him without anyone else knowing. I need to feel like I have someone in my corner, even if it’s someone who I’m paying the big bucks to.
It’s just too big and scary for me to handle on my own.
So I reached out to the last person I wanted to, the only person I know who is so far removed from the Dumonts that there would be no issue of misplaced loyalty. Someone who owes me a lot. Someone with few morals who knows a lot of people with even fewer morals.
My ex-husband, Cyril.
Believe me, I have my pride, and all of that was ripped to shreds the moment I picked up my phone and gave him a call, telling him my problem and needing him to keep it all a secret.
I’m meeting him tonight at a divey bar in the Latin Quarter, along with someone he thinks is the right person for the job.
It’s the last thing I want to do. I think I’d rather accompany Blaise to his movie, if he really is going to one. But I know it’s the only shot I have.
And the one saving grace in all this is that Cyril didn’t hang up. He didn’t laugh, and he didn’t call me crazy. He knows my family very well, and he’s hated them as much as they’ve hated him. Yes, he was cheating on me; yes, he only married me for money. Both of those truths tore me up inside for a long time.
You’d think I would be used to rejection at this point. It’s what an adopted child always goes back to: the rejection.
I managed to get over it, though. It still stings, it still makes me mad, but it no longer hurts like it once did. I’m guessing that’s because I realized I never really loved Cyril, I just loved the idea of him. I loved the idea of being married, of maybe being a mother, of having someone who loved me.
It turned out to be a lie, but at least I didn’t lose my heart in the matter.
I leave the office before Blaise can stare at me any longer. It’s almost as if he doesn’t believe me.
I don’t bother going home. I park my car around the corner from my apartment and head to my favorite café on the street corner. I live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, one of the more expensive parts of Paris. At one point in my life, the status and the power and the money of this neighborhood fueled me. It made me feel like I had to work harder and harder to be deserving of a place like this. It made me competitive, though more against myself than anyone else.
Of course, I know I don’t have to work. I’m an heiress. With my father’s death, I inherited a lot of money, and even before, that silver spoon was lodged firmly in my mouth from the moment I entered the family.
But the last thing I want is to not earn my place here. And so I’ve worked harder, smarter, better, to ensure I belong. It’s probably why I didn’t want to leave the neighborhood after Cyril and I got a divorce. I should have wanted a fresh start, but my apartment was mine before I left him.
I sit down outside under the heaters, wrapping my scarf around my neck tighter and slipping on a pair of leather gloves with a zipper running across them. They’re by Acne Studios, a Swedish brand, and I was always so nervous to wear them around my father because he would immediately know they weren’t the Dumont label. The craftmanship pales in comparison, but these gloves were €200 instead of €2,000, and, well, I find them cool.