My feet hurt, and I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with him much longer like this. “Zeke, I don’t have any shoes on.”
He stopped, looking me up and down for a second. “Really? What happened to your shoes? Or were you always barefoot?”
“I lost them in the run. My feet hurt and…”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Fuck.” A second later, he’d scooped me up and strode out of the hotel holding me like he was going to carry me over a threshold. It was sort of funny. I was in a wedding dress, and he was carrying me around like something out of a movie.
Only I didn’t know him, this wasn’t that, and I had no idea where he was taking me.
“We’re going to the car,” he answered my unasked question. “And then I’m going to take you to your hotel room to get you some shoes, collect your stuff, and we’ll go from there.”
I held up two fingers. “That’s how many stops we have to make.”
“Right, I’d known that. We have to go back to that venue, too. Fine. In the meantime, I want you to consider staying.”
Oh, we were back to this. The moment right before Sophie had shown up when I was confused and didn’t know what was going on. I was still in that zone. What was happening here? “How could I do that? I have no money.”
“You don’t need it. You’ll be my guest.”
Being carried like this might have been the most awkward conversation position in the history of all conversation positions. “Why would you do that? We don’t know each other, and I have the distinct feeling that you don’t like me very much.”
“I don’t like anyone that much. People in general. Maybe because I understand them too well after a lifetime of selling them on things they probably shouldn’t be doing. Trust me, if I can make bank executives invest in your father’s crummy platforms, I can make anyone do anything. I’m leveling with you. Keeping you will make your father crazy. He will fume over this, and it will give me the ability to finally figure him out with his guard down. Or he’ll make a mistake.”
He opened a car door in the parking lot. It was a two-door Porsche. I’d been in a lot of them in my life. I knew men cared a lot about this kind of thing. I shouldn’t be genderizing. Some men and some women probably did, too. Hell, I needed to keep my head focused. When he would have strapped me in, I stopped him. There were some basic things I was absolutely capable of doing for myself.
Zeke shut the door and went around to the other side. With traffic so constantly bad in Paris, I couldn’t imagine he got to open this up around town very much. But it was probably more about having it than actually driving it. There was status to this car, and it probably got girls like Sophie to agree never to be exclusive with him.
“What do you think?” He started the car.
“About what? You haven’t really told me anything. You want to make my father nuts by keeping me. Is that what you want me to help you do? Stay here and make him nuts?”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel while he pulled the car out into traffic. It was the middle of the day, and it was going to start to rain. My reception would have been ruined. I smiled. That was sort of funny. It would have been a terrible disappointment to everyone. They hadn’t put out the tents. And rain had not been in the forecast.
“I can help you. What I saw today when you booked it away from your chosen life partner was a person who needs to take some control of her life. I can help you do that. By the time you go back to New York, you can have some say over your destiny. Trust me. I pulled myself out of a shit hole. I pulled your father out, and I can help you do the same.”
It sounded lovely. But too good to be true was too good to be true. “That would make you just like my dad. He paid for me, too.”
“By the time I’m done with you, you won’t need anyone else for that the rest of your life. Layla, you can be the captain of your own destiny. Then no one can touch you. Ever. Trust me on that. You’ll say when, who, and how. The world can fuck itself if you tell it to. You won’t have to ask your father or your sisters or anyone for help. I’ll help you. If you help me. A little quid pro quo.”
I sat up straighter in my seat. “Really?”
“Really.” He nodded. “You help me, and I’ll see to it that you will never have to run from anyone ever again. They’ll run from you, honey. I promise you that.”
Chapter Four
Was it possible to even consider this? That was the question that plagued my mind the whole drive over to the hotel. I’d limped into the hotel behind him, declining to be carried because that was just too much. Once, okay, he’d surprised me, but now he’d put it out there that he wanted to Pygmalion me into some kind of woman who could take on the world.
It turned out my bags were packed and waiting by the front desk for me. The staff ran fast, holding all of them out to me as soon as I came through the door.
Zeke spoke to them in French before turning back to me. “You have a passport in the safe, right?”
Yes, as it turned out, I did. “How did you think of that?”
“People put their passports in the safes in their rooms. We all do that. It’s not rocket science. They cleaned up your room because Laura Allard told them to. But they didn’t get the passport, so let’s go do that now and get it out.” He gave some more instructions, and suddenly, my bags were being brought outside. I watched them go a little bit like I was watching a television program I’d just stumbled upon. There was a distance to everything, the sense that nothing was real, even though it was happening.
Maybe my adrenaline was crashing.
I followed Zeke and the manager, who was really talking fast, into the elevator and headed back upstairs to the room I’d exited that morning before sunrise. A guest entered on the next floor before we continued on to the fourteenth floor where my room had been. Who had picked this hotel for us? This wasn’t where we were supposed to have gotten married or where our reception would have been. Why had we stayed here?
The second the woman in the elevator recognized me, her demeanor changed. She was tall and maybe thirty years old. She was in a bathrobe, so she was either coming from the spa or the pool. I assumed there were both those things in this hotel. I supposed it was possible she just liked to walk around in her bathrobe. Stranger things had happened.
“You’re Layla. One of the redheads.” Her accent was British.
I put on my smile. “I am. But I mean, there are lots of redheads. I bet you can find three or four others here. We’re—”
“My God,” Zeke groaned behind me, leaning on the elevator wall. “Really? Every time?”
I ignored him. He could go suck on an egg. “Sorry, he can’t control himself. We don’t pay attention to him, and you shouldn’t either.” I smiled broader at the woman, hoping she’d remember that and not Zeke’s outburst.
“Oh, I would love to shop with you.” She practically squealed. “And you can make me look like the best me.”
I nodded. “I’d love to be able to do that if we had the time.” The elevator dinged. “Have a wonderful day.”