He removes my hand from my chest, where I’ve balled it into a ist, opens my palm, and laces his ingers with mine. “I’ll have you talk to Stephen to give you some peace of mind. He’s very good at his job, and you’ll know it when you talk to him.”

I lift our hands and press his to my cheek. “I just want this to be over.”

“I know, and I hate you’re worrying yourself over this. It’s going to blow over quickly.”

“I hope so.” An idea hits me. “Can we call Mark? Maybe he’s heard something about the police investigation?”

Chris’s lashes lower and he sighs before leaning back in his seat. “Yeah, well. Mark. There’s another story altogether. I talked to him.”

I tense at his bleak tone. “When? What did he say?”

“Today. He’s in New York. His mother’s in the hospital, and he’s by her bedside.”

My lips part at the horrible timing. “Oh, no. What’s wrong with her? Please tell me it’s not serious.”

“Breast cancer.”

Unbidden, I see a lash of Dylan’s frail, cancer-sickened body, and the vision punches me in the chest. Certain Chris must be thinking of him, too, I lace my ingers through his.

“How bad is she?”

“Stage two. They caught it early. She’s having a mastectomy tomorrow, and since it’s a Friday he’s staying the weekend and lying back home Monday to meet with the police. He’s pissed about Ava twisting things in knots and pulling him away from his family right now. He told me to tell you he’ll deal with her.”

He smiles. “And you know Mark. If he says it, he means it. So stop worrying. Between me, Mark, and Stephen, you have a lion, a tiger, and a bear on your side.”

Amused, I ask, “Which are you?”

“All three when I have to be—and for you, baby, I’ll do it all.”

My hand closes over his tattoo, thick muscle lexing beneath my palm, his expression turning alluringly sexual. My body tingles to life with my ability to afect him with a simple touch. “I’ll take the dragon.” I don’t try to hide how much I want him. “Just the dragon.”

His eyes gloss slightly, his lashes lowering, but not before I see a lash of the same emotion from a few minutes before.

I cup his face, urging him to look at me.

“Monsieur Chris,” a man says from beside our table.

Chris and I both turn to inspect our visitor. Recognition lashes on Chris’s face and he pushes to his feet to shake the hand of a short, dark-haired man who looks to be in his ifties, and introduces him to me as an employee of one of the many galleries in Paris. I listen as the two talk and laugh, and I understand nothing they say, but I can see how much the man likes Chris. Everyone likes Chris, and so few know the haunted man beneath the surface. But I do. Or do I? He doesn’t seem to think I do. With all I’ve seen, all we’ve been through, what could possibly still be bad enough for him to dread sharing it with me?

Our visitor departs as our food arrives, before I can let my mind run too wild with possibilities that can only do more harm than good. My worries slide away as plates illed with delicious Mexican food are set in front of us. Chris rubs his palms together and pats my leg. “You’re going to love it.”

I smile at his contagious enthusiasm and do exactly as he suggests. I dig into my cheese enchiladas while Chris watches for a reaction, and their spicy, yummy lavor explodes in my mouth. “Mmm,” I manage as I swallow. “It’s terriic.” I scoop up some of the sauce and swallow. “Really terriic.”

Chris scoops up a forkful of his chicken enchilada and holds it to my mouth. “Try mine.”

I accept the bite and he slowly removes the fork from my mouth, watching me, his eyes brimming with hunger—and not for food. “Good?” he asks, and his voice has a soft, velvety quality.

“Yes.” My voice is raspy, and not from the spicy heat of the food. “Very good.” But not as good as him.

He eases closer and brushes his mouth over mine. “It tastes better on your lips than mine.”

I blush as he leans back again. I never understand how he still makes me blush, but he does.

He’s smiling at my reaction, his expression pure male satisfaction. “Now do you believe you can eat well in Paris?”

I’m pretty sure everything will taste better with Chris around. “I do believe you’ve convinced me.”

Our eyes collide and our laughter fades. The air thickens and something I can’t name sparks between us, tingling through my body. “I wouldn’t steer you wrong, Sara,” he says, and there is a rasp in his voice where there had been velvet before. He’s not talking about food anymore, and the sincerity in the depths of his stare touches me deeply.

“I know,” I whisper. And I do know. I really, really do. This man has all of me, or . . . no. That’s not true, and it hurts to admit this, even to myself. He has almost all of me. It’s hard not to hold back a small bit, when I know I don’t have all of him.

Twelve

The attorney calls Chris during our ride home from the restaurant and, as promised, Chris has me talk to him directly. Despite having little new to tell me, Stephen does make me feel better, assuring me the police eforts are just due diligence and I have nothing to worry about. And no, I don’t have to leave Paris.

I actually relax and Chris and I plan our exploration of the city together. We debate which exhibits we want to visit irst, and I decide I’m a very lucky girl. I am going to view famous art with a famous artist as my guide. It’s a dream come true.

“My only commitment is a boys’ sleepover camp for disabled kids Friday night, at the Louvre,” Chris says as we turn onto Foche Avenue near our house.

“No meetings?”

“No meetings,” he conirms. “Which means I’m free to take you to some of the museums and introduce you to some important people in the industry.”

“Who I won’t be able to talk to.”

“There’s plenty of people who speak English.” His phone rings for the third time since we’ve been talking, and he glances at the screen before declining the call. His attention turns back to me, a subtle tension in him that hadn’t been there moments before. “This whole city feeds of tourism, especially from Americans. There are more people who speak English than you might think here.”

“I still want to break down the language barrier,” I say, though I’m wondering about the two unanswered calls. Whoever it is, he doesn’t want to talk to them in front of me. I think it’s Amber. She knows he’s pissed, and my womanly instinct says she won’t let what happened earlier at her shop pass without contacting him.

We pull up to the gate of the house, and Chris rolls down his window to key in the entry code. A moment later we’re pulling into the garage attached to the house.

His house. I’m never going to fully feel like I’m at home until these secrets stop dividing us.

Inside, I make my escape to a hot bubble bath, intending to pull my jumbled thoughts into some kind of order. I’m not going to let myself think about Chris returning his calls to . . . whom-ever, since I’m liable to let my imagination run wild.

I’ve barely buried myself in bubbles to my chin when Chris saunters into the bathroom with a glass of wine in his hand and sits down on the edge of the tub. “This’ll help calm your nerves,” he says, ofering it to me. “I have an extensive cellar outside the city that my father left me. I keep a few bottles here for guests.”

Wine his father, the wine expert who drank himself to death on wine, left for him.

Uncomfortable with the thought, I set the glass on the other side of the tub.

I grab his shirt and wrap my wet hand around it, tugging his mouth near mine. “Thanks, but I don’t want it. I just want you.”

He looks at me knowingly. “The past is the past. I’m putting it behind me, and us.”

Unease stirs inside me. This its into his need for control in some way, but I’m not sure how. “The past is a part of you and us. You can store it away someplace diferent, but you can’t make it go away. And you can’t even resolve it until you, we, face it.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do?”

Maybe this isn’t about control at all. Maybe it’s about losing it. Maybe bringing me here, exposing himself to me for what I believe he sees as judgment, is doing a rare number on him.

Am I selishly pushing him too hard and too fast? Stripping him na**d too quickly? “Chris—”

His cell phone rings and he squeezes his eyes shut. “I should check it in case it’s important.”

“I know.” I wish I could throw the phone in the tub.

He doesn’t move, lingering as if he feels the same way. The ringing stops and his lips twitch. “I guess it wasn’t important.”

He leans in closer, and my heart begins to race with the promise of his mouth against mine.

The phone starts ringing again.

Chris curses and starts to move away, and I reluctantly release his shirt. He stands up, tugging his cell from his jeans pocket, his face impassive as he looks at the number and hits “end.” There’s an instant pinch in my chest, and I quickly roll to my side so Chris can’t see my reaction. At least he’s still declining the call. Apparently he didn’t return the prior calls while I was running my bath. Or maybe he did and “the person” is calling back.

“Amber.”

My stomach clenches at her name and I roll back over to face him, feeling exposed, thankful for the bubbles still brimming to my neck. “What?”

“You want to know who’s calling. It’s Amber.”

“Oh.” My reply lacks inesse, but considering the edginess of his mood, it’s better than the “I know” I almost said. “Why don’t you take her calls?”

He runs a rough hand through his hair, leaving it in sexy disarray. “Because right now I’d tell her to stay the f**k away from you, and I won’t say it as nicely as I just did.”

I’m taken aback by how angry he is. Too much, it seems, and I wonder why. “She didn’t lure me into a trap.” I have no idea why I’m defending a woman who’d stomp me with her spiked heel in a heartbeat.

“She cornered you.”

“And I let her. A mistake I regret.”

“You don’t know what Amber is capable of. I do.”

Chris happened to me. My gaze drops to the water as Amber’s words replay in my mind, carved in one part pain, one part elusive backstory. Did he hear what she said to me? Does the accusation I’d sensed have anything to do with his anger? Yes.

Yes, I think it does.

I glance up, seeking some kind of answers, only to blank at the sight of Chris stripping of his shirt. “What are you doing?”

The hard lines of his face fade into amusement at the less-than-brilliant question, another one of his rapid shifts of mood.

“Getting na**d. Got a problem with that?”

My gaze slides over his deliciously sculpted body, lingering on his rippling, sexy abs, and my mouth goes dry. My questions about Amber slide away. “No problem,” I assure him. I sound aroused. I am. “What took you so long?”

He tosses one of his boots. “I was trying to be Mr. Nice Guy again and let you enjoy your bath. It really doesn’t work for me.”

“I’m so glad you igured that out.”

As he tosses his other boot away, his cell phone rings again.

Exasperated at Amber bursting inside my barely realized little fantasy, I say, “Again?”

Chris glances at his phone. “Blake this time.”

“I need him!” I sit up, bubbles lying and water splashing. “I have to talk to him, right away.”

Chris’s gaze rakes over my na**d breasts, then lifts to mine.

“This is not the reaction a man wants his woman to have for another man.”

I sit up on my knees. “Don’t joke. Answer the call, please, and put it on speaker so I won’t get the phone wet.”

Looking baled, Chris hits the answer button and says, “Hold on. Sara wants to be on speaker.” He sits down on the tiled seating area of the tub and places the phone closer to me. I sink back into the water and curl my knees to my chest in front of the phone. Chris arches a questioning brow at me and I give a nod before he says, “You’re live, Blake.”

“You two are giving me performance anxiety,” Blake drawls over the line. “We Walker men don’t like performance anxiety, or to let down a pretty woman, but I have no news. You know what they say, though. No news is good news.”

“It’s not about Rebecca this time,” I say, thinking of Ella’s silence, insanely worried about what it means. “I went to City Hall today to check on Ella’s marriage certiicate.”

“What?” Chris asks. “When?”

“This morning. Chantal took me.”

He opens his mouth, then licks a look at the phone and clamps his lips shut, obviously deciding what he has to say is better said alone.

I continue: “When Ella came here, she told me she was eloping and would be back in two weeks. But you can’t get married here unless you’ve established residency for sixty days.”

“Maybe her doctor was caught up in romance and forgot to check the laws,” Blake suggests.

Chris adds, “I’m a resident and I didn’t know about the sixty-day rule. Maybe she just decided to stay longer.”

“Maybe,” I concede, my voice tight. “But most people ile a required public notice of their intended marriage—and there’s no record. She’s just disappeared without a trace.”