Inside, Chez Patrick was bustling. An elderly Frenchman took Tracy’s coat and scarf. He was reaching for Frank’s heavy tweed coat when Frank’s phone rang.
“Sorry,” he mouthed to Tracy, darting back into the mews. “You go in. I won’t be long.”
Leaving him to his phone call, Tracy followed the maître d’ through the restaurant. Weaving her way through gingham-clothed tables and past chattering diners, she arrived at a table tucked away round a corner, in a little alcove all its own.
Jeff Stevens looked up and smiled.
“Hello, Tracy.”
CHAPTER 34
TRACY TURNED AND BOLTED out of the restaurant.
She looked up and down the mews in search of Frank Dorrien. But Frank had gone.
He set me up. The bastard set me up.
By the time she turned around, Jeff was standing outside. In a dark suit that off set his gray eyes perfectly, with his curly dark hair ruffled by the wind, he looked as handsome as he had the day Tracy first saw him, in a train compartment en route to St. Louis. Tracy remembered that first meeting as if it were yesterday. She had just pulled off her first ever job, stealing Lois Bellamy’s jewels for a crooked New York jeweler named Conrad Morgan. Jeff, posing as FBI Agent Thomas Bowers, had scammed her into handing them over; and Tracy had scammed him right back.
But of course, it wasn’t yesterday. Decades had passed since that train journey. Decades of adventure and excitement, of love and loss, of exquisite joy and unbearable pain. Nicholas’s life, and death, lay between then and now, an unbridgeable Grand Canyon of grief that Tracy could never cross, no matter how much she might want to.
“Please,” Jeff said reproachfully. “Don’t run away. Have lunch with me.”
“I can’t believe Frank did this,” Tracy muttered furiously.
“You mustn’t blame Frank,” Jeff said. “I begged him. I told him I needed to see you.”
“And I told him, very plainly, that I didn’t want to see you,” Tracy said.
Jeff’s wounded expression was like a punch in the stomach.
Softening her tone, Tracy said, “It’s a bad idea. You know it is.”
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“It’s only lunch.”
Tracy gave Jeff a knowing look. When it came to the two of them, there was no such thing as “only lunch” and they both knew it.
“We do need to talk,” Jeff pressed her.
Tracy hesitated, just for a second, and Jeff smiled. He knew he had her.
THE FOOD WAS DELICIOUS. Nothing too rich and creamy, the way French food sometimes could be. Tracy had a langoustine salad that positively exploded with flavor, and Jeff had a fortifying steak frites, washed down with a good Burgundy for courage.
He knew he was going to need it.
For the first half an hour they talked about the case. About Hunter and Kate and the drone strike that had killed Alexis Argyros. About the fracking industry and corruption and the duplicitous nature of politicians.
“If only more people were as honest as us, eh, darling?” Jeff quipped.
Tracy loved his sense of humor and she envied it. She wished she could still laugh at the world the way Jeff could. She used to laugh a lot.
“I love you, Tracy.”
Tracy’s head whipped back as if she’d been stung. This was so out of left field, so unexpected. She looked at Jeff almost angrily.
“Stop.”