“I’ll probably pop out of the dress and have to scrunch my toes to get into the shoes,” Emily said, and he, horrible and arrogant man that he was, laughed.
They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then she opened the iPad, found the notes he’d left for her and began to read through them.
“There’s a lot here,” she said. “Didn’t you think of filling me in while we were in the air?”
He glanced at her. That telltale muscle in his jaw knotted as he turned away, stared straight ahead and folded his arms over his chest.
“I should have done so but my thoughts… took a detour.”
There were endless answers to that but she wasn’t foolish enough to try and lay the blame for what had happened on him. He’d kissed her, yes, but she’d been more than a willing accomplice.
Even the thought sent heat shimmering through her blood.
She was in deep trouble.
“Cara.” The sweet endearment sounded exactly like a caress. “Your face is an open book.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Still,” he said softly, “it is true. I can read what you are thinking.”
“Has anyone ever told you that life isn’t all about you and what you can and can’t do?”
Those amazing eyes of his darkened.
“Has anyone ever told you that you are a puzzle a man would find challenging to solve?”
She wanted to tell him he was being ridiculous, that a woman would never be moved by a line as corny as that.
But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t because what she really wanted to do was ask him if he meant it, if she could be a challenge for a man like him
“Emily,” he said, and the only thing that saved her from making a fool of herself was a tangled knot of typical Parisian traffic, a blast of French car horns, and thank heaven fo
r that sudden dose of reality.
******
The City of Light was as beautiful as she’d remembered.
She’d been a teenage kid the last time she’d visited Paris. She, Jaimie and Lissa had spent a couple of weeks of summer vacation with the general on one of his European command tours.
They’d stayed in his assigned housing, an impressive apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, and he’d seen to it that their days were filled with carefully escorted tours. Still, they’d found the occasional chance to sneak away and wander along the Seine or pop into the McD’s on the Champs-Elysées, where Lissa, the eldest at fifteen, would try to look old enough to order beers with their Big Macs and frites. She never pulled it off but it was the trying that counted.
They’d also attended a couple of formal functions including a dinner the general had hosted at the George V, one of Paris’s most elegant hotels. Well, not the dinner. The cocktail party before it. They’d worn velvet dresses: Emily’s had been the color of rich summer grass.
“Circulate among my guests and make me proud of you,” had been their father’s command, which had meant show them that you can make useless conversation in French as well as in English.
Lissa had slipped off and somehow charmed her way into the kitchen to watch the sous chefs at work. Jaimie had wiled away the time doing complex math problems that involved the number of guests and the number of canapés—something like that, anyway.
Emily had dutifully chatted with half a dozen people and then she’d wandered into an adjoining salon, discovered a beautiful piano and spent the next few minutes happily playing Chopin until the general found her.
“So it’s you making all this noise,” he’d said sharply. “It’s carrying through to the next room. You are not a pianist, Emily. Remember that.”
Such a foolish thing to think of on her first day in Paris in more than a decade. Things had changed. She was an adult now, here as assistant to a man who had chosen her for that position because he believed her capable of handling it.
Yes, a voice inside her whispered, but are you, really? You’ve failed at so many other things…