“Alright. Love wins.”
“May I ask your name?” I asked. “Or should I just continue to call you Ice Queen in my head?”
“Wasp.”
“Wasp?” I repeated, and it was my turn not to believe. “That has to be your bar name.”
“My bar name?”
“The name you give random men at bars because you don’t like the familiarity of them calling you by your actual name.”
There was a moment of bewildered interest before she banked it down.
“I don’t have a bar name. My name is Wasp.”
“Don’t worry, Wasp,” I told her, letting it drop there, knowing she would ask for more.
“Worry about what?” she asked, unable to help herself.
My gaze slid in her direction, holding hers for a long moment.
“I don’t mind getting stung,” I told her, dropping some more cash on the bar, getting up, and walking out.
Wasp, and I was still not convinced that was her actual name, needed to be left hanging. She needed to be on the hook. She wasn’t the kind of woman you could seal a deal with in one night. And if she was, I wouldn’t have been nearly as interested.
Chances were, if she was at that bar, then she was staying at the hotel across the street.
Which meant we had to serendipitously on-purpose happen to cross paths again.
I shook my head at my driver, deciding to walk back to my own hotel.
Suddenly, the city that had become so dull to me, everything dimmer and less exciting than when I first arrived, had burst back to life.
Lights blazed.
Music blasted.
Lovers kissed on corners.
Everything pulsed, begging to be experienced.
Maybe I wasn’t quite so done with Paris after all.
I mean, I couldn’t just leave a woman like her all alone in the city of love, now, could I?
THREE
Wasp
Paris was everything I thought it might be. And more. And less.
I had experienced that phenomenon more times than I could count over the years. When I built up my expectations to towering skyscrapers that nothing could measure up to.
There was also something to be said for the fact that I was experiencing it on my own. There was something about sharing a travel experience with someone else that made it even more special.
To have someone to point out things to.
Did you see that?
Do you hear that?
Oh, my God, get a picture of that.
I think we need to treat ourselves.
Alone, I was both the sense of wonder and the voice of reason. So I didn’t stop for that third pastry on my walk from my hotel to the corner store where I needed to pick up some fashion tape to be able to put on the dress I was going to wear to meet Fenway Arlington.
Meet.
But I’d had my eyes on him for two days leading up to the actual meet-cute.
I needed to study him, since the client who hired me had been oddly tight-lipped about everything in her emails.
I was used to women pouring their hearts out to me about their situations, everything from how they and their spouse met right up to when they suspected he was cheating. I knew the names and ages of children, physical descriptions of the porn stars they knew their spouses preferred. I knew their daily schedules and what their favorite drinks were.
But with Fenway’s case, all I got was a couple of cryptic messages claiming he was someone who had caused many international incidents because of women that had needed to be kept out of the society pages by a professional “fixer.” And then I was told how he needed to be brought to his knees by a woman, so he could learn the repercussions of his lifestyle.
That was a cold kind of revenge, if you asked me, but I understood that even more than I did the hot, raw, exposed-nerve sort of revenge that most women typically approached me with.
Cold was natural to me.
And after watching the warmth that was Fenway Arlington—and all the women who flocked around him, pretty little trust fund bunnies—I knew that my natural cold, maybe even amped up a bit, was exactly what was going to set me apart, make me intriguing.
Pair that with a dress that exposed more than it covered up, not even bothering to put flower petals on my nipples under the slinky material, and I was pretty much catnip to his tomcat self.
He’d been an easy enough man to find, even in a city as bustling as this one.
He was a man of wealth which meant he would flock toward places that had VIP sections and top-shelf everything. Which narrowed things down a bit.
Then once I found him, uglied down in oversized clothes, glasses, and a hat for good measure, he was easy to pick out of a crowd.
There was a magnetism about him that made you notice him immediately, even if you somehow missed his ridiculously good looks.