Spotless (18 page)

“He’s from South Africa.”

My eyes fluttered closed. “Do you think he’s the man my mom was seeing? Wouldn’t it explain every—”

We almost ran a red light, and the car halted abruptly. March grabbed my shoulder to turn me toward him, a whirlpool of scary emotions forming in his eyes. “Dries would have never done this. This is not . . . This is
not
the way we do things.”

I swallowed painfully. God, I didn’t like when he raised his voice. It was out of character and downright terrifying. “What do you mean
we
? How can you be so sure of that? Maybe he helped my mother steal the diamond for him. Maybe he killed her because he wanted it only for himself!”

For a couple of seconds, he stared at me as if he were seeing me for the very first time. The light turned green again, and he averted his eyes to look at the road, tapping his index finger against the wheel. “Dries did
not
kill your mother.”

“Then who did?”

“I don’t know,” he replied through clenched teeth, his nostrils flaring.

Creepy-hat’s words rang inside my head, and I finally understood them. He had been right. If that Dries guy was my mother’s lover, her accomplice, and the man competing with the Board in the search for the Cullinan, we had a serious problem because it was obvious March couldn’t—wouldn’t—accept the notion. Clearly, that “we” meant something along the lines of “Dries’s and my little killer club that you’re
not
admitted to.”

“If it can ease your mind, I’ll try to contact Dries. Maybe once we get to your notary, we’ll learn more about that third accomplice,” March reasoned, regaining his composure.

Letting out a deep exhale to control my temper and avoid yelling that he needed a fricking reality check, I touched his forearm tentatively. “Is he your friend?”

March seemed to hesitate before answering, as if he himself wasn’t sure of that. “No. Dries is not my friend.”

“What did Creepy-hat mean when he said Dries was your master? Did he . . . teach you—”

I had gone too far; he shut down. “I already told you I don’t serve him, and he has nothing to do with this.”

We both sulked for a while, March driving with a grim look on his face, me staring absently at the traffic. I didn’t even try to play with
the radio, and he gobbled down half a dozen mints. That’s how bad it was. He was much better at sulking than I was, though. After fifteen minutes of the silent treatment, I started to get bored, and soon the tip of my tongue itched with yet another touchy question, one that had to do with Kalahari’s unfinished tale. “March, how long have you known me?”

He glanced briefly at the round black clock on the dashboard. “Fifty hours.”

I groaned in frustration. “And you’re lying again! Kalahari knew about me before you took the job!”

The Paris mayor’s office dedicates a considerable amount of time and effort to ensure that the Périphérique remains at least partially jammed at all times of the day. It was seven thirty, and this Sunday evening was no exception. Soon, March couldn’t even pretend to be driving in order to avoid answering my question, as the car had all but stopped. I looked at his profile, outlined by the lights around us, and waited.

He eventually answered. “I did know you before we officially met. I’d seen you a few months ago.”

I almost jumped in surprise. “What? Were you stalking me before that Queen person asked you to recover the diamond?”

“No. I was interested in one of your father’s clients, well, his right-hand man, to be precise. I was at Halder Equities’ Christmas party with Paulie last year.”

He sounded like he wanted to leave it at that. I didn’t. “Seriously? You were there? I don’t remember either of you.”

“I know. I don’t think you ever looked at us. You were . . . busy.”

Busy
, indeed.

I had always found my dad’s corporate Christmas party to be a well of unfathomable boredom, a tiresome scripted parade for the wealthy, where the hedge fund’s board members would give the troops and clients a small pep talk while everybody drank champagne to celebrate the miracle of being rich. I know I’m sounding like a spoiled brat, the
wealthy Simon Halder’s pampered daughter, and I guess I am to some extent. The Christmas tree was, after all, always nice, and there are worse places to dine at than the Waldorf. Still, is good food worth an entire evening spent smiling until your face hurts? Not sure.

Which brings me back to how busy I had been that specific night. Feeling lost among all these people I hardly belonged with, I had retreated into the farthest corner of the room. There, I started playing with two equally bored Russian kids, showing them how to curdle Bailey’s with Coke and introducing them to the fascinating world of acidic reactions.

There was still a long line of cars in front of us when March turned to look at me, his eyes filling with such warmth that I felt defenseless. “You were conducting science experiments with Mr. Agdanov’s sons. Your dress was pretty.”

I was having a hard time figuring where he was going with this. My black flapper dress had been too big, and overall a monument of ridicule compared to the swarm of elegant designer gowns surrounding me. I scratched my head in mild confusion. “So you were interested in Agdanov’s secretary, the guy with the missing pinkie?”

He nodded, and I winced at the memory of the tall blond guy with deep bags under his severe eyes. “He creeped me a little. Was he dangerous?”

He seemed to search for his words before answering. “He had a crowded résumé.”

“Had?”

March apparently thought it best not to elaborate on the whereabouts of Mr. Nine-fingers. He went on, deflecting this sensitive topic. “You also removed your shoes at some point. I think you believed no one would notice if you stayed away from the other guests.”

His dimples creased into a faint smile as he recounted this, causing me to blush a little. Thank God we were in the dark. “My toes hurt. Look . . . I know I made an embarrassment of myself—”

The car in front of us sped up, and he looked away, making a little show of concentrating on driving at eight miles per hour. “It’s not what I meant. I actually thought you were the most interesting feature of the party. I can even say I toyed with the idea of chatting you up while you stood barefoot in that little black dress.”

He was maintaining a remarkably deadpan face as he recounted how he had met me ten months ago and considered flirting with me at my dad’s Christmas party. Worse was the fact that he had somehow discussed this with Kalahari, which suggested our non-encounter had been kind of a big deal to him. I
needed
to get to the bottom of this. “What stopped you?”

“I wasn’t there for that. Anyway, Mr. Halder arrived, and you lost all your appeal.”

I didn’t miss the way his fingers tightened briefly on the wheel at that specific memory.

“Scared to make a move in front of my dad?”

“It had nothing to do with that. I couldn’t have cared less.”

I rolled my eyes at this surge of typical male arrogance. “Yeah, right . . . what made you back off then?”

“You. As soon as he was done lecturing you about your appearance, you quite literally disappeared. One minute you were the Barefoot Contessa, and the next, nothing, a mediocre girl with her eyes downcast and no meaningful input on Jackson Pollock’s work.”

Hearing Kalahari’s mysterious words cross March’s lips made my chest heave with a flurry of emotions—pleasure, confusion, fear . . . and anger, since I had apparently been the Barefoot Contessa for less than half an hour before, of his own admittance, retrograding to utter mediocrity. I snorted in derision. “Thanks for the compliment . . . I guess.”

A ray of light danced on his cheeks, painting the most infuriating smile. “You miss my point, but you’re welcome.”

There was no longer any doubt that March had somehow turned my once endless fuse into a one-inch firecracker. Flustered by the idea
that he had in fact witnessed one of my many social shortcomings, I exploded. “What did I miss? The part where you said I’m mediocre? I’m not stupid, you know. I don’t compare myself with girls like Kala—”

“Will you stop that? It’s terribly annoying!”

Holy shit.
He had raised his voice again. I clammed up, wrenching my fingers as the black sedan glided along the Seine’s right bank. All around us, old baroque buildings bathed in the gold of public lighting glimmered against a dark indigo sky, enveloping the car in that copper hue so typical of Paris at night. March ignored me for a few minutes and pulled out to take the nearest exit. When we reached the Pont au Change, I raised my head to gaze at the four stone sphinxes guarding Place du Châtelet’s fountain, each continuously spitting a long stream of water in a large circular pool. He parked in a nearby alley, causing me to snap back to attention.

“I thought Ilan had arranged a hotel room.”

I registered an exasperated sigh. “He has. I simply didn’t want to finish this conversation while driving.”

I wrapped his jacket tighter around my body and curled into the seat, remembering my state of undress. Somehow, it hadn’t mattered to me before, but he hadn’t been looking at me the way he was now that he was no longer concerned with the traffic around us.

March took a deep breath. “I never meant to say that you were intrinsically mediocre . . . and you should stop comparing yourself to other women.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t need to. You’re in a league of your own.”

The words had escaped his lips in a hurried mumble, as if it were difficult for him to say them out loud. My brain wasted no time in reviewing every single interaction with the opposite sex it had ever recorded, and its verdict was final: no man had ever suggested that I was a countess who didn’t compare to other women because she boxed in her own league.

I wanted to dismiss his compliment and say something lame like “Wow, thank you. Nice weather, by the way,” but instead, I kept digging us both into a hole. “Is it the reason you’re helping me? Because you—” My throat was dry. I couldn’t go on. Say what, anyway? Ask him if he still felt the way he had at the Christmas party? What was the point now that I was his client?

He answered in a tight voice. “It’s a possibility.”

I wondered how much it cost for a control freak like March to admit such a thing, certainly as much as it did for me to do the same. “I know it’s a little easy to say this now, but . . . I wish you would have talked to me that night. I wish we had met.”

I looked away, as if I could pretend someone else had spoken. After a few seconds of embarrassing silence, I took a timid peek at him to assess the damage. I didn’t understand the expression on his face. Surprise, sadness? Without a word, he peeled off his black leather gloves, his eyes never leaving mine, and a foreign tingle spread in my body when he extended a now bare hand to cup my cheek, his thumb stroking my skin. I laid my right hand on his, and I closed my eyes at the feeling of the warm skin under the pads of my fingers.

I opened them again. Suffice to say I shouldn’t have: it was like standing on the edge of a cliff. I looked down and felt myself spiraling in those dangerous blue pools. I think I let go of his hand on my cheek and leaned forward to rest my palms against his chest while he pulled me toward him. I have the memory of his face inching closer and closer, his fingers threading into my hair, the smell of the mints, and that little voice inside my head that kept shrieking, “First base!
First base!
”

Fun fact: there are approximately 2,249,975 inhabitants in Paris, 47 percent of whom are male, and 25,056 of whom are not only male, but also homeless. So, in the event that a weird guy squishes his face against your car’s windshield and groans that he needs change and will definitively
not
use it to purchase booze, there is therefore a 2.38 percent chance that he is in fact a bum. Or maybe a 100 percent chance.
Whatever. What I mean to say is that March pulled away abruptly, drew out his gun, and my near mint-flavored-kiss got ruined.

He immediately relaxed when he saw that there was no imminent threat, save for that of greasy fingerprints on his windshield. Meanwhile, in front of the car, our visitor wasn’t yet drunk enough to ignore that someone was aiming at him with a suppressed gun: he backed away slowly, hands up in the air, fear and disbelief painted on the leathery contours of his face.

“Il est pas bien celui-là, il est pas bien . . .”
That dude’s crazy, he’s crazy . . .

We watched as the guy eventually ran away with a slew of curses. “Va voir un psy, sale enculé!”
Go see a shrink, fucker!

Once he was gone for good, the blush that had been heating my cheeks for several minutes turned fierce. The spell was broken, and I had no idea what to do with myself. March seemed just as confused by our mutual lapse in judgment. In his eyes, I could now read guilt. He cleared his throat, eyes darting away from my body, only half-covered by his jacket despite my best efforts to keep it wrapped tight around me. “I think you’ve been under a lot of stress, Island, and I’m perhaps a bit tired as well.”

His polite rejection did sting, but he was right. Sweet compliments or not, I wasn’t cut out for this: the whole Parisian romance cliché belonged in my books, not in real life, and kisses weren’t supposed to be interrupted by your partner pointing a gun at some inebriated onlooker. I shook my head, coming back to my senses. This entire conversation, along with the non-kiss that had ensued, were nothing more than regrettable accidents, and March was just another dot on my dating chart, one to file under the “gave up after bum attack” category.

That little voice in my head commented that, had our interactions not been subjected to Murphy’s law, I would have gladly let March ravish me. I told the little voice to shut the hell up and cut me some slack: I had narrowly escaped being dismembered alive on an operating table a few hours ago, for God’s sake!

Straightening in the seat, arms still crossed around my body to better hold his large jacket, I managed a nervous laugh. “Wow. I think I was a little tired too. Er . . . how about we never mention that again?”