The Art of French Kissing (26 page)

Gabe looked up at him, and for the first time, there was something in his expression that wasn’t embarrassment or anger.

Guillaume continued. “And, Emma, wherever you are—” He looked directly into the camera. I sat up in my seat and stared at the monitor above me. “I owe you an apology, too. Now, listen to me. I want you to give my brother here a chance, okay? And once you two have worked things out, I need you to come back and be my publicist again. I’ll fix everything with KMG. I can’t seem to stop getting myself into trouble. I need you.”

The audience laughed again, and I sat stunned, frozen to my seat.

Katie, an eyebrow arched, interjected, “Okay, Gabe. Is there anything you want to say to this Emma?”

Gabe turned even redder and shook his head. The audience groaned, and Guillaume looked delighted at his brother’s discomfort.

“Come on, big brother, you’re on national television in America,” Guillaume urged. “It’s the perfect opportunity to finally make that move on the girl, for once in your life.”

I felt mortified for poor Gabe. But at the same time, I hoped he’d say something. After all, I had no idea how he felt. Would he forgive me? Or was he just as angry at me as he had been?

“Okay,” Gabe said, taking a deep breath. I leaned forward in my seat, my heart pounding. “I’d just like to tell her . . .” His voice trailed off, and he paused for a moment. Then he looked straight into the camera, and above me on the monitor, it looked like he was talking directly to me. “I’d like to tell her that I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to listen and realize that this was just Guillaume being a jerk again.” He paused and looked at his lap. When he looked up again, his cheeks were a little flushed. “And also, I think I might be in love with her.”

There was a collective
“Awwwww!”
from the audience. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. He
loved
me?

“Hey now, watch it, big brother!” Guillaume said with a grin.

“All right, guys, you can kiss and make up over the break,” Katie said with a grin. She turned to the camera and added, “Stay right here to see Guillaume perform ‘Beautiful Girl,’ the second single off his album, when we come back.”

The Katie Jones house band played a few chords, and the house lights came back up. I watched, rooted to my seat, as Gabe unhooked his mic, said something to Guillaume, and strode offstage.

“Emma?” said a voice above me. I looked up slowly to see Poppy there, smiling down at me. “Gabe is backstage. Come on.”

I stared up at her.

“You . . . you knew about this?”

Poppy nodded and grinned.

“Guillaume has been planning it for the last week,” she said. “He really does feel bad. He even made sure that the UPP took Gabe off the obit desk for the week to fly him over for an exclusive on his trip to America! But it went even better than I thought! Did you hear Gabe? He said he loves you!”

I felt like I was in a fog as I got silently to my feet and followed her. The Texan next to me shifted, looked up at me, and muttered to his wife, “Where does she think she’s goin’?”

It wasn’t until Poppy had shown her pass and we had slipped through a backstage door that I finally found my voice again.

“Poppy,” I said, still feeling very confused. “Does Gabe know I’m here?”

“No.” Poppy’s grin widened. “But he’s about to find out.”

She led me to the area behind stage left, where I could see Guillaume and his band onstage, getting ready for the show to come back from commercial break so they could launch into “Beautiful Girl.” Between me and Guillaume, only ten feet away, stood Gabe, with his back to us, watching Guillaume from the wings. I wished I knew what he was thinking. I studied his broad back for a moment, my heart pounding as I tried to think of what to say to him. I felt suddenly terrified. I stopped dead in my tracks, rooted to the spot.

Just then, Guillaume, who was adjusting his mic stand, glanced over. “Emma!” he exclaimed. He grinned and waved.

Gabe whipped his head around and stared. “You’re here,” he said softly after a moment, shock playing across his features.

Before I could respond, the lights came back up and I could see Katie Jones standing on the stage.

“Here he is again, ladies and gentlemen, Guillaume Riche!” she said enthusiastically. Guillaume’s band immediately launched into “Beautiful Girl,” and, still grinning, Guillaume turned his attention away from me and began singing. Gabe continued to stare at me for a moment, then shoved his hands in his pockets and took a few steps closer.

“Hi,” he said softly. Onstage, Guillaume glanced over and gave us the thumbs-up sign before he went back to the song.

“Hi,” I said nervously. We both stood there in silence for a moment. I was dimly aware that Guillaume was playing, but suddenly everything around me—the music, the bright lights, the people who were beginning to whisper and stare—faded into the background. I felt as if I were in one of those films where everything is fuzzy and blurred except for the characters in the middle of the scene.

Gabe and I stood looking at each other for what felt like an eternity. A lump had risen in my throat, and I could feel tears pricking the backs of my eyes. My cheeks were hot, and my heart was pounding. I felt like everything was suspended. Then Gabe reached out and touched my arm.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out, the spell broken. “I’m so sorry, Gabe. I never meant to do anything to hurt you.”

Gabe studied my face for a moment while my heart pounded double-time. I didn’t know what he’d say. Was he trying to decide whether he could forgive me? Whether he could forget what had happened? After all, even though it seemed that Guillaume had conjured the whole situation to get under Gabe’s skin, the fact remained that I
had
kissed his brother.

“No,” Gabe said after a moment. “
I’m
sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t give you a chance to explain.” He glanced toward the stage for a moment, where Guillaume was playing his heart out to a backdrop of screams from the audience. “I’m so used to Guillaume getting the girl—for the last ten years, at least—that I just assumed it had happened again.”

“But it didn’t,” I whispered.

Gabe gave me a small smile. “I know,” he said. “I mean I know that now. But he and I are pretty competitive, and, well, let’s just say that the rock star usually trumps the reporter in situations like this.”

I smiled. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that most girls would be more attracted to a flirtatious rock star than a quiet journalist.

But I wasn’t most girls.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I never should have let Guillaume kiss me. I . . . it’s a lousy excuse, but it was the champagne, not me.”

Gabe nodded and touched my arm again softly. I knew he understood. We looked at each other for a moment and then we both turned our attention to Guillaume, who was still making his way through the verses of “Beautiful Girl” onstage. After a moment, he glanced over at us, smiling.

“So doesn’t this violate some sort of professional ethics?” I asked carefully. “You covering your brother for the UPP, I mean?”

Gabe shrugged. “Maybe. But my editor has known about it since day one. The thing is, I’ve been the chief music reporter for the UPP in Europe for the last five years, way before Guillaume signed a record deal. It wouldn’t make sense to take me off a big story like this one.”

“Even if you have an obvious bias?” I persisted.

Gabe smiled. “If you’ve noticed, I’ve been nothing but fair in my articles,” he said. “Even when I wanted to kill my brother, I stuck to the facts. As for the reviews about his album, my editor wrote all that. We
did
decide it wasn’t fair for me to pass judgment on him.”

I nodded slowly. “So what now?” I asked as Guillaume launched into the chorus.

Gabe studied my face. “Will you move back to Paris?” he asked softly. “Guillaume will make sure you get your job back. I’ll fix things between KMG and the UPP. You can pick up where you left off.” He paused, and I could see his cheeks turn a bit pink. “And maybe,” he added in an embarrassed mutter, “you and I can give things a try and see what happens without my brother getting in the way.”

I gazed up at him for a moment. There suddenly wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I’d do it. After all, I’d left Paris because I’d been sure that my own professional error had led to bad press for the star I was being paid to promote. But now that I knew it hadn’t been my fault—or at least that it had been only about 10 percent my fault—I could take the job back in good conscience.

Suddenly, for no reason at all, Brett popped into my mind. Not because I had any interest whatsoever in him but because the fact that he had always refused to leave Orlando—and his comfort zone—remained for me an open wound.

“What if I want to stay in Orlando?” I heard myself asking Gabe. It was a stupid question; staying in Orlando wasn’t even a consideration. But somehow, I needed to hear what Gabe would say.

He looked startled. He thought about it for a moment. “Well,” he said finally. “I suppose there’s a UPP bureau there I could find a job with.”

I stared at him. “You would leave Paris?”

He considered this for a moment. “Paris is my home,” he said. “But it will always be there. And you might not be. I want to see where things can go with you. And if you want to stay in Orlando, well, I guess I’ll see about moving to Orlando. We could figure something out.”

I felt breathless. Gabe, whom I’d known for only a couple of months, was saying the words I never would have heard in a million years from Brett, whom I’d been so sure loved me.

“No,” I said finally. “I’ll come back to Paris.”

“Good.” Gabe breathed a sigh of relief and grinned. He glanced at Guillaume. “Because my idiot brother clearly needs you to keep him out of trouble.”

I laughed. “That’s true. Plus, Paris
is
the most romantic city in the world.”

Gabe rolled his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Guillaume told me all about how you and Poppy are on the hunt for the perfect French kiss.”

I could feel myself blushing. It sounded pretty stupid when he put it that way.

“But do you know who kisses better than Frenchmen?” Gabe continued.

“No,” I said, startled. Why would Gabe be suggesting that there was someone out there who kissed better than his countrymen?

Gabe grinned. “French-American men,” he said. Then he leaned down to touch his lips lightly to mine. Everything in my body began to tingle.

If I’d thought that the rest of the world had been fuzzy when we were staring at each other a few moments ago, this was a whole new ball game. Everything faded away as my lips parted and Gabe’s kiss grew more passionate. It was, in fact, the perfect French kiss, the one I’d been searching for high and low at Poppy’s insistence. It had been right here, with Gabe Francoeur, all along.

Gabe pulled me to him, and the whole rest of the world disappeared. That is, until I heard Guillaume whooping from the stage.

“All right, Gabe!” he was cheering into the mic. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s my brother!”

Mortified, I pulled away from Gabe and realized that not only had Guillaume and the band stopped playing while we had been lost in kissing each other, but now a camera was trained on us, capturing our every move. The audience was cheering, and I could see our faces on every monitor overhead. I suspected it wasn’t just the lighting that made both of us look bright red.

“Kiss her again, Gabe!” Guillaume encouraged. The audience cheered, and I could hear a few shouts of “Kiss her! Kiss her!” Gabe and I looked at each other for a long moment.

“I guess we don’t really have a choice,” he said with a little smile.

I smiled back. “I guess not,” I said. Then slowly, with the cameras trained on us and all of America watching, Gabe pulled me into his arms and leaned down. The cheers, the shouts, and even the refrain of “Beautiful Girl,” which Guillaume had started playing again, faded into the background as our lips met in the perfect French kiss.

Epilogue

ten months later

I
t should have been one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

As the sky deepened to a sunset of pink-streaked royal blue, Gabe and I were floating above Paris in a hot-air balloon, something I had always dreamed of doing. However, as you might suspect with Guillaume in the picture (and Guillaume
always
seemed to be in the picture these days), things weren’t quite as idyllic as they sounded. For instance, apparently hot-air balloons were not supposed to move into the airspace directly above Paris—probably for fear of some sort of disaster involving a balloon impaling itself on the Eiffel Tower. But we weren’t concerned about the rules at the moment.

We were more concerned about the fact that Guillaume, who was single-handedly manning a second balloon a hundred yards away, was floating to his certain death.

Below us, Paris rose up around the ribbon of the Seine, a gentle sprawl of cream-colored, centuries-old apartments, little chimney tops, quaint bridges, and geometric green parks. We were just west of the city, so the Eiffel Tower jutted gracefully into the sky right in front of us, and had I not been in such a state of panic, I would have marveled at just how beautiful it was as it loomed, all thousand feet of iron gridwork and graceful symmetry, over the glorious green ladder of the Champ de Mars, which spread out in a neat rectangle to the foot of the dark-domed École Militaire.

The Arc de Triomphe, the stone masterpiece Napoléon had commissioned two hundred years ago, looked palatial in the waning sunlight as it sat across the river in the center of the busiest roundabout in Paris, twelve avenues radiating like points on a star from its center. The Avenue des Champs-Élysées, lined with trees and sparkling lights, marched away from us toward the center of Paris, ending in the octagonal Place de la Concorde, where I could see the tall, slender, thirty-two-hundred-year-old Egyptian obelisk that pointed at the sky, framed by two fountains.

Beyond that, the perfectly geometric Jardin des Tuileries was an emerald expanse toward the enormous Louvre, which hulked on the Right Bank, long and limber around I. M. Pei’s famed glass pyramid. On the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine, I could just make out the twin towers of Notre Dame beyond the Palais de Justice and the spires of the Sainte-Chapelle cathedral. All along the gently winding river, which sparkled bright blue in the fading daylight, bridges looked like rungs of a ladder from the air.

Yet there was hardly time to take in any of the incredible beauty. Instead I was in a state of panic as Gabe and I, with the help of a hastily hired balloon operator, chased Guillaume through the clouds above Paris. Gabe had called me an hour ago to tell me tersely that Guillaume had taken a hot-air balloon and was currently floating solo above the city. My stomach had twisted into knots, and I’d asked Gabe if he could arrange for another balloon so that we could go up and try to talk Guillaume down before he killed himself. After all, hot on the heels of the success of “City of Light,” Guillaume was just finishing recording his second album and was due to embark on a world tour the week after next. It would be a little difficult for us to fill auditoriums if the headliner was in a body cast or, heaven forbid, splattered across the Paris pavement. I shuddered at the thought.

Now Guillaume was floating high above Paris, all by himself, without a balloon operator, in a green, yellow, and red balloon that he’d evidently somehow stolen from a field just outside Paris. He was cheerfully firing up the propane tank every few minutes, making his balloon rise and gently fall as our balloon, which Gabe had scrambled to hire from a tour site outside the city, floated close enough to put me in shouting distance. I didn’t even want to think about the legal trouble we’d all be in when we landed; we were currently much closer to Paris than we were allowed to be.

“Hi, Emma!” Guillaume’s voice wafted over, faint over the wind and the periodic gentle hiss of the propane burner heating the air inside our balloon.

“Guillaume!” I shouted back, fearing that my voice wouldn’t carry far enough. “What on earth are you
doing
?”

I’d just been counting myself lucky, too. I should have known better. But it had been two whole months since a major incident with Guillaume. Sure, he’d done dumb things here and there—swimming in the fountain in the Place de la Concorde (along with his favorite rubber ducky, no less) one afternoon two weeks ago, for example—but nothing life threatening. Until now. And of course Guillaume wasn’t just my insane rock-star client anymore. He was also the brother of the man I loved, which made me that much more worried about how this situation would play out.

“Emma!” Guillaume shouted. He sounded surprisingly chipper for someone who was all by himself in a hot-air balloon that could plummet earthward at any moment. “I thought you’d never get here! And you’ve brought Gabe with you? How fantastic!”

“Guillaume!” I shouted back. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”

I turned to Gabe, feeling panic rise inside me. “We have to help him get down,” I said urgently. “We have to have our balloon operator tell him how to land.”

Gabe nodded, but he made no move to help or to yell across to Guillaume.

“Gabe!” I exclaimed in exasperation. “Why aren’t you doing anything? Aren’t you worried?”

Gabe shrugged. “Guillaume always manages to get himself out of things,” he said.

I groaned. Sometimes Gabe was infuriating. Every time I’d been called by my office to respond to a Guillaume emergency, Gabe had acted like it was no big deal. One of these days, he was going to be wrong. I wished he’d stop acting like his charmed brother had nine lives—although I had to admit that so far, that had proven to be the case after all.

In the ten months I’d been back in Paris, everything had gone relatively smoothly up until now. Véronique had reluctantly given me my old job back, as it appeared that I did, somehow, have the ability to get Guillaume out of the many disastrous scrapes he routinely got himself into. I’d moved back to my old desk at the office and back into the spare room in Poppy’s flat, which had relieved her to no end, because it meant she had someone to share the rent with. For her part, she was still going out with random Frenchmen occasionally. But Darren had been visiting her every few weeks, and she had confessed just a few days ago that despite herself, she thought she might actually try to have a relationship with him. I’d even seen a stack of her self-help books in the trash can, under some used coffee grounds, one day last week.

As for me, my string of random Parisian dates had ended, as I was fully absorbed with Gabe. The more I got to know him, the more compatible I knew we were. We had even taken a trip back to the States last month so that he could meet my parents and I could meet his mother, who still lived in Tampa. Jeannie and King Odysseus had even liked him; Odysseus had temporarily ceased the launching of milk-sodden breakfast cereals to play some sort of complicated French patty-cake game that Gabe patiently taught him.

But now, no matter how well things were going, I half wanted to push Gabe out of the balloon. He wasn’t exactly helping matters.

“Guillaume!” I yelled across. “Our balloon operator is going to tell you how to float west out of Paris and then lower your balloon into a field. You
have
to listen!”

I nodded at the operator, who gave me an incredulous look and turned to Gabe. Gabe shrugged and said something to him in French. The balloon instructor spoke rapidly back. In the ten months I’d been in Paris, I’d enrolled in French classes and was picking up the language of my new home. But my education hadn’t progressed enough to allow me to understand the quickly spoken words of someone with a thick country accent who was currently speaking over the hiss of a propane burner.

Gabe said something else in rapid French to the operator and then added,
“Allez-y.”
Go ahead.

The balloon operator heaved a big sigh then shouted several unintelligible sentences to Guillaume, who grinned, waved, and yelled,
“Merci, monsieur!”

“Guillaume!” I exclaimed in frustration a moment later when it became evident that he was making absolutely no attempt whatsoever to land his balloon. “What’s wrong with you? Do you know how hard it’s going to be for me to get you out of this, if you don’t wind up killing yourself first?”

“Oh, Emma, you worry too much!” Guillaume yelled back cheerfully. He fired up his burner again, and his balloon rose a little higher. Our operator shrugged and followed him, trying to stay at an even altitude so that I could scream at him adequately. Not that it was doing any good. At this rate, Guillaume would be floating toward the upper atmosphere within the hour.

“You’ll probably wind up in jail if you don’t get killed!” I shouted. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

“Not really!” Guillaume yelled back. He came to the edge and leaned over to look at the ground. I almost had a heart attack as his basket wobbled back and forth. He looked back over at us and grinned. “Hey, Gabe!” he yelled. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

There. Finally. Maybe my boyfriend would actually step up and try to talk some reason into his lunatic brother for a change.

“Come
on
, Gabe!” I urged softly without turning around. I was still watching Guillaume wobble in his basket. “Say something!”

“As a matter of fact, there is something I’d like to say!” Gabe finally yelled across to his brother.

“It’s about time,” I muttered, still watching Guillaume.

“Okay, Gabe!” Guillaume said cheerfully. “Let’s hear it! What is it?”

“I’d just like to ask Emma if she’ll marry me!” Gabe shouted back.

It took me a second to register what he’d said. “What?” My response came out in a gurgle.

“Would you marry me, Emma?” Gabe asked.

I turned slowly and saw Gabe kneeling awkwardly in the wicker basket of our balloon, holding a little jewelry box with a silver diamond ring inside. My jaw dropped, and my eyes filled with tears. But I quickly blinked them back.

“Gabe,” I said softly. “This really isn’t the time, I don’t think.”

My heart was thudding as I looked down at my boyfriend, who was still kneeling, ring outstretched, smiling at me. It would have been the best proposal I could have imagined, had I not been so sure Guillaume was floating speedily deathward a few yards away. I couldn’t believe that Gabe had chosen
now
, of all times, to ask me the most important question in the world.

“Emma!” Guillaume shouted. I whipped around, feeling guilty that my attention had been distracted from him for a moment.

“What, Guillaume?” I shouted back. “Are you okay?”

“Did Gabe forget to tell you that I was a hot-air balloon operator for nine months the year I turned eighteen?” he yelled. “I’m still licensed, you know!”

I stared, uncomprehending. “Wait, what?”

“This is my balloon!” he yelled back. “Do you like it?”

“
Your
balloon?” I repeated. I stared at him for a moment. “Do you mean that you planned this whole thing?”

“Maybe!” he shouted cheerfully.

“You didn’t steal the balloon?” I asked incredulously. “You’re
not
about to float into the atmosphere or crash-land on the Eiffel Tower?”

“No!” Guillaume grinned. “But it was worth it to see the expression on your face! Sorry to disappoint you, Emma, but I’ve paid for these balloons, fair and square. And on top of that, I’ve even gotten permission from the French government for us to be in this airspace. It’s amazing the doors that open for you when you’re a rock star.”

“Wh . . . what?”

“Yes!” Guillaume looked triumphant. “And much as I’d like to stick around to see what my idiot brother has to say to you, I suppose I’ll leave the two of you alone.
Au revoir.
See you back on earth!”

With that, he turned off his burner, and his balloon began to float back toward the ground. He waved once more, blew me a kiss, and then turned his back to me. Slowly, feeling like I was in a daze, I turned around. Gabe was still kneeling in the basket, holding up the ring.

“So?” he asked softly after a moment. “Will you? Will you be my wife?”

I smiled at him, completely overtaken by emotion. I blinked a few times. Then I threw my arms around his neck and laughed. “Of course I will!” I exclaimed. I leaned back and grinned at him. “Yes! Yes, I’ll marry you!”

Gabe breathed a sigh of relief. “I was hoping you’d say that.” He grinned at me and took the ring out of its box. “May I?” he asked, holding it up.

I nodded, and he slipped it onto my left ring finger. It fit perfectly. We both watched for a moment as the princess-cut diamond sparkled in the late-afternoon sun.

“Felicitations.”
Our balloon operator, whom I’d nearly forgotten about, congratulated us.

“Merci.”
I beamed at him.

“Your accent is really getting quite good,” Gabe teased. I rolled my eyes.

“I think I still have some work to do,” I said. “I’m not French yet.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a sly smile. “You have the kissing part down at least.”

He touched his lips to mine, and I kissed back, feeling the breeze in my hair as our balloon began to descend. Gabe slipped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. As the sun began to set and Guillaume’s balloon drifted gently downward below us, we held each other tightly and looked over the edge of the basket as darkness fell on the City of Light.