A taciturn driver loaded Thor and me into a car. “I’m taking you to Neuilly.”
I didn’t care where the driver took me as long as I could put my feet up. I rested my head against the seat and closed my eyes on the lights of Paris. My arms were too heavy to move and sinking into bed sounded better than anything. Ever.
“What do you know about Dylan Roberts?” Thor asked from the front seat.
I opened one eye. “Not much. She was on that show.” The name escaped me.
“What show?”
“You know the one.”
“No, I don’t.”
I struggled for a name. “Think The Real World meets The Bachelor.”
“Not helping.”
The driver snorted, saving me the trouble.
“Don’t you watch television?” I asked.
“The news.”
That Thor didn’t spend his days keeping up with Kim and Khloe wasn’t exactly a surprise. But no television? “No Netflix? No Prime?”
“I work.”
“You’ve never binged a show?”
“No.”
“Never?” How were we even from the same planet?
“No.” Annoyance crept into his voice. “Back to Dylan Roberts.”
“Why do you care about Dylan?” Especially right now. We had better things to think about than Dylan and how she’d snagged her fifteen minutes of fame.
“She knew you’d be at Lambert’s tonight.”
I opened my other eye. One of those bullets had rattled Thor’s brain. “You think Dylan Roberts called up Diaz’s hit squad and told them where I’d be?” Not in a million years. She wouldn’t know the first thing about contacting Diaz.
“I think you were photographed with her and it’s possible someone promised her a large payment to let them know your whereabouts in advance.”
When he put it that way, Dylan selling me out wasn’t nearly as ridiculous. Thor might be right. “It could just as easily have been Ghislain Lambert. I bet he would have betrayed his grandmother if the price was right.” Talking ill of a dead man who’d slipped drugs in my drink didn’t seem too awful, but something niggled at me. “Although, if it was Ghislain, why was he killed?”
Thor grunted.
I was not in the mood for conjecture with someone who wasn’t using his words. I closed my eyes again, but a thought, just at the edge of my brain, still niggled. “We’re missing something.”
Thor grunted again.
I crossed my arms over my aching ribcage. I’d figure out what was bothering me when I didn’t feel as if I’d been flattened by a steamroller. “Either one of them could have tipped off Diaz’s people.”
“What about your other friends?”
“Mia and André? No way.”
I waited for a grunt, but it didn’t come. Instead, Thor looked over his shoulder at me. His brow was wrinkled, and his chin was tucked. He looked almost as if he pitied me.
“It wasn’t them.” My voice was loud enough to catch the driver’s attention. He looked at me in the rearview mirror with jaded eyes.
“Right.” Thor shrugged.
Suppressing the urge to lean forward and smack him in the head was the hardest thing I’d done all night. I slipped my hands under my thighs.
“Can you tell me anything about the guy who saved us?” Thor asked. “Did you get a look at him?”
“You saw him. He was wearing a motorcycle helmet.”
Another grunt. No surprise.
The drive to Neuilly went by too quickly. All too soon, Thor opened the back door and extended his hand to me.
I stood without his help. “You’ve got to be hurting as much as I am.”
“I’m fine.” He didn’t look fine. Dark circles shadowed the skin beneath his eyes and his usually fluid movements were as jerky as a windup toy’s.
I pushed myself clear of the car and together we lurched into the safe house.
Mr. Brown waited for us in his usual chair. “What the hell happened?”
We told him—the drugs in the wine, the intruders, the rappelling, the shooting, the guardian angel—everything.
“But you did as we asked, you went to the site on Lambert’s computer?” Mr. Brown’s brows were drawn and his lips tight.
Hadn’t he been listening? “Yes, but what good will it do if Ghislain’s dead?”
“Someone used his laptop.”
“What site, sir?” Thor sounded properly respectful.
“Galeries Lafayette,” replied Mr. Brown.
The men’s gazes settled on me.
Seriously? “It wasn’t me.”
Neither Thor nor Mr. Brown looked convinced.
“Look—” I wiped my suddenly damp palms on my pants “—I did exactly as you asked, then I heard Thor running up the stairs.”
“Thor?”
“Mark.” The flush of heat on my cheeks wasn’t exactly welcome. I ignored the warmth and kept talking. “I didn’t have time to shop. And, if I did, it wouldn’t be on Galeries Lafayette’s website.”
Mr. Brown raised a single brow.
“I’m in Paris. If I want to go shopping at Galeries Lafayette, I’ll go to the actual store.” There was logic no one could argue.
“Then who visited the site?”
“It must have been one of the men who broke into the apartment.”
The way Mr. Brown pursed his lips let me know what he thought of that theory. “Who’s the guy on the motorcycle?”
“No idea. I thought he worked for you.”
“No. It seems someone wants you alive.”
“Shouldn’t that be you?”
Annoyance fluttered across Mr. Brown’s forgettable face. “You knew the risks, Ms. Fields.”
“There’s more going on here than just Javier Diaz wanting me dead or Badawi wanting to know happened to his nephew.”
Mr. Brown leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “What makes you say that?”
“First off, there’s the number of men sent to make sure I never walked out of Ghislain’s apartment. Someone sent an army.”
“And?”
“Aren’t assassins supposed to be stealthy?”
“Not necessarily.”
“The sheer number of killers seemed like someone was making a statement.”
“What do you mean?”
“How many men does it take to kill one woman?”
“You have proven yourself to be remarkably resilient.” Mr. Brown’s voice was dry. Who would have guessed he had a sense of humor?
Not me. I bared my teeth at him.
Thor’s grunt sounded almost like a laugh.
The thought that had been niggling at me wandered onto center stage in my brain and waved at the audience. “What if I wasn’t the target?”
Both men regarded me with blank stares.
“Seriously,” I insisted. “What if someone wanted Ghislain dead?”
“Why would someone want Lambert dead?” asked Mr. Brown.
“Someone has been after him to transfer money. Maybe they killed him after the transfers were complete.”
“But why?”
“No idea.”
“And who?” Mr. Brown looked down his nondescript nose.
“Someone who can put together an army. Have any of the dead men been identified?”
Mr. Brown’s bland face grew serious. “One so far.”
“Who was he?”
“Saif Rahim.”
“Who?”
“A terrorist,” explained Thor.
“That list of landmarks—”
Mr. Brown’s serious expression darkened. “What list?”
I pulled up the picture of Ghislain’s document and handed the phone to Mr. Brown. Had I stumbled onto a terrorist plot? “The Eiffel Tower’s on there. And Gare du Nord. Plus the other locations Ghislain mentioned at the party.”
Mr. Brown stared at the image for a moment, then gave the phone back to me. “We’ve had no inkling that Lambert does business with terrorists. He laundered money for drug dealers.”
“Maybe he branched out.” It was a reasonable suggestion.
Mr. Brown’s gaze settled on me. “Do you really think a Frenchman like Lambert would be planning attacks on iconic sites in Paris?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Maybe Lambert was planning a scavenger hunt.”
That was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. I glanced at Thor, but his face was unreadable.
“Our intel says you were the target.” Mr. Brown took a sip of coffee. “Perhaps Diaz didn’t appreciate his banker having dinner with a woman he wants dead. You’ve already cost him hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Maybe Mr. Brown was right. Maybe Diaz’s plan was to kill both of us. If so, you’d think the killers would come from Latin America, not the Middle East.
A man whose appearance was nearly as bland as Mr. Brown’s appeared in the doorway to the salon. “I apologize for interrupting, sir, but there’s a call you need to take.”
“Who is it?”
“The director of SDAT, sir.”
Mr. Brown shot Thor and me a look that could best be called black. Apparently getting calls from the French authorities wasn’t on his to-do list for Paris. With a sigh, he stood. “I’ll be back.”
Thor and I were alone and I felt marginally better than I had in the car. I turned in my chair and scowled at him. “What were you thinking?”
“When?” The man looked mystified.
“When you went all heroic and chose not to run for that building.”
He cocked his head to the side as if I’d presented him with a trick question requiring careful thought. “I was thinking I could save your life.”
“You do realize you’re my colleague and not my actual bodyguard, right?”
Thor grunted.
I looked at the ceiling and begged some higher power for patience. “I’m not helpless.”
“I know that.” He rubbed his eyes. “You’re also not trained.”
I clenched my hands into fists. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Does, too.”
My nails cut crescents into my palms. “Does not.”
We were one breath away from nanny-nanny-boo-boo.
I drew air deep into my lungs. “You are the second most annoying man I’ve ever met.”
A wry smile twisted his lips. “Only the second?”
Jake was the first and Thor was nowhere near as annoying as Jake.
“Do you have any idea how much I dislike being thought of as a damsel in distress? I wasn’t raised that way.”
Thor raised a brow. He’d met Chariss. If ever there was a woman to raise a damsel daughter…
“I meant my father.”
“Your father?”
“Before he died, he made sure I could protect myself.”
Thor stretched out his legs and leaned his head back. “Listen, I know you’re cranky, but shouldn’t you save this lecture for the man who actually saved you?”
Cranky? That called for another deep breath. “He saved you, too.”
Thor closed his eyes and his lips pinched together. “I know that.”
I stared at the man in the chair. He looked exhausted. He sounded exhausted. He needed a break. Besides, I didn’t have the energy for the complete scolding he so richly deserved. “Could we go back to the hotel? Please? I’m about to drop.”
Thor opened one eye.
Mr. Brown strode back into the salon wearing his best sour-pickles expression. “The National Police want to talk to you.”
“Oh, joy.”
Thor snorted.
“Tell them they can come to the Ritz.”
“You really want someone from the National Police in your suite?” asked Mr. Brown.
I sure as heck didn’t want to wait for them in the safe house. “Yes.”
“I’ll have a driver take you and Stone back to the hotel.”
“Thank you.”
Mr. Brown turned his attention to Thor. “You said Lambert was dead.”
Thor sat up and opened his second eye. “We heard a shot.”
“His body wasn’t in the apartment.”
“What?” I stared at Mr. Brown.
“No body.” Mr. Brown shrugged. “Maybe it was Lambert who was online shopping after you left.”
Because that’s what people did when their homes were invaded and World War III broke out in their car parks. I sealed my lips, keeping the sarcasm bubbling within me locked inside.
Mr. Brown’s eyes narrowed. “You look tired.”
“I am.”
“The men from the National Police will come to your hotel.”
Thor and I rode back to the Ritz in exhausted silence.
My thoughts made up for the lack of words. What happened to Ghislain? What was up with that lists of sites? Who had sent the posse of killers? Who’d saved us?
Plenty of questions. Not a single answer.
Two men stood as Thor and I entered the lobby.
“Je suis LeBeau. Il est DuPont,” said the shorter of the two.
They both pulled out badges. Not that they needed them. Even to my untrained eye, they looked like law enforcement. Men who’d had their senses of humor surgically removed.
Thor, who was looking fairly thunderous, took down their badge numbers and made a call. He listened for a moment, nodded, rattled off the badge numbers, and nodded again.
“This way.” No inflection hinted at how little Thor wanted to talk to the National Police, but I heard it in his voice. Or maybe I was projecting.
LeBeau and DuPont followed us to the suite.
When the door closed behind us, even before I sat down, LeBeau asked, “You saw Badawi?”
“Yes.” If I was a good hostess, I’d offer them drinks. I didn’t. Instead, I curled in my favorite corner of the couch and waved at the various seats. It was as close as they were coming to an invitation.
“You’re sure it was him?” LeBeau insisted.
“Positive.” I told him all that transpired in Sevran.
DuPont, who was seated on a fauteuil, leaned forward. “What happened tonight?”
Thor told them.
“And you have no idea who came to your rescue?”
“None,” I replied. “I wish I did. What happened to Ghislain?”
“We’re looking for Monsieur Lambert.” Now DuPont leaned back in his chair. “There have been four attempts on your life since you came to Paris?”
Had it been that many? “I suppose so.”
“And how long have you been here?”
“Three days.”
We all thought about that for a minute.
“The National Police will assign you protection,” said LeBeau.
“Mr. Stone is protecting me.”
Le Beau shook his head as if Thor wasn’t worth counting. “We will add a second man. Perhaps with two guards, we can catch whoever is trying to harm you.”
Thor looked more thunderous than ever. “We don’t nee—”
The door to Chariss’s bedroom flew open. “What in the hell is going on out here? I have an early ca—” She got a good look at me and Thor.
“Chariss, meet Monsieurs LeBeau and DuPoint. Gentlemen, this is my mother, Chariss Carlton.”
The men from the National Police gaped at her.
“The actress?” LeBeau stood and extended his hand.
DuPont was right behind him.
“What happened tonight, Poppy? Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“There was an attempt on Miss Fields’s life this evening.” LeBeau wasn’t helping.
“I see.” You’d think trained agents would have heard the dangerous edge in Chariss’s voice. “What happened?”
No one replied.
Chariss clutched the doorframe. “You’re running out of lives.”
“I hope not.”
She shifted her attention back to LeBeau and DuPont. “You both look official. Which agency are you with?”
“The National Police.”
“I see.” Her eyes narrowed. “What exactly happened tonight?”
“We’re still not sure,” said LeBeau.
Chariss shifted her gaze my way. “Were you involved in that gun battle I saw on the news?”
“Yes.”
Now she turned to Thor. “You’re supposed to be protecting her.”
“He did.” I hated to bring her attention back to me, but she really couldn’t blame Thor for the night’s adventures.
“Pfft.”
“I’m still alive. Tho—Mark did his job.”
Now Chariss turned to the men from the National Police. “It’s late. I’m sure any questions you have for my daughter will keep until the morning.”
“Of course, Madame Carlton,” said LeBeau.
Thor and I exchanged a look. Who knew it was so easy to get rid of the French policemen?
Not that I was complaining. I was too wiped out to do much more than nod from my spot on the couch. “Good night, messieurs.” Yes, the National Police would send someone in the morning, but tonight I was too tired to care.
As soon as the door closed behind the Frenchmen, Chariss turned on me. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“No.”
She gave me a long, simmering look. “Well, it sure as hell looks that way to me.”