The last time Maxence Grimaldi had been inside the Louvre, he’d watched his first love, Flicka von Hanover, dance at her wedding reception after she’d married his older brother, Pierre.
Everything was connected to Flicka that week. He’d seen her a few days before, and that had been a horrible mess.
Sayyida was saying something.
Maxence’s attention snapped back to her. He said confidently, “Yes,” even though he’d no idea what she’d said.
Sayyida stared at him. “I asked what time you’ll want to leave.”
“Oh, perhaps around one?”
“Fine. Text me on my cell, and I’ll let you out the doors, then, ‘Augustine.’” Her lowered voice made it clear that she didn’t approve of his alias.
“Thank you, Sayyida.” He took Dree’s hand and led her toward the spiral staircase that wound down into the lobby of the Louvre.
They descended, the bright Parisian sunlight streaming through the nearly seven hundred triangular panes of glass that formed the four-sided pyramid.
At Flicka’s wedding reception, he’d walked down these curling stairs, carefully placing each foot in the center of each step, as the man who announced the important people’s arrival bellowed his name across the lobby.
He’d attended the reception without a date, so his name had been announced alone, while everyone else was announced in couples. He’d meant it as a statement that he had found strength and serenity.
As he’d descended the stairs, he’d just felt pathetic.
Everything came back to Flicka, and he knew why she was on his mind.
Dree, who had a solid hold on his arm, swayed as she walked down the stairs.
Maxence placed his hand over her fingers that cupped under his elbow, making sure he could grab her if those high heels slid out from underneath her.
Dree was swaying so much because she was craning her neck to look at the transparent pyramid above them that appeared open to the blue Parisian sky and bending to survey the magnificent lobby below. The spiral staircase was built to allow people an excellent view of both the sky above and the entirety of the many levels of the Louvre that led to the different exhibition halls. The entrance had been controversial when first built because the hyper-modern steel-and-glass pyramid constructed in the middle of the ancient palace had seemed out of place. However, the effect of the open sky above and the cavernous lobby below reminded visitors that France had been a world power and had looted some of the most majestic artifacts in existence.
Maxence had many mixed feelings about France’s “glory” and the terrible effects from the colonial era he’d seen the past few years. His only, insignificant solace was the fact that his own family’s money came not from colonialism but from trade and allowing the world’s elite to gamble away their wealth in the casino.
They reached the bottom of the staircase, the soles of their shoes tapping the marble floor. Their footsteps echoed in the lobby.
Maxence turned to Dree and forced a smile onto his face. “What do you want to see first?”
She cocked her head to the side and looked up at him, hesitantly smiling in return. “What’s up with you?”
“Nothing, nothing. I’m just pleased to be back in the Louvre and seeing the collections in such a lovely, quiet environment. What do you want to see first?”
“Some paintings, I assume? I don’t know anything about art or artifacts or what’s-all in here that I’m supposed to see. You said you’ve been here a few times. Just take me around here and show me the stuff that people will ask me if I saw while I was here.”
“The Egyptian exhibit first, then, where we shall see some ancient artifacts from the dawn of civilization and a small blue hippopotamus. After that, art that includes the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Mona Lisa, because everybody has to see the Mona Lisa. It’s practically a rite of passage to fight your way through the crowd and take a picture of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Luckily, we won’t have to do the crowd part.”
Maxence steered Dree on the most efficient path to the Egyptian exhibit first. He’d been to the Louvre on many school field trips as a child and several times for charity events since. Thus, he knew his way around the labyrinth of exhibit halls, hallways, and staircases that sometimes bypassed floors and turned people around such that they became hopelessly lost.
Within minutes, they found themselves in the enormous room displaying the Processional Way of the Sphinxes, a line of the stone human-headed lions from Egypt. Several of them even had intact noses.
As they walked past the sphinxes on their tall stone boxes, Dree asked him, “Are you going to tell me what’s up with you?”
Maxence said, “There’s personal stuff floating around in my head. I don’t want to burden you with it.”
“I’m safe to tell, if you wanted to bounce it off someone. I don’t even know your real name, so it’s not like I could go and narc on you to your friends or parents or something.”
Maxence laughed at that. “My parents are both dead, so I shan’t worry about you telling on me to them.”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up. I knew about your dad, but not your mom.”
“I’m not happy that they’re dead, but I’d only met them a few times that I can remember. I remember my mother being around more when I was very young, but they sent me to boarding school when I was five for kindergarten. I came home during the summers, but there were people there to see to my needs, not my parents.”
Dree stopped walking and tugged on his arm to stop him. “Your parents didn’t raise you? Then what’s even the point of having kids?”
Maxence did not feel the need to tell her again because he didn’t want her to know that. “Some people are different that way, I suppose.”
“Are you going to do that to your kids?” she asked him, and he would have described her expression as aghast.
“No, I’m not. The boarding school I attended, Le Rosey, kept me off the streets and provided a world-class education. I met my friends Arthur and Casimir there, who are closer to me than my brother. When there is a problem, I call them. When I dropped out of sight a few days ago, the pal—” He faked a coughing fit. “Police, the Monagasquay police called Casimir and Arthur rather than my brother. Le Rosey gave them to me, I suppose.”
“Sounds great.”
“I would never send a child there.”
“Oh. It was rough?”
“It was rough,” he agreed. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“You can talk to me. I would never tell anybody about whatever is messing with you. Beyond the fact that I don’t know any of your friends, I don’t tell on people, jerkface ex-boyfriends who turned out to be drug dealers not included.”
Maxence laughed again. She made him laugh. “Our exes seem to be giving us trouble this week.”
“Ah, you have ex trouble, too, huh? It seems to be going around.”
Maxence looked at the sphinxes and the hall. On a school field trip to see this very room at the Louvre when he’d been in the upper school, he, Arthur, and Casimir thought the world would be all right, and Max was already noticing Flicka von Hannover.
He said, “Everything seems to be reminding me of my previous girlfriend, Flicka. She was married in Paris just a few months ago. Her wedding reception for her family and friends was here.”
“Yeah, you said a friend of yours had held her reception here. I’ll bet that cost more than a cake from Smitty’s Grocery Store served in the church basement.”
“The lobby where we came in was set with banquet tables, a dance floor, and musicians. The seating, dining tables, and chairs, took up all the balconies and extended back into the exhibition halls. It was simply splendid. She did an amazing job planning it.”
Dree slipped her fingers down his arm and held his hand. “Regretting that you didn’t stand up and say something when the preacher asked if anybody knew why these two people should not be joined in Holy Matrimony?”
Maxence winced. “Actually, yes, but not for myself. It’s obvious that I was not Flicka’s first choice, and I would wager that I wasn’t her second choice or even her third.”
“It’s kinda weird, the way you talk about it like that. In America, two people date for a while, fall in love, and decide to get married. You’re almost talking about it like she had the church booked, so she lined up the guys in order and took the first guy in line, but there was a whole line of guys who wanted to lock her down. It sounds almost medieval or like Jane Austen.”
Max was shaking his head at her, but she was right. “I hang out with some old-fashioned people.”
“I grew up the old-fashioned way, too. Around the sheep farm, we sewed our own clothes, canned vegetables and berries from the garden for the winter, fed our leftovers to the chickens and gathered the eggs, and sewed our old clothes into quilts.”
That was not the old-fashioned way that Maxence had grown up, but he wasn’t going to tell Dree that.
She said, “I’m good at sewing and quilting. I was working on an appliqué top before Francis stole everything. I wonder what happened to it.” She turned back to him. “Anyway, Flicka.”
Maxence gazed around the room, inspecting the stolen artifacts. “She and I dated for about a year, quite a while ago. It was on and off, but I felt like we’d end up together. There was always an edge to our relationship for me, that the long-term was the point of it.”
“Oh, yeah. I get that. When I was first dating Francis, only the first couple of dates I felt like, hey, this is a date, and now it’s over. After a month or two, it seemed inevitable that I was going to marry him.”
“Yes, that’s it. Our relationship and marriage felt inevitable, but it wasn’t.”
Dree sighed and touched her chest. “Yeah, I get it.”
“When we broke up, it felt temporary. It felt like a break. She was too young, and I knew that when I first started going after her. She’s four years younger than I am.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“Oh. I’m twenty-five, so that’s five years.”
“At the time I dated her, four years was a large gulf. We stayed friends. We traveled together afterward with groups of friends. There were house parties where we were invited for a weekend or a week, and she and I would stay up talking to all hours of the night about what we wanted to do in life and how we felt the world should be. We were aligned on everything. It felt like we were still us.”
Dree’s naughty grin was hysterical. “Were you two having ex-sex at these house parties?”
Maxence rolled his eyes and then studied the ground. “When we were dating, she was too young for that. The only times I slept with her were after we’d broken up, when we traveled together in those groups and were working on charity projects together, during the last few years. For her, I think, it was an affectionate friends-with-benefits situation. I’m not sure who her first was, but I know it wasn’t me.”
Dree’s grin looked forced, but it looked like she meant it to looked forced. “Oh, ouch.”
“It wasn’t any of my business, and I didn’t make it any of my business.”
Dree raised one of her pale eyebrows at him. “For a guy who was raised the old-fashioned way, you’re pretty evolved.”
Maxence raised both his hands. “I try not to be an asshole.”
“An excellent life philosophy.”
“So, about a year and a half ago, Flicka was suddenly dating my older brother.”
Dree’s eyes inflated. “Again, ouch.”
“I’m not even sure how it happened. She puts on this charity benefit every year in London. The one year that I didn’t go, other people told me that she looked upset and was refusing to dance the opening waltz. She has an older brother who usually escorts her to things like that, but he was evidently not available that year. So, they said she looked upset, and my brother Pierre rushed in for the rescue.”
Dree rolled her eyes. “Of course, he was right there.”
“Yep, Pierre was right there, waiting to swoop in. I’m the one with the Galahad complex—”
“Like when you rescue buxom blondes who accidentally incite a riot at the Buddha Bar?”
“Precisely. It’s a hobby. Some people collect stamps, and some people watch birds. I collect women who need help, and I am always right there, ready to get my ass in trouble whenever there’s a damsel in distress who needs rescuing.”
Dree stepped forward, still smirking, and slipped her arms around his waist. “I’m kind of glad you have this little Galahad problem of yours.”
He settled his arms around her because as much as Maxence liked a woman on her knees with his dick in her mouth, this hug meant everything to him in that moment. Dree’s voluptuous body was a cushion of comfort. “I think I may have made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”
“Rescuing me? I know that I’m no prize like this Flicka chica, but I would hope that you wouldn’t think—”
“No, I don’t regret rescuing you, my silly little goose.”
“The mafia guy’s wife?”
“Not her, either. Simone just needed a little support and a ride to the airport. I’m glad she found me. Between Simone and you, I feel like a halfway-decent human being. Not entirely decent human being, but maybe half of one.”
Dree pulled back in his arms and looked him in the eyes. “Jesus, Augustine. What happened?”
Maxence gathered her back into his arms because he couldn’t bear to see the look in her eyes when he admitted this. “I think I left Flicka somewhere I shouldn’t have. I think I should have thrown her over my shoulder if necessary and taken her out of there, but she told me not to. She told me directly and in no uncertain terms to leave her there.”
Dree disentangled herself from his arms and led him over to one of the low benches where people sat to sketch the Egyptian artifacts. “What the hell happened?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I know that Flicka left my brother a few months after she married him. She obtained a divorce in Nevada in the US, but there is a great deal of controversy as to whether the divorce is valid in Monagasquay.”
Max couldn’t believe he was still saying Monagasquay.
Dree said, “A few months? That’s fast.”
“She was right to leave him.” Max’s mind recoiled. His mouth could not articulate what had happened, nor could he give voice to his horror at not being there to stop it or at least beating the living shit out of Pierre that night. “A few days ago, the day before I came to Paris and met you, Pierre sent me up to Geneva to try to convince her to reconcile with him. He told me it was all a misunderstanding and I should try to convince Flicka to return to Pierre and the marriage.”
Dree shrugged. “I don’t think avoiding divorce is a bad thing, unless there were some pretty extenuating circumstances.”
Maxence flinched inwardly. “There were extenuating circumstances. After I heard her side of what happened, I think she was right to leave him.”
“So, you heard her out. No harm, no foul.”
“I don’t think she was safe where I left her.”
“Look, Augustine,” Dree said, shaking her head. “Did she get herself into another abusive situation? Some women like abusive men. It breaks your heart, and it has made me so angry at people sometimes. I don’t want to say more than that, because we promised not to tell each other the important things. There have been times when I’ve tried to counsel women not to go back to an abusive man, but I couldn’t convince them not to.”
“I didn’t say Pierre had abused her.”
“You didn’t need to. It was obvious.”
“I’m not sure what was going on with Flicka three days ago. I asked her to leave with me. I told her that if she stood up and walked out with me right then, I could get her to safety. She wouldn’t do it.”
Dree took both of his hands and held them, and Maxence held on as tightly as he could without hurting her. Everything about Flicka had been dragging him down for days.
He said, “I got word about where she was to her older brother. He raised her and has always protected her. Pierre knows where she is, too. Either Wulfram or Pierre could get her out if they wanted to or if she wanted them to. I don’t have the resources to order a rescue like that. Neither one of them has done it yet. The only thing I can figure out is that she told them not to or there’s some other reason why they’re not.”
Dree gripped his hands more tightly, and she looked straight into his eyes like this was a very important question. “Is there anything else that you can think of that you can do now?”
He ran his hand through his hair. “I could go back to Geneva and take her hand and walk her out of there.”
“You said you tried that before, and she said no.”
“But she might’ve changed her mind, or she might say yes this time. Maybe I can do something differently so that she’ll come with me this time.”
“I cannot tell you how many times I have said something exactly like that, how many times I thought that if I just argued longer or said something better, that they would leave an abusive man.”
“I don’t think she was in danger of abuse there. Indeed, where she was, she was safe from my brother, who is a damn sociopath. I’m just not sure what was going on.”
“So, just to clarify, she was not with your brother, the sociopath. She was somewhere safe from the actual sociopath.”
“I’m having trouble explaining, but I think she was being kept there against her will.”
“Was she in jail?”
“No, she was in a mansion on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.”
“Sounds like a pretty fancy place to be kidnapped to.”
“It did seem a lot better than the usual kidnapping prisons, like a rusty tanker ship out in the Mediterranean somewhere.”
“That seems oddly specific. Whose house was it?”
“The Mirabauds. They’re an old Swiss banking family.”
“Swiss bankers? No wonder they wouldn’t tell you anything. Swiss bankers never tell anyone anything, right?”
“Her ex-bodyguard, who guarded her since she was a little kid, was there with her. He was her older brother’s best friend. Her brother, Wulfram, raised her. Wulfram had legal custody of her since she was five and he was fifteen. I’m pretty sure Mirabaud was the guy she was in love with all her life. That’s why when we were dating, I never really had a chance with her.”
“She’s in love with her older brother’s best friend, the best friend of the older brother who raised her? Does this not scream daddy issues to you?”
“They even look appallingly alike: tall, blond, and Teutonic. The bodyguard looks a little more French than German, but not a lot.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Can this get any freakier?”
“And her bodyguard used to be Swiss special forces, like the US Navy SEALs.”
“So, that’s dude number three who has better resources than you do to get her out of there.”
“Oh, and my older brother Pierre, the one she married, was also Wulfram’s close friend when we were all in boarding school. They were roommates. She’s known him since she was five.”
“Wow, Auggie. This girl is nothing but a pretty bag of skin stuffed with red flags.”
Yes, that was Max’s favorite kind of woman. “This sounds crazy, but I think some Russian mafia guys were threatening her, either keeping her there or threatening her if she left.”
“Dude, you have a lot of problems with the mafia. I’m kind of nervous, just sitting here with you.”
“But if she was kidnapped, shouldn’t I get her out?” he demanded of Dree.
She stared at him. “So, your ex-girlfriend, the one who married your actual brother, threw him over and went back to her previous other boyfriend, and she’s staying with him in his family’s house in Switzerland, and you’re worried she was kidnapped?”
“She seemed scared.”
“Was she afraid of you because Pierre the sociopath sent you to take her back to him?”
Maxence mulled over the events in his head, still trying to figure out what was going on. “I don’t know. I know she didn’t want to go back to Pierre. She seemed happy to see me at first.” She’d thrown her arms around him, and he’d thought, for a moment, that maybe, something could happen between them.
Dree said, “So, again, and I’m going to ask you this seriously, is there anything else that you feel you should do now to help her?”
Maxence played it all over and over in his head. “I don’t see what else I could do, short of getting an assault rifle, which isn’t easy to do in Europe, and walking into that mansion in Geneva, shooting the place up, and dragging her out of there with me.”
Dree shook her head at him. “I think that’s your answer. Just to be clear, I think the whole getting an assault rifle and shooting up a mansion is a terrible idea, so I think you can’t do anything else right now. You said that you told people where she was.”
“And other people already knew. Pierre told me where she was and to go negotiate with her. At this point, her location is a pretty open secret.”
“Can you call the cops?”
“I called better people than the police.”
“Do you have any other way to contact her?”
“I don’t think she has a cell phone, but I could get word to her through friends.”
“This is obviously troubling you. Contact these mutual friends and get word to her that if she needs you to come back that she should tell these mutual friends.”
“Okay.”
“Do it now,” she told him.
Maxence pulled his phone from his hip pocket and texted his cousin, Maria-Therese, and some of their mutual friends, telling them to get word to Flicka that Maxence could be back in Geneva within a few hours if she needed him.
Maxence said, “It’s done.”
“If she told you to leave her where she is, shouldn’t you?”
“But what if I shouldn’t?” Maxence said.
“Maybe you should listen to her.”
Maxence nodded. “Right. I should. I should listen to her.”
“Good. Now show me this museum.”
Maxence walked around the immense Louvre with Dree Clark, showing her the various statues and art. He sneaked glances at his phone.
Maria-Therese texted back that she had texted with Flicka, and Flicka had said in no uncertain terms that she was to be left alone. She wanted people to know where she was, but she wanted to stay where she was.
Maxence was leaving in less than forty-eight hours to return to his other life on another continent anyway. Forgetting Flicka was impossible, but he needed to stop obsessing about her.
That hit home.
Maxence needed to stop obsessing about Flicka.
Beside him, Dree was hanging onto Max’s arm and staring at the Winged Victory of Samothrace, absolutely enraptured. “It’s so beautiful.”
He tilted her head up and kissed her on her lips, savoring the kiss of the woman who had chosen to be with him. “You’re beautiful.”
She batted her eyelashes. “Augustine, I declare, you will turn my head. It’s not good for me. Now, take me to see this Mona Lisa picture that everyone loses their minds over.”
They walked through the Louvre, and then Dree darted over to see something. When Maxence caught up to where he thought Dree was, she jumped out at him and squeaked, “Boo!”
Before long, they were running through the Louvre like kids, hopping out at each other and tapping each other’s shoulders from behind.
This was not dignified, responsible, or mature.
Maxence hadn’t had so much fun in decades, since he was in fifth grade, he thought, and he told her so.
Dree teetered ahead of him toward an exhibition hall that Max knew was a dead-end.
Max side-stepped into a niche to hide because she had to come back that way.
Maxence Grimaldi, the sober and serious one, was standing in a Saville Row suit that was far too conservative for his taste, waiting like Cary Grant in To Catch A Thief to leap out at an hourglass blonde who was trying to evade him.
The reference to that particular movie amused him. He’d seen it dozens of times because he watched it when he was homesick. His grandmother was in it.
Dree tried to tiptoe past him, and he popped out of his hiding place and caught her around her waist, dragging her against his chest and kissing her. She was laughing too much for a proper kiss, so he let her go. She careened off through the exhibits.
She was having fun being chased, so Maxence strolled when she wasn’t looking, letting her outpace him for a while.
When he caught her again, Dree laughed at him. “In my job, which I can’t tell you, I constantly have to be on. There’s no playing around. There’s no silliness. You walk in, and everything you do has consequences from the first second you set foot in the—place. Running around like a lunatic with you was exactly what I needed.”
They did that some more, dashing among the galleries while being very careful not to jostle any of the exhibits or leave fingerprints on the glass cases.
They ended up in the gigantic room that was the Mona Lisa exhibit, where on regular days, hordes of people shuffled past it in a giant line that meandered around the room.
Maxence and Dree stood, hands folded, in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.
Dree leaned toward Max and whispered, “It’s really small.”
“It is,” he agreed.
“What’s so special about it?”
“The painting is flawless,” Max told her. “There are no brushstrokes.”
“Okay,” she said. “Have we admired it enough?”
“I think so.”
“Tag! You’re it!” She scooted out of the room, mincing on her high-heeled shoes.
She sprinted on her toes like Marilyn Monroe, all succulent rounds of feminine curves bobbling cheerfully. Maxence was thoroughly enjoying himself chasing her slowly so he almost never caught her, and thus the game would not end.
Almost never.
He caught her in a small alcove in Asian ceramics and kissed her until she melted against him. In Seventeenth Century European Paintings, he kissed her while he palmed her luscious, round bottom.
At one o’clock, Sayyida was waiting for them in the pyramid to let them out.
Maxence and Dree solemnly thanked her for allowing them to view the priceless treasures, though Max was sure they looked wind-blown and wiggling with giddiness as they left the Louvre, holding hands.
Oh, what a day.
What a perfect, exhilarating day.
And now, back to the hotel for the evening.
When they were walking across the courtyard toward the arch where a car sent by the hotel would pick them up, Maxence didn’t notice the five men triangulating their position, ready to strike.