Nora was sipping coffee in the hotel dining room when Nico arrived a fifteen minutes ’til eight. He furrowed his brow when he saw that she wasn’t alone—Zach was sitting with her.
“I’m early,” he said to her. He turned to Zach and, with infinite politeness, said, “Sorry to interrupt.”
“No need. Just finishing my dinner,” Zach said. He tossed his napkin on the table. “Back up to the room to get some work done. She hasn’t eaten yet.”
“We were talking about work,” Nora said, putting her cup down and waving the waiter over for more coffee. “So I’m thrilled you’re early.”
“See you later,” Zach said. He rose, leaned over the small round table and kissed her cheek. “Nico. Have a good evening.” They shook hands. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”
Zach left them alone and the waiter, who was also the hotel’s bellhop—he’d roused himself from the couch for the evening shift—cleared the table of everything but coffee, put down new silverware, and brought over a menu.
“You look different,” Nora said. She sat back in her chair and nodded approvingly. “Haircut.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “I needed one.”
“Looks nice,” she said. Understatement. He looked incredibly handsome with his hair tamed to short waves. He’d cleaned up for dinner—no work boots or dirty jeans. His shoes were suede and his jeans freshly laundered. The gray scarf and leather jacket were a nice touch.
“Your hair is…nice, too,” he said, repaying her compliment with all the suaveness of a man in his twenties. He sat down. “You haven’t eaten?”
“Not yet. I was waiting on you. I’m starving,” she said with relish, and truth. After her bath—and sex—with Zach, she’d fallen into a deep sleep. When she’d woken, it was almost evening. Too late for lunch. Too early for dinner. “Ever eaten here? What’s good?”
“I always get the boeuf bourguignon,” he said.
Nora smiled to herself.
“What?” He asked.
“Nothing. The friend you remind me of…he loves boeuf bourguignon. Are you a coffee snob, too?”
“I don’t know if I’m a snob,” he said, wrinkling his nose a bit. “But, you know, I wouldn’t drink Starbucks if you threatened me with the guillotine.”
“Don’t say that. I have a guillotine.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“Just a little one,” she said.
“You’re not joking.”
“It really is a very little one. It’s for threatening men.”
“You like to threaten men?” He didn’t sound horrified, more intrigued and amused, like he couldn’t imagine ever finding her threatening.
“I’m a dominatrix. Do you know what that is?” If she was going to tell him about Kingsley—everything about Kingsley; the good, the bad, and the kinky—she might as well start slow. If he couldn’t handle her being a dominatrix, he’d never be able to handle Kingsley being…well…Kingsley.
“You said you were a writer.”
Interesting. He seemed more wounded that she had possibly lied to him than that she beat up men for money.
“I do both. It’s not easy to pay the bills from writing alone. I needed a side gig.”
He nodded, as if that made perfect sense.
“Really? No follow-up questions? No who, what, when, where, why the hell are you a dominatrix?”
“What’s so wrong with being a dominatrix that you would have to answer all those questions? It’s not illegal in America, is it?”
“No, not really.” Now it was her turn to narrow her eyes at him. “You are a very interesting young man. Très intéressant.”
He made a face like she’d just said something très stupide. “What? No. I’m nobody.”
“You’re what…twenty-four? You run your own vineyard.”
He snorted the purest French snort, and the eyeroll he gave her should have been on the French flag. “Not by choice. If I had my choice, I’d be working for my father still.”
“You don’t bat an eyelash when I tell you I’m a sex worker.”
“You’re a beautiful woman. I think it’s a good job for you,” he said as he glanced over the menu again. The way he’d said it, it was like he was talking to a tall man and said, You’re seven feet tall, of course you play basketball. He didn’t seem to be pretending, either—pretending to be okay with who and what she was.
The waiter appeared before Nora could say anything in response. She ordered the Niçoise salad. Nico ordered only soup and coffee.
“Just soup?” Nora asked after the waiter had left. “What happened to boeuf bourguignon?”
“Not hungry.”
“You need to eat something more than soup.”
He glared at her.
Nora winced. “Sorry. Really. I’m not… I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘you need to eat more’ to anyone in my life before. I’m not motherly. At all.”
“I bring it out in you?” His tone implied he would not appreciate any further mothering.
“It’s not that. It’s…I feel protective of you. I don’t know you, but I…”
Her voice trailed off as she noticed Nico glancing away. His fingers toyed with his tiny coffee cup. “Nico?” she asked.
He smiled. “Makes me feel very…I don’t know, strange when you say that.”
“That I feel protective of you?”
He nodded.
“I don’t mean to make you feel strange.”
“It’s a good type of strange. I don’t know. I wish there was a word for that.” He smiled at her, drank his coffee. Abruptly he put his cup down and said, “You have to tell me why you’re here.” He leaned in closer, reached his hand, still warm from the coffee cup, across the table and touched her hand. “Please.”
She looked at his fingertips resting on top of her hand. He seemed to realize he’d gone too far, took his hand away. She could still feel the heat of it on her skin.
“Just promise me one thing, Nico.”
“Anything.”
“Please don’t hate me for what I’m about to tell you.”
He stared at her with a look of worry in his green-glass eyes. She waited for him to make his promise, but he didn’t. She appreciated that he was wise enough not to make promises he couldn’t keep.
“Why would I hate you?” he asked.
Instead of answering, Nora took a deep breath. She pulled her bag off the back of her chair. She’d hoped this could wait until after dinner. But it wasn’t fair to Nico to make him sit there and stew in his fear and uncertainty over what she had to tell him.
“Before I tell you, let me say again… I am sorry, Nico.”
He turned his head, smiled nervously. “You’re scaring me now.”
“It’s not bad news. I’m not the Angel of Death or anything. I just know something that I can’t, in good conscience, keep secret from you or the other person involved.”
“I can’t tell you to ignore your conscience. Go on then. Tell it to me.”
“It’s a long story,” she began as she pulled a file of photographs from her bag. “And I won’t go into the whole thing right now. But the short version is…someone came here on a trip and saw you, and when they saw you…”
“What? What did they see?” His voice was soft, scared. She hated herself for doing this to him.
Nora took another breath, opened the folder and took out the first photograph—the one of Kingsley when he was nineteen, the one where the resemblance between he and Nico was the most obvious. She moved the coffee pot and set the photograph on the table between them.
“Kingsley Boissonneault,” she said. “The man who saved my life. The reason I’m here.”
Nico leaned over the table again to get a better look. He could have picked it up but didn’t. Maybe he saw it right away. Maybe that’s why he didn’t want to touch it.
“Who is he? A long-lost cousin of mine or something?” Nico asked.
“You see the family resemblance?”
He shrugged that Kingsley shrug again. “I guess. I mean, we do look alike.”
“He was a few years younger than you when that picture was taken. Here’s one from when he was twenty-nine.” She showed him another picture of Kingsley. He was in profile in this picture, taken for the society page of a New York magazine. “Turn sideways.”
Nico slowly turned his head. Nora held up the photograph by Nico’s profile. “Your noses are twins.”
“All right, so who is he?” Nico asked. “Don’t tell me I have a brother out there.” He laughed nervously, as if he knew what was coming and could make it go away by joking about it.
But it wouldn’t go away.
“Kingsley came here to Mozet twenty-five years ago. He was in La Légion. He’d been shot and he came here to recuperate. In May, twenty-five years ago. He was here for one week…thirty-eight weeks before you were born.”
Nico said nothing. He just stared at the two photographs on the table.
“You shrug like him,” she said. “Just like him. You have identical noses. Same jawline. Same build. You both love boeuf bourguignon and you are both coffee snobs. When you walked away from me today, you looked just like him from—”
“Stop,” he said.
Nora stopped.
She’d never heard a silence so deep as the silence of a young man’s heart breaking over a cup of coffee. The silence was so heavy, she couldn’t bear it longer than a minute.
“You and your father looked nothing alike,” she said softly. “There’s no way you didn’t notice that you looked nothing like him, like his side of the family. The doctor who delivered you would have noticed it. The private detective I hired found you because he showed around a picture of Kingsley, asking if anyone had seen that man. Someone thought he was you. That’s not a coincidence.”
That silence again. The longest, coldest silence.
Then, Nico spoke.
“My mother went into labor early with me. Too early,” he said. “It had snowed that day, thirty-six centimeters. A record. It almost never snows here. We have no plows. My father—my real father—couldn’t get the car out of the garage, and the ambulance couldn’t get to the house. He carried her, half a kilometer down the driveway to meet the ambulance on the road. He hadn’t stepped in a Catholic Church since he was a little boy, but he prayed that day. He prayed out loud to Saint Nicolas. My mother said she’d never heard him pray out loud before. She didn’t even know he prayed at all. He prayed to Saint Nicolas because he said that was the only saint he remembered. The doctors helped her, saved me… I was born six weeks later, healthy, because of him. That was my father. This man…” He picked up the photographs only to toss them carelessly aside. “He’s nothing to me. Nothing. Rien.”
And that was it. Nico walked out of the dining room just as their food came out of the kitchen.
By 8:14 P.M. she was back in her suite. Zach looked up, surprised, as she walked into the room.
“Well?” he asked.
“That,” she said, “could have gone better.”