Hidden Devotion (Trinity Masters #5)(17)

“Let me help you.”

The woman crouched just as he bent down, and Franco knocked his head into hers. She yelped and leaned away. Franco reached to help her, stuttering an apology, and instead lost his balance. Arms flailing, he managed to smack her in the shoulder before finally surrendering to gravity.

The blonde fell back onto her bottom and Franco landed on his hands and knees, his face an inch from her breasts.

There was a pregnant pause during which he could only blink, wondering how the hell he’d managed this particular f*ckup. Seriously, these things only happened to him.

Then she started to laugh. The blonde dropped back until she was lying on the floor, propped up on her elbows, laughing so hard she was gasping for breath.

Juliette peered at the half-horrified, half-bemused expression on the man’s face and a fresh wave of laughter shook her. Of all the scenarios for how this meeting would go, the current situation had never been even a remote possibility.

Pushing his too-long hair away from his face, the man crawled backwards away from her, turning to sit on his butt and unwind the velvet rope from around his ankle.

He looked like a hobo, or a frat boy after a week-long bender. Baggy jeans with holes in the knees and rips by the pockets hung limply on his hips. He wore a ratty t-shirt that may at one time have had university lettering on it and a neon-green zip-up hoodie with some obnoxious cartoon alligator on the front.

Cut his hair, put him in a suit, and this could be Francisco, but nothing about this man said “Foundation President”. If this wasn’t Francisco, it had to be someone related to him, the resemblance was so strong. Plus, who else but a member of the family would be in the museum on a day it was closed?

When he was finally free, the man rose to his feet and reached out a hand to Juliette. Rather dubiously, she accepted.

As soon as their fingers touched, a shiver of awareness rippled through her. From the way he paused, eyes widening, she wondered if he’d felt it, too. It was chemistry, pure and simple, and she’d only felt something like this one time before, in Paris.

His fingers tightened around hers and she was lifted to her feet with a surprising amount of strength. Juliette looked up into the startlingly light blue eyes of this odd man and said the only thing she could think of. “Hi.”

He cleared his throat. “Hi.”

“I’m Juliette…Juliette Adams.”

“I’m a grade-A klutz.” He tucked his hands into his pockets with a self-deprecating smile. “Francisco Garcia Santiago.”

“You’re Francisco?”

Now he was back to looking bemused. “That’s me.” He grimaced. “We were supposed to be meeting? I was working and… I’ll go find an usher, or Marcia—she’s the director and you’d be better off talking to her anyway—and if you give me a few minutes, I’ll find someone.”

Juliette hid her smile. He was nothing like she’d expected from the information in the file or what she’d found online on the flight down here. “No, we don’t have a meeting.”

“Oh, well, uh…” He ran a hand through his hair, struggling to figure out what else to say. “Want me to find someone to give you a tour?”

“That might be hard, since the museum is closed today.” She said it gently.

“It is? Then it’s Monday.”

“Yes,” she confirmed, “it’s Monday.” Juliette fought the urge to grab him and kiss him. He was just so hapless it was cute.

“Wait…if it’s Monday, how did you get in here?” For the first time he regarded her with suspicion. In Juliette’s opinion, that reaction was very late coming.

“The door was unlocked.” That wasn’t entirely true. The deadbolt on the front door hadn’t been engaged, so it had been child’s play to open it. She’d had wire cutters in her hand, ready to deal with the alarm if her quickly gathered intel on the museum’s lack of security was wrong, but nothing had gone off.

“Oh, uh, sometimes I forget.” He was still looking at her suspiciously. “So you’re just here visiting the museum?”

“No, I actually came to meet you.”

“You…did?” He sounded both alarmed and resigned.

“Yes. I have something I think might interest you.” Reaching up, Juliette first took the clips out of her hair, which was half down after he’d accidentally whacked her on the head. She didn’t miss the way his eyes lingered on her as the locks fell around her shoulders.

Opening her purse, she slid the hair clips in and then extracted the cardboard sleeve she’d placed the pictures in.

Wordlessly, she handed it to him. Francisco frowned but shook the photos out into his hand. He peered at the first one for a moment, before his whole body went still. Flipping to the next one, he brought the photos closer to his face then fumbled in the pocket of his hoodie, extracting a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses.

They magnified his eyes cartoonishly and Juliette had to bite back a giggle.

“Where did you get these?”

Juliette opened her mouth, ready to start her carefully prepared statement, the first phase in a plan to suss out what he knew about the Trinity Masters, but before she could say anything, he’d turned and walked away, disappearing through the door he’d appeared from.

Juliette waited, but he didn’t come back. Half-amused, half-irritated, she too stepped through the door, taking time to put the stanchions and rope back in place before following after the lost member of the Trinity Masters.