The Fidelity Files (Jennifer Hunter #1)(124)

"I'm serious," I insisted gently.

He cleared the smile from his face and looked me straight in the eye. "Yes, of course people still have mistresses. Where there are promises, there are broken promises. It's just the nature of being human."

I blinked in disbelief. What the hell did that mean? Rules are made to be broken, so we might as well just deal with it? What a load of bullshit!

But as we walked back over to the glass case and continued to study its various contents, like Marie Antoinette's water jug and a signed paper documenting her imprisonment, I wondered if maybe Jamie was making a statement about marriage itself. That maybe it's just a principle. A piece of paper, backed by the government. Endorsed by society rather than human behavior. Therefore, almost asking to be desecrated.

He looked up at me and smiled, completely unaware of the thoughts running rampant in my head.

No, I told myself. That's not what's important here. It's not about a piece of paper or a societal behavior. It's about honesty. One of the few aspects of humanity that can't be controlled by a society of rules and behavioral suggestions. He lied to me. And he lied to his wife. And that made him just as guilty as a French king with a bedroom full of forbidden lovers.

I took a deep breath and looked at my surroundings. And suddenly I was reminded, once again, that I had come here with a purpose. A job to do.

Maybe Jamie wasn't about to get a fair trial either, but if the French revolutionaries had taught us anything it was that, when you're fighting for a cause, there's no room for feelings. There's no space for doubt.

Treason is treason.

I stood in the old French prison and wondered if history was destined to repeat itself. More than two hundred years later, as the possible reincarnated Marie Antoinette, was I still just another prisoner of my own making?

But then I wondered if I was really the one being held captive here. This whole trip felt like one gigantic trap. And from the outside, I'm sure it appeared as though Jamie was the one about to walk right into it. But from the inside I knew that I was just as doomed as he was.



WHEN DINNERTIME rolled around, Jamie and I sat down at a romantic outdoor bistro on the Avenue de L'Opera near our hotel. I looked out at the bustling street, and despite the reasons that had brought me here, I still felt a twinge of excitement. After all, it was Paris. The lights, the noise, even the smell brought back so many memories of my last visit.

I had come here on an assignment more than a year earlier. It was for a woman who had married a French native (one of those Paris summer romances turned serious) and relocated him to the United States. He was going back to France to visit family, and she was worried that those instinctive French womanizing tendencies might resurface once he was back in his homeland.

"Did you know that most French men don't even believe in monogamy?" she had said to me during our initial meeting.

And she was right. To Pierre LeFavre, monogamy was a word that didn't quite translate.

I was supposed to be a well-educated American businesswoman who was traveling to France to close an important transaction. My French was to be "passable." And my taste in wine and fine cuisine, impeccable.

The French I had studied in school wasn't quite going to cut it. I took three weeks of intensive French lessons to prepare for that assignment. And after it was finished, I didn't come home for another two weeks. I fell in love. Not in Paris, but with Paris. That's when my obsession with French history began.

And now, more than a year later, I was delighted to see that my French was still...well, passable.

"When do you have to start working?" I asked, folding my menu and placing it on the table next to my plate.

Jamie closed his as well and replied solemnly, "We have our first meeting tomorrow morning. So I'm afraid I'll have to leave you on your own for the day."

I smiled. "That's okay. I'll be fine."

"Do you really think you can handle this city by yourself?"

"I'm honestly more worried about you," I said with a tender smile.

Jamie bowed his head in shame. "Yeah, that makes two of us."

The waiter came and I ordered for both of us. Jamie's French was somewhere between pathetic and just plain embarrassing. His face seemed to reflect a mixture of relief and arousal as he watched the language of love float from my lips into the brisk Paris night air.

"Do you realize that we wouldn't be here if it weren't for our cars?" Jamie said after the waiter disappeared.

"What?"

"If you didn't drive a Range Rover and I didn't drive a Jag-yoo-ar, we wouldn't be here. I doubt you would have ever called me. So bumping into you at the dealer that day is essentially the reason we're in Paris together. It's funny how fate works like that, isn't it?"

I squirmed in my seat. Goddamn, useless, meddling fate! Look how well that turned out! "Yeah, it is kind of funny," I managed to mumble.

He lifted his wineglass in the air. "To gas-guzzling SUVs?"

I smiled and lifted mine as well. Why didn't I just get that freaking hybrid? "Yes," I said, clinking my glass against his. "To the cars. That brought us together in Paris for the next five days."

As I took a sip of my Bordeaux, I noticed Jamie fidgeting awkwardly in his seat. I watched him intently as he suddenly appeared extremely uncomfortable.