The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(3)

The next thing I knew, we stood at the entrance to a small, run-down-looking hotel called the Grand H?tel Voltaire. The brass appointments were tarnished. The stone threshold was worn down from the millions of footsteps that had crossed it through the centuries. It was a one-star hotel, but I thought it was perfectly poetic and completely romantic.

James looked into my eyes.

And he held open the front door.





I was flushed and even trembling as James and I crossed the worn Persian carpets in the hotel’s charming, velvet-lined lobby and stepped into a metal cage of an elevator. James slid the gate closed.

When he looked at me, I was sure he knew what I was feeling. We were in uncharted territory, James and I. Maybe he was scared, too.

All my life, my demanding parents had trained me to suppress all emotions, believing they were unnecessary distractions. But to be robbed of this intensity would have robbed me of my humanity. I was made to feel this way, to love James and to be loved by him.

He put an arm around me and pressed the button for 3eme étage. The creaky lift rose and stopped on the third floor with a jolt. As we walked down the hallway toward his room, James whispered, “My father can’t find us now, Tandy.”

We stopped at a door near the end of the hall. James pushed the key into the lock. He wiggled it. It rattled and then, finally, the door opened. I stepped into a room that was shabby but clean, smelling faintly of cigarettes.

There was a narrow bed against the wall to my right, a chair with claw feet beside it, and a tall carved armoire across from the bed that called up images of an earlier time. The one small window looked out onto Boulevard Voltaire, and enough moonlight and streetlight came through it to see by.

James hung his jacket on a hook behind the door and turned to face me. I could hardly look at him. My skin was hot, and my heart was skipping, thudding, banging against my rib cage, acting like a child on a sugar high.

I knew what James would see on my face when he looked at me: that I was his, only for him. He held my face with both hands and kissed me. It was real and tender and full of desire. He loved me. He wanted me. And I wanted him. I had never done this with anyone before, but I wasn’t afraid. It felt completely right.

Fierce heat flashed through my body. He unbuttoned his shirt, and it whispered to the floor. Then he unbuttoned mine.

I’m not the kind of girl to tell others what was deeply, personally ours. But I can say this.

When I woke up in his bed many hours later and reached for him, I was alone.

James was gone.

I doubted my senses. Was I dreaming? I screamed out for him inside the tiny room, and then I looked in the bathroom down the hall. Back in the room, I turned on my phone and waited for it to ring. And I imagined terrible things: that James had been abducted while we slept. That he had been caged. That he was being tortured.

Then I saw the note that must have slipped from the bed and was lying on the floor. The small square of paper shook in my hand as I turned on the light. This was James’s handwriting, for sure.

Dearest Tandy, he wrote, I’ve been lying awake for hours watching you sleep. You are my true angel, and because I love you so much, I have to protect you. My family situation is worse than I’ve told you, worse than you can imagine, and I can’t give my father any more reasons to hurt you or your family.

I know this note won’t be enough for you. I know you will be furious with me. But please believe this, there is no other way.

Something I read yesterday: L’amour fait les plus grandes douceurs et les plus sensibles infortunes de la vie. Love creates the sweetest pleasures and the worst misfortunes in life.

Don’t ever doubt that I love you. And always will.

James





Alone, I left the Grand H?tel Voltaire feeling as though I’d been slammed across the back of my head with a shovel, then hurled headfirst into a Dumpster.

I didn’t get it. Any of it. And I was seething.

Why hadn’t James woken me up to talk? Why didn’t he trust me with what he knew and felt? Was there any truth in that note? Had he ever loved me? How could he leave me alone to figure out what had happened to us on what had been the best and worst day of my life?

Yesterday, I had thought no one could crush me.

I was wrong.

As I walked away from the hotel, I couldn’t help but remember how happy I was on this same street last night with James… whoever he was, whoever I had thought he was. I hurt so much that I cried like a little kid as I navigated the streets of Paris at dawn. My family had checked out of the Hotel George V yesterday and moved into the house that had once belonged to my late grandmother, which I found with little effort.

Once “home,” I went upstairs to the second-floor bathroom. I filled the bathtub and sat in the warm water for about a half hour without even moving. After that, I changed into clothes that hadn’t been touched, fondled, or unbuttoned by James Rampling. I went downstairs and poured a cup of coffee, plugged in my phone to charge, and then huddled in a big leather sofa in the parlor.

Later, I heard the sounds of my family moving around the huge house, but I didn’t call out. I sat on that sofa as still and as unblinking as a corpse until my little brother, Hugo, ran past with his arms outspread.

He was giving himself landing instructions—“Control tower to Hugo One, runway six is cleared for you now”—and making truly annoying engine noises. He saw me in the parlor, made a U-turn, and flung himself across my lap.