Discretion (The Dumonts, #1)(16)

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

“And you’re a doctor now?”

I grin and get to my feet. “You didn’t read that about me?” I joke. “Stay there. I’ll get something for the pain first.”

I disappear back into the room, pluck two champagne glasses from the cabinet, and come back out with them. “Here we go.”

I expect her to tell me she doesn’t want any, but instead, her eyes never leave me as I pop the champagne cork and send it sailing over the balcony railing.

“You probably won’t be too shocked, but I’ve never had Dumont champagne before,” she says as I carefully pour her a glass. “Or Dumont anything, for that matter.”

That’s going to change, I think to myself, and when she meets my eyes, I swear I see a flash of heat burn behind them, as if she knows exactly what I’m thinking.

I pour myself a glass and hold it up to hers, clearing my throat before I say, “Here’s to being in the right place at the right time.”

She gives me a loaded look. “I think it’s more wrong place at the wrong time, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, but I was thinking about me.”

She scoffs, lets out a dry laugh. “Okay, well then I’m toasting to how lucky I am that it was you, of all people, who happened to save me. I doubt I would have ever experienced a place like this otherwise.”

“Santé! You never know,” I tell her as I clink my glass against hers. “Perhaps we would have found each other some other way.”

Her eyes flash at that, and I know perhaps I’m being a little presumptuous, but I’ve found it impossible to be anything but that around her. I take a sip of my drink, and when she pauses with hers, I tip up the bottom of her glass so that she finishes most of it in one go.

“For the pain,” I remind her.

She smiles, licking her lips in a way that nearly undoes me. “That’s what the painkillers are for. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were getting me drunk.”

“Drunk?” I repeat. “No. We don’t get drunk here in France. We get happy. Now, let me take a look at your foot.”

I put my glass on the table and sit down beside her on the lounger, gently taking her calf in my hands and placing her ankle over my thighs. Her breath hitches, and she tenses as she moves back to accommodate me. I give her a reassuring glance, reading the trepidation on her face. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“How can you be so sure?” she asks after a beat, and there’s a weight to her words, as if she’s talking about something else.

I don’t let my mind go there. Instead, I slowly and carefully start to unwrap the bandages around her ankle. I obviously have no medical training, but Seraphine used to do ballet, and I have memories of my mother helping her with her feet on particularly rough days.

Sadie gasps when I pull apart the final wrap, but her ankle isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It’s just puffy and swollen, with very light bruising.

“It looks fine,” I tell her.

“It’s not fine,” she says. “It looks gangrenous.”

I laugh. “It isn’t gangrenous. It’s just inflamed. Another few days of plenty of rest and keeping your weight off it, and you should be fine. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“Well, no. But you have to wrap it back up, so there’s always another chance.”

I can’t help but grin. She can be so prickly. I nod at her drink. “Pour yourself another glass and drink up.”

“Back to getting me drunk.”

“I’ll join you in a second.”

And I’m not lying. With the same care as when I took off her bandage, I wrap her ankle back up. “Not too tight?” I ask, her ankles still resting across my thighs.

“I’m impressed,” she says, taking a sip of her drink. “Just as I’m impressed by this champagne, this hotel, you, and everything else that you happen to touch in some way or form.”

“Well, I’m glad I can impress you by the things I do and not by the things you’ve read about me.”

“Oh, believe me, I was still impressed. Even by the blatant lies. I had no idea you had a secret baby with the princess of Monaco.” She pauses, narrowing her eyes. “Unless . . .”

“Blatant lie,” I tell her. “Though I do think my cousin has had a few dalliances with her.”

“Which one?”

“You know about them?” I practically bristle.

“It’s hard to do research on Olivier Dumont without learning about the rest of his family.”

“What did you learn?” I ask carefully.

She shrugs. “A lot, but who knows what’s true and what isn’t? Your family does seem to be at odds with each other, though. They seem so different from one another, your father and your uncle.”

“How so?” I ask. Of course, I know the truth, but I’m always curious to see how we appear to others, particularly to people from outside of France who weren’t brought up with my father and uncle dominating the news from time to time.

“The gossip sites like to paint you like you’re in a family feud. There’s the so-called good side with you and your sister and brother and parents. And then there’s your uncle and aunt and their sons. The so-called bad side. Though sometimes they just called them progressive, so I guess ‘bad’ is just a relative term. So to speak.”