Suspects(24)

What she felt for Mike went beyond words and intelligent exchanges. It was a force of nature. She couldn’t remember ever feeling that way before, even with Matthieu. He had taken over her life like a domineering father at first, but she had liked it—it made her feel loved and safe. It had begun to chafe with time, particularly as she gained more experience herself and a mind of her own. She ran her business the way she wanted to. She valued most of Matthieu’s advice and disagreed on some points. They had almost always agreed on how to raise their son. But Matthieu still treated her like a child at times, and he respected and valued his own freedom and independence more than hers.

Matthieu was very old-fashioned about some things, particularly about her. He was old school, which she had found charming at first and annoying later on. He was brilliant about business, but less so about people. He prided himself on knowing her perfectly, but he didn’t always. He said things that hurt her, and when he cheated on her, she found it hard to forgive him, but she always did. He was far less forgiving than she was but expected his transgressions to be forgiven every time. She was having trouble getting over the last one. After all she’d been through with his death and Axel’s, it was a final blow to learn that he had had a mistress in Russia until shortly before he died. She was fifteen years younger than Theo, which hurt too, and forty years younger than Matthieu. Now she was feeling guilty for being attracted to a man. What would people think if she stopped mourning him one day? She knew she would never stop grieving for Axel, but Matthieu had been her husband, not her child. They’d only been gone a year. It seemed like minutes at times, or days. Was it long enough? Had she cried enough? She looked down at the wedding ring still on her finger, and after a simple dinner at a diner, it felt like a lie. She wasn’t the grieving widow if she was smiling and laughing and having dinner with a man.

Mike was having the same qualms when he thought about her. He berated himself for being too forward and letting his attraction to her show. He had spent seventeen years using Becky as an excuse for not forming a serious attachment to any woman. His survivor guilt had convinced him that her death on their mission was his fault, despite the fact that agents died in the field every day, and she had been marked by an informant and would have been killed whether Mike was there or not. She was doomed by the informant, not by him. He knew that now, too late. Now he was edging closer to a woman who had already suffered too much and didn’t deserve the risks that his job exposed him to. He vowed to himself that he would do everything he could to get the investigation of the kidnappers brought to the forefront again. It was the best thing he could do for her, and he had no right to be in her life in any other way. He was angry at himself for missing her when he hardly knew her. He wanted to send her flowers for her arrival in Paris but wouldn’t allow himself to.



* * *



—

Theo was alone in first class on the trip home, which was a relief. No one was there to stare at her or recognize her. She sat lost in thought watching a movie she paid no attention to, thinking about Mike. Being drawn to him seemed completely unreasonable. She couldn’t wait to get back to Paris and get to work in her office. She had meetings for Matthieu’s company too. She was on the board and an advisor of the company, as she had been for the past ten years. Those responsibilities remained and were even heavier now, with Matthieu gone and unable to run the company himself. His remarkable CEO was doing a great job and consulted Theo on an ongoing, nearly daily basis. Everything she had learned through his company had served her well in her own. She had learned so much from Matthieu, and was grateful for it. He had been an excellent teacher, and a relatively good husband. Even the girl in Moscow didn’t change that, although it tainted things for Theo. It made her question how much he really had loved her. He had never been an entirely one-woman man, even for her. He had never considered them equals, possibly because she was so much younger than he was. She accepted it, because there was no other choice, but it chafed now, as she thought about Mike and made a decision to be faithful to Matthieu’s memory for as long as she could, out of love and respect for him and Axel. Matthieu would have expected that of her, even if he didn’t hold himself to the same standard, and probably wouldn’t have done it for her.



* * *



—

She didn’t contact Mike again after her email thanking him for dinner, and he didn’t respond, which startled her. She told herself that the attraction she felt had been her imagination, the reaction of a lonely woman who had no one to talk to or share a life with anymore. She was determined to get used to it. She couldn’t imagine herself ever marrying again, and didn’t want to. She had had fourteen years of marriage, and she was going to have other pursuits now to fill her time. She had a business to run, and Matthieu’s empire. She told herself it would be enough. It had to be. She doubted she’d ever see Mike again, and tried to convince herself she didn’t want to. He was a nice man, but he had his life to lead and she had hers, with an ocean between them.



* * *



—

Daniel, the bodyguard who had gone to New York with her, accompanied her to her apartment, and went off duty immediately. The three guards she had left in Paris took on their usual shifts, so that she was never alone, at home or in the office. There was a private security guard at the entrance to the building now because of her, and another at the door to the apartment. She had the first two floors of an elegant building in the sixteenth arrondissement. She liked the seventh better, but had never been able to talk Matthieu into it. He wanted to live where his family had lived before they lost everything, which had been two blocks away in a similar building. She loved the idea of buying a small h?tel particulier, a private house, in the seventh, on the Left Bank, but Matthieu thought it was dangerous and more vulnerable to intrusions and burglaries. He thought they were safer in an apartment building, but that made no difference in the end, since he and Axel were kidnapped at the chateau in the late afternoon on a Friday, when all the servants had left and father and son were alone. The kidnappers knew exactly which day to come, so someone knowledgeable had been paid to inform them. She changed all the staff afterwards, once they were all interrogated by the DGSI and the police, but it was too late to make a difference. She no longer went to the chateau now anyway. It was too painful for her to even visit, let alone stay there. The shutters were closed and she hadn’t seen it in a year. She couldn’t bear the thought of going back.