Suspects(43)

“Do you think de Vaumont and his client will try to snap it up the minute you list it?” he asked her.

“I doubt it. He was very eager to see it before I listed it. His client may not be respectable at all, and Pierre doesn’t want to lose part of his commission to a realtor. He wants it all for him. For Matthieu’s sake, I hope someone buys it who treats it well and loves it. I would never sell it to de Vaumont and his client now.”

They lay in the bed side by side, talking quietly until the doctor came in at almost noon and told her that her bloodwork was satisfactory and she could leave. She already had her little bag packed, and her car and driver were waiting outside. Daniel was due to be discharged an hour or two later. His girlfriend was picking him up, and he was coming back to work after the weekend.

She and Mike drove home to her apartment, and they retreated to her bedroom. He was gentle with her, not wanting to wear her out since she’d been sick, but their lovemaking escalated rapidly to what it had been when he last saw her. They couldn’t resist each other.

“What do you suppose it is with us?” she asked as she lay in his arms after they made love, feeling sleepy and sated and alive again. It was as though they shared their life force with each other and became more by being together.

He laughed at the question. “I think they call that lust. Pure raw passion.”

“I’ve never had anything like that before, with anyone.” He was an extraordinary lover, and he thought the same of her.

“Never?” he asked her. She shook her head. Matthieu had been Mike’s age when she married him, and he had never had the wild abandon or sexual skills that Mike did. Or maybe she had been different then. Mike brought out something very different in her. She had been a young girl with Matthieu, and then a mother. Mike made her feel like a woman. She loved how powerful and manly he was. It pained her at times now that she was no longer a mother—she had lost a major part of her identity, as Matthieu’s wife and Axel’s mother—but she was growing into it with Mike, being “just” a woman. It was a new role for her, and there were things she liked about it, aside from the losses, which were devastating.

They went out that afternoon for a walk and stopped by her office. Everyone was relieved to see her. No one knew the details of the poisoning, and she had decided they didn’t need to. They only knew that she’d been ill with a severe flu. And Daniel had caught it too.

She introduced Mike to her assistants and some of the key people in her operation, then showed him their full offering online. He was surprised by how many employees she had, that she had started the business at twenty-two, and how much it had grown in fifteen years.

“How sophisticated is your security here? To keep the wrong people out of the building?”

“It’s probably not tight enough,” she admitted, “but we’ve never had a problem.”

“That’s the trouble in security. You don’t have a problem until you have a problem and then it’s too late. With all the crime that happens in Paris, and the trouble in Europe these days, it sounds like you need a better system and procedures. You have a lot of people working here. You need to protect against a hostage situation run by some nutcase. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and your systems at home. What you have relies more on humans than on technology. Sometimes technology is more reliable. I want to give you some suggestions, but I haven’t had time to work on it. We’ve been a little crazy at the office.” She knew he wouldn’t tell her why, so she didn’t ask.

“And I’ve been driving you crazy too, getting poisoned by a doorknob,” she said wth a laugh. She had gotten over the shock and felt fine again. She had read up on the Novichok nerve agents, and related poisons, while she was in the hospital. “Do you know that one of the guys who invented them actually poisoned himself by mistake and died from it? It took five years for it to kill him, but it did. That stuff is nothing to mess around with. The first thing it did was confuse me so much I couldn’t think straight.”

Mike kissed her neck and then held her. “That’s what happens to me when I’m anywhere near you. I can’t think straight,” he said, and she laughed.

“You’re just a sex addict,” she teased him, and he looked at her.

“Is that a compliment or a complaint?” he asked her.

“A compliment of course. You’ve turned me into one too.”

“That’s the best news of all. And you’ve made my life more glamorous. I spend my weekends in Paris now. Me, a poor boy from Boston.” But he wasn’t that anymore, and he was way more sophisticated than that. Enough so to fit perfectly into her life. He had his own field of expertise. “Theo, do you ever think of moving your business back to the States?” He had been thinking about that a lot lately, about how they could be together more, and even live in the same city.

“Never,” she said simply. “This works. I have access to great talent for my business. People with terrific experience. I love living here. This really works well for me, and for the business. And I have Matthieu’s business to take care of now too, even though I don’t work on it full time. If I moved Theo.com to New York, I’d be on a plane every five minutes to deal with his business. It’s hard enough having both offices in two separate locations in the same city, let alone three thousand miles apart.”