“You may shower, if you like, and then join me upstairs.” He gathered his discarded garments and left.
Dismissed. He’d had his way with her and now he was done. How could he be so conscientious of her satisfaction one moment and then such a cold bastard the next? Shame crept over her.
What are you doing? Falling for the first guy to give you an orgasm? So he’s a good lover. He bought you. Just because he’s doing favors for Vincent and he watched out for your friends at the club doesn’t make him a nice guy.
And he has plans. Plans that don’t include you.
Irritated with herself, Stacy climbed from the water, dried off and wound the towel around her nak*dness. She grabbed her shoes and clothing from the weight bench and let curiosity lead her into a humongous tiled bathroom. A large glass shower stall took up one corner and a wooden sauna occupied the other. And was that a massage table? Did Franco have a personal masseuse?
A V-neck sundress in a muted floral print of blues and greens and a matching lightweight sweater hung in an open closet beside a white toweling robe. She ran her fingers over the dress’s flirty ruffled hem. Silk, whereas her dresses were cotton. Designer instead of department store. Other than the sexy but impractical sandals in a box on the floor of the closet, the outfit was exactly the style she would have chosen for herself if she had an unlimited budget. Which, of course, she’d never had.
The dress tempted her, but she didn’t want anything else from Franco, nor did she want to explain to her suitemates why he kept buying her presents.
Her reflection in the long mirror caught her eye. Ugh. Her makeup was ninety percent gone and her hair clumped in wet tangles over her shoulders. She dumped her clothes on the counter, washed her face in the sink and then finger-combed her hair as best as she could. She unhooked the diamond bracelet and left it on the long marble vanity and froze. Her heart stalled. Her watch. She hadn’t removed it. Panic dried her mouth. Where had she misplaced it?
She backtracked, but didn’t see it on the bottom of the spa or anywhere around the weight bench. It hadn’t been expensive, but its value couldn’t be measured in dollars. She remembered putting it on tonight. Wherever it was, she had to find it.
Maybe Franco could help. She returned to the bathroom and quickly yanked on her dancing outfit. The cool, sweat-dampened fabric made her grimace. After smoothing the wrinkles with her hands, she followed the direction Franco had taken earlier. The stairs led to a hallway, and while she would have preferred to explore this end of the house and perhaps learn more about Franco, she tracked his voice to the living room. With his back to her, he swore, dropped the phone on the cradle and shoved his hands through his damp dark hair.
“Is something wrong?”
He turned, his gaze narrowing over her choice of clothing. He’d changed into jeans and a black polo shirt. “The taxi is unavailable for an hour. I will drive you back to the hotel. Why are you not wearing the dress?”
“I told you. You don’t have to keep buying me gifts. I accepted this one because I didn’t have anything suitable to wear tonight, but otherwise…” She shrugged. “I don’t need anything.”
His lips compressed and a muscle in his jaw jumped. “And the bracelet?”
“I left it downstairs on the counter. It’s beautiful, but not practical for an accountant. If I wore it to work people would wonder if I’d been embezzling from their accounts, and I never go anywhere dressy enough to need something like that.”
Surprise flicked in his eyes. “You will continue to work when you return home?”
“Of course.” As soon as she found another job. “Once I pay taxes on the money and buy a house there won’t be enough left to live a life of idle luxury.”
“Taxes? And what job will you list as a source for your income?”
Good question. She twisted the thin gold strap of her evening bag. “I haven’t figured that out yet, but suddenly opening a bank account with more than a million dollars would red-flag the IRS. And I’m not stupid enough to keep that much cash lying around my apartment.”
“Why not use an offshore bank?”
“Too cloak-and-dagger. I’d feel like a money launderer. Besides, not reporting the income would be illegal.” Did he think she was crazy not to hide the money? She couldn’t tell from his neutral expression. “Franco, I lost my watch. I didn’t see it downstairs. Could you give me the number for the limo service, the taxi and Jimmy’z? I’ll call to see if anyone found it. It wasn’t expensive, but it was…my favorite. I need to find it.”
“I will make the calls.”
“Thank you.” She agreed because the language barrier might be an issue, but then shifted in her sandals, reluctant for some stupid reason to see the night end. “I enjoyed tonight.”
He folded his arms and leaned his h*ps against the back of the sofa. “You sound surprised.”
She rubbed her bare wrist and wrinkled her nose. “I’m not a clubbing kind of person.”
He studied her so intently her toes curled in her shoes, and then he reached behind him and lifted a small plastic shopping bag. “This is one gift I insist you accept. A cell phone. My numbers are already programmed into it.”
She’d be at his beck and call. But that’s what he’d bought. And the phone might come in handy when she needed to reach Candace or if one of the women needed to reach her. “Am I allowed to use it to call anyone else?”
“Not your lover in the States,” he replied swiftly.
She took the bag from him and peeked inside to see a top-of-the-line silvery-green picture phone. “I meant Candace, Madeline or Amelia. I don’t have a lover back home. If I did, I wouldn’t be involved with you.”
Again he looked as if he didn’t believe what she said—a circumstance she was beginning to get used to. He pushed off the sofa. “Come.”
She followed him outside and slid into the passenger seat of his car and waited until he climbed in beside her. “Why did you choose MIT?”
He didn’t answer until he’d buckled his seat belt and started the engine. “They have an excellent Global Leadership program.”
“Couldn’t you get that at a university closer to home?”
He pulled onto the road and drove perhaps a half mile before replying. “My mother was from Boston and I was curious about her city.”
Stacy jerked in surprise. “An American?”
Another long pause suggested he didn’t want to share personal info. “Second-generation. She met my father while visiting her cousin in Avignon.”
The lights of Monaco sparkled across the mountainside in the pre-dawn hour. Stacy didn’t think she’d ever tire of the view, but the insights into Franco fascinated her more. “Are you close to her? Your mom, I mean.”
“She died when I was three,” the brusque response seemed grudgingly offered.
“I’m sorry. It’s hard to lose a parent.” She still missed hers, and now that she knew why she and her mother had lived such a vagabond life, she could even accept, respect and forgive her mother’s choices.
A streetlight briefly illuminated his tense face. “Yours?”
A gruesome graphic image flashed through Stacy’s mind. She squeezed her eyes shut and forced it away. “She…died when I was nineteen.”
“And she left you enough money to attend college?”
“No. I co-oped.”
“What is that?”
“I worked part-time in my field with sponsoring companies and that meant I had to take a lighter load of classes. It took six years of going to school year-round, but I finished.”
“Vincent did not tell me that.”
“You asked Vincent about me? What did he say?”
“That he had not met you, but that you had…how did he put it? You saved Candace’s bacon in a tax audit.”
Stacy laughed and Franco’s gaze whipped in her direction. He acted as if he’d never heard her laugh. Come to think of it, he probably hadn’t. “Candace’s was my first audit, and I went a little overboard in her defense. I think the IRS agent was glad to get rid of us by the time I finished pointing out all the deductions Candace could have taken but hadn’t.”
Franco pulled the car into the hotel parking area, but not into the valet lane and stopped. He turned in his seat and studied her face in the dim light. “You enjoy your work.”
“I love—um, my job.” She’d barely caught herself before using past tense. Being laid off had been like moving to a new school and being rejected all over again. It had hurt—especially since she hadn’t done anything wrong. “Numbers make sense. People often don’t.”
He pinned her with another one of his intense inspections that made her want to squirm. “I will be out of town this weekend. A car will pick you up at quarter to six Monday evening and deliver you to my house. My housekeeper will let you in before she leaves. Wait for me. We will have dinner.”
And then sex? Her shameless pulse quickened. “I look forward to it.”
And the sad thing was, that wasn’t a lie, and Monday seemed a very long way away.
Seven
“I have found her,” Franco said upon entering the chateau’s study.His father looked up sharply, set his book aside and rose from the sofa to embrace him. “Franco, I was not expecting you this weekend. If you had called I could have delayed lunch.”
He hadn’t known he was coming. This morning’s urge to put some distance between him and Stacy had been both sudden and imperative. She had clouded his thinking with incredible sex and contradictory behavior. He needed distance and objectivity to decipher her actions.
“No problem. I will raid the kitchen later. Where is Angeline?”
“Shopping in Marseille.”
Ah, yes. Exactly why he was here. To remind himself that a mercenary, self-indulgent heart beat at the core of every woman.
Take his mother, for example. Although his father had never spoken a negative word against her, Franco had been curious enough about the woman who had given birth to him to investigate her death. During one of his university vacations he had researched the police reports and the newspaper stories and discovered that his mother had enjoyed her status as a rich, older man’s wife. She had often attended weekend house parties without her husband, and there she’d indulged. In booze. In coc**ne. And who knew what else? At one such party, a chemical overdose had killed her at age twenty-six.
His father passed him a glass of wine. “So tell me about this young lady.”
“She is an American accountant, a friend of Vincent’s fiancée, and she claims she counsels troubled teens in her spare time.”
“And?”
“I offered her a million euros to be my mistress for a month. She accepted.” But she would not accept all his gifts. That did not make sense. Her honesty had to be a ruse. Who would report a million euros windfall to the tax man and forfeit almost half in taxes?
“She is attractive? Desirable?”