The driver turned the steering wheel, and the car coasted to a stop at a dingy building emblazoned with neon-colored graffiti in at least three alphabets.
The part of town didn’t alarm Maxence any more than it had her. Though some people might have hesitated to venture into “District 93,” as the French social services ministry euphemistically called it, Max had lived in much more impoverished and violent areas of the world for most of the last few years.
The driver asked, “You sure this is it?”
Maxence jiggled the little blonde with his arm. “This is it, ma chérie?”
She turned and blinked at the building. “Yeah, this is it. I’m on the third floor. There’s no elevator. You okay with three flights of stairs?”
He almost retorted something, but she was obviously an American. Most Europeans and Parisians didn’t balk at climbing a few flights of stairs. “Yes, that’s fine. Let’s go, then.”
Max added a tip on his phone for the cab and thanked the driver, who sped away as soon as Max slammed the car door.
It was very late at night, past midnight, and several of the streetlamps farther down were broken. The cement-block buildings faded away into the darkness, and few trees had found root in the paved-over landscape.
Window boxes shadowed the barred windows. In the daytime, those might have some greenery.
The woman was fumbling with keys for the iron-barred security door to the building. Her aim for the lock left much to be desired.
When she dropped the keys for the second time, Maxence scooped them up, picked out the key, and twisted it in the lock.
The whole door clicked as bolts retracted, and Max breathed a sigh of relief that this was indeed her address. He did not particularly like standing on this road in the dead of night, illuminated by one streetlamp, when other people were moving in the shadowed parts of the rutted street.
He opened the steel door inside the security gate, and they were inside a hallway illuminated by a bare bulb in the ceiling. The woman leaned against a wall and stared up at him. “You haven’t run away yet.”
“Why are you so worried about that?”
“Tonight is the first night of the rest of my life,” she said with a heartbreaking choke in her voice. “I don’t want to fuck it up.”
He reached for her again and pulled her into his arms, feeling the delicate narrowness of her waist and the softness of her flesh. He shoved her up against the wall and kissed her hard. Her mouth opened under his, and she ensnared him again with her arms and one leg. This time, she had a wall behind her, and he ground upward with his thigh, rubbing her.
The blonde moaned, and it was a soft and sexy sound that tightened his groin. He growled, “Where are the stairs?”
She flopped her hand toward the hallway, and he reluctantly lifted himself off her far enough that she could slip out and lead him to yet another locked stairway door that he navigated the keys for.
Max held her tiny hand while they climbed the three flights of stairs, just in case. She had seemed so intoxicated, but she’d had no trouble walking from the nightclub to the cab, and now she managed the three flights of stairs all right.
That was odd. Someone who was as drunk as she’d seemed shouldn’t skip up three floors of stairs without a bobble.
Though he liked her bobbles. He knew she was going to be on him like a vine as soon as her door closed.
His dick felt heavy and pulling in his tuxedo pants.
He did not have sex with women who were too drunk. He didn’t like a dead lay in the slightest, anyway. There was nothing exciting about a woman who didn’t scream his name and flay the skin off his back with her fingernails.
An image of her scarlet-painted fingernails drifted through his mind again, and he needed to adjust himself through his pants pocket because his underwear was dragging on it.
But anyone who found their hotel so easily, could climb stairs unassisted and without tripping, and chatter on as she was without so much as a slur was not dead drunk.
He considered that thought.
She argued coherently, even if her logic seemed twisted by a dark emotion flickering behind her eyes. Her trains of thought started with that napkin she kept referring to, but they reeled out logically after that.
She wasn’t dead drunk.
Had she been faking it?
And why?
Wariness crept into his mind.
He wasn’t afraid of the tiny blonde. He was pretty sure he could snap her slender neck or wasp-waist if she attacked him, but she might be leading him into a set-up.
Lots of desperate people trolled the Parisian bars, looking for an easy mark to isolate and rob. Some of them were organized enough to lure a man to a second location with a honeypot trap.
The neighborhood was the red flag.
Blue-painted door, yellow stain on the white paint down the hall, charcoal gray industrial carpeting under his black formal shoes, a man shouting behind one of the doors, the rustle of the blonde’s clothes as she walked beside him, the sour smell of humid mold in the walls.
The blue paint on her door was peeling. She plucked her keys out of his hand and unlocked the door. One of the three locks spun when she twisted the key, broken.
She hadn’t had any trouble sticking the key in those locks and twisting them, unlike the building’s front door.
Maxence warily pushed the door and let it swing open.
Inside the room, the darkness was silent and still. Pale light from a window touched square objects with gray lines.
If conspirators were hiding in there, they were doing an excellent job of not moving, speaking, or breathing.
Maxence flipped on the light switch by the door without walking inside.
Just a bedroom, done in blue, white, and yellow. The air smelled fresh enough, a mild hint of lemon and lavender.
A small kitchen area had been built into one corner with a coffeemaker, countertops, and a refrigerator underneath. A high, white-painted iron bed with a slightly sagging mattress and blue coverlet stood in the center of one wall. It had long legs for storing luggage underneath.
White lace curtains surrounded one window, and an air conditioning unit jutted from the other. The walls were painted the same sunny yellow as the faded rugs on the blue cement floor.
Okay, no thugs.
It wasn’t a trap.
A memory of a small place and the scent of saltwater assailed Maxence, and he shut it out, hard.
Nothing about the room seemed personal. Indeed, it looked exactly like a substandard efficiency apartment purchased by an investor and rented out over the internet to tourists who didn’t know the shadier parts of Paris or were too cheap to care.
A nylon duffel bag lay on the bed next to a small pile of clothes and a toiletry bag.
Small hands grabbed his hips and tugged. He allowed himself to be turned around to face the woman, who shut the steel door and twisted the locks. She leaned against the door and stared up at him with huge blue eyes. “Are you still up for this?”
Max was so up for this that his cock ached. “Yes.”
The blonde balanced on one leg as she pried her delicate little shoe off her foot, then did the other.
If she’d touched her nose, she would have passed the drunk-driver test.
Why had she feigned being so inebriated when she clearly wasn’t?
She said, “And promise me you’ll leave in the morning. Don’t wake me up. Don’t say good-bye. Just go.”