Whatever walls she had erected around her heart came crumbling down without warning. “I have missed you as well. Would you like to come to my apartment? Most cafes are closed for the night.”
“That would be awesome.”
Lizette headed to the door and pushed it open. June in Paris was different from New Orleans. It was greener, not as hot. “How was your flight?” she asked politely, then hated herself for doing that. Manners were as much an armor as metal, and she wanted to learn how to be more open, more honest about her emotions. “I am sorry for leaving the way I did. That was not fair to you.”
They strolled down the sidewalk together. “That’s okay,” he said. “I know I was being an ass, and I’m sorry for that. I was thinking, you know, that maybe we could sort of put that behind us. Start fresh.” But then he seemed to doubt her response because before she could answer, he starting speaking again. “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but this is a cool neighborhood. I like it. It suits you.”
“It has been home for a long time.” She lived in the fashionable 18th district, where the river and the Eiffel Tower dominated the landscape, along with cafes and shops. It was primarily residential, though offices such as her own were tucked here and there. “I do love it here.”
“I brought the stuff you ordered with me. You know, your shoes and the other . . . things.”
Oh dear. She remembered precisely what that other stuff meant. She had tried to cancel her orders when she’d gotten home, but it had been too late. She had written the purchases off as lost, and she realized she had underestimated Johnny yet again. He wasn’t going to let a thousand dollars of her drunken purchases languish on his doorstep. That wasn’t him. “Thank you, I appreciate that very much. I do love those shoes.”
“What about the sexy panties? You love those?” he asked with a grin as she stopped in front of her building. “Because I have to say, I kind of was digging them when I opened the box to pack them in my suitcase.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them yet.”
“By the way,” he added, as she used her key on the front door. “I talked to Saxon about the wedding night. He actually remembers everything. It turns out he didn’t drink the punch. He said that we were never alone. After the reception we were hanging in the group with everyone just having fun, and that the only reason we were in the dungeon was because you insisted such a thing couldn’t exist.”
That did sound like her, expressing skepticism over a sexual fetish. “So what does that mean?” Good God, she hoped they hadn’t had sex in front of other people.
“No funny business. Saxon said it was all good clean fun. We were in handcuffs because he wanted to show us a magic trick with them, only he couldn’t remember it and he couldn’t find the key.”
She didn’t even care about the handcuffs. She was just relieved that they hadn’t had exhibitionistic sex. Though she found herself oddly somewhat disappointed that they hadn’t had the private, intimate night of wild and unbridled passion she had been envisioning. Of course, they had the next night, but there had been something romantic about the idea. “So where did my panties go? And why did I feel so . . . aware down there?” That seemed a rather puzzling mystery to her.
But Johnny didn’t seem to think anything of it. He gave her a big grin. “You rode the mechanical bull at the Bourbon Cowboy. I saw the pictures. I’m guessing that might have had some impact on your girl parts. I’m sorry, I can’t account for your underwear.”
“What? Bull riding?” Lizette started up the marble stairs, her shoes echoing loudly as she walked rapidly. Of course, she couldn’t stomp her way past her actions. “I’ll have to see that to believe it. So did you find out who drugged the punch? It was the punch, yes?”
He nodded, keeping up with her on the steps. In a minute they were in front of her apartment. “It wasn’t the Chers, like Drake suspected. It was Ashley, Josie Lynn’s catering help.”
“Really? Well, I have to admit I’m glad to hear the cross-dressers weren’t involved. They seemed so helpful in the bar, and I rather liked their style. But why on earth would she drug a punch at a wedding reception?”
“It turns out she is the daughter of another cross-dresser who has lost business to the Chers in the last few years, so her plan was to roll the wedding and frame the Chers to give her father a leg up. Though one of the Chers did make off with Zelda’s wedding dress. So basically it was like an entire night lost because of a catfight over clothes and stage time. Totally insane.”
That was insane. “I am speechless.” Lizette led him into her apartment, which was a typical Parisian place, with a small living area and an even smaller bedroom. “Make yourself comfortable.” She still felt nervous, like what happened in the next few minutes could determine the course of her immediate future.
“This is a nice place,” he said, sitting down on her sofa. “Have you been here long?”
“Ten years. Probably in the foreseeable future I’ll have to move. My neighbor has been here the whole time and she is starting to ask me how I keep my youthful appearance.” Which was a shame. She loved this apartment. She sat down next to him because she wanted to be close enough to touch, to read his eyes.
“It looks like you. It feels elegant and cozy all at the same time.”
“I have to confess something to you,” she blurted. “There is a reason why I am so committed to the VA and to our secrecy as a species.”
“Why is that?” He sounded genuinely curious. “What happened to you? Beyond your family being killed, that is. It seems like there’s something you’re not telling me.”
Lizette swallowed hard and studied her manicure. This was important. She needed to share the whole truth. “I want to tell you about Jean-Baptiste.”
HOLY FUCK, WAS she serious? He’d flown halfway around the world and she wanted to tell him about her dead boyfriend? He literally wanted to talk about anything but that dude. They could even not talk at all and that would be preferable. But he forced himself to remain nonchalant and just say, “Yeah?”
Lizette kicked off her heels and tucked her slim legs under her skirt in a move that he found wildly distracting and really sexy. Okay, she could talk about the dead guy.
“You see, we had a solid relationship, but as I said, we were not without our issues. But I was committed to him and assumed we would have a future. But during the late nineteenth century, when medical schools were getting so heavily into dissections, you know there was a lot of grave robbing and whatnot going on, yes?”
“I can’t say I’m really familiar with the time period, since I was born at the end of the century, but I can see how that would happen.” Just a little before his time.
“Due to advances in science and anatomy, the human body was considered essential to the study of young medical students, and they were willing to look the other way as to how bodies were acquired. It was a booming business. Jean-Baptiste was stolen from his coffin in the catacombs on the assumption that he was a corpse.”
That was more than a little fucked-up.
“But of course what happened was that when they dissected him, he woke up. Since it was daytime, he was disoriented, I presume, and they were able to secure him to their operating table and watch as he healed. So they dissected again. Again he healed.” Lizette swallowed hard. “I witnessed a good deal of this as I followed the carriage in the hopes of rescuing him.”
Shit. That was why she was so afraid of being caught. She’d seen the consequences. Johnny felt like a complete jerk-off. He reached out and took her hand, which she had clenched into a fist on her knee.
“But they never left him, and I couldn’t see how to get him out of the restraints and help him move when it would take all my strength to protect myself from getting caught. So I watched his torture. It went on for hours and hours and he was awake for the entirety.” Lizette stared at him with glassy eyes. “I will hear his screams of agony forever.”
“That’s horrible,” he said, because there were no words adequate enough to express his sympathy and disgust. “I’m so sorry.”
“Finally, after they posed for photos with his bleeding body, skin peeled back from all his bones, head scalped, nails driven through his hands to see what the result would be, they went out for a pint to celebrate their real-live Frankenstein. It was my plan to release him then. But Jean-Baptiste begged me to merely kill him. He didn’t think he would survive anyway, and I would only be slowed down and putting myself at risk.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t do it. How could I?”
“Holy shit, baby . . .” Johnny was speechless. She shouldn’t have had to make that kind of choice.
“But then one of them came back because he had forgotten his hat, and I knocked him unconscious. I knew I had to kill Jean-Baptiste then, so . . .” Lizette took several deep breaths. “So I did.”
Johnny took her hand and stroked her cool skin gently. He spoke softly, awed by her strength, her tenacity
