Or he might be screaming inside and good at covering it up. It was hard to tell with guys sometimes.
“It really is okay,” she said. “I was just thinking about things I might do in Paris, like tourist stuff.”
He finally spoke. “Last night, it sounded like you had a bucket list.”
“Funny you should put it like that, a bucket list.” That’s what Roxanne and Gen had called it the night before. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
Augustine neatly wiped his fingers on a paper towel and then reached over and picked up her special napkin that was covered with black handwriting and her map for the rest of her life.
“Uh, yeah,” she said. “You don’t have to look at that.” A lot of it was pretty embarrassing and made her look like a tramp. Well, even more like a tramp than she’d already made herself look by screaming that she wanted to screw all the men in a bar and then taking a guy home for the hottest sex of her life.
Yeah, the tramp ship had already sailed.
He studied it, frowning in places. “This is quite a list.”
“I wasn’t planning on doing it all.” She totally was.
Augustine tilted his head, glanced up at her with a startled expression, and then looked back at the napkin as his eyes grew larger. “A threesome, a foursome with three guys, a gang bang. You mentioned these last night.”
It all sounded so sordid now, like only an idiot would want to do ridiculous things like that. “It’s just a list. I don’t even know how many of those things I’ll be able to do, ever, in my whole life.”
“It also says that you should see the Louvre. You haven’t seen the Louvre?” He shook his head and raised one hand. “I forgot it’s your first time in Paris. Of course, you haven’t.”
“Yeah, I haven’t done anything.”
“Just as a fellow tourist in Paris, I might suggest you prioritize seeing the Louvre and the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and eating in some of the restaurants listed here before you check the various debaucheries off your list. You can sleep with men anywhere in the world, but only Paris has the Louvre and the Palais Garnier.”
Dree considered the one hundred fifty-two euros that were still in her wallet. Tickets to get into the Louvre were seventeen euros, and she needed to eat. “Well, I’m not going to be here for very long. I don’t know how many of these things I’ll be able to see at all.”
“When is your flight back?”
“Thursday morning,” she said.
His dark eyebrows rose. “That’s when I’m scheduled to leave, also. I believe I have an early flight.”
“You don’t live in Paris?”
He shook his head. “And no more questions unless you want me to lie to you, as you said. Of these restaurants listed here, may I heartily recommend Le Cinq. It’s the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel George V.”
Dree muttered, “I’m kind of on a budget. I don’t think I’m going to be eating at any of those fancy restaurants my friends recommended. They’re a lot better off than I am.”
He looked up from the napkin. “Oh?”
Shame filled her. Some families were weird about money. Dree’s sheep-farmer family was ridiculously proud of how they’d made do for over a hundred years with the small income that shepherding their small flock provided. Dree had never owned any clothes that weren’t hand-me-downs from her siblings or cousins, and most of them had made a trip through the church’s poor box at some point, too. She could mend, darn, or patch anything.
In college, when the teaching hospital had provided her with brand-new scrubs for her student nursing rotations, that had been the first time she’d ever owned brand-new clothes.
Dree swallowed hard. Like everyone in her family, she’d always been too proud to admit her poverty, and they’d actively hidden and denied it.
But she was trying to change her life.
Since her family had adamantly denied their poverty, she wouldn’t. It was just a thing, not her fault. She was also blond of average height, and a little plump. They were just things to neither take pride nor shame in.
And she had always been poor, and now she was destitute.
She sucked in a deep breath and used every bit of that air to tell him. “My people aren’t well-off. I don’t even know how to make a reservation at a place like that, and I don’t think I have enough money to go to the Louvre. I was just going to walk around Paris or something and do the free stuff.”
“Oh, but you have to see the Louvre. It’s truly worth the price of admission. Surely, you have a credit card or something.”
Dree steeled herself and said with no shame, “I don’t have the money for the Louvre. I had a problem.” Problem was a good way to put it. “Yeah, a problem, and I had a non-refundable plane ticket to Paris. I figured I could decide what I was going to do with my life in Paris as easily as I could in Phoenix, so I got on the plane and came here. But now I’m here, and I don’t have enough money and I don’t know what to do. I’m just a hard-working girl who got screwed over again.”
Augustine had been watching her quietly, almost without moving. When she finished talking, his thick, black eyelashes rose as his eyes widened slightly, and his lips parted. He was perfectly still for a moment, and then he shook his head just one time as he pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and thumbed the bills inside, counting.
Dree wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do at that point, so she didn’t do anything. Okay, whatever.
He removed a thick sheaf of bills from his wallet and placed them on the dresser beside where he was standing. Quite a lot of the currency seemed to be green, which meant
