Page 104 of Tangled Up In You

Conor laughed. “Well, you free tonight? Let’s grab a drink.”

“Perfect. Come ’round about nine. Oh, and give Colette my regards,” Jackson said before hanging up.

Conor looked at Colette again. She lay on her side, facing him. Her thick hair fell like a blanket over her bare shoulder. There was no doubt that she was vibrant and beautiful, but Jackson’s call made Conor wonder what he was in for with her.

After a lazy,sex-fueled morning, Conor suggested he and Colette come up for air. Though their time together had been ridiculously satisfying, he realized they would have to leave the hotel room to actually have a conversation. They reluctantly separated so she could go to her hotel room to clean up while he did the same in his.

When they met up again, they wandered around Covent Garden, content to mingle with the tourists and admire the disparate mix of architecture of the Market Hall and Royal Opera House. As they window-shopped at Burberry, Sandro, and Paul Smith, conversation was easy, and Conor enjoyed the feel of Colette holding onto his arm.

Late in the afternoon, they stopped at Champagne & Fromage on Wellington Street. It was a picturesque wine and cheese cafe with the menu displayed on blackboards, olive-colored walls, and perfectly weathered wood tables paired with rustic red metal chairs set under an enormous stainless-steel wine-glass rack hung from the ceiling.

Conor felt like they could have been in the middle of Paris, especially with Colette’s perfect pronunciation of the Gallic offerings. The daughter of a Greek father and a French mother, she had been raised in Quebec before beginning to model at age fifteen. She was fluent in French and preferred to play up that part of her heritage, even taking her mother’s surname.

They were well into their bottle of champagne when she asked about his history with women.

“What about them?”

“I know—everyoneknows—all about the models and actresses you’vedated.”

He laughed. “Why do you say ‘dated’ with such suspicion?”

“You do have a reputation for liking, let’s call it, volume and variety.”

Sipping his champagne, he gave that thought. “I enjoy women,” he conceded.

“What was your most serious relationship?”

He smiled at her bluntness. “I suppose that was with a woman I lived with for a short time.”

“Were you in love?”

He didn’t need to think about it but he hesitated as if he did. “No. I wasn’t very fair to her in that sense.”

Colette shrugged and took a bite of a crostini topped with figs and melted Fourme d’Ambert cheese.

“It happens,” she said. “Most of the time people come together wanting different things and pretending that’s not the case.”

This declaration struck him as something relatively deep, especially coming from a twenty-one-year-old model. “You’re probably right.”

“So, have you ever been in love?”

“Yes,” he replied, this time without hesitation and regretted it.

“Who with?” she asked, intrigued.

“Someone who was unavailable to me.”

“You were never with her?”

“No.”

“But yet you fell in love? That’s sort of sad.”

Now, he was the one to shrug. “It happens.”

She watched him for a moment, seeing something he couldn’t hide. “Oh, you poor thing,” she said. “You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

“No, not at all,” he said quickly.

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