Page 105 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

And I remind myself that I am only as unsettled as I allow myself to be. That he does not control this. It’s true that he’s called my bluff in a way I didn’t expect and, yes, find astonishingly shocking. It’s hard to imagine what kind of man he must be when he’s not here, to even conceive of such a thing.

Much less attempt it.

Then to pull it off with such ease. But the fact that he did tells me a great many things.

About him, that is.

He must have researched this extensively. He has to have been absolutely certain that Luc Garnier was a construct, not a person. And the only way that’s possible is if he’s been following me for a long while.

Following me. Tracking the firm. More than that, he’s had to talk frankly with those who use our services.

He’s been investigating us, in other words. Investigatingme.Building a picture, then striking with such precision that the only possible response was this.

Me. Reeling.

But this suggests, I can only think, that he means it when he says that he intends to inhabit this role and then disappear again. That tells me something, too. He wants anonymity. Or at least, he wants to be Luc Garnier—not the person who found out Luc Garnier is a lie.

I don’t recognize him on sight, so he can’t be famous in the celebrity culture of the day. He doesn’t even look familiar.

Except,something in me whispers,he does look precisely as you imagined he would. If he was really Luc Garnier.

I think again about that unstudied gesture he made with his suit. I think about how he inhabits this room. He has a different kind of authority, that much is clear. He’s a man who is used to getting what he wants, and who expects his needs to be anticipated. He holds himself with the kind of confidence that I have never seen a man who didn’t truly possess it manage to broadcast in this way. Even though I know him to be a liar, and even though I know that he’s running a scam here, something likeintegrityandcertaintyexudes from him.

He holds himself like he matters, even when he’s said something that should keep me focused on me, not him.

“In two weeks there is a particularly exclusive gathering in Cap Ferrat,” I tell him. Then add, “that’s in France,” because I have the notion it will annoy him, the suggestion he doesn’t know where Cap Ferrat—that monied retreat in the South of France—is located. I see that it does, and smile. “Mr. Garnier has declined the invitation year after year, citing work conflicts.”

I could have had Mr. Garnier send me in his place, of course, but I’ve always worried that appearing alone at this particular event would require a lot of very careful maneuvering around the sort of haughty, impossibly wealthy men—in agroup—who are the reason I invented Luc Garnier in the first place. Better, I’ve always thought, to find them in other places, where they are not in a famously wealthy throng of offhanded affluence and might compare notes.

It’s easy to flatter a man alone. It’s harder to flatter a group of them at once. It’s my experience that they prefer to think of themselves as singularities.

“Perhaps this is the year he will make his appearance,” I say now. “My understanding is that it is a desperately chic sort of dinner party and ball, impossibly sophisticated in every regard, and the sort of gathering that is only whispered about afterward. In hushed tones of awe, naturally, when faced with this sort of wealth and power on display.” I purse my lips. “Though notquiteon display, of course. As I believe the ball and all the rest of it is masked.”

He nods. And we are still standing there, on either side of the expanse of this office, facing off like it’s high noon.

“I suppose that will do,” he says after a pause.

But it’s the kind of pause that thrums with unspoken certainties and wild eddies of understanding just beyond my reach.

“Wonderful,” I reply in as cheerful a voice as I can manage at the moment. “I can’t wait to read about the reaction the world has to its first sight of such a man of myth and legend. In the prosaic flesh, at last.”

I expect him to react to the wordprosaic.I might even have said it deliberately, to force that reaction.

But he is not responding to what I said. Or at least not that part.

Instead, suddenly, it’s entirely too easy to read the look in his eyes.

It’s triumph. Sheer triumph.

As if this particular masked ball was what he was after all along. That tells me something, too—and not only that I walked into whatever trap this is. But that he likely never wanted to go to the charity event tonight at all. That he got me to offer what he wanted from the start, and I didn’t even notice he was doing it.

It would be tempting to conclude that I’m an idiot, but I know perfectly well I’m not.

He’s that dangerous. I need to remember that.

And he doesn’t need to smile when he replies.

But he does. “I’m sure it will be nothing short of epic.”

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