Page 114 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

I feel many things then, but none of them aregratitude.Some of them veer worryingly close tohomicidal,actually.“I suppose I’m glad we’re admitting that you’re a con man now, instead of pretending that a fictional character is real. Progress?”

If I want him to respond to that—to actuallyadmit, out loud,that this is a game we both know full well he’s playing, no matter his reasons—I’m disappointed.

Luc returns his attention to his laptop again and we do not speak for the remainder of the flight.

Though from time to time I see a muscle in his jaw tense, as if he is not as calm as he wishes to appear. I try to take a bit of comfort in that.

We land in Nice. And it occurs to me, as the car sweeps us away from the airport and we are soon nearly blinded by the intensity of the blue sky and sparkling waters of the Côte d’Azur, that I’ve lost control.

This is not my car. These are not my arrangements. I don’t even know where he’s taking me, and the strangest thing is, it’s something I should have been paying attention to all this time. Yet I wasn’t.

It’s as if I was lulled into some false sense of security…why? Because I could perform Olympic gymnastic events on his cheekbones?

I can’t even take in the normally restorative views of Nice, the dome of La Negresco beckoning, because it has occurred to me only now that after all these years of cheerful immunity to men, it turns out that I am decidedly basic after all.

Because I know that if this man was not gorgeous, I would have waved him off at the airfield outside New York and found my own way here, then stayed in my own accommodations. If he wasn’t absurdly beautiful in theexactway that gets under my skin, when I thought no one could, I would not be in this vehicle. I would not be hugging the coastal road as the car winds its way out of Nice and on into Villefranche-sur-Mer, which clings to its hillsides and basks in the light.

I tell myself I’m perfectly capable of handling whatever he throws my way. And that may or may not be true—I don’t really want to find out.

The real truth is, I want to see where he’s going with this.

Still, as I sit in the car beside him, I do a quick check-in to make sure I’m not beingtoofoolish. I decide that I’m not. This man had initial access to every single part of my business and did not block me from it, lock me out, or help himself to the bank accounts before I quietly changed all the passwords.

He has not exploited anything more than the loophole.

More importantly, he has not behaved in a way that I would describe as inappropriate at all.

To my own dismay, if I’m being brutally honest.

Not just because he’s stunningly beautiful, with that gravitas to what ought to be pretty features that make him impossible to look away from. But because it would all be a lot easier if he would cross those lines. It would make things clear.

But he never does.

And I know it would be easier to dismiss him if he did.

Besides, I assure myself as I continue checking in with my rational brain, now that the golden glow of his plane isn’t addling my senses, I’m not exactly helpless. I’ve been in questionable situations before—that’s part of the job.

People get angry when you start poking around in their lives. Sometimes they get blustery about it, too. I’ve always been good at talking them down.

It helps to be a six-foot-tall woman who looks like a Valkyrie. Most of the men who’ve gotten a little too aggressive were smaller than me.

Nonetheless, I do not drift off as we take the turn and head into the peninsula that is Cap Ferrat, one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. I pay attention to my surroundings as they become immediately more impressive and harder to see from the narrow, winding streets. I pay attention tohim.

And there’s something about his total lack of concern that is comforting.

A person bent on harming me would have done so already. I was isolated at the moment I stepped on that plane. Besides, there’s no point taking me all the way to the South of France to do something that could have been easily achieved in an office building in Manhattan.

Especially when what he wants from this is not me, in any form, but Luc Garnier. The image. The name.

I am determined to find out why, and being here in France on the day of the masked ball only makes me feel more pressured to do so.

Because I’m almost positive that after tonight, I won’t see this man again.

We make our way along streets that are all walls and gates and hedges, and what look like houses rearing up into the street—but are only garages, a carriage house, and possibly a security detail or two. This is not the playground of the wealthy. This is several cuts above.

The wealthy play in their yachts out in the sea. Here on land, the villas house only the most elite. Some are so private that their names can only be guessed at, so I suppose that in that sense, this man is in good company.

We pull through a set of gates to a villa that is set behind a wall of thick vegetation so that no one can see it from the road, and we are greeted by staff members who do not bow and scrape, but somehow manage to give the impression of doing so all the same.

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