Page 99 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

All that and he sounds like poetry when he speaks.

A kind of distinctly European poetry, I think as I take it in. I can’t quite place that accent. His English is perfect, but it is clearly not his first language.

I am not a fan of the way I want to just stand here andstareat him.

“Who are you?” I ask.

I am staring at him, but now the staring is withintention,I assure myself.

He lifts his head from the laptop screen and stares back at me, and something seems to leap there between us. Somewhere between his inscrutable gaze and the odd sensations chasing around inside me.Challenge,I tell myself. That’s all.

His mouth does not seem to move, and yet I’m sure there’s a hint of a smile there all the same. He lifts a finger and makes a languid circle in the air above his head, taking in not just his office—myoffice, damn it—but the broader Miravakia Investigations office all around.

“Do you lack comprehension skills?” he asks me. “I would think that a surface level requirement for a private investigator, Ms. Alden. How have you managed to remain employed—by me—for so long?”

Once again, I’m certain that I can see some small hint of a smile, not quite there on his face. Some lurking knowledge in those eyes of his that he is fully aware of what he is doing here.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” I say, very quietly, because the shocks keep coming and coming inside me, and I’m not certain why I’m finding it hard to breathe.

Temper, I tell myself. It has to betemper.

“I beg your pardon?”

He sounds filled with the upper-class affront of a man of means and authority, exactly the way he would if he really was Luc Garnier.

But he’s not.

Because despite how real the figurehead seems tome,I know he’s a figment of my imagination.

I shouldn’t have to remind myself of this.

“This office belongs to a very powerful man,” I tell him. What I want to say is that I know perfectly well that he’s not Luc Garnier, because I made Luc Garnier the way I made everything else in this office, and, indeed, this office itself. I made him up in my own head and I put him onto documents, then put his name above mine everywhere, so that people would finally treat me as if I was more than a secretary. I did these things. He’smine.This manis an impostor at best, and I don’t want to think what might be worse. “I don’t know who you are, but if I were you, I would rethink whatever experiment this is that you’re doing and leave before I have to get the authorities involved.”

I don’t know what I expect from him. Maybe…some acknowledgment of the real situation here? Or at least for him to drop the character he’s playing. To show by even a fleeting expression that he knows he’s playing a game and that I’ve caught him doing it.

But instead, the man behind the desk who is absolutely not Luc Garnier pushes back. He takes his time standing, and once again, I am struck by his sheer and astonishing perfection. It really shouldn’t be possible. I’m not sure where on earth he could come from, because not even the most gilded reaches of the highest echelons of Hollywood could produce something likethis.

He looks like a carving of my wildest fantasies, brought to life. Every line, every inch, everything about him is mouthwatering in a way that is so overwhelming that I’m tempted to just…find it funny.

No single human should havethis muchwildfire charisma and that he doesandis clearly a con man is a sort of whiplash I suspect might take me a very long time to sort through.

But that will have to happenafterI get rid of him.

Something that’s difficult to think how to do when he takes up all the air in this office, and maybe all the air in all of Manhattan, too.

Standing, he’s even taller than I imagined. But I notice other things now, like the broadness of his shoulders, that suggest something more than he appears. If I were to see him anywhere else, I would think that he was aristocratic. It’s in the way he holds himself, as if expecting that genuflection might break out at any moment, and it’s best to be prepared.

He absently smooths down the front of his lapel, a gesture that I have seen many attempt to ape and only some pull off. It’s a gesture born of many, many years of wearing perfectly tailored suits, cut and sewn to the wearer’s specific measurements. Men who don’t wear suits often, or only wear suits of a lower standard, can forever be found smoothing down the front of them, trying to make them hang correctly.

The way this man smooths his lapel is less about securing a proper fit and more an unconscious confirmation of the excellence of the suit in question, and therefore also of himself.

It is the equivalent of the way a regal woman might minutely adjust her crown, and I doubt he’s even aware that he does it.

The moment I think that, it bothers me, because I know it’s true of this man. He has that kind of gravitas. And it makes me wonder who on earth this man really is if he can pull that off. This gesture I might normally expect to see on, say, a king.

Con men are good at the suggestion of a gesture, but not all the stateliness and breeding that makes it unconscious.

I hate that I can see the difference.

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