Page 33 of A Royally Fake French Menage
His white shirt was dotted in the blood of another man. I reached him, the flashlight app on my phone illuminating his face that also bore several dark splattered spots.Fuck.He’d freak out if he knew. Barclay was so pedantic about his personal hygiene. I’d seen it in how fastidiously he washed his hands, how often he showered. How disgusted he’d been with himself the night after he spent hours asleep in the garden, passed out drunk.
Tentatively, I raised a hand and slid my thumb nail beneath the largest dot of blood. The man at his feet didn’t moan and I doubted he would miss it any time soon. “You’re not hurt, are you?” I offered it up as a distraction.
“No,” Barclay said softly, watching me with all the patience in the world.
With another careful nail I caught the next drop, and the next, until I almost had them all. His face nearly clean, I admired my work, and him. At least, his demeanor. He didn’t shake or break down like I might have expected.
“Your bodyguard does an excellent job,” I said softly.
“I know,” he whispered back. His voice shook, though I wasn't sure if that was from fear or pride. Maybe a mix of both.
“Maybe you should listen to Beau.” Jacques stood tall behind me. I didn’t need to look back at him to know that he mirrored Beau Bennett's imposing stature, his unyielding stance.
Perhaps we have our own gangster noir stage after all.
Barclay leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine. “I’m proud of you. Not a single tear. And you never bought into her bullshit.”
I shrugged. “Sadly, this isn’t the first time she’s pulled something like this because her ploy didn’t work or she didn’t want to sue for bankruptcy. That would be admitting to failure in public. My mother hates letting the world know that her plans have failed.” I grimaced. “I stopped falling for that sort of con when I was ten years old.”
“A ripe old age to attain wisdom," Barclay intoned solemnly.
“You bet your ass.” I kissed him back slowly as Beau snuffed out the still smoking cigar that was as cheap as the rest of the set. I broke away and glanced over my shoulder at him. “How did you know he wasn’t a paid actor?” I asked curiously, uncaring that he knew about my own mistake.
Beau paused in the act of grinding the cigar into ash beneath his patent heel. Barclay wasn’t the only one with a penchant for pretty things or a pedantic nature.
“Because he used to work for my father,” he said softly, his tone pensive. “I didn't like that he was involved with the mother of someone I used to date.”
Someone I cared about.
The unspoken words hung in the air between us.
I swallowed hard, hating that he put me in this placement, but grateful for the heads up all the same. “Th–”
“Genie says thank you.” Jacques stepped in front of me, placing his body between Beau and where Barclay and I crouched on the floor. “She says you’ve paid your debt for any hurt that you may have inflicted on her before, and that you’re no longer required here.” He folded his hands before himself, including the one holding his gun.
I stared at the back of my newest lover, only able to see his imposing silhouette, crouched on the floor of a dusty, urine scented warehouse, enfolded in the arms of another.
A sort of stillness fell over us all, the city alive everywhere but here.
“I like this shade on you.” Barclay broke into the void, the standoff between dominants above us where I feared to tread.
Breath whooshed from me as I looked down at my blood stained nails, and giggled. “What should we call it? ‘Inequity’s den at midnight’?" The name and the whole situation left me giggling harder as Barclay kissed his way down my neck, edging his boot behind the dead man’s neck beside us and kicked his body out of the way.
“Call it ‘Jacques’s Delight’,” Beau said suddenly from the same place where he hadn’t moved since ending the life of the cigar smoker opposite my mother. He shot her a hard look. “Shall I take this away and get it ready for your event thisevening? It looks as though I'm attending while I’m here on my father's behalf.”
I stared, having no idea why Beau Bennett needed to represent the California mafia’s don at a London gala charity dinner. But if Beau Bennett said he had work to do, then I wasn’t one to fight him on it.
And besides, he was taking a particularly unpleasant job off my hands. Still…
“What will it cost me?” The tightness that had released from my chest a moment before zinged back along my spine. Jacques, with his hypersensitive attention to us, shifted a foot backward. I ran my fingertips along his calf muscle through his pants leg under Beau's watchful gaze.
Fuck it, I’d go down on both my lovers before him just to earn a reaction right now, and I think we both knew it. He might have Sylvie now, but I'd always been a soft spot for him, the girl who wouldn’t stay put no matter what he demanded of me. That I'd fallen for two Frenchmen must gall him.
They were both mine and no one else’s. Well, except between us, of course. All sharing gratefully permitted.
“I’ll take you home, if all this is accounted for?” Jacques caught my elbow at a quick glance to Barclay.
I shook my head. "We're still establishing details.” I knew Beau Bennett well. Well enough that his silence spoke louder than any shouted claim. I suspected both men knew as much, but I wanted to understand this debt I’d just walked into. If all I had to do was pay my mother's debt out and dress her for the evening, then I'd manage.
