Page 124 of Hunting Pretty

No response.

I slipped my phone into my tiny Chanel clutch, my heart cracking in two.

Pierre went to hail a cab.

I tugged him back from the curb. “Let’s walk.”

“It’s too far.”

I forced a smile. “Perfect to build up an appetite.”

He wrapped his arm around me and settled his hand against my ass, guiding me down the sidewalk. “I know a shortcut.”

I didn’t want to admit it, but I was giving my stalker yet another chance to stop me.

Pierre’s “shortcut” cut through the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery.

A row of mausoleums wound ahead on the gravel pathand the darkness within each cobwebbed doorway was blacker than the last.

As Pierre tugged me along beside him, I wasn’t sure this was a good idea anymore.

I wasn’t even sure that we were still going in the right direction.

Towering trees cast shifting shadows in the dim light of poorly dispersed lamps.

The farther we walked, the more I doubted that the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery should even be open at this time of night.

There was certainly not a single soul in sight. At least not one living.

“Are you sure this is the way?” I asked, tugging against his iron grip.

Pierre smirked at me. “Of course. I am local, no?”

Pierre turned me down a side lane between a pale stone angel with a blackened face and an obelisk consumed by dark climbing vines.

I’d hoped to see the welcome sight of a wrought-iron gate and beyond it a busy street, a well-lit café filled with Parisians too tired to go home.

But as my eyes adjusted to even less light, I saw tangles of roots over a dead leaf-riddled path where the tombstones crowded in even more tightly, as if together they could protect themselves against the decay which had already seized them.

“There’s nothing down here,” I said lightly.

I wanted to give Pierre the benefit of the doubt that he’d gotten turned around, made a mistake. No pride had to be wounded.

We could just turn back.

We could laugh; wasn’t that usually how shortcuts went?

But when I pulled gently on Pierre’s arm, he patted my hand with a laugh and then left it there. My heart rate quickened when he tightened his grip over my fingers.

“Nothing down here?” he said incredulously. His accent was still charming, but when he smiled down at me, I couldn’t remember what I’d found so attractive about his eyes.

Perhaps it was just the night, but there was not the spark of life I remembered.

“You are quite mistaken, mon cherie. Victor Noir’s grave is this way.”

He urged me along faster and I resisted after a few stumbling steps.

“It’s getting late,” I said, trying to remain polite. “I’m tired now, so—”

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