Page 89 of The Lost Heiress
Ana’s eyes were cold and hard as she looked at him. She crossed her arms over her chest, as if she were cold, and something about the bareness of her shoulders and the way she was standing there, all alone, looking at him, made him feel weak in the knees. She opened her mouth to say something, but Ransom cut her off.
“I need a drink,” he said brusquely.
He turned away from her quickly and made a beeline for the bar. When he caught sight of the line there, he thought better of it; hegrabbed a glass of champagne from a proffered tray instead and headed for the open doors to the patio. Outside, the night air was cool and crisp against his face. He hadn’t realized until that moment that he’d been sweating, the collar of his shirt sticking to the back of his neck. He took a swig of champagne and felt the bubbles, hard and abrasive against the inside of his throat.
What was wrong with him? What was he doing?
He stared out into the dark night. He couldn’t see the water anymore with the lateness of the hour, but he could hear the waves in the distance beating against the shore.
“What the hell was that about?”
Ransom turned to see Jacqueline standing behind him, looking winded and irritated.
“What?” he asked.
“You left that poor girl stranded on the dance floor.”
Ransom shrugged. “I didn’t feel like dancing.”
Hugh came up behind Jacqueline, jovial and oblivious, two fresh drinks in hand. “An old-fashioned for you, my dear,” he said, handing Jacqueline hers. “What’d I miss?”
“Nothing,” Ransom said. “I’m going to bed.”
“Bed?” Jacqueline said, sounding insulted. “It’s barely nine thirty.”
“You two enjoy yourselves,” Ransom said curtly. He had to get out of there.
“Huzzah!” Hugh said, lifting his glass in mock salute while Jacqueline huffed in blatant disapproval.
“You’re not really going to turn in early at your own party? Ransom?” she called after him as he walked away, his back to her.
The night was already a disaster, and it had barely started. He couldn’t wait for it to all be over, for all this to finally be behind him once and for all.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Paris, 1961
On Tuesday evenings, they played cards with their neighbors, crowded around the tiny table next to the hot plate and sink and freezer box that comprised their makeshift kitchen.
“I don’t think I would have ever left my husband if he spoke French,” Astrid said, taking a drag on her cigarette in one hand and surveying her cards in the other. “French is such a romantic language. Every time they speak, it sounds like they’re making love to you. But English, it’s so vulgar, all the harsh consonants, ther’s. We sound like barking seals. And it’s easy to be cross and fight when you sound like that. But I don’t think French men ever say anything ugly.”
“Never mind how they speak,” Gisele said. “It’s how they make love that sets them apart. I’ve never been so pleasured by an American man, an English man, even an Italian, as I have by the French.”
Astrid laughed and laid down a card. “Well, I can’t speak to that—yet.”
Astrid and Florence had been in Paris for over a year now. They’d settled in Montmartre, a hilltop neighborhood on the northern fringes of Paris, where the rent was cheap. Rent went down as the hill went up, so they’d taken an apartment near the top, a few blocks fromwhere a young, struggling Picasso had once lived in his artist abode, Le Bateau-Lavoir.
Their apartment was small—a single room, with a shared bath down the hall. Just a few steps from the table where they now sat was the bed where Astrid and Florence both slept at night. Their laundry hung from a drying rack near the solitary window that they’d left open in hopes of tempting in any passing breeze.
“What about you, Florence?” Gisele asked. “Have you experienced all that French men have to offer?”
“No,” Florence said, blushing. “I’m a tabula rasa when it comes to love.”
“How very Lockean of you,” Hugo said, exhaling a plume of smoke from his cigarette.
“A virgin? At nineteen?” Gisele said, sounding horrified. “Mon Dieu! Mon pauvre. Is this by choice or circumstance?”
“My Florence is an ingenue,” Astrid said, wrapping an arm protectively around Florence’s shoulders. “I happen to think it’s quite romantic that she’s saved herself for so long. I, for one, would love to go back and experience it all again for the first time—that heart-pounding first kiss, the first time you fall in love. But we all only get one first.”
