Page 75 of When He Lies
His arm tightened around Simone’s shoulders. “I don’t like this.” Hello, bad omen.
Soft laughter. Real laughter spilled from her. Damn but he enjoyed the sound of her laughter. The look of her smiles. Her scent. Her taste. Fuck, he enjoyed everything about her.
Like that doesn’t spell trouble for me.
“Oh, come now, Ryan,” Simone chided. “Dark-and-dangerous you can’t be afraid of a little kitty.”
It wasn’t that he was afraid. He was simply cautious. “Black cats are bad luck.” Didn’t everyone know that?
“In France, they are actually viewed as good luck.” She crouched. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
No, she was not calling a black cat to her. Was the woman just trying to invite bad luck? After the danger she’d already faced?
“Kitty!”
With a soft meow, the cat bounded back toward Simone. The thinnest, roughest looking cat he’d ever seen. One complete with a scraggly ear that looked as if a bigger animal might have tried to claw it off at one point.
She offered her hand to the cat, and Ryan could have sworn the black cat nodded before it allowed Simone to stroke its head. “Aren’t you beautiful?” Simone cooed to the harbinger of darkness.
All right, fine, the cat was probably not the actual harbinger of darkness but… “Do you need to pet it? Now?” Ever?
“Yes, I do. Because my mother was French and, as I told you, in France, black cats are good luck. There is nothing bad about this beautiful darling.”
The cat was purring.
Ryan glanced around, searching for threats. As far as he was concerned, the cat was just a sign that this side trip out into the night was about to take an unfortunate turn.
As if the attack in the suite had not been bad enough.
“Good luck, good fortune, and maybe even a bit of good magic for you in life.” Another careful pat on the cat’s back before Simone rose to her full height. “I had a black cat when I was a child. When I was with my parents. His name was Lucky.”
Unlucky would have been more fitting. Now that she was talking about her past, he found that he could not move. He wanted to hear every detail, though he feared the story was going to be painful. Dark.
The rain began to fall a bit harder.
The cat ran away.
“Wait!” Simone called out, but the cat was already gone. Her head tipped back. “I don’t really like the rain,” she said. A shiver skated over her body. “When we were at Frederick’s country estate, I wasn’t lying about the fact that I can’t stand storms.” Raindrops sprinkled over her face, and she shuddered. “Reminds me too much…” Her words trailed away as another shiver rocked her.
“Let’s go back to the hotel.” Where he could better control the environment and where she wouldn’t be shivering from the cold and the rain.
But Simone shook her head. “I need to be outside. I need to breathe.”
She could breathe in the hotel?—
“The Arch,” she decided. “Let’s go there. If we’re under the Arch, we’ll be sheltered from the rain.”
The sky seemed to open up around them as they rushed toward the Arch. The rain wasn’t a trickle any longer. It hit far harder. More of a downpour and would it have killed Jezebel to mention the weather forecast to him when he’d updated her and said they were going out? Hell. Talk about getting drenched.
He yanked off his coat and tried to cover Simone with it as they raced toward the waiting Arch. She darted forward, and he was right with her. Moving fast, faster…
Until they were under the massive Arch. Until the stone walls were on either side of them, and they were protected from the downpour.
He realized that he still had his coat raised over her head.
She stood on the edge of the Arch, watching the rainfall. There was no sign of the cat she’d been so enamored with moments before. No sign of anything but the rain. They appeared to be the only people out, but he knew other agents had to be watching them in the darkness. Jezebel had promised more eyes would be monitoring them.
“I hate the rain.” Simone’s shoulders sagged. “It wouldn’t stop that night. The car was in the ditch. I was trapped, and the water was just rising and rising.”
