Black Ice - Anne Stuart [25]
“Here you go,” he said, making no effort to turn off the car. “This is the remarkably boring little town of St. André. There’s a small bookstore around the corner, and if you change your mind you can get yourself some lunch at the café. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
“You’ll be back? Where are you going?”
“I have some business to attend to. If you were counting on my company I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there are certain things that demand my attention….”
“I’m not disappointed,” she said, feeling oddly grumpy. She glanced through the windscreen. The sky was dark, overcast, and the town looked small and depressed. “Are you sure the bookstore will have what I need? The town is very small.”
“It doesn’t matter. Hakim doesn’t care about the books—he just wanted to get rid of you for a few hours. Me as well. I doubt he’ll even look at what you bring back.”
She stared at him. “I don’t understand.”
“What’s to understand? This way he kills two birds with one stone.” His hands were draped loosely over the steering wheel. Beautiful hands. Even with the plain gold band.
She opened the door and slid out of the low-slung car. The temperature had dropped, and the wind was picking up, sending leaves scudding across the narrow roadway. “Two hours?” she asked, looking at her watch.
“Probably.” And he pulled away the moment she’d closed the door, disappearing down the narrow road as fast as he could.
It was after one—given the speed he was driving they could be halfway to Marseilles by now. She should have brought an umbrella—the weather was looking more threatening by the moment.
It was just as well that he’d left. He made her unaccountably nervous, and she wasn’t used to that. Men were basically predictable creatures—what you saw was what you got. But Bastien was a different matter altogether. She wasn’t sure of one thing about him—his nationality, his business, even his on-again, off-again interest in her. The only thing she was sure of was that he drove too fast. And smelled too good.
She headed for the bookstore first. Among other things, she certainly couldn’t count on Hakim’s errand being spurious, and she was a conscientious employee, no matter what the circumstances. The place was hard to find—she had to ask directions from a sour-faced old woman who probably wouldn’t have answered her in English even if she understood it. Fortunately Chloe knew her accent was very good, the result of starting French in kindergarten at the private girls’ school her parents had sent her to. She sounded more like a Belgian than a Frenchwoman, but that was much more acceptable than a lowly American.
The bookstore was just the disaster she’d expected. It was filled with the discards from some professor’s old library, and some of the titles were so esoteric even she couldn’t translate them. All in French, of course, and not a dust jacket in sight. They’d probably all been published before the war.
She found a couple of novels and bought them anyway. If they wouldn’t do for Hakim’s French-speaking guests then she’d read them herself. And then she headed back toward the café. Maybe there’d be a newsstand around—glossy magazines would probably serve just as well for bored grocers in their off-hours.
But there was no newsstand, not even a newspaper to be had at the dingy little café. But at least there was food, and by that point Chloe was ravenous.
She had a baguette and brie for lunch, washed down with strong coffee instead of the wine she usually would have ordered. At that point she didn’t plan to go anywhere near alcohol for the duration of this peculiar little job Sylvia had conned her into. And the sooner she was done, and back in her tiny apartment with a fistful of euros, the happier she’d be.
She lingered as long as she could over her meal, checking her watch every now and then. It was almost two hours—surely