Nichelle shrugged off an unexpected twinge of unease. “Wait.” She sat up in the swaying hammock. “Are your parents asleep yet?”
He frowned. “No.”
“Then why are you leaving? I’m sure they want to sit and talk with you some more.” Although Wolfe loved his parents, he was often at work, or at play, seeing them maybe once a month tops, and sometimes not for very long. “You should stay,” she murmured. “The new booty can wait until tomorrow at least.”
She could see his eyebrow tip toward the ceiling, a considering look on his face. He was surprised by her request, she could tell.
“I’ll see,” he finally said, hands in his pockets.
Nichelle knew what that meant. “Okay.” She lay back down. “Have fun tonight, wherever you end up.”
He paused in the doorway again, shoulders broad against the light flooding from the sitting room behind him. “Good night.”
“Don’t let the strange girl bite,” she sang out to him softly.
When he left, she heard Nala stirring nearby. Her friend sat up and swung a leg on either side of the hammock.
“Is he really going to leave his parents’ house on family dinner night so he can go bang some random chick?” The disbelief was plain in Nala’s voice.
“It seems so,” Nichelle said. “He is a man, after all. I think it’s biologically impossible for him to turn down booty.” But even as she said the words, she winced. That wasn’t quite true. Wolfe was actually a lot more discriminating than that.
As if reading her mind, Nala snorted with laughter. “If he caught every piece of ass that got thrown his way, he’d never get any damn work done. Hell, he’d never eat.”
“At least not food, anyway.” Nichelle smiled and curled up in the hammock. It rocked from the movement of her body.
“Doesn’t that piss you off?” Nala asked.
“What?”
“The fact that he’s off screwing around when he could be here with you...and his parents?”
“No. Should it?”
Nala sighed. Even in the dark, Nichelle could practically see her rolling her eyes. The assumption that she and Wolfe were, or at least should be, together wasn’t limited to people in the office. Nala and just about everyone Nichelle loved rarely missed an opportunity to tease her about him, insinuating that there was a lot more going on between them than she and Wolfe were letting on. But she’d never had any romantic or sexual feelings for him. Yes, he was the most interesting of his eight brothers. But that was all. There was nothing more to her admiration than that. He was gorgeous, but there were gorgeous men all over the place, especially in Miami.
“Go back to sleep, Nala.”
Her friend cackled and flopped back down into the hammock. “And you should wake up, Nichelle. That man won’t wait around forever.”
Nichelle snorted, a bad habit she’d picked up from her best friend years ago. “The only one waiting around here is you. For a hookup that’s never going to happen.”
Only silence greeted her declaration. Apparently, Nala had taken her snarky advice and fallen back asleep. Annoyed, Nichelle stared up at the ceiling of the verandah, the hammock swaying with her weight, her mind drifting. To Wolfe.
Paris was beautiful, just like Alice had said. The taxi from the airport dropped them off on a breezy and warm day bright with midsummer sunshine and the smell of baking bread from a nearby boulangerie. On the steps of the hotel, Nichelle drew in a deep lungful of scented air and basked in the skin-prickling heat of the sun. Wolfe had to nudge her up the marble steps and through the gold-trimmed doors, where the doorman watched her with an indulgent smile.
“This is nice,” she said.
He laughed. “Yes, it is.”
Despite her unexpected infatuation with the city, she was more than ready when it came time to unpack and meet Wolfe in his adjoining room for a prewar conference. His narrow windows opened out on to a busy street and a view of the Eiffel Tower. Sunlight poured in like a dream.
Still wearing her travel clothes, she sat across from Wolfe in one of a delicate-looking pair of chairs near the coffee table. Nearly every piece of furniture in the room was lined with gold and perched on spindly legs better suited to effete royalty than a pair of robust Americans. But Wolfe took everything in stride, making himself comfortable in the slight burgundy-and-gold chair that only emphasized his powerful masculinity.
“Let’s go over this thing one more time,” he said.
She wordlessly handed him the tablet with her proposal and the slight changes she’d made during the taxi ride from the airport. As they talked, Nichelle’s gaze slid to the open window. Although she wouldn’t admit it just yet, she’d love to go and play outside. Alice’s glowing talk about the magic of Paris had affected her more than she realized. Even the sound of traffic flowing in through the fifth-story window, a soothing mix of cars, bicycle bells and voices speaking softly in French, was its own seduction.
She and Wolfe weren’t slated to be in Paris long, and the client they were chasing was just as likely to tell them no as he was to say yes. And it was really just peanuts compared to the Quraishi account, the one she’d given Wolfe the proposal for in Miami.
Jamal al Din Quraishi was the Moroccan head of a multibillion-dollar research and development company that also dabbled in oil. Having him as a client would be a real coup. Nichelle had it from her sources that she wasn’t the only one angling for his business. The competition would be high, and gunning for the Quraishi account was going to be a challenge. Luckily, she loved a challenge.
Nichelle stopped in midsentence when she heard her phone chiming from the other room. “One sec.”
In her room, she grabbed her cell and frowned at what she read on the screen. “Favreau doesn’t want to talk business until after three this afternoon,” she said when she got back to his room. She paused to look at the clock. “Four hours from now.”
Wolfe tossed his cell on the replica Louis XVI settee across from him with an impatient scowl. “But he did invite us to come to his restaurant for drinks and enjoy his hospitality.” Apparently, he’d just gotten the same message.
“I’m not here to socialize with people I’d normally avoid at home.” The bright sunlight teased Nichelle through the window, something beautiful and tempting she couldn’t have just yet. “I came to close a deal.”
Wolfe shrugged. “Well he’s happily stringing us along. At this point I’m not even sure if he has any intentions of doing business with us.”
“That little weasel better sit down and listen to reason. I am not in the mood.” She threw another longing glance toward the open window with its gleam of sunlight.
Wolfe caught her eye and smiled. “You keep looking out that window like you have someplace to be. You want to test out the city of romance theory for yourself?”
Nichelle looked away, not able to hide her smile. It was sometimes disconcerting how transparent she was to him. “Not quite. But if Favreau is going to jerk us around for four hours, we might as well go do something interesting that involves sunshine.”
The last time she had been in Paris was for a long trip in college. She and three friends had only stayed in the city for four days before hopping on a train to Naples. The entire four days had been wet and cool, even though it was summer, the clouds and rain retreating for only a few hours at a time before enveloping the city once more in