Almost immediately, he signalled for another beer.
Veronica almost fainted with nervous relief. He wasn’t just going to get up and leave! Although at this rate they were going to drink each other under the table before they said a word to each other, she thought with an inward gurgle of amusement.
For a while she was content to sit and bide her time, listening and occasionally being drawn in by the general comments about the heatwave and the state of the city that the Patron periodically offered around the bar—in heavily accented English to Veronica, Spanish to the waitress and French to the man barely pretending to read his newspaper, who replied with concise, but perfectly amiable comments in both of the Romance languages.
How appropriate … the whispered thought brought a husky laugh to Veronica’s lips, the unusually deep voice, which had often embarrassed her as a teenager, suddenly an advantage as it drew dark eyes snapping to her face.
This time she was ready for him. She let her laugh die to a natural throaty chuckle as she held his gaze, picked up her drink, and walked the three steps to his table.
‘Parlez-vous Anglais?’ she asked, her resonant voice warm with the remnants of laughter.
He tilted his head back to look up at her and folded his arms across his chest, the open paper lying forgotten across his splayed knees.
‘Non!’ The uncompromisingly curt answer was delivered like a flung gauntlet.
His eyes weren’t black, as she had first thought, but brown, like the darkest of dark chocolate, the best and most expensive kind … intense, slightly bitter at first but delivering the most delicious sensory thrill.
At the moment they were veiled and enigmatic, not giving a hint as to his thoughts as he waited to see how she would handle the flat rejection.
‘Oh.’ She sank into the chair on the other side of his narrow table. ‘Je ne parle pas bien française.’
Her trusty little French phrase book was tucked in her purse, but tonight wasn’t a night for going by the book.
He shrugged, pushing out that sullen lower lip to indicate his unspoken contempt. Trying to look unruffled, she took a leisurely sip of her drink. She knew he spoke some Spanish, but that was no help as far as she was concerned.
‘Italiano?’ she tested, although she only spoke a basic word or two herself.
His stony expression didn’t change. ‘Non.’
‘Hmm …’ She eyed the angle of his chin, and understood that he was going to stick stubbornly to French, whatever she said. But she could be stubborn, too. It was one of her greatest strengths … and her biggest flaw, according to Neil, her ex-fiancé.
‘Te reo Maori?’ she threw in mischievously, seriously doubting that he would be of the minority speakers of New Zealand’s second language, especially when he didn’t even speak the first—English.
Or did he?
She detected a dark glimmer in the back of the brown eyes as his mouth compressed. Was that a tiny quiver of amusement at the down-turned corner? She felt a surge of elation.
She decided to let go of her security blanket and allowed her wrap to slide from her shoulders, turning to drape it across the back of her chair, her twisting movements drawing attention to the whiteness of her lightly freckled shoulders against the blackness of the chiffon top.
As she turned back she almost blushed to feel the nervous rise and fall of her breasts, cupped in their luxuriant nests of embroidered tulle, against the sheer silk. Every breath felt like a wanton act of provocation.
And naturally he looked … he was a man, after all … with a thoughtful expression that was somehow more stimulating than a leer, and Veronica was thankful for the strategic pleats of tulle when she felt the tips of her breasts begin to tingle and harden into betraying little points.
‘Russian? Icelandic?’ A slight breathlessness made her voice even more husky as she resumed their game.
His gaze fell back to his newspaper and for a shattering moment she feared that she had overplayed her hand. She looked around for inspiration, glancing over at the owner of the bar, who had been following the progress of their encounter with frank interest. To her chagrin he grinned and gave an expressive shrug, as if to indicate the hopelessness of her case.
‘Sprechen Sie Deutsches?’
Veronica’s head whipped back to find the chocolate-brown eyes waiting for her, banked with a taunting amusement, the roughly folded newspaper wedged down the side of the table.
The wretch!
‘Nein,’ she said, giving him look for look. ‘Je parle anglais seulement,’ she stressed, admitting her language deficiency with a defiant tilt of her chin.
A slow, sexy smile trawled across his mouth.
‘Je suis désolé,’he said, placing a mocking hand across his heart.
She understood that, but chose to turn his mockery back on him: ‘Et je suis Veronica,’ she replied pertly.
He laughed and inclined his head. ‘Lucien.’
Effervescent emotion bubbled up inside her. She offered him her hand across the table. ‘Pleased to meet you, Lucien.’
‘Enchanté,’he murmured, and she shivered as she felt the warm slide of his palm against hers, his thumb caressing up over her knuckles, his breath warm on the back of her hand as he lifted it to his mouth, holding her gaze as his lips brushed lightly over her skin.
It was a ridiculously over-extravagant cliché of a gesture, as they both well knew, but it still made Veronica feel hot all over, and when she disengaged her hand she wrapped it quickly around her glass in a vain attempt to cool off.
Noticing that his beer-glass was almost empty, she tried to buy some more time by ordering another round, but he protested when she tried to get herself another Kir and she became even more flushed at the idea that he thought she was drunk. But no—by word, gesture and helpful translation from the bar-owner, she divined that he was changing her order to a Kir Royale, and putting it on his own bill.
It was, she discovered, made with champagne rather than still white wine, and was an altogether more superior drink. Judging from her peep of the Champagne label on the bottle that the barman had discreetly turned away to pour, it was also a great deal more superior in price. Her dark-haired companion, then, was obviously not a poor man … something she had already deduced from the expensive labels on his casual clothes.
The champagne went immediately to her head, and banished her former nerves and with them any remaining doubts about the wisdom of what she was doing. You didn’t need to speak the same language, she discovered, in order to have a good time—in fact, in some ways it was more liberating not to have to make sense!
The language differences made deep conversation impossible, but neither of them was in a mood to be serious, so over the course of the evening they invented their own way of communicating.
Across the twin barriers of language and a mutual reluctance to touch on personal subjects, they established the important basics: the fact they were both single, over twenty-one, and currently alone in Paris—she in need of a knowledgeable guide to the best places to be in Paris on Bastille Night, and he … well … her feeble French wasn’t up to questioning his