Covenant (Paris Mob Book 1) (20 page)

I
t was
dark when she woke up, the bed empty beside her. She glanced at the old bedside clock.

3:22 a.m.

She lay on her back, watching the curtains blowing in the breeze. She wanted to stop time. To stave off the moment when she would have to admit that he was gone.

When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she got up, grabbed the old silky robe off the back of the door and wrapped it around her naked body.

She made her way into the living room, dark except for the little bit of moonlight sneaking in through the balcony doors. She opened them and stepped outside, leaning against the railing.

She didn’t have to look to know there would be no note. Everything that needed to be said between them had been said. It had been said the first time he’d taken possession of her body in Vienna. During all their long conversations and lingering walks in Boston. It had been said when he'd stood in front of her at Randall Ayers’ house. When he’d protected her body with his own.

It had been said when he’d shot his brother to save her.

She'd known then that he would leave her. She'd seen it in his eyes. Not the horror that he’d hurt his brother, but the knowledge that Bruno had almost cost Charlotte her life. Christophe was a protector of beauty. He would never allow her to be hurt under his care.

She could call him. Try to change his mind. But it wouldn’t matter. He wasn’t an indecisive man. His decisions were based on reason, and that reason would not be tempered by something like affection.

Even the mystical kind of affection that had seemed to wind around them from that first moment in Paris.

She leaned over the railing, watching the moon cast a pillar of light onto the water. Her heart hurt, like an archaeologist had taken a pick to the center of her body, excavating everything until there was nothing but a shallow grave.

Maybe that was the price of beauty.

And maybe love, too.

She wanted to believe they would meet again. That he would think of her when he walked the streets of Paris, when he saw a Renoir or an Art Deco divan.

Had they been fated to be together? Or was this all destiny had in store for them?

Ducunt volentem fata.

The fates lead the willing.

Time would tell.