When You Come Back to Me (Lost Boys #2) - Emma Scott Page 0,117

it in my pocket, downed the rest of my drink, and strode across the room to Jean-Baptiste Moreau.

“Well?” I demanded.

He smirked, amused, but his dark eyes raked me up and down. “Can I help you?” His voice was low and smoky and tinged with a thick accent.

“I hope so.” Help me, JB. Help me forget him. “I’m Holden Parish.”

“I know who you are,” he said. “I’m Jean-Baptiste Moreau.”

His hand closed around mine, and the deal was sealed right then and there.

“I have a question for you, JB.”

“No one calls me that.”

“But you make an exception for me.”

“I suppose I do.” His gaze roamed my face, lingering on my mouth and then my hair. “Silver. I like it.”

My one cheat against anonymity. River could find me in a crowd…

“My question is,” I said, “we’ve been in the same room for the last hundred hours. Why are we just now meeting?”

JB laughed, showing beautiful white teeth in a face of perfect dark skin. “Perhaps I’m shy?”

“God, I hope not.”

His smile turned seductive, his dark eyes locking on mine. “Why don’t you take me upstairs and find out?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Hours later, JB lay sleeping in the tangled sheets in my bed while I sat in the suite’s next room, writing furiously in a journal by the light of a small desk lamp. A bottle of Ducasse sat beside me, half empty.

For the last three months, Suite 1925 had been my home. It wasn’t the biggest suite the hotel had to offer but it had a view of the Eiffel Tower, and Josephine Baker had lived here for a while, which made it feel appropriately artsy.

With JB’s scent still all over me, my body still humming from our tumble in the sheets, I wrote about River until my hand cramped. I wrote to River, crying out for him, my pen crawling over the paper, falling down the page until it was just his name, over and over, blotted with my tears.

“Goddammit…” I whispered brokenly. “I can’t do this…”

I could write, drink, or fuck my way through Europe—and had been doing that exact thing for the better part of a year—and River couldn’t hear me. Somewhere beneath the cold whispers, I knew I couldn’t keep going like this much longer.

My alcohol-soaked brain concocted a plan to rescue my broken heart. Like a puppet guided by someone else’s strings, I staggered out of the chair and made my way to the phone on the small table under Josephine’s smiling face. My fingers fumbled over the receiver.

“Can we help you, Monsieur Parish?” the operator answered in her French accent.

“Concierge,” I said, glancing at my trunk of journals under the window. Years’ worth of my story. Everything that was me was in that trunk, raw and unfiltered.

The concierge came on the line. “How can I assist you, Monsieur Parish?”

“I need to have something sent to America. Immediately.”

We spoke for a few minutes and then I staggered back into the bedroom. JB slept peacefully, his strong body spread out, claiming ownership of my bed, just as he’d claimed my body that night.

Too late, I thought, wandering back to the living area. I belong to someone else. I will always belong to him…

At the striped couch in the living room, the puppeteer cut the strings. I collapsed and pulled a thin throw blanket over me. Shivering, I curled in a ball and fell into oblivion.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Amelia, get back here!” I followed my sister through the front door. “We’re not done talking about this.”

She ignored me. The same silent treatment she’d given me in my truck when I got her from the police station where she’d been picked up for truancy. She stomped up the stairs to her room. I was about to go after her when a sharp pain lanced up my shin. I tripped, catching myself on the bannister.

“Goddammit.”

Someone had left a steamer trunk in the entry. It looked vaguely familiar; maybe Dazia was back for a visit. I rubbed my shin with a curse and started after Amelia upstairs, but her door slammed hard enough to make the house shiver.

“Shit.”

I gave the trunk a kick, anger and frustration boiling up in me. I fought for calm; if they escaped, the grief was sure to follow.

“But the fucking police station?” I seethed and stormed through the house to the den.

Dad was in his chair, having taken the day off from the shop. He’d been doing that more and more lately. A replay of the 2018 Eagles-Patriots Super