Brothers of Paradise Series

I find myself just looking at him, my mouth curving into a smile. He looks back at me calmly, but there’s something swirling in the depths of those eyes, too. “You know what,” I say. “I don’t find you uninteresting either.”

His eyes spark. “Well, perhaps this trip will be tolerable after all.”

Ivy

We touch down in the City of Love midday. I feel like a kid in a candy store. This had once been a distant dream, and here I am, about to walk streets I’ve only fantasized about.

“You never told me why you speak French,” I say to Rhys as we follow the bell boy upstairs to our rooms. The Rieler hotel in Paris is magical. The ride to the hotel had been magical. I think that might be the lead word for this stop-magical.

“No, I didn’t,” he says, like that’s a reply. I roll my eyes at his broad back. Predictably unpredictable, that’s Rhys.Ccontent © exclusive by Nô/vel(D)ra/ma.Org.

The bellboy opens the door to a room that is splendor personified. Gilded bedframe. Painted ceilings. It looks like a pared-down version of Versailles. He informs me in near-flawless English that the hotel has a gym on the fourth floor, that breakfast is served from seven, that the staff are at my beck and call. I can barely focus on the words, my eyes locked on the balcony doors.

I open them the second I’m alone, and the view… the Eiffel Tower stretches up into the blue, Parisian sky in the distance, a giant amidst the mid-rise silhouettes. I can clearly make out the sliver thread of the glittering Seine.

It’s a balcony to loudly proclaim Let them eat cake! from, minus, you know, the subsequent beheading. I grip the railing tight and just breathe it all in.

You’re a lucky, lucky bastard, I tell myself. And then I take pictures and send them to Penny, complete with a small video of myself freaking out on the balcony.

A knock on the door and it’s time for makeup and hair, done by a very talented French woman who gives reluctant smiles at my enthusiasm. Forty minutes later I’m all done, dressed up in the first of the four outfits the agency has packed for me to wear in Paris.

So when Rhys knocks on my door, I answer it with the widest of grins. “We’re in Paris,” I tell him.

He blinks at me. “Yes, we are.”

“I’ve never been here before.” And for good measure, I twirl, my skirt floating around me. “And I have the best hotel room in the world, courtesy of Rieler.”

Rhys looks past me, eyes zooming in on the balcony immediately. “We should shoot there, perhaps around sunset.”

“Yes, good idea.”

“After all,” he says dryly, “we’re selling the hotel, too.”

“Yes we are.” Not even his trademark cynicism will dampen my mood. Paris beckons outside the hotel doors like a flirtatious lover, all its secrets and streets available to us. Rome, yesterday. Paris, today.

Rhys snorts by my side. “Excited, are we?”

“Just a tad. Where do we begin?”

He eyes the bag of clothes I’m carrying. “You’re planning on changing a lot?”

“I was told they wanted shots of all these outfits.”

“Then we’ll grab taxis. I think we’ll start at…” He looks at the shoot list and shakes his head in disgust. “Whoever wrote this has never been to Paris.”

“Wasn’t it put together by Rieler?”

“Yes. But there’s no logic in this. Montmartre first, then St. Germain, then up to Le Marais? We’ll be crossing the Seine the whole day. Idiots.”

I bite my lip to keep from smiling. “But you know Paris.”

He lifts his camera high and snaps a picture of me like that, looking at him on the sidewalk. The sound of the trigger goes off like ammunition. “Yes,” he says, “luckily for us, I do.”

Rhys talks to the cab driver completely unhindered, his French fluent. I try not to let it show on my face how deeply impressive I find that, but perhaps I fail, because he turns to me with a raised eyebrow.

“What?” he asks me, like he doesn’t already know, the arrogant man.

We shoot along the winding, tourist-filled streets of Montmartre, both with Paris as our backdrop and Sacre Coeur as the majestic church above us. Rhys swears more than once about the absolute mass of tourists.

“And I thought we’d bypass them by being here early,” he mutters, reaching out impatiently to put a hand on my low back. I can’t walk fast in these heels, but I’m trying to keep up.

“We could return tomorrow morning.”

“We could.” He shakes his head again. “Fucking tourists.”

“Isn’t that what we are?”

“No, we’re here to work.”

“You speak like a local.” He lowers his hand and I slow my pace, grateful. Perhaps I should switch into the flats I’d brought-depending on how far we’re walking…

Rhys is quiet for a beat. “I was, for a while.”

“A local?”

“Yes.”

I pause, sinking down on one of the low stoops. “Changing shoes,” I inform him. “You’ve lived in Paris?”

“For two years, yeah.”

I want to roll my eyes and gape at the same time. It doesn’t seem the least bit surprising, in many ways, that he would do something like that. Was there any part of the world that wasn’t your oyster when you were a Marchand?

“So that’s why you speak French?”

His smile is a slow curve. “No.”

“Do you thrive on being a mystery?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Why not?”

“Because then I’d stop being mysterious.”

I roll my eyes at him, but I’m smiling. “And you accuse models of being vain.”

“Never said I wasn’t.” Out of his back pocket, he fishes out the shoot list. He studies it for a second before returning it, crumpled up on his pocket. “They want you walking by the Louvre and along the Seine next. We’ll do those back-to-back, including Tuilières.”