#spencereaux

The woman by the door kept smiling at him.

Eliot had chosen his position carefully, stationing himself where he would be unobtrusive and unobserved at the bar in the hotel lobby. It was late, and the lobby was empty except the two of them and the bartender. There shouldn’t have been anyone to notice his presence.

She was noticing him. 

Maybe she thought he was looking at her. He wasn’t—he was looking past her, through the window and out to the street, waiting for a dark jacket marked with a half-moon pin. If his intel was correct, his target would arrive within the next hour. Eliot had been tracking the man for the better part of a week, half of which he’d spent trying to cross the Chinese border into Vietnam. He was operating on less than three hours of sleep over the last two days, and he didn’t have time for distractions.

 But when she stood up and glided over to the bar, Eliot didn’t leave.

“Le changement d’horaire,” she said, her voice low and lavish in the deserted room. “Vous ne pouvez pas dormir?”

French. Eliot looked her over again, noting her European features, her Italian dress. He hadn’t spoken French in years—not since his first tour—and though her words made sense, his brain wouldn’t translate an answer for her.

“Time change,” he said finally. “No, I can’t sleep either.”

She smiled and sidled closer. “Un Américain? Vous ne parlez pas français?”

“I understand French,” he answered. “But I don’t speak it very well. Can’t do the ‘r’ right.”

She slid a silk wrap from her shoulders and draped it over the bar. It matched the clinging champagne-colored fabric of her dress, which dripped off her curves and pooled in shimmering, strategic ruches along her chest and hips. When she perched on the barstool beside him, her knee parted a thigh-high slit in the draping skirt and brushed the inside of his leg.

“Je m’appelle Louna,” she said, reaching to where his arm rested on the bar and laying her fingers across his wrist.

Eliot withdrew his hand. He turned his body back toward the door, but she pressed her knee against his to hold him in place. “Et vous?” she asked innocently.

“Not looking for company, ma’am,” he said.

She shook her head and leaned closer. “Je ne comprends pas.”

“You do understand,” Eliot said, his voice soft.

A flicker of interest crossed her face, and she sat back, returning the space she’d taken. “Bien. Mais moi, je cherche de la compagnie. Puis-je rester?”

Eliot hesitated. She said she wanted company, and she was clearly a woman who was used to standing in the spotlight—but he couldn’t give it to her. He needed to stay in the darkness, unseen, unhindered. Someone who shone as brightly as she did wasn’t just a distraction.

She was a danger.

Can I stay? she’d asked.

No, he thought.

“You’re a long way from home,” he said.

“Ah, je sais.” She flashed him a smile that lit up the bar and shifted her leg away from his. “Je suis ici pour le travail. Toujours pour le travail, jamais pour le plaisir. Vous aussi?”

“Yes, I’m here for work, too,” Eliot said. “What kind of business are you in?”

Louna waved her hand, and the bartender who had been tactfully ignoring them stepped over. “Rượu vang trắng nhé,” she said, in perfect Vietnamese. The bartender nodded and reached for a bottle of white wine, and Louna turned back to Eliot. “Et vous?”

“Nothing for me,” he said.

She lifted one bare shoulder and tilted her head in a suit yourself gesture.

The next hour passed in a blur of lilting laughter and stolen touches. Louna was as incandescent as the moon she was named after, radiant as she spoke about her work with art museums in Paris and Florence, the French architecture and history in Vietnam, her partnership with the Vietnam National Museum of History in Hanoi. She was on her way to Lào Cai to meet a representative from China to conduct an art exchange, and had stopped in Ban Houei Xai for the night. When she asked about his work, Eliot redirected the conversation back to the museum. She sparkled under his questions, patting his arm or his chest in admonishment whenever he deflected, and then shamelessly indulging in each changed topic.

But her words weren’t nearly as captivating as her mannerisms. She seemed to be making a game of pushing the barrier Eliot tried to keep between them, walking a tightrope between alluring and aggravating. If he drew back, she pressed an attack—if he turned away, she trailed her fingers across his cheek to reclaim his attention.

“Pas de nom,” she purred at one point. “Comment t’appellerai-je?”

No name. What shall I call you?

She’d switched to the familiar you, and he tried not to dwell on the difference. “Nothing,” he said.

She ran her finger along the collar of his jacket, then up his neck and through the short hair on the side of his head, down his jaw, finally coming to a rest beneath his bottom lip. “Assis seul dans l’ombre,” she said quietly. Her words sent a shiver of apprehension through him, and his jaw clenched without his permission. “Que chasses-tu, mon loup?”

She was calling him a wolf. Her wolf—a term of endearment, probably, and a way to poke fun at him for not telling her his name, but the rest of her words chased themselves in constricting circles through his thoughts. Sitting alone in the shadows… what are you hunting, my wolf?

He forced himself not to look away. “Just can’t sleep. Time change, like you said.”

But something in his reaction stood out to her, and she pressed on his lips until they parted, exposing his teeth. “Quelles grandes dents tu as,” she whispered.

Eliot took her hand, the cold pit in his stomach abating slightly at the sight of her bright eyes. She was teasing him again, testing his boundaries, not knowing how close she was to rattling the bars of his cage. “And what big eyes you have,” he answered, matching her lighter tone but holding her fingers tightly.

She accepted the warning and sat back, returning to the safer shallows of art and travel. 

When movement outside the window drew his eye, he listened with one ear as Louna discussed a painting she had acquired from London the month before. The door opened, and in his peripherals, Eliot watched a man in a dark jacket shuffle through the lobby, followed by two obvious bodyguards. The man mumbled to the clerk at the front desk and continued on to his room without a glance at his surroundings. His guards brooded in his wake, but Louna was between them and Eliot, and they didn’t seem to notice him as they followed their charge down the hall.

Dammit. He didn’t know which room they were going to. He’d hoped to overhear, but they spoke too quietly, and trying to read lips in Vietnamese while translating French in his head was impossible on three hours of sleep. “Excuse me,” he said, interrupting an impassioned description of Monet’s lilies. Louna broke off, but put a hand on his chest to stop him from leaving.

“Qu’est qu’il-y-a?” she said.

“I have a meeting,” Eliot said. “The man who walked through. We had an appointment, but he didn’t see me. I’m sorry—je suis désolé. I need to go.”

“Ah,” Louna said. “La proie du loup.”

The wolf’s prey.

He inhaled, forcing down the chill that tried to wind its way around his spine. “Excuse me,” he said again.

“Où vas-tu?” she asked. Where are you going?

The pressure of her fingertips over his heart held him in his seat, so he settled for a version of the truth. “To ask for his room number.”

“Oh?” she said, smiling. “C’est ma faute. Je t’ai distrait. Permets-moi de t’aider.”

She stood, running her hand down his arm as she turned from the bar. It’s my fault, she’d said. I distracted you. Let me help. Something about that made him want to call her back and tell her to forget about it.

But he had a job to do, and if it came to using her to get it done, then so be it.

The bartender hovered beside Louna’s empty wineglass, following the trail of her dress to the front desk. Eliot caught his eye, and he mumbled a frantic apology Eliot could hardly understand and turned back to his work.

He listened as Louna spoke sweetly in Vietnamese, making an excuse about how she had been waiting for her friend, but was lost in conversation and didn’t notice when he came in. Could she please know his room number so she could go meet him? The woman behind the desk smiled and checked her computer, and Eliot felt a prickle of something sour in his throat.

Louna hadn’t mentioned him. By withholding his involvement, she’d unknowingly placed herself in what should have been Eliot’s position—the last known connection between the man who had walked through the lobby and what the hotel staff would find in his room the next morning. Her light would draw all attention, leaving Eliot free to operate in the shadows, free to finish the job, free to return to Moreau before spiraling off on his next assignment. It was exactly what he needed.

She glowed across the room, warm and remote, and he couldn’t look away.

The woman behind the desk said something he couldn’t hear, and Louna thanked her and returned to the bar. “Maintenant,” she said, bending over him to whisper in his ear. “J’ai quelque chose que tu veux. Que me donneras-tu en retour?” 

Now I have something you want. What will you give me for it?

A curling tendril of her hair tickled his cheek. She drew back to look at him, and he waited in silence as she searched his face, her hands resting on the back of his stool, their chests nearly touching. Her gaze dropped to his mouth, lingering a moment before rising slowly again, and still, Eliot didn’t move.

A small, disappointed smile touched her lips. “Salle 215,” she said.

Eliot stood, and she moved as he did, keeping her body a breath from his. In her heels, she was about as tall as he was, and he looked across the expanse between them and wondered what it might have been like if he had met her three or five or ten years ago.

“Merci,” he said quietly.

“Viens avec moi,” she said.

Come with me.

Eliot smiled. He reached past her, took her wrap from the bar, and settled it gently over her shoulders.

“Good night, ma’am,” he said.

She placed her hand against his cheek. “Au revoir, mon loup.”