But today he raked his hands through his hair, wondered what the hell had become of him, and called his best friend.
“I don’t understand the issue,” Dorian said after Conrad had laid out the scenario for him. Grudgingly, because still Rory felt like his. Only his. “So she’s brand-new. So what. If you don’t handle her, someone else will. How do you imagine you’ll feel about that?”
“I’m not in the market for feelings,” Conrad said darkly.
Dorian laughed. “You can control anything, brother. But not that.”
Conrad sighed, glaring out at Paris and seeing only Rory. And the things he wanted, even when he knew better.
“The trouble is,” he said, “even if I thought it was appropriate, I don’t know if I have it in me.”
There was a pause, then. Conrad could hear Berlin street traffic. The muffled sound of conversations in animated German.
“Listen,” Dorian said after a moment. “Marie Jeanette wasn’t a referendum on your life. I know that your narrative is that she changed, but she didn’t, Conrad. She lied.”
Of all the things he thought Dorian might have said, it wasn’t that.
And Dorian wasn’t finished. “She never wanted the things you did. She wanted a meal ticket. When’s last time you saw her and Claude in any kind of scene? That’s not part of their life.”
“Many people take their play private,” Conrad said. “Including, as an example, you.”
He regretted it the moment he said it, given said private play involvedhis sisterthese days.
“But it’s still a huge part of my life,” Dorian said, then laughed at the expression on Conrad’s face he must have sensed was there. “Though I will spare you the details.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Conrad said dryly. “My understanding is that you and Erika both took holy orders.”
Dorian only laughed again. “Marie Jeanette didn’t want to play, ever. Now she doesn’t have to. She used you, you rightly scraped her off, and I don’t think you should allow the memory of that situation to inform what you do now. You’re allowed to care, Conrad. That’s not a detriment to who you are as a dominant or as a man. It’s what makes you both of those things.”
Because, though his friend wouldn’t say it, Dorian had never been among those who thought Conrad was heartless.
And it was with his best friend’s words ringing in his ears, whether he wanted them to or not, that Conrad told his secretary to hold all his calls and cancel his appointments, because he was going out.
He assumed that Rory might be anywhere, really. The whole city was available to her, after all, since she went about cleaning people’s houses. He assumed she would be off intruding on the privacy of others—and why did he now find that amusing?—but when he went to her flat, the chatty man in the boulangerie below was only too happy to inform him that Mademoiselle Morton did not work on Tuesdays.
Conrad hadn’t quite believed where the man had said she was instead.
The truth of the matter was, he had never heard of acat café.
But when he stalked his way down the street and to the very edge of her neighborhood, the evidence was impossible to ignore. Sure enough, there was a cat café.
A café. With cats.
And not merely a motif of cats, as he had convinced himself on the walk over.
But a café in which there were actual cats. Roaming about.
Conrad wrenched open the door, looked inside, and was not the least bit surprised to find Rory sitting at a café table, a coffee at her elbow, a white cat with a smushed-in face in front of her and a giant ginger one on her lap.
There were cats everywhere. They were covering all the surfaces, climbing up and down trees made of furniture, presumably put there for that purpose.
If you do this,a voice in him that might have been himself all those years ago, flush with certainty after ending things with Marie Jeanette,you can never tell yourself later that you didn’t know what you were walking into.
Because, when he stopped to think about it, of course Rory wouldn’t be in a typical café, like every other tourist and Parisian. Of course, though she was in Paris, she was here.
Rory shifted in her chair, the enormously fat orange cat on her lap, and glanced over. And she didn’t startle. She didn’t look at all surprised. She kept her gaze on Conrad as if she’d been waiting for him to come.
That, too, felt very nearly inevitable.