Wicked Becomes You(83)

Two tables.

Another muffled curse pierced the tomblike silence of the room. More players laid down their cards.

One table.

She reached the entrance just as Alex did. He put his arm around her waist as the doors opened for them. “Head down,” he said softly as they exited the gaming salon.

Ahead of them, at a distance enviably closer to the main exit, a couple strolled arm in arm. As the next pair of doors opened for them, Gwen released a breath: she did not see Barrington or his men anywhere down the long stretch before them. “Have we enough to get to Nice?”

“Yes.”

By some silent, mutual decision, they picked up their pace. They had almost made it back to the lobby when a voice cried out, “Ramsey!”

The shout seemed to ring off the marble floors. Gwen looked up and saw Barrington standing at attention beside a very startled Signora Rizzardi.

“Music,” Alex said decisively. He knocked open the doors to the concert hall with an elbow and yanked her after him.

The interior was dark, the great chandelier put out; she could make out nothing at first but rows upon rows of red velvet chairs, and then the backs of heads, all turned toward the spotlit stage where a huge orchestra was playing, seventy men at the least. Alex’s grip slid to her hand, tightening; she followed him blindly along the back of the theater as her vision clarified. The walls were covered in paintings of Greek deities, the ceiling ornately carved and gilded, and so far above them that she felt very small, suddenly—almost childish. She had a fleeting feeling, based perhaps on dim memory, that she was sliding about in the shadows while the adults, her parents, glittering people, threw a party to which she’d not been invited.

They reached the very end of the back row. “Here,” Alex whispered, and she heard the faint snick of a latch, and then the door was opening into fresh air, and he was pulling her outside, into a small courtyard that appended the main entrance.

Not until their feet touched the grass again did she breathe freely. And then, all at once, she wanted to run. To dance? Oh, something wild and rollicking! An escape in Monte Carlo! She turned to him to say something—maybe only to laugh—and he was already smiling at her and behind him she saw the man creeping up, the man from the stairway in Barrington’s house, and the glint of metal in his hand.

Instinct was all. She threw herself forward into Alex, knocking him out of the path of the descending pistol butt. He stumbled back, and the guard missed her; he had not gauged for her height. “Bitch!” he snapped at her and swung back his hand.

Alex hit him. She had never seen a man take a hit before. She had never gone to watch boxing. It was not appropriate for debutantes. She had not known the sound it made, the sickening crunch, the spray of blood it occasioned.

The man dropped to the ground.

“Bloody Christ,” Alex said, shaking out his hand, and for a confused moment she thought he was complaining of the pain, until he took her by the shoulder and turned her roughly toward him. “Stop doing that,” he said, and she shook her head. She had no idea what he meant.

He made a sound low in his throat, and from the way he let go of her, she interpreted it as disgust. “Come,” he growled. “Let’s find a cab.”

Barrington’s search made it inadvisable to stay at the best hotels, the second-rate hotels, the thoroughly average hotels, and also, to Gwen’s regret, any hotels that had proper names. Stepping down from the carriage at Nice, she dogged Alex through a tangle of streets that led off the main stretch, past a diminishing number of stationers’ stores with books on roulette in the windows, into an area where French flags no longer waved gaily from windows but hung in tattered strips from rusting poles. At a corner, they paused so he could shake awake a street urchin and ask, in rapid French, where a bed might be found. The boy looked as if he wouldn’t answer, but he grew friendlier once he had his Napoleon. “Madame Gauthier,” he said, and roused himself, on the promise of another coin, to show them the way.

Gwen was braced for very shabby appointments, and Madame Gauthier’s unkempt appearance—she answered the door in a stained wrapper, with a shawl wrapped round her hair—did not invest greater confidence. But after retrieving a pitcher of water from one low shelf, the woman led them through a pleasant courtyard, whitewashed, with cactus growing at the edges, and then presented them with a room that was bare but clean: a bed large enough for two; a chamber pot; a washstand; a pitcher and glass. The plaster walls were cracked, but they were as white as marble.

When the door closed behind their hostess, Gwen sank onto the bed. “Do you think we’re safe now?”