“Late rendezvous?” Celine ventured.
“Grandfather.”
“What does he want this time?”
“Hopefully begging me to return home,” Bastien said, rubbing the back of his neck. Wincing, he quickly pulled his hand away when his fingers touched one of the needles. “My sleeping arrangements are not the best at the moment.”
Celine scrunched her nose in mock-concern, causing her glasses to slide down. “Aww, has Elana left you sleeping on the couch?”
“I’m sleeping onacouch.”
“And I was worried,” she muttered. “Silly me.”
“It’s not like that,” Bastien protested. “I’m staying with my best friend and—oh, what?”
Celine was staring at him over the rim of her glasses. “Men and women are neverjustfriends.” Letting go of the neckline, she motioned for him to take off the gown. “Especially if that man isyou.”
“You and I are friends,” he pointed out.
Celine almost snorted; somehow she managed to hold herself in check. “You and I are not friends, Bas. You need money and I need you to keep quiet. Friendships do not have conditions.”
She sat down on the machine again, leaving him to mull over that thought.
There had been a time when she had wondered if they could have been friends. She remembered her first time visiting the Ménard mansion after receiving an ironically posh invitation in Anaïs’s slapdash handwriting. Ten minutes in, and she had heard a voice screeching from another room:“You are not going out like that. Wipe those eyes!”
It had resembled her mother’s admonishments so much that Celine’s head had whipped in that direction, her heart hammering anxiously in her chest. And then Bastien had walked in, eyes rimmed with kohl and rolling at the remonstrations.
Celine couldn’t stop thinking about that encounter whenever she met him afterwards. But this grudge between him and Jacques had made it impossible for them to so much as talk without tossing jibes at each other.
“Well…we could be,” he said once he was back in his own clothes.
“You want us to befriends?” The sheer incredulity of the idea caused her to look up and feed the pieces she was stitching together into the machine. It resulted in a wrinkly stitch that bunched up the fabric. Celine cursed under her breath, carefully lifting the needle to clean up the mess. “Look what you did.”
“It is not a crazy notion,” Bastien pressed, coming up to her desk. Planting his hands on each side of the sewing machine, he hovered over her. “You’re actually fun when you’re not play-acting the obedient good girl. I will confess, I have been praying for those magazines to be right about your rebellious alter ego. Who knew it only required a little poking to come out.”
He was wrong about that. Shewasobedient, and on top of that, she was a miserable people-pleaser. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t handle the look of disappointment. She would rather flatten herself on the ground for people to walk all over her if that was what they wanted than be met with a look of pure displeasure. No manner of poking could make her break out of that. Celine knew—she had tried.
He was, however, right about something. “It’s not an alter ego.”
“Even better.”
The whirring of the machine stopped again.
Celine didn’t buy it. Bastien was playing at something, she could not guess what yet. He had never shown a sliver of interest in her, save for using whatever information he had ferreted about her against Jacques.
Not today apparently. Today, he wanted to be friends.
She looked at him,reallylooked, scouring for any hidden intentions behind his words. When she came up empty, she returned to her sewing.
“You’re fun, too,” she admitted, hoping the words would get lost amidst the whirring of the machine. “That is, when you’re not salivating over everything that breathes.”
Bastien’s grey eyes flashed. “You know, you should get more credit for that sharp tongue. A pity I hadn’t noticed before.”
A snort slipped Celine’s lips.
“What now?”
“I willtryand believe your sudden desire to be friends,” she replied. “But do not act as though you are interested in me now. I know why you’re helping me—yourotherreason, not the money.”
