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Looking back, he knew that his confidence had in fact been arrogance. Margo had given him no hint that she’d wanted a ring on her finger. Everything about her—her bold, sassy, sensual confidence, her easy acceptance of their arrangement—had indicated otherwise. And yet she’d admitted that the persona she’d adopted was nothing more than a mask.
So did the real Margo, the lovely, thoughtful, interesting woman he’d come to know beneath that mask, want what he wanted now?
‘Leo...’ She came up behind him and rested her hands lightly on his shoulders.
Leo blinked back the memories before turning around to face her and slip his arms around her waist.
‘We’ll always have Paris,’ he quipped, and though she smiled he saw her eyes were troubled.
‘Will we?’ she asked softly, sadly, and too late Leo realised how that had sounded.
They would always have Paris and the memories they’d made here...whether they wanted them or not.
* * *
Margo tried to banish the disquiet that fluttered through as she saw Leo’s eyebrows draw together in a faint frown. She’d been nervous about coming back to Paris, to the city where they’d met so often during their affair, and the very room where Margo had rejected him. She didn’t think she’d imagined the suddenly shuttered look on Leo’s face as he’d come into her apartment, and she had a terrible feeling he was remembering how he’d proposed to her here and what her answer had been.
Now, however, he smiled, his face clearing, and looked around her sitting room. ‘Do you know, before I came here I would have thought you’d have some modern, sleek penthouse? All chrome and leather and modern art.’
‘You mean like your bachelor pad in Athens? I prefer a homier place to live.’
‘Which is why you were a buyer of home furnishings, I suppose?’
She nodded and he strolled around the apartment, noting the squashy velveteen sofa, the Impressionist prints, the porcelain ornaments and figurines. She’d had a lot of her things sent to Greece, but there were certainly enough left for Leo to examine and make her feel oddly exposed.
‘How did you get into the buying business, anyway?’ he asked as he picked up a carved wooden figurine of a mother holding her infant.
It had been whittled from one piece of wood and the result was a sinuous, fluid sculpture in which it was impossible to tell where the mother finished and the child began. Margo had always loved it, but never had it seemed so revealing of her life, her secret desires and heartache.
‘I got a job with Achat, working on a sales counter, when I was sixteen. From there I moved up through the ranks,’ she said. ‘I’ve never actually worked anywhere else.’
‘And you wanted to go into the buying side of things? Home furnishings in particular?’
‘Yes, that was what I always liked.’
The bedsits and sheltered housing, the homeless shelters and foster placements that had comprised her childhood homes had never felt like proper places to grow up. Safe or loving places. And she had, Margo knew, been trying to create that for herself—through her job and in her own apartment.
Somehow she had a feeling Leo knew that too.
He put the figurine down and turned to her. ‘You have a beautiful home here,’ he said. ‘You have a real talent for making a space feel cosy and welcoming.’
‘Thank you.’
‘If there are any more things you’d like to take to Greece I can arrange for them to be shipped.’
‘I’ll look around tomorrow and box things up.’
He smiled and reached for her again. Margo snuggled into him, grateful for the feel of his arms around her, making her feel safe. For now.
* * *
While Margo went to Achat to say her goodbyes Leo attended to his business in the city. He’d been acting a bit mysteriously, which had made Margo wonder what he was doing or planning, but she told herself not to be nervous and just to wait and see.
In any case, her arrival at Achat put Leo out of her mind for a little while, as she was caught up in reunion s with different acquaintances, a bittersweet meeting with her boss, who wished she could stay, and then a catch-up with Sophie.
They left the office for a café with deep velvet chairs and spindly little tables a few blocks from Achat. Sophie ordered them both bowl-sized cups of hot chocolate with lashings of whipped cream.
‘A celebration,’ she proclaimed, ‘since things seem to have turned out all right for you.’
‘How do you know they have?’ Margo challenged as she took a sip of the deliciously rich hot chocolate.
‘You haven’t sent me any panicked texts,’ Sophie answered, ‘and, more importantly, you look happy, Margo. Happier than I think I’ve ever seen you.’
