“We’ll be a half hour at the most, an hour, tops. I think we might be able to find some useful nuggets for the show. I promise to make it quick,” I pleaded.
She pressed her lips together into a smile. “Yes, of course, go. This is your day. I’ll try to hold off going to the exclusive Chanel boutique without you, but no promises,” she teased before turning more serious. “As much fun as this trip has been, I still need all this footage for the show, so Elliott, you stay close to Plum, and be sure to film the rest of the day. Can you both be back at the hotel by five for our spa appointment? We need to be sure to check in promptly, or else they double charge. Or I suppose I could cancel the spa too, if that’s what you really want?”
“No, I don’t want that. Don’t cancel. I’ll be there, and I promise Elliott will film every mundane moment,” I said, crossing my heart.
“Go, have fun. I’ll see you back at the hotel—five sharp. Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, arrêtez-ici, s’il vous plait,” Kate called to the driver.
The car pulled in front of the museum’s entranceway, and the driver opened the door to let me out. Elliott had already hopped out and hustled up the front steps. I followed him, hurrying to catch up, but stopped halfway. He looked over his shoulder and then, puzzled, came down four stairs to meet me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
I held out my palm. “What do you say, temporary truce in the name of Château Mirabelle?”
“Deal,” he said, shaking my hand and sending a warm tingle up my arm. Our eyes met for a second before letting go. “Actually”—he stepped a bit closer, and I craned my neck up to look at him—“I’m . . . I’m surprised and dare I say impressed that you’d sacrifice your trip to Chanel to come here. Maybe I was wrong, and you do care about this thing?”
“And I am excited to hear you admit you’re wrong. I promise to cherish that nugget in the deepest recesses of my heart until the day I die. I do care about Château Mirabelle—and these people. I know my résumé. And I know the kind of person I must’ve seemed like. I almost can’t even blame you—if all I had to go on was what was shown on the screen and in the papers, I’d have a pretty poor opinion of me too.”
“Plum . . .”
“No, really. I get it. Maybe I even was that girl when I made the crack about sitting in coach when we left LA. But being here and experiencing the world this way . . . it’s like I’m seeing it, really seeing it, for the first time. I’ve probably been to more countries and cities than I can count, but did I ever get to know them? The people? What makes a place unique and special? Never. But Maubec is different. I’ve come to care about it. About Agnès and Pascal. Even crotchety Monsieur Grenouille. Is that crazy?”
He nodded and scratched at his chin. “No. Not crazy. Strangely . . . I feel the very same way. Look, I had my mind made up about you from the start, and that wasn’t fair. I see that now. So truce accepted. Now, let’s go and see what else we can uncover to solve this mystery of ours and do our best to get you back to Kate on time. Don’t want to piss off the boss.”
Though over the past few weeks, I’d grown to find Elliott’s gruff demeanor weirdly comforting, the sight of the smallest smirk that crossed his lips was a reassuring sign that we were finally starting to find some middle ground.
“Yeah, hurry your ass up, I didn’t blow off Chanel for nuthin,” I poked back and hurried up the stairs, leaving him in my wake to catch up.
Without hesitation, Elliott lifted his camera to his shoulder and tracked me as we hurried into the Resistance Museum and over to the ticket window. Grabbing a handful of brochures off the counter, I skimmed through them, landing on a pamphlet about a newer exhibit called Vines and Victory, the Role Provence Played in the Resistance. I held it up to the plexiglass information window. “This? Où? Where?”
“Ah oui, follow the signs that way and turn right. You cannot miss it,” the volunteer instructed.
“Merci,” we both called, speed walking as respectfully as we could to the exhibit.
Following her instructions down the narrow hallway into the retrospective, I was immediately drawn in by the photos, testimonials, and maps detailing the Provence region’s involvement in the French Resistance. Elliott and I wandered over to an exhibit about Camp des Milles, an internment camp in Aix-en-Provence for political dissidents, artists, intellectuals, and people to be deported to Auschwitz.
According to a quick Google search, the camp was about an hour from Maubec, so it was pretty likely Luc and Imène Adélaïse had been taken there following their arrest. We might be able to find out what happened to them if we were able to visit. We separated to cover more ground, and I jotted down as much information as I could on the scraps of paper and pamphlets I had on hand before noticing the time. We’d blown well past the one-hour mark, and it was almost five o’clock.
“Why are you still filming!? Move your ass—Kate’s going to kill me!” I cried as we scurried down the steps out of the museum. “Here,” I said, thrusting my pile of notes at him once we climbed in a taxi. “We should try to go to Camp des Milles. I think it may be where the Adélaïses were taken.”
Elliott looked impressed with my discoveries. He glanced over my notes and tucked them deep into his jacket pocket as the taxi pulled up in front of George V. We quickly hopped out, and Elliott paused to anchor his camera atop his shoulder, pointing it in my direction.
“Seriously?!” I gawked at him with the camera still on me. “I know Kate said to film everything, but we’re so late and I doubt anything significant is going to happen between us getting out of this cab and me making it by the skin of my teeth to our spa appointment.”
But Elliott, already filming, was still hot on my tail and wasn’t missing a beat. He probably just didn’t want to be caught without his camera in hand when we met up with Kate. I rushed over to the concierge desk to ask for directions to the spa, and that’s when I spotted him, my heart practically exploding in a single beat. His arms were wrapped around the tiny waist of one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.
Rhys was standing in the middle of George V.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I leaned against the concierge desk at the entranceway of George V, hoping it would help support my trembling frame. What the hell was Rhys doing in Paris, and who was the leggy redhead on his arm? God, he looked good, though. The sleeves of his tight-fitting, white button-down were rolled just past his muscular forearms, showing off a new tan—no doubt fresh from Saint-Tropez or some other exotic destination on the Côte d’Azur. He pushed his fingers through his tousled hair, revealing sun-kissed strands that glistened under the lobby’s swanky lights.
The redhead kissed him softly on the cheek, and a sweet smile swelled from Rhys’s lips. He pushed a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses off his face, and for just a moment, our eyes locked. His face split into a wide grin as if I were an old college buddy instead of his ex-girlfriend of half a lifetime. As excited as he looked to see me, I was pummeled with a sense of dread that almost knocked me off my feet. I had exactly three seconds to decide whether to turn and run, or face him and his new arm candy head-on. Too late, they were already striding over, his swagger and magnetism cutting through the crowd like a hot knife through butter. I moistened my lips, shook out my shoulders, and smoothed my hair down behind my ears.
“Plum, what are you doing here?” he offered casually, as if we were stumbling into each other at a supermarket in West Hollywood.
I blinked hard. “Rhys? Wha . . . What are you doing here?” I scanned the room, and my face grew hot as I noticed all the hotel guests who now had their phones and cameras pointed in our direction. Flashes snapped and the familiar red lights of video recording illuminated through the space, and a spell of dizziness rolled from my stomach to my head.
Rhys looked over his shoulder toward them and then back at me. “I’m here with Anya,” he answered, like I was supposed to know exactly who she was.
“Sorry, and who are you?” I asked, my voice going up at least three octaves.
He reached over and massaged my left shoulder. “Anya, my fiancée. I wanted to tell you, but, you know, you’ve been here . . .”
My eyebrows practically jumped off my face. “Your fiancée? Rhys, I saw you right before I left, and I’ve only been in France for like a month. You met someone you want to spend the rest of your life with in the last four weeks?!” I spoke like she wasn’t standing in front of me.
He tightened his grip around her. “When you know you know, and as soon as I saw her on TikTok, I knew.”
“You met her on TikTok? He met you on TikTok?” I bounced my gaze back and forth between them, unable to digest what he was saying.
“Anya’s a huge influencer. She has like over eight million followers.”
“It’s actually ten, sweetie,” she said, correcting him as she puckered her lips into her compact and slathered on a fresh coat of gloss.
My head was spinning. Engaged? Engaged to be married? Rhys had been categorically clear that he wanted to focus his energies on his burgeoning acting career and felt anything that distracted him from that pursuit was now a waste of time. So how did marriage fare in that equation?
“I thought you didn’t want to get married. I thought you were all about your career right now?”
“I guess I changed my mind. I mean, when you meet the one, I guess you do just know,” he said while gazing at Anya, oblivious to how it would hit me . . . throwing it out there as if he were talking about switching deodorant brands or the type of milk he preferred in his latte. “Anyway, what’s new with you? In Paris for work? Can’t say I’ve seen your name in the trade papers lately.”
