The Day After Tomorrow

11

VERA WATCHED from the window of her first-class compartment as the train slowed and came into the station. She’d tried to relax and read for the few short hours she’d been on the train. But her mind had been elsewhere and she’d had to put her reading material aside. What impulse had caused her to introduce herself to Paul Osborn in Geneva in the first place? And why had she slept with him in Geneva and then gone with him to London? Was it simply that she had been restless and had acted on a whim at the attraction of a handsome man, or had she immediately sensed in him something else, a rare and kindred spirit who shared on many levels an understanding of what life really was and what it could be and where it might lead if they were together?

Suddenly she was aware the train had stopped. People were getting up, taking their luggage from the overhead racks and leaving the train. She was in Paris. Tomorrow she would go back to work, and London and Geneva and Paul Osborn would be a memory.

Suitcase in hand, she stepped from the train and moved along the platform in a crowd. The air felt humid and close as if it were about to rain.

“Vera!”

She looked up.

“Paul?” She was astonished.

“In sickness and in health.” He smiled, coming toward her out of the crowd, taking her suitcase, carrying it for her. He’d taken the shuttle from London and then a cab from the airport to Gare du Nord, where they were now In between he’d booked a flight from Paris to Los Angeles. He would be in Paris for five days. For five days they would do nothing but be together.

He wanted to take her home, to her apartment. He knew she had to go to work, but he wanted to make love to her all the hours between then and now. And after, when she’d finished her shift and came home, they would do the same all over again. Being with her, making love to her, was all that mattered.

“I can’t,” she told him flatly, angered that he’d even come. How dare he presume upon her like that?

It wasn’t exactly the reaction he’d counted on. Their time together had been too close, too perfect. Too loving. And it hadn’t come from him alone.

“You agreed that after London there would be no more between us.”

He grinned. “Besides a few hours at the theater and dinner, there wasn’t an awfully lot to London, was there? Unless you count the throwing up, the high fevers and alternating chills.”

For a moment Vera said nothing, then the truth came out. She told him quickly and directly. There was someone else.

It would not be prudent to reveal his name, but he was important and powerful in France and he must never know they had been together in Geneva or London. It would hurt him deeply and that was something she would not do. What she and Paul had had, what they had shared in the past few days, was done. And he knew that. Because they had agreed upon it. Painful as it was, she could not and would not see him again.

They reached the escalator and went up and out to the cabs. He gave her the name of his hotel on avenue Kléber. He would be there for five days. He wanted to see her again, if only to say goodbye.

Vera looked away. Paul Osborn was unlike any man she’d ever met. He was gentle and kind and understanding even in his hurt and disappointment. But even had she wanted to, she couldn’t give in to him. Where she was in her life, he could not be part of. There was no other way.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at him. Then she got into a cab, the door closed and she was gone.

“Simple as that,” he heard himself say out loud.

Less than an hour later he found himself sitting in a brasserie somewhere off rue St.-Antoine trying to piece the whole thing together. If he had followed his original plans, never taken the shuttle to Paris, in a few hours he’d be landing in L.A., taking a cab back to his house overlooking the Pacific, getting his Chesapeake retriever out of the kennel, seeing if the deer had come over his fence and eaten his roses. The day after that he would be going back to work. That would have been the natural course of things had he done it. But he hadn’t.

Vera, who she was and what she stirred in him, was all that mattered. Nothing else was worth anything. Not the present, the past or the future. At least that was what he’d been thinking when he looked up and saw the man with the jagged scar.