Page 108 of Under Her Protection

She turned.

She went back inside.

Vivienne went up the stairs of her own house.

She went into her bedroom. She did not turn on the lamp. She closed the door. She put the phone face down on the bureau and she sat down on the edge of the grey linen bed in the black wool dress, and she put her right hand flat on her own breastbone, and she stayed there.

The fire downstairs was, by now, going out.

20

Leo's flat on the rue Oberkampf was four rooms on the second floor at the back of a building that had been a hat-block factory in nineteen ten and was now four flats and a courtyard.

She put her keys on the small wooden bowl by the door.

She put the SIG and the shoulder rig and the spare magazine on the kitchen counter.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen in the field jacket she had walked the rue de Chaillot to the rue Oberkampf in, because the chase car had felt, by the boulevard Beaumarchais, like a thing she could not be inside. Her boots were wet from the boulevard du Temple and her hair was out of the elastic on the right side and she put her shaking hands on the counter and she stood there.

She stood there longer than she could afterwards have measured.

She did not take the field jacket off.

She walked into the bedroom. The bed was neatly made. She sat down on the edge of it in the field jacket and the wet boots and put her hands on her knees and looked at the door of her own bathroom across the room.

She cried.

Leo Cole was not someone who cried.

She knew she was in love with Vivienne Strauss. In love with the most ridiculously complicated infuriating woman who also happened to be her boss.

Vivienne Strauss did not love her back. Vivienne Strauss was just using her for sex.

It was a ridiculous situation.

She wiped her face on the cuff of the field jacket. She did it the once and she did it as she would have wiped a smear of dust off a windowsill, which was to say, without ceremony, because there was no one in her flat to make a ceremony for.

She took the field jacket off.

She put it on the chair by the bed. She sat the boots in the bathroom on a towel. She washed her face in the small white basin and looked at herself in the mirror above it, green eyes, dark hair half out of its elastic and she registered the woman in the mirror as a woman she would not, this week, be asking anything of.

She went into the kitchen.

She made coffee.

She sat down at her own kitchen table in a clean black T-shirt and the same jeans, and she drank the coffee, and she let the day come.

The day came.

She thought about the curve of Vivienne’s lips in red lipstick as they whispered Fuck me.

She thought about the beautiful curves of Vivienne’s breasts and ass in a black wool dress.

She thought about the way Vivienne clung to the back of her neck while she fucked her.

She thought about the way Vivienne melted in her arms and became someone else after sex.

She thought about the risk to Vivienne’s life and that was more important than anything.