Page 81 of Under Her Protection

Vivienne put her knees either side of Leo's head.

"Hands on my hips, Mademoiselle."

"Yes."

"Mouth, please."

Leo opened her mouth and Vivienne lowered herself to meet it. The taste of Vivienne on her tongue was what Leo realized she now craved all the time.

Vivienne's hand went to the wall behind the daybed, flat, to steady herself, and she lowered, slow, and she took what she wanted, slow, and she watched Leo as she did it, and Vivienne, whose control all morning had been the control of a woman in a crisis, was now the control of a woman who was not in a crisis and who had all the time in the world, and who was spending it. She rode slow. She rode at the pace she had set Leo's shoulder blades to. She breathed through her nose. She did not, this time, hurry.

She ground herself slowly but surely onto Leo’s face and at times she could barely breathe… but she didn’t care. She would have happily suffocated doing this.

When Vivienne came she came quietly gushing into Leo’s mouth and Leo swallowed her all down. Leo closed her eyes. This woman was driving her crazy with need. Her free hand in Leo's hair, and her other hand flat on the wall, and her thighs tight at Leo's temples, and a single low word in the back of her throat that Leo did not catch and did not ask her to repeat.

She eased off.

She lay down along Leo's body on the daybed, naked from the waist down, cream silk still on, and put her forehead against Leo's.

"Thirty minutes," Vivienne said, quietly, "is up."

"Mm."

"Back to work."

"Mademoiselle Cole."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Vivienne."

"Yes."

"Any time."

Vivienne's mouth, at a quarter inch, opened.

"Noted," she said.

She got up and dressed. Leo lay on the daybed for three more breaths than she had intended to, and then got up, and dressed, and clipped her earpiece in, and walked down the stairs to the library, and got back on the phone to Avery, and at three seventeen Avery told her that Petit's train from Zurich had been cancelled and that Petit had, in the last fifteen minutes, dropped off the network.

Leo rubbed her eyes and did not, once, regret the thirty minutes with Vivienne. She needed those releases. She needed them so badly.

The house was, again, on alert.

By four she had revised the courtyard rotation. By four-thirty Fournier had sent over a list of seven further Strauss employees whose access the morning's three-name cut had created second-order questions for, and Vivienne, at her desk down the hall, had cleared the list with a short typed note and a signature in under nineteen minutes, which was a pace Leo had not, in five weeks, seen Vivienne work a personnel list at. By five Avery had flagged a second Gaudin number on a new SIM. By five thirty-nine a black sedan that had driven twice past the gate on the rue de Chaillot between four forty and five ten had been pulled over by the Police Nationale at the request of a liaison Dominique had called by name. The driver, a man named Bertrand, had an YLV Advisory business card in his wallet.

Leo stood in the library at five forty-four with the sun already down outside and the low lamps on, and she permitted herself one breath. One. She was not, today, going to take more than one. The house was on alert and it was staying that way, and there was a woman in the small study at the end of the corridor who had an hour ago oiled her shoulder blades and came into her mouth and was now, almost certainly, upstairs on a phone call running a board she did not need Leo's advice to run.

Leo smiled at the Vigée Le Brun.

The Vigée Le Brun did not smile back.

At six she went up.

She did not go to the small study. She went to the bedroom, set her boots inside the door, and stood at the French window the way Vivienne had stood at it this morning, palm flat on the glass, looking down at the courtyard. The rotation had changed shift. The gravel was wet. The gate was closed. The neighbour's eaves had been patched at four by a Blackthorn-affiliated contractor and the pigeons would not be rolling again.