For Her Eyes Only

“Or tea.” He seemed to grow inches taller as he straightened. “You, um, look like you could use a cup. You know, to settle down before you get back on the road again.”

He nodded toward her hands. They shook slightly. No doubt the day’s events were beginning to take their toll, but she didn’t know how coffee or tea or anything with caffeine could remedy the situation.

He nodded to the right. “There’s, um, a café a couple of blocks away.”

His gaze was direct. His eyes clear. And just being near him made her feel safe in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. In at least eight weeks. Before Lili was taken.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

The man seemed surprised by her response, which didn’t make much sense. Why should he invite her out if he expected to be turned down?

She followed him across the street where he picked up a manila file folder he must have dropped when he tore after the purse snatcher. He straightened the papers in it, looked at the INS building, then at her. “I guess I should introduce myself, shouldn’t I? I’m Jake. Jake McCoy.”

“Michelle Lambert.” She thoroughly looked him over, thinking herself certifiable for agreeing to have coffee with this beautiful stranger, much less pondering all the other possibilities his nearness presented. But those same possibilities made her feel gloriously alive in a way she hadn’t for a long, long time.

THREE QUESTIONS puzzled Jake. Who was this woman? What was he doing here with her? And why couldn’t he shake images of her naked and moving restlessly beneath him from his head?

He sat across the bistro-style table from her, slightly turned to the side because he was too tall to sit as designed. Michelle Lambert took a generous pull from a latte, or at least that’s what he thought she’d called it. She sat back with a satisfied sigh, licking the white foam from her upper lip in a provocative way that made him want to groan before he looked around to see who was watching. “It is not like mine, but it will do,” she said.

Jake found himself running his tongue along his top lip, wondering not only how the foamy concoction would taste, but how it would taste on her.

He looked away. Everything about this woman seemed to throw him for a loop. Her sweet, spicy scent was light, almost nonexistent, making him want to lean closer and breathe it in. Her accent, decidedly French, was heavy…sexy, which was a way he’d never viewed a foreign accent before.

He didn’t know why he’d suggested coffee with her. He also didn’t know why he was in the trendy coffee shop he must have passed a hundred times but had never entered. He glanced around the busy place. It seemed they served everything but coffee—at least as he knew it. He supposed part of the reason he’d extended the invitation was he couldn’t see her getting into that car in the shape she was in. Besides, for a brief, telling moment, she had looked like she’d…needed someone. And he’d felt an inexplicable urge to respond to that need.

That he battled against a completely different need of his own was another matter entirely.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, her small fingers curled around a cup that could have doubled as a soup bowl. “I…I really needed this. I haven’t had a cup in six weeks.”

He raised a brow. Six weeks? His mind clicked. He assumed that she hadn’t had a cup of whatever it was she was drinking because she’d been in the country for that long. If that was the case, and if she was in the country on a B2 tourist visa, then it should be about to expire, if it hadn’t already.

He didn’t like his train of thought. Especially since it didn’t seem to change his almost unbearable attraction to her one iota.

“My pleasure,” he said in delayed response to her thank you.

She smiled. The action sent his stomach down somewhere in the vicinity of his knees. “You don’t speak much, do you?”

“I’ve been told it’s not one of my stronger suits.”

“That’s okay. I’m of the personal opinion that people, as a rule, talk too much anyway. You know, when your friends tell you, ‘I’d really like to go back to university,’ or ‘I keep meaning to lose that last five pounds,’ my response is always that they shouldn’t talk about it, they should just do it. Sometimes it seems the moment they say it, the importance attached to the statement loses all impact, you know what I mean? Anyway, how exactly do they expect you to respond? I think it’s their way of asking you to share all those things you’ve been meaning to do but haven’t, as a type of shared misery.” She waved her hand. “I don’t go in much for that.”

He stared at her. He hadn’t known a woman could say so much without taking a breath.

She smiled. “Then tell me what is.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said talking isn’t one of your stronger suits. What is?”

He noticed that her eyes were a light, light brown, matching the color of her designer coffee. He found himself returning her smile. “Well, I’d have to talk to tell you that, wouldn’t I?” Her laugh was as smoky as he thought it would be. “Um, my job.” Oh, but that was lame.

“Your job?”

“Yes.” He didn’t offer more. It was suddenly important to him that she not know he was with the INS. He was drawn to her openness. Her teasing smile. And he suspected that if she knew what he did for a living, she’d close all that off to him. He didn’t want that to happen. Not yet, anyway.

He was relieved when she turned her attention toward the sugar decanter. She straightened it, then the napkin holder behind it, her gaze scanning the café’s interior. “I once wanted to open a café.”

His brow rose again, but for a completely different reason.

“Oh, not here. In Paris. Until Papa pointed out that the last thing Paris needed was another coffee shop.” That smile again. She tucked her mass of unruly hair behind her right ear. Jake was inordinately fascinated with the move and found himself wondering if her hair was as soft as it looked. And pondered how it would feel trailing a path across the sensitive skin of his abdomen. “So I switched my plans to a restaurant.”

Her laugh caught him unaware. What was funny about that?

“You know. If Paris doesn’t needed another café, it needs another restaurant even less?”

“Oh.” He cleared his throat again, then blurted, “You seemed distracted.”

She squinted at him slightly, as if not understanding.

“When we bumped into each other earlier.”

The light in her eyes diminished. “Yes. I was distracted.”

She took another pull from her cup, and he looked at his own. He wasn’t sure what it held. Was afraid to find out. “Any particular reason?”

He noticed then that she bit her nails. They were too short, barely crescents on her fingers. Unpainted. “Yes. There is a reason. Tomorrow, I’m told, I must leave your country full of swindling private detectives and bloodsucking purse snatchers. Go back home.”

He held his gaze steady on her. Just as he suspected.

She gestured with her hands. “They, those people don’t care that I need to stay here. That I need to find my daughter. They tell me they can’t help me. They can’t grant me an…”

“Extension.” He finished her sentence.

She squinted at him again, making him wonder if she normally wore glasses. He scanned her features, imagining her with all that unruly hair pulled into a smooth twist—

“Yes, an extension.”

“So you can find your daughter.”

Her hands stilled on her cup. “Yes. Her father, or the man who calls himself her father when he didn’t want any involvement in her life before now, came to Paris two months ago and…took her. Brought her here.”

“Your husband?”

She shook her head. “No. He and I, we had a brief—how do you say it?—relationship. No, no, an affair. You use the same word, yes? Five years ago. He was an American living in Paris. I was a waitress. Lili was the result.”

Jake stared at her. Not so much shocked by what she’d said, but shocked that she was saying what she was as easily as she was. And that he found it impossible to tug his gaze away from her animated face. She was a single mother who’d had her child out of wedlock. And she was foreign. Not that he had anything against foreigners. At one time or another, all Anglo-Americans had been foreigners to this land. But in his job as agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the word foreigner took on a whole new meaning.

Not knowing what to say in the situation, he asked, “So your daughter’s four?”