The Wealthy Frenchman's Proposition by Katherine Garbera Page A

expect you to feel the same.”
    He shook his head.
    “I can still feel you on my body, ma petite. The remembered feel of your sheath clasping me is making it damned hard for me to let you go.”
    “Oh.”
    “Yes, oh. Maybe you don’t know quite everything.”
    She looked down. “I never meant to imply that I did.”
    He nodded. “Good. Then stop trying to manage this on your own. We need to deal with this together, or else you’re going to get hurt.”
    She wrapped her arms around her waist before realizing what she was doing. The move was a dead giveaway that she felt vulnerable, and Tristan already had seen her with tears in her eyes. She knew him well enough to know that weakness wasn’t something he understood.
    He was immune to that flaw. And if he wanted her by his side, wanted them to be a team, she wanted to be worthy of staying with him.
    This was the first time a man had come after her and brought her back. The first time a man hadn’t walked away from her, or simply let her walk away.
    She knew better than to read too much into it, but she felt her heart beat a little faster.

Six
    T he getaway was simple. Gui, Sheri and Tristan left together via Tristan’s dark-windowed Mercedes sedan, which the housekeeper drove to the private airport where the Seconds corporate jet waited for them. They had decided that Sheri would accompany Tristan to Paris and then back to Manhattan instead of getting on the commercial flight straight back to New York that he’d booked for her return.
    She’d lost that wounded-doe look and smiled at him whenever he looked at her—which wasn’t as often as he would have liked, but ignoring her was the only way he could even pretend to himself that he wasn’t starting to care for her.
    In that moment when they’d heard her scream, he’d felt fear for another person for the first time in eight years. And the fact that he’d wanted to first protect her and then rip apart the photographers who had threatened her, had been a warning Tristan couldn’t ignore.
    Despite the fact that he knew Gui was right and the only way to protect Sheri was to keep her by his side, another part of him—the man who’d experienced the crushing blow of losing the only woman he’d ever loved—wanted her far away from him.
    “Have you been to Paris before?” Gui asked Sheri.
    “No, never. This trip to Mykonos was the first time I’ve been out of the U.S.”
    “You should travel more,” Gui said. “Tristan, you should make sure that Sheri has the opportunity to see the world. Do you know she still lives in the same brownstone that she was raised in?”
    Since he wasn’t deaf and the corporate jet wasn’t a jumbo one, he’d heard the details of her life as Gui pried into her past. He knew it was Gui’s way, but he hated the attention that his friend was giving to Sheri. And hated even more the way she soaked it up. She was hungry for a man to talk to her.
    “I heard.”
    “It’s in Brooklyn.”
    “Thanks, Gui. I know where my assistant lives,” he said.
    Sheri flushed and he saw her sink deeper into her chair. He’d crossed a line with that comment. He didn’t need to put her back into the employee role at this moment.
    Gui gave him a sharp look and turned back to Sheri, telling her about his latest escapade with one of his cousins who was at the Spanish royal court.
    She laughed, but the sound was hollow and he knew he’d done that. Taken away her joy by being a complete ass. He should apologize but, when she was ignoring him, he knew that they were both moving apart. The way they needed to.
    But dammit to hell, if Gui didn’t move away from her, he was going to leap across the aisle and strangle his friend. “Sheri, when you have a moment I’d like to discuss a few things with you.”
    “What about?”
    “Work. Our delay in returning to the office will mean rescheduling some appointments.”
    “Of course. I didn’t bring my laptop with me….”
    “You can log in on