Barefoot in Lace (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 2)

  Or maybe it was Tom, exercising his superpower, making her vulnerable.

  Whatever caused her distress, the wounds seemed less severe tonight, and everyone seemed happy, including Gussie. She sipped the Dom Perignon that Ari and Willow had arranged to have sent to the table during the surprise birthday party that Tom had confessed he’d planned before they’d even arrived in France.

  Not only had he managed to get a table for six at Chantecler, one of the best and most exclusive restaurants in Nice at a gorgeous hotel, there’d been a single white rose at her place setting.

  She glanced at Tom, who was next to her, his arm securely across the back of her chair, the position protective, proprietary, and public.

  “Thanks for doing this,” she whispered. “It would have been easy to stay in tonight after the long day of work.”

  He added a little pressure on her shoulder. “Thirty only comes once, Pink.”

  “And you gave me what I value the most.” She looked around the table, half Americans, half Brits, all animated and all dear to her.

  “A party?”

  “A group of people I care about.” She gave a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “I mean, I know I’ve been here two days, but…”

  “But that’s what you do. You have a gift for it, you know.”

  “For what, exactly?”

  He thought for a moment, glancing around. “For making something out of nothing. For making…” He swallowed, as if the realization of whatever he was going to say had an unexpected impact on him.

  “Fun?” she supplied.

  “I was going to say family.”

  She sighed. “I guess I do.”

  Leaning closer, he whispered. “You’re okay now, right?”

  “More than okay,” she assured him. If there hadn’t been a table full of friends gathered to celebrate, she’d probably have given in to the lure of his blue, blue eyes and spent the next two hours talking about her brother. But not tonight. Not now.

  “So how does it feel to be thirty?” Annie asked, leaning away from the children back to the adult side of the table.

  “It feels”—she lifted her champagne flute in a playful toast—“not as old as it sounds.”

  “Pfft!” Annie flicked off the comment. “Wait until you hit thirty-five.” She leaned closer. “And your husband decides he prefers twenty-three.”

  “All the more chance for you to find love again,” Gussie quipped.

  “Spoken like a true wedding planner. Do you firmly believe in the elusive happily ever after?” Annie asked.

  Tom’s arm tensed ever so slightly, barely enough to notice. But Gussie did, and her stomach flipped, because she knew he was listening intently.

  “I do,” Gussie said.

  Annie narrowed her eyes, and Gussie braced for the vitriol of a newly divorced woman. “And those are exactly the words you’ll say when you find it.”

  Gussie smiled at the unexpected response. “And here I thought you were going to bury me in bitter.”

  “Not tonight,” she said. “You inspire me, Gussie. Young, optimistic.” She shifted her gaze to Tom. “What about you, handsome photographer to the stars? Are you a believer in fairy tales?”

  Gussie gave an exaggerated cough, not only to tease him, but because hearing the truth from this loner might put a damper on a perfectly wonderful evening. “This is a man without a permanent address,” she told Annie. “So he’s obviously not planning on any fairy tales.”

  Annie’s eyebrows lifted. “You’re homeless?”

  “I have a loft in New York,” Tom said, picking up the bottle to refill Gussie’s glass.

  She gave him a sharp look. “Really? I thought you said you didn’t actually have a home.”

  “Define home. Mine happens to be a six-hundred-square-foot apartment I use to store equipment, but it does qualify as a permanent address for my passport.”

  “And your expired driver’s license,” she reminded him.

  “Passport’s all I need.”

  It would be to a man like Tom.

  “Pity,” Annie said on a sad sigh.

  “Why is that a pity?” he asked.

  She angled her head as if to communicate what a stupid question that was.

  “Because of Alex,” Gussie whispered, though she was certain Alex, Lizzie, and Eddie were deep into their own conversation, their three heads together as they looked at something on one of their phones.

  “No,” Annie said. “Because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Her?”

  Gussie and Tom asked their questions in total harmony, only it didn’t sound harmonious at all. More like a couple of bats that accidentally flew into sunlight.

  Annie laughed. “Denial is not a pretty thing, my friends.”

  Tom picked up his drink rather than respond. Gussie opened her mouth, and for a change, nothing came out. Annie found this even more amusing.

  “Oh, would you two stop bloody acting like it’s not real?” She threw a glance at the kids and added in a stage whisper, “The only two who have more chemistry at this table are Alex and Eddie.”

  “They do?” Tom practically spewed his drink. And suddenly, the kids stopped talking, their radar for a more interesting conversation in perfect working order. “You have got to be kidding,” he said.

  “Kidding about what?” Alex asked.

  “About this—”

  “Nothing.” Gussie smashed her foot into his. “Nothing, Alex. We’re talking about”—what was the most boring thing in the world to a kid?—“the value of the euro versus the dollar.”

  Alex rolled her eyes, and instantly, all three of them went back to something far more riveting on the phone.

  Tom shifted in his seat and narrowed his eyes at Gussie. “Why are you protecting her?”

  “Because you were about to ruin her night, if not her life.”

  He grunted and looked at the ceiling at the hyperbole. “Are you concerned?” he asked Annie.

  Smiling, she shook her head slowly. “Well, I am for poor Alex if you’re going to react like that to a harmless summer friendship between two kids.”

  “You made it sound like more than friendship.”

  “I doubt he’ll be proposing tonight,” Annie said dryly.

  “Especially with Lizzie in the middle of it,” Gussie added.

  Tom sat forward. “I need to talk to her and—”

  Gussie put her hand firmly on his thigh. “Do you actually want her to die of embarrassment?” She heard the edge in her voice, but couldn’t help it. “She’s tender and uncertain, on top of being in mourning for her mother. She doesn’t need a bodyguard. She needs a strong and empathetic male figure in her life.”

  That got another eye roll, but his disgust was directed inwardly. “Can we change the subject?”

  “Please,” Gussie said, turning more in her seat so Alex couldn’t see her face. “If she hears us, she’ll never forgive me.”

  Tom looked hard at her. “Forgive you? You’re not responsible for her, Gussie.”

  For a long moment, neither spoke, and Annie took a drink to cover the awkwardness. Gussie bit her lip, but that didn’t work. The words were not going to be held back. “I’m not responsible for her, Tom, but she has my heart.”

  His eyes flashed, but he didn’t say a word.

  “Maybe you don’t understand that,” she said on a harsh whisper. “Maybe when you don’t have a heart to give, you don’t understand when someone takes yours.”

  He stared at her. “And maybe you’d be wrong about that.”

  “Um, excuse me,” Annie said, putting a hand on Gussie’s arm, obviously uncomfortable. “But, Gussie, your phone is about to explode.”

  Gussie took the excuse to look away, seeing text after text popping up on her home screen.

  “Birthday messages,” she guessed, picking it up, welcoming the distraction. What did he mean she’d be wrong about that?

  She focused on the messages, but none of t
hem mentioned her birthday. In fact, none of them even made sense.

  Instagram…photos…LaVie campaign…congratulations!!!

  Her arms suddenly felt heavy. Her chest vibrated with a sudden shot of adrenaline. Around her, the restaurant noise and heated discussion faded away, taken over by the pulse in her head.

  “What are they talking about?” She tapped the first message. Then the second. Then the third. And, oh, no, there were more.

  “What’s going on?” Tom asked.

  Blame and fury welled up. “You released the photos?”

  “Of course not.”

  “They’re on Instagram.”

  “What?”

  “And Twitter. And Facebook. They’re all…over…the…”

  “Hey, Gussie!” Alex shouted, holding up her phone. “Did you see this?”

  Oh, God. Oh, God.

  “Give that to me,” Tom demanded.

  Gussie didn’t want to look. Instead, she stared straight ahead. “No one will see the pictures except a few marketing yahoos,” she whispered, throwing his empty promise back at him.

  “Son of a bitch,” he murmured, staring at the screen. “LaVie took the test to social media, asking for people’s opinions.”

  Gussie grabbed her glass and downed the entire thing like a frat boy playing beer pong.

  When she slammed the flute on the table, she turned to him, praying for the brain-numbing buzz to hit. “How did this happen?”

  “I don’t know, but you’re winning,” he said. “In a landslide. Everyone loves you, Gussie.”

  * * *

  Tom didn’t get to talk to Suzette until late the next afternoon, while he, Gussie, and Alex perused Cours Saleya, the expansive food and flower market that spilled from one end of the street to the other in Old Town.

  Alex and Gussie were under a brightly striped awning, tasting grapes and olives from a bucket, laughing with the street vendor, when Tom’s phone finally rang with the call he’d been waiting to get since the night before.

  “It’s Suzette,” he said to Gussie, holding up his phone. “I’ll be right over on that bench, so don’t go far.”

  She popped an olive into his mouth. “Tell her she’s a dead woman.”

  He munched the olive and nodded, heading toward some privacy before he took the call, answering it the minute he swallowed the briny bite. “You’re a dead woman.”

  A soft laugh was the only response.

  “I’m serious, Suzette. What the hell were you thinking putting out those shots? Turning it into some kind of social media contest? Gussie is furious and, frankly, so am I. As far as I’m concerned, you posted unauthorized, copyrighted photos, that I let you preview, in a total breach of confidence and contract, and I demand you take them down or I’m off the job and you better have a slew of attorneys, because this is going to cost LaVie a fortune.”

  Another laugh, which irritated the shit out of him. “Are you finished, monsieur?”

  “I haven’t even started.”

  “But will you listen to me, s’il vous plait?”

  He answered with a low, unhappy sigh as he sat on the bench, his gaze settling on Gussie and Alex. Side by side, they paid for a small container of olives and moved to the next stand, spilling over with fuchsia begonias, deep-red roses, and playfully angled sunflowers. Even through the crowd and with a phone to his ear, he could hear Gussie’s laughter float across the marketplace and touch something deep in his heart.

  She gave Alex a fistful of violets, getting a look of sheer joy from the girl who gazed up at her. If he hadn’t been on his phone, he’d have taken the shot, profile to profile, smile to smile, woman to girl.

  “…So we hardly had anything to do with that leak and simply don’t know who on the crew put the photos out.” Suzette’s lame-ass excuse finally got through to his addled brain. “But, Tom, the results are astounding, and we’ve been in nonstop marketing meetings to figure out the very best way to…to exploit…is that the word?”

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly the word.”

  “No, no, utilize—that’s it. The best way to utilize this fascinating information.”

  He moved the phone to the other ear since the first one already hurt, bracing his elbows on his knees to observe Alex and Gussie move on to the next stall, then suddenly change their minds and scamper over to another flower stall. A man a few feet behind them made the same sudden change, making Tom wonder what was so interesting about that stall.

  “We must work fast.” Suzette’s lilting, French-accented enthusiasm brought him back to the conversation. “Instantly, in fact, to launch this campaign before another company takes this unexpected gold mine of market information and beats us to the slap.”

  “The punch,” he corrected, leaning to the side to try to keep an eye on Gussie and Alex, who’d disappeared around a mountain of strawberries and apples.

  “And it would hurt like one.”

  He closed his eyes to focus. “What gold mine of market information?”

  “Monsieur, have you not looked at the statistics on these social sites? Eight hundred thousand views! Ninety percent women, who are our target audience. And over half of them have voted, and the results are extraordinaire! Consumers prefer Gussie nine times to one, and the comments! They’re relating to her bit of scarring. Really, how have you done anything but read them?”

  “For one reason, I’ve spent much of the last day and a half assuring her that I had nothing to do with this and that you would pull these posts from every site immediately.” Which had cost him any intimacy he had hoped for and had made him even more frustrated than Gussie.

  “Non, non. That cannot be done, je regret.”

  She did not sound like she regretted anything. “Oh, we could pull anything that is on LaVie’s Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and the like pages,” she continued. “But the photos, especially the one that contrasts Gussie and Johanna, have gone viral. You know the picture I mean?”

  “I know it.” Someone—possibly the someone he was talking to right now—had used a shot he’d taken of Johanna standing in front of the stone planter on the Cannes street. It was a lousy shot, a throwaway, as far as he was concerned, because she looked cold, haughty, and flawless. But the real problem was that the water bottle was utterly lost in her human perfection.

  But edited next to that shot was Gussie in the same location, a breeze lifting her skirt and hair in the same way, a profile shot that caught her scar. The angle of her face showed an expression of someone who’d survived and thrived, a woman who had her priorities in order, a woman who knew her true beauty came from the inside. And in that shot, he’d gotten the bottle perfect, the label like a flashing neon sign that said her inner beauty was fired and fueled by what she put in her body…LaVie.

  Damn it, why had he made the shot so perfect? For a test. Across the market, he tracked Gussie and Alex. They’d moved about a block away, to a vegetable stand, and Gussie stood back, taking a picture of Alex, who playfully dangled a bright red pepper before dropping it into a basket.

  He was about to answer Suzette when he noticed that same man, the one who’d made the sudden turn that they had, and he, too, had his phone out and was taking a picture…of them. Instantly, Tom stood, scowling.

  “Tom, you must see that we have hit the ballpark!”

  He choked at the idiom, as screwed up as this situation. But his focus was really on the stranger.

  “Our brand is highlighted. Our message is clear. And our audience has responded exactly as we’d hoped,” she continued excitedly. “In fact, in one of the comments, we found the theme for the whole campaign. Are you ready?”

  Gussie and Alex disappeared again, rounding a flower cart out of sight. And the man—a bit taller and huskier than Tom, with a short, military-style haircut—followed. Gussie and Alex were a good city block away from him, so Tom got up and moved fast.

  “We’re changing the entire campaign.”

  He lost the guy at the flower car
t.

  “Don’t you want to know our new theme, Tom?”

  Was this because Gussie had gotten famous overnight? Now she had stalkers? Or was he some pedophile after Alex? Tom dodged a few tourists without an apology.

  “We’re working on ‘Beauty isn’t perfect, but LaVie is.’” She made a soft shriek. “We love it! Don’t you? Our whole campaign will feature not just real women, as you suggested, but flawed women. Women who celebrate their imperfections and find—”

  They were all out of view now, and Tom’s pulse pumped along with his legs as he practically ran through the market now. “I have to go.”

  “Don’t you love it?”

  “It’s fine. I have to go, Suzette.”

  “Be sure to tell Gussie she has inspired the whole campaign!”

  “I will.” If she’s still alive. The thought spurred him on, elbowing through a pack of shoppers who scowled at him. He ended the call with a jab of his thumb, pocketing the phone as he reached the flower cart and whipped around to the other side.

  And there they were, picking flowers one stem at a time, laughing and talking and totally safe.

  Breathless, he scanned the area, searching for the man in the black T-shirt and jeans, but he was gone.

  “What’s the matter?” Gussie asked him.

  “Are you okay? No one talked to you? No man?”

  She drew back, fighting a smile. “No, but are you worried one might?”

  “He’s jealous,” Alex teased.

  “No, no, I’m…” He looked again, peering at a guy standing next to a display of hanging Persian rugs, but that dude was about fifty. The one following them hadn’t been a day over thirty-five, if that. “I saw someone taking a picture of you.”

  “Really?” Gussie’s eyes widened, and then she puffed out a breath that sank her shoulders on the exhale. “Well, I guess if a person wants to get over a weird phobia about having her picture taken, getting her face splattered all over the Internet for a million people to see is the way to go.”

  “Only eight hundred thousand,” he corrected, giving up his search.

  Gussie grunted and closed her eyes. “Are they taking it down? Did you fight her? Did you tell her you didn’t give permission to—”