“They are?” I asked, casting a glance at one cigarette-smoking slender guy, dressed head-to-toe in charcoal gray, who was giving Poppy—or rather her on-display cleavage—the eye.
“Absolutely,” she confirmed. “They are nothing like those duffers back home in our countries. They know how to treat women. They wine us, they dine us, they actually fall in love with us without getting all effed up because their friends think they’ve no bollocks. They speak romance as a second language. If you’re going to get back on the horse, Emma, these are the guys you want to saddle up with.”
“But I don’t want to get back on the horse,” I said stubbornly.
“Sure you do,” Poppy said. “You just don’t know it yet. And there’s no better place to start than right here.”
Chapter Four
An hour later, Poppy was deep in conversation with the cigarette-puffing guy in head-to-toe gray while I was being chatted up by a sandy-haired French guy named Edouard.
“Ah, I know Floreeda!” he had exclaimed when I told him where I was from. His accent was thick and his speech, slow and careful. He blew smoke out of his mouth, took another drag of his cigarette, and grinned widely. “Ze land of Meeckey Mouse, oui?”
“Er, yes,” I said, stifling a cough. “But there’s lots more to Florida than that.”
“I know!” he said, his broad smile growing even wider. “Beaches everyvhere! Le jus d’orange! Sunshine every day!”
More cigarette puffing from him. More coughing from me.
“Um, something like that,” I said, neglecting to mention the storms every summer afternoon or the fact that in Orlando, I’d been forty-five miles from the closest beach, or the fact that I drank Tropicana, not fresh juice from some mystical grove out back. I imagined it was much like the fact that many Americans envisioned all of France as one big baguette-eating, beret-wearing country surrounding the Eiffel Tower.
“So, you would like to see Paris avec moi?” Edouard asked carefully, resting his right hand on the banister behind where I stood and leaning forward in a way that was clearly meant to be seductive but seemed more like an invasion of my personal space. Not to mention my personal lung capacity. “I can give you ze tour, non?” he asked with another giant exhalation of smoke. He grinned again.
I coughed. “Um, no thank you,” I said, taking a discreet step backward. Unfortunately, the whole bar seemed to be swirling with smoke, so stepping out of Edouard’s cloud just meant stepping into someone else’s. I took a long sip of my third caipirinha of the evening and reminded myself to be polite. “I just got here today,” I added. “It will take me some time to settle in.”
“So Saturday, maybe, heh?” he pressed, leaning closer. “I take you on a peecnic, perhaps? Paris, it is such a romantic city.”
I stared at him for a moment. This was so different from an American conversation, where the guy would have asked for my number, strolled casually away, and failed to call for three days—all as a means of expressing interest in me.
“Maybe another time,” I said finally.
“So, I can to have your phone number?” he persisted.
I paused. “Um, why don’t you give me yours?”
He frowned. “That is not normal.”
I shrugged, not quite knowing what to say.
He hemmed and hawed for a moment but eventually scribbled his number on the back of a gum wrapper and handed it to me.
“I hope you will to call me, pretty lady,” he said.
I forced a smile, took the gum wrapper, and excused myself, backing out of his haze of smoke as he stared after me, seemingly confused that his advances hadn’t been successful.
I walked back over to Poppy, who cheerfully informed the gray-clad guy that we’d both like another drink. As he hurried away, she leaned in and whispered to me, “So? How’d it go with that guy you were talking to? Any snogging potential?”
I shrugged. “He had bad breath. And he smoked the whole time I talked to him.”
Poppy laughed. “You’d best get used to that in this city,” she said.
“Great,” I muttered. Now I could add lung cancer to my list of things that would go wrong because Brett had broken up with me.
“Don’t take things so seriously,” Poppy chided.
I made a face at her. “I think I’m ready to head home whenever you are,” I said after a moment, glancing around at the burgeoning crowd of cigarette-smoking Frenchmen on the make and the giggling American girls batting their eyelashes at them.
“No,” Poppy said simply.
“No?” I was sure I’d heard her wrong. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that you’re not going home until you’ve made a date for tomorrow night.” She fixed me with a firm stare.
“What?” This hadn’t been in my plans for the evening. Or for the foreseeable future, for that matter.
“Were you paying any attention to me earlier when I told you about Frenchmen?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“All I remember is something about horseback riding,” I said crossly.
Poppy laughed. “I believe you’re referring to getting back on the horse.”