“Don’t they have underage laws here?” I whispered. Poppy nodded.
“Oh, sweet Emma, they are not underage!” Guillaume exclaimed, having apparently overheard. “I wouldn’t be that foolish! I checked all of their IDs before inviting them here!”
I just stared at him, dumbfounded, until Poppy took over.
“Damn it, Guillaume!” she exclaimed. “You know we’re launching your album in less than four weeks! You know how much KMG has invested in you. Do you know how many photographers and reporters are in the lobby waiting to destroy your perfect image?”
“So it’s good publicity!” Guillaume exclaimed brightly, wobbling a bit as he said it. He glanced at me, seemed to have trouble focusing, then shook his head and looked away. “All press is good press, right?”
“Wrong,” Poppy said firmly. “You know we’re trying to portray you as Mr. Perfect. Clearly, you’re determined to make sure I fail miserably at that task.” She sighed and looked around the room. “Allez-y!” she said, making eye contact with each of the girls and clapping commandingly. “Let’s go! Everybody out!”
She spoke a few sentences in French to the girls, who suddenly looked worried and scrambled to put their clothes back on.
“What on earth did you say?” I whispered.
“I told them we had called the police, and they’re on their way,” she said. “Sentences for drug use in France are pretty severe.”
“Poppy!” Guillaume exclaimed, watching dejectedly as the girls scrambled to get dressed. “You are ruining my fun!”
She fixed him with a glare. “One of these days, Guillaume, you are going to get into a mess we can’t get you out of.”
Guillaume shrugged sheepishly. Then he turned to me and winked, as if I were his conspirator.
I swallowed hard and tried to look annoyed instead of smitten.
Chapter Six
Ten minutes later, Poppy and I were riding an elevator in silence toward the ground floor with Guillaume wedged between us. Edgar and Richard had helped sneak the girls down the back stairs and out the service entrance by disguising them in bellboy outfits Edgar had found in a storage closet on the eleventh floor.
“I don’t see why I can’t just sneak out, too,” Guillaume grumbled.
“Because,” Poppy said sensibly, “everyone knows you’re here.”
“So?”
“So,” Poppy said impatiently, “the only way to deal with this is to act like it was one giant mistake on the part of the guy who brought you room service. There was nothing unseemly going on in your room at any time.”
“I don’t follow your logic,” Guillaume muttered.
“Of course you don’t,” she shot back irritably. “You’re completely mad.”
I stared straight ahead, pretending to myself that I wasn’t trapped in an elevator with two people who sounded very much like they were involved in some sort of lovers’ spat.
“I have no idea what to say to the press,” Poppy had confided in me desperately five minutes earlier while we stood outside Guillaume’s door, waiting for him to put his shirt back on and make himself look as presentable and presumably sober as possible. “I’m so bad at this. I can write the press releases and spin all these stupid situations the next day, but I’m terrible at knowing what to say on the spot. That was what Marie was good at!”
“So why don’t we take some time to think about it?” I had suggested.
“Because we need to go down now to distract attention from the girls leaving,” she said. “Because if we wait, someone’s bound to spot them, and they’ll tell the real story.”
“What story will we be telling?” I asked.
“I haven’t a clue.” Poppy’s face had clouded over, and she’d looked like she was about to cry.
“Okay,” I’d said slowly. I put a hand on her arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out.”
So while Poppy and Guillaume bickered during the seemingly interminable elevator ride, I tried very hard to stop finding Guillaume attractive and instead formulate a plan.
“Let me handle the talking, okay?” I said, glancing past Guillaume to an exhausted-looking Poppy as the elevator finally touched down on the ground floor. “Poppy, can you just take care of translating whatever I say into French?”
She stared at me with concern. “Emma, are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said firmly, although of course I wasn’t sure at all.
“I mean, because you don’t have to—”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
Fortunately, we had time to have this entire conversation, because the elevator was clearly designed to open as slowly as humanly possible. First it landed, then it locked shakily into place, then the door gradually eked open, and finally we had to push ourselves out of what appeared to be a rusty, gold-chipped cage of some sort, which, in turn, was heavy, unwieldy, and badly in need of WD-40.