Gabe studied my face. “Will you move back to Paris?” he asked softly. “Guillaume will make sure you get your job back. I’ll fix things between KMG and the UPP. You can pick up where you left off.” He paused, and I could see his cheeks turn a bit pink. “And maybe,” he added in an embarrassed mutter, “you and I can give things a try and see what happens without my brother getting in the way.”
I gazed up at him for a moment. There suddenly wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I’d do it. After all, I’d left Paris because I’d been sure that my own professional error had led to bad press for the star I was being paid to promote. But now that I knew it hadn’t been my fault—or at least that it had been only about 10 percent my fault—I could take the job back in good conscience.
Suddenly, for no reason at all, Brett popped into my mind. Not because I had any interest whatsoever in him but because the fact that he had always refused to leave Orlando—and his comfort zone—remained for me an open wound.
“What if I want to stay in Orlando?” I heard myself asking Gabe. It was a stupid question; staying in Orlando wasn’t even a consideration. But somehow, I needed to hear what Gabe would say.
He looked startled. He thought about it for a moment. “Well,” he said finally. “I suppose there’s a UPP bureau there I could find a job with.”
I stared at him. “You would leave Paris?”
He considered this for a moment. “Paris is my home,” he said. “But it will always be there. And you might not be. I want to see where things can go with you. And if you want to stay in Orlando, well, I guess I’ll see about moving to Orlando. We could figure something out.”
I felt breathless. Gabe, whom I’d known for only a couple of months, was saying the words I never would have heard in a million years from Brett, whom I’d been so sure loved me.
“No,” I said finally. “I’ll come back to Paris.”
“Good.” Gabe breathed a sigh of relief and grinned. He glanced at Guillaume. “Because my idiot brother clearly needs you to keep him out of trouble.”
I laughed. “That’s true. Plus, Paris is the most romantic city in the world.”
Gabe rolled his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Guillaume told me all about how you and Poppy are on the hunt for the perfect French kiss.”
I could feel myself blushing. It sounded pretty stupid when he put it that way.
“But do you know who kisses better than Frenchmen?” Gabe continued.
“No,” I said, startled. Why would Gabe be suggesting that there was someone out there who kissed better than his countrymen?
Gabe grinned. “French-American men,” he said. Then he leaned down to touch his lips lightly to mine. Everything in my body began to tingle.
If I’d thought that the rest of the world had been fuzzy when we were staring at each other a few moments ago, this was a whole new ball game. Everything faded away as my lips parted and Gabe’s kiss grew more passionate. It was, in fact, the perfect French kiss, the one I’d been searching for high and low at Poppy’s insistence. It had been right here, with Gabe Francoeur, all along.
Gabe pulled me to him, and the whole rest of the world disappeared. That is, until I heard Guillaume whooping from the stage.
“All right, Gabe!” he was cheering into the mic. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s my brother!”
Mortified, I pulled away from Gabe and realized that not only had Guillaume and the band stopped playing while we had been lost in kissing each other, but now a camera was trained on us, capturing our every move. The audience was cheering, and I could see our faces on every monitor overhead. I suspected it wasn’t just the lighting that made both of us look bright red.
“Kiss her again, Gabe!” Guillaume encouraged. The audience cheered, and I could hear a few shouts of “Kiss her! Kiss her!” Gabe and I looked at each other for a long moment.
“I guess we don’t really have a choice,” he said with a little smile.
I smiled back. “I guess not,” I said. Then slowly, with the cameras trained on us and all of America watching, Gabe pulled me into his arms and leaned down. The cheers, the shouts, and even the refrain of “Beautiful Girl,” which Guillaume had started playing again, faded into the background as our lips met in the perfect French kiss.
Epilogue
ten months later
It should have been one of the most beautiful moments of my life.
As the sky deepened to a sunset of pink-streaked royal blue, Gabe and I were floating above Paris in a hot-air balloon, something I had always dreamed of doing. However, as you might suspect with Guillaume in the picture (and Guillaume always seemed to be in the picture these days), things weren’t quite as idyllic as they sounded. For instance, apparently hot-air balloons were not supposed to move into the airspace directly above Paris—probably for fear of some sort of disaster involving a balloon impaling itself on the Eiffel Tower. But we weren’t concerned about the rules at the moment.