The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

André’s smile.
I’m in so much trouble here,
was her last coherent thought before he pulled her out of her chair entirely, setting her down with unexpected gentleness on a velvet-covered couch. She saw him in fragments: dark hair falling over his eyes, the decisive cut of the muscles just above his hips, dark stubble just below the strong planes of his cheekbones, a mole on his rib cage that looked a bit like a heart. It was still, but hers was racing, racing, as he bore down on her and gave her exactly what she had asked him for.

Twenty-three
    A BLACK CAB RUMBLED by, and Jane hugged her plaid Burberry trench coat closer to her body. Patches of warm light spilled onto the sidewalk every few yards from crowded pubs and elegant shops, but their inviting glow just made Jane feel colder.
    I thought London was supposed to be foggy,
she griped to herself.
I didn’t realize I was in for constant drizzle.
Having finally managed to get a few hours away from her extremely attentive travelling companion, though, she supposed that she couldn’t really afford to be picky about the weather.
    Since they had landed, André had been so cagey about where he was going after London, and why, that Jane was starting to wonder if he had made the whole trip up as an excuse to stalk her. He had begun by expressing extravagant concern for her train-wreck of a younger cousin, and insisted that he had nothing but time to be supportive of Jane while she searched for the fictional party girl. Jane, who had no idea where she was going but certainly didn’t want André accompanying her there, had invented excuse after excuse. They had spent a day and a half in a stalemate, and instead of looking for Annette, Jane had accomplished nothing but dining, sightseeing, and sleeping with André.
    Over beet salad at Texture, he had finally, if reluctantly, told her that they would have to spend the afternoon apart, and Jane’s heart leaped.
He must actually have had business to attend to here,
she smiled to herself, spearing a leaf of frisée cheerfully. Then it had occurred to her that this might just be a new kind of ploy on his part, and she felt a little sad that it actually made sense now for her to be so paranoid.
    In spite of herself, Jane glanced over her shoulder. From the thin crowd behind her, a dark-haired man in a brown leather jacket ducked into a used bookstore. Jane clenched her fists and hurried on. She had already seen him twice since she had left their Kensington hotel. He was wearing something different each time and never paid the slightest bit of attention to her, but her heart still thundered in her rib cage.
    She lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply and waiting for the smoke to calm her down. But her jitteriness remained, and her hand was even colder than it had been before. She stamped out the barely smoked cigarette on the sidewalk and stuffed both hands back into her pockets.
    If André
was
leaping from rooftop to rooftop and following her every move, she admitted ruefully, at least her movements were both boring and unintelligible. She’d spent nearly an hour wandering along Hyde Park until it emptied into Green Park, and then St James’s Park, and if it weren’t for the occasional massive monument or statue, she might almost have forgotten that she was in a majorly crowded city at all. But the impressive stretch along the Thames was livelier, and she wandered aimlessly up the bank. She felt an urgent need to look seriously and systematically for the building she had seen in her vision of Annette, but it was more difficult than she had allowed herself to expect.
    There’s so much here,
she thought anxiously, clenching her jaw tightly. She had visited London three times, all with Elodie. The Dessaixes had a spectacular house, whose top floors overlooked the river, and a suite of its rooms had remained exclusively Elodie’s for years after she had moved to Paris.
If I’d had to find something belonging to
her
in her parents’ house, it would have taken, like, two seconds,
Jane realized ruefully. But now that Jane was in this supposedly familiar city alone, with nothing but a glimpsed shape to go on, she realized how dramatically she had managed to oversimplify the task ahead of her.
I could wander for weeks. I might even pass it and not notice.
    Jane had both an innate and a well-trained eye for architecture, but there were an awful lot of buildings in London. It was a bit like looking for a needle in an oversize