Confession

By Cara McKenna

This is the fourth title in the Curio Vignettes series, follow-up stories to the novelCurio.

Caroly has waited forever to fall in love. An American now living in Paris, she’s finally found what she craved all those lonely years—a passionate, sensitive man, more gorgeous than she’d ever dreamed, and just as beautiful on the inside.

The only issue? Well, that small matter of him being a prostitute.

Didier’s job is more than a calling. It’s a beloved craft, a chance to soothe broken hearts. It’s also a crutch—the perfect vocation for an agoraphobe, never forcing Didier to leave the safety of his flat. Yet the role he used to cherish has soured since he met Caroly, his admirers now feeling more like enablers. It’ll take a leap of faith to cast his fear aside in favor of a future, but when the alternative is to risk losing the woman he loves, he might discover he’s braver than he ever knew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Publishing
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781094437750

Cara McKenna

Meg Maguire has published nearly forty romances and erotic novels with a variety of publishers, sometimes under the pen name Cara McKenna. Her stories have been acclaimed for their smart, modern voice and defiance of convention. She was a 2015 RITA Award finalist, a 2014 RT Reviewers' Choice Award winner, and a 2010 Golden Heart Award finalist. She lives with her husband and baby son in the Pacific Northwest, though she'll always be a Boston girl at heart.

Book preview

I

I beat the rain, if barely. The sky went from silver to pewter between the Métro station and number sixteen Rue des Toits Rouges, but I’m spared, dodging a headful of frizzy curls and a ruined silk skirt.

I trot up the stone steps and into the elegant old foyer, and press the brass button for flat 5C. Smoothing my top and hair, I wait for the buzz—for Didier to unlock the foyer’s inside door. Normally it takes a matter of seconds, but not this evening. After a minute I ring the bell again and check his mailbox. Empty.

A smile overtakes my lips.

It blossoms to a grin when I spot him through the glass door, appearing at the end of the hall from the stairwell. He waves, striding to let me in.

Hello, I say. Well done. Perhaps one visit in five he’ll come down to meet me. Sometimes he has food on the stove, a ready excuse, but in truth it’s his agoraphobia that keeps him upstairs. But not tonight, it would seem.

Caroly. Good evening. He kisses my cheeks and takes the overnight bag from my hand. We head for the stairs and I save the chitchat, knowing he’ll be edgy and distracted until the deadbolt’s snapped shut behind us, four flights up in his garret sanctuary.

Ah, blessed Saturdays. Nowhere to be in the morning and my lover all to myself for the evening. Usually I get him both Fridays and Saturdays, but yesterday I had a friend’s engagement party to attend, a girls-only affair.

Other days of the week…

On weekend nights Didier is all mine, but he’s anyone else’s for the right price come Sunday evening. I used to pay that price myself, but not since March, nearly five months ago. Now the price I pay is having to settle for whatever leftover weekdays haven’t been booked by his clients.

Sometimes it’s a pittance. Other times, not such an easy pill to swallow. But he’s my lover, not my boyfriend. I’m a total lost cause—drowning in terminal love-lust for him, though I haven’t told him in so many words. In gifts? Yes. In heated glances and physical gestures and emotional support—loud and clear.

I watch his back as we climb the stairs, wondering if he knows exactly how bad I have it. He’s the best-looking man I’ve ever seen, as if you shook a copy of Vogue and a swarthy, elegant model from a Brioni spread magically tumbled out. Add to that the fact that he’s so good in bed, women pay for the experience? Yeah, wobbly-kneed infatuation probably isn’t a noteworthy reaction to him.

What does make me special—aside from my being the only woman I’m aware of who doesn’t have to shell out to enjoy his company—is that I’m the only one who makes him leave his flat. Every time I visit, I drag him out with me, down the street for a coffee, occasionally to dinner. It’s the equivalent of taking someone who’s deathly afraid of the ocean and pushing them overboard into a choppy sea, so I must be special for him to keep letting me torture him so.

We reach his flat and when the door shuts behind us, I smile up at him. Good job.

Thank you.

And your mailbox was empty.

Yes. It was a good day. He pushes off his shoes. He hadn’t bothered with socks, and he’s just as I prefer, barefoot in slacks and a tee shirt. A shirt I bought him, a cotton-merino blend as soft as a baby’s cheek and the dark green-blue of the Seine, with a price tag that would make any sane person snort with derision.

I lean my umbrella against the wall and breathe in deeply. I smell potatoes. And chicken. And something else.

"Romarin." Rosemary.

Yum.

The living room feels already set for seduction, a single lamp switched on in the corner, its soft glow all but swallowed up by the deep red walls. The curtains are drawn back, but the clouds offer little more than a view of the birds roosting on the ledge, gray as the fog. Except for one.

The white pigeon is back, I say, excited. He showed up last week, and has a mottled black and gray marking on his breast partly obscured by one wing, which I think makes it look as though he’s holding a painter’s palette. Perhaps I’ll name him Gauguin. Gauguin was a Parisian transient with unsavory diseases too.

I