Le Français Ch 79-81

The previous installment had two Chapter 76's, so this one has been re-numbered to account for that. There are no missing chapters.

Chapter 79

Sinead hated that she was nervous. Again.

And this time it wasn’t the kind of nervousness that had butterflies fluttering between her gut and her cunt because Marc was scary and sexy and she was turned on. This time she was nervous because as she waited for him, Jules was next to her in the coffee shop and Sinead was worried Jules was going to see something. Catch on to Sinead’s secrets. The things she wasn’t telling her best friend.

If anyone would notice that Sinead acted differently around Marc, it would be Jules.

So she couldn’t. And yet, she sort of felt like she had to.

Marc was in control, and he’d made it clear he didn’t like the idea of a brat being in… whatever they were calling the thing between them. But what was considered bratty when it wasn’t a BDSM thing? What if she wasn’t being bratty, she was just being a cop and a detective, but he felt like something she said or did was bratty?

“Sinead, what the fuck?” Jules asked quietly, setting down her coffee and giving Sinead’s foot a hard enough nudge that the bouncing leg slipped off of where she’d crossed it at her knee.

“Sorry,” Sinead said, readjusting in her seat. “Probably didn’t need this cup of coffee.”

“I told you to get tea,” Jules rolled her eyes.

“Tea might as well be water filtered through a handful of dirt.”

“Because coffee beans are so much more refined.”

“You drink coffee too,” Sinead countered.

“Next time get tea so you aren’t bouncing off the fucking walls. God, you’re gonna need to pee as soon as we get back in the car, aren’t you?”

“Shut up,” Sinead sighed. The door to the coffee shop opened and she glanced over, but it wasn’t him.

“Is he usually this late?” Jules asked.

“No,” Sinead said. “Usually he’s pretty prompt, even when he says he’s running late. I think it’s a European thing or something.”

“I thought the French were known for being sort of lax on promptness?” Julia snorted.

“OK, maybe it’s just a Marc thing,” Sinead shrugged. “Or, like, an ‘I make a shitload of money because I’m smart as fuck and super structured in how I do things’ thing.”

“Sounds like he has a stick up his ass to me,” Jules said. “Though I guess he wasn’t like that when we had dinner at your place.” Then she smirked and snickered. “What if you’re all hot for him, and it turns out he’s into getting pegged or something? All that sexual tension and suaveness and he wants you to grab a dildo and-”

“Fuck off,” Sinead sighed, very aware that Marc was the exact fucking opposite of that, then sat up as she saw Marc through the front window. “He’s here.”

“Calm your tits,” Jules murmured with another smirk, taking a sip of her coffee.

“Twat,” Sinead murmured back, then tried not to smile as Marc finished brushing the snow from his coat and strode through the seating area of the coffee shop and approached their table.

“Detectives,” he said with that fucking smile of his as he nodded to them and swept off his coat, folding it neatly once and hanging it over the free chair at their table. “A moment, if you please. Can I get you anything while I order?”

“We’re good,” Jules said.

Marc looked to Sinead.

“We’re good,” she confirmed.

Marc nodded and went to the counter to make an order, and Sinead could tell immediately that he was being his smooth-talking self as the older woman behind the counter gave him a warm look and started bantering with him.

“OK, he’s hot,” Jules sighed. “You’re still on thin fuckin’ ice.”

“Fuck off,” Sinead sighed, shaking her head. She wasn’t sure what was worse, Jules knowing just enough to torture her like this with her littlesing barbs, or Jules not knowing before and flirting with him in her apartment.

Marc came back carrying his coffee with a ceramic cup and saucer - a fucking cup and saucer when everyone else in the place had basic cardboard takeaway cups. And he had a croissant on a plate, buttered neatly.

As soon as she saw the croissant, Sinead regretted not ordering one. Or a doughnut. 

“I apologise for the delay, Detectives,” Marc said as he set his plate and saucer down and pulled out his chair, adjusting how his coat hung on it before taking his seat. “It was not my intent to keep either of you lovely ladies waiting on my account.”

“It’s fine, Marc,” Jules said, leaning back in her chair and eyeing him over a bit. Sinead wasn’t sure if she was doing it because she was doing another round of judging him, or just to bug Sinead. Either one was equally likely.

“Thank you for coming,” Sinead said. “I know we could have met at your office, but this seemed… more appropriate.”

Marc lifted an eyebrow as he took a sip of his coffee, then set it down on the saucer neatly. “Is this meant to be a clandestine meeting?”

“... Sort of,” Sinead said.

“More yes than no,” Jules said, leaning forward in her seat. Sinead took a second glance at her friend and partner - had Jules unbuttoned an extra button on purpose, or had it just slipped? It wouldn’t have been the first time for either. “Look, Marc, I get that you and Sinead had your arrangement with you helping her sort through financial documents and such, but I didn’t realise you were… Fuck it. I didn’t realise you were ‘going undercover’ with her. That’s super dangerous.”

“Ah, Julia,” Marc said with one of those fucking smiles of his. “Please, providing Sinead with an unobtrusive escort into locations that would otherwise be more difficult for her to access is my pleasure.”

Jules gave him a deadpan look. “Yeah, sure.”

Marc sighed, cocking his head slightly. “Detective, I would be happy to provide you with a similar excursion. I’m sure Sinead would vouch for my proficiency as an undercover partner.”

“Marc,” Sinead groaned. “Just… stop talking.”

Jules snorted and Marc gave her another one of those grins.

“Look,” Jules said, lowering her voice a little more as she leaned into the table between them. “I’m not saying what you’ve helped us uncover so far isn’t helpful, but every time you get involved and things aren’t done by the books it makes things more complicated. You know this, Sinead knows this. At this point, things have gotten so fucking complicated that the little knot you two have tied is going to take some serious unpicking to make any of it workable.”

“It sounds like you’ve already come to a decision on how that ‘unpicking’ needs to occur, Detective,” Marc said with a little smirk. He glanced at Sinead. “Sometimes it is helpful to get a third, outside perspective on things.”

Sinead felt her eyes widen just slightly, reading the unspoken question in his eyes. Does Jules know? Marc was asking. NO, she silently screamed back, hoping he would get the message without Jules catching on.

“Well, that’s me, the third perspective,” Jules said, almost but not quite rolling her eyes. “And yeah, we worked out what needs to happen. I get why you’re refusing to be an official informant, Marc, but it’s really fucking us here - none of the financial documents you’ve got us are admissible in court, which means nothing we find out following them without being able to show another way we discovered the info is rotten too. And since you don’t want to be named or testify, that means every time you do something with Sinead it’s pretty much useless too. So your whole thing with the cards and finding out about the smuggling? So far it’s totally useless to us.”

“I appreciate the dire picture that you have painted for me, Detective Xu, but I sense you’re coming to the point of this midday meeting?” Marc asked. He’d been taking small bites of his croissant throughout the chat and now he gestured with the tail end of it. “In other words, perhaps you should get to the point?”

“We need actionable information, Marc,” Sinead sighed. “Something one step removed from Victor so that everything we’ve done so far can be plausible happenstance. Something that Jules can chase down separate from me, because Victor knows my face now and that it’s tied to you. I can’t show up in court or he’ll know you’re involved, and that’ll roll downhill. So we need to figure out what those antiques were, where they are now, or even better where they are going and how. If we can find out what and where then Jules can set up a plausible discovery of them, which can lead to us getting a warrant to dig up everything else we already know about from your work.”

“I see,” Marc said, looking back and forth between Sinead and Jules. He was leaning back now, and Sinead’s training told her he’d settled into a power position. Open body language, feeling unthreatened and dominant. Feeling in control.

Before, it would have gotten Sinead’s back up to see him like that. Not him, but someone standing between her and what she needed for a case. Someone she was going to need to cajole, intimidate or otherwise manoeuvre into doing what she wanted.

Now, because it was Marc, because of everything between them, Sinead felt her pussy start getting wet.

Sinead knew that Marc, in control, in a position to make demands, meant that she would be paying a larger price than before. And that meant that she might finally get the fucking that she’d been craving from him.

God, I’m fucked up, she thought to herself.  And yet she couldn’t help it.

“If you’re about to ask what’s in it for you, I’m going to seriously consider taking a key to your probably very expensive car,” Jules said dryly.

“Not at all, Detective,” Marc said. “No, I’m very happy with the current arrangement we have going. In fact, I would say that I have very few complaints at all. Other than the business with the legalities of the information, would you disagree, Sinead?”

“No,” Sinead said quickly. “No, I’m happy with the terms of our… agreement.”

“What do you think of helping us get this straightened out then?” Jules asked.

“I think it will take some careful execution, but I can likely figure something out,” Marc said. “Though I may only be able to discover what, where or when, not all three.”

“Whatever you can get for us, we’ll make it work,” Sinead assured him.

“Where and when are more important than what,” Jules added. “We can figure out the What once we have the suspicious cargo in custody. We need to catch it before we can tag it.”

“Understood, Detective,” Marc nodded, taking a final sip of his coffee and setting it down on his saucer. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do need to get back downtown. While I will always appreciate a visit with a pair of beautiful women, and my two favourite Detectives, I am expected to be available to my paying clients. En avons-nous fini très chères?”

He shook each of their hands, acting like the smarmy French bastard he was and kissing their knuckles before sweeping his coat on and giving them one more nod before leaving.

“God, that’s corny and shouldn’t be attractive,” Jules said as he stepped out the door of the coffee shop and back into the snow. “But somehow he makes it work.”

“I know,” Sinead grumbled. She hated the fact that she loved it.

“Do you?” Jules asked her with a sly smirk. “Do you know?”

“Fuck off,” Sinead sighed.

Chapter 80

‘I’m sorry I didn’t give you a heads up.’

Marc sighed as he checked his phone and saw the text from Sinead. He wasn’t sure if he’d put up too much of a front or not with Jules in the meeting. The truth of the matter was, on this sort of a day in Toronto even the Finance world started to slow down as the weather started to plaster the streets with slush and thick snow. It was like the mood in every office across the city shifted, the heavier the coating of snow. And a late February snow could be thick due to nearby Lake Ontario.

Making the trip out to the coffee shop the Detectives had chosen had taken some time, but it was time Marc could easily spare. More than half his employees were working from home for the day, there weren’t any deadlines approaching until the end of next week, and it wasn’t exactly the time of year to be aggressively hunting for new clients or projects - that season would come soon enough, not that Marc was the one to go hunting for them at this point. His sorts of projects came looking for him, these days.

‘It was no problem at all, Detective,’ Marc texted back. ‘It was good to see you and Julia working together again.’

‘Are we good?’ Sinead asked quickly.

Marc looked at the message and decided to let her stew for a few minutes. She’d responded immediately, which told him this, or her next question, was what she really wanted to talk about. Her apology had been a pretext. He turned back to his computer, finishing his email of items for Jillian to check up on for him, before considering how to respond to Sinead.

‘We should talk about expectations, ma petite rebelle,’ Marc texted her.

‘I assumed I would owe you,’ she responded a few minutes later, though Marc only glanced at the text since Jillian had come down to his office to follow up on a couple of items rather than them trading emails back and forth. She really was excellent at her job. Marc made a note to make a reservation for her and her partner somewhere nice next week. He’d pay her the same, or better, than some of his other staff if it wouldn’t have raised flags with the greater HR machine of the company - she was more valuable than half of them by far.

Once Jillian had strutted back out of his office, shooting him a knowing smirk as she closed his office door that had him wondering if maybe she had somehow figured out how to clone his phone so she could read his texts, Marc responded to Sinead again. ‘Assumptions are dangerous, Detective. What did you assume I would be owed?’

Her next response didn’t come for a good twenty minutes, but when it did it came in the form of a picture. He was a little surprised she’d gone this far, but then they’d done much more risque things now than this.

Sinead was in a bathroom stall, likely at work, and her slacks were down around her thighs as she took a picture of her cute, pale ass. Her buttplug was perfectly seated between her cheeks, and her vagina was slightly flushed with arousal.

‘We’ll see,’ Marc replied, smirking to himself. That had been a backhanded request if ever he’d received one. He knew he was stretching things out with the redhead, but now that the game had progressed to explicit consent, the anticipation was delicious and there would only ever be one first time.

He also knew that he was torturing her with a comment like that.

‘Tonight?’ she asked.

Now she wasn’t even trying to be demure.

‘I would, ma petite rebelle, but I am otherwise engaged tonight. I will let you know when.’

‘Thank you.’

He knew she didn’t mean it. That was a ‘Fuck’ sort of thank you if he’d ever read one. He smirked a little, glancing at it one more time before setting his phone down and getting to work. He really was otherwise engaged for the night, and the Detective had summoned him to a meeting even if it had been more because of Jules than her own demand.

Chapter 81

Felicity leaned over the centre console of the car, kissing Marc’s shoulder. He was just parking out in front of Gregory Stanhope's absolute mansion of a house in the Bridle Path neighbourhood of the city, northeast of downtown. Marc had once heard of the neighbourhood being called ‘Millionaire’s Row’ by a Real Estate agent, and that might have been true at one point but with the overpopulation of the city and the skyrocketing real estate prices it was probably more like ‘multi-millionaires row’ at that point.

Of course, Gregory certainly qualified for that title, sitting on the boards of several highly profitable companies as he did. 

Marc turned to Felicity and found her smiling at him as she rested her chin on his shoulder. Her eyes, bright and glittering from the house lights, were mirroring her smile.

“What is it, ma petite fée?” he asked, taking her hand in his own and giving it a squeeze. They were both wearing gloves, his leather driving gloves and hers fashionable long suede gloves to match the coat he’d given her the previous winter.

“I’m just really happy,” she said, a little wistfully.

“I’m very happy you’re here too,” Marc replied, leaning in and giving her a gentle kiss. He could feel her continue smiling.

He got out of the car and went around to open the door for her, helping her up and out since she was wearing heels that he’d chosen for her to match her dress. They were entirely unsuitable for the weather, but she looked fantastic. Then, with her on his arm, they walked across the cleared driveway and up the steps to the front door.

“Do we know who else is expected?” Felicity asked.

“Only Gregory and his daughter Andrea,” Marc said. “But I’m sure it will be a selection of the regular rogue’s gallery.”

She flashed him another smile, this one more of a smirk, as they reached the door and he thumbed the doorbell. “The fact that you still consider your friends a ‘rogue’s gallery’ tells me that you’re still a lovable little boy at heart, darling.”

Marc chuckled and let his eyes drift down from her face to her cleavage, which was peaking delightfully from the top of her coat. “Well, if that’s the case, then this lovable little boy is easily distracted.”

That made Felicity laugh, and it was perfect timing as the door opened and Gregory, clad in a wool knit sweater, slacks and house slippers broke into a chuckle of his own because the blonde smile and laugh were often infectious.

“Felicity, my dear,” Gregory said, offering his hands and helping her up the stoop and into the house. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Oh, it’s been too long, Greg,” Felicity said, sweeping him into a hug.

“Marc,” Gregory grinned, offering his hand for a firm shake. “Glad you could make it.”

Their coats were taken and hung up, Gregory made the appropriate ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ over Felicity’s dress without going overboard, and he led them deeper into the house to his parlour. The regular furniture had been rearranged and a couple of the couches moved somewhere else in the house to make room for a big card table that would have fit fairly easily onto a casino floor. When men of Gregory’s means decided to host a party to do something like help their daughter learn a mildly obscure card game, they rented a professional table and hired a professional dealer. That dealer was a pretty black woman, her curly hair neatly tucked back and her glasses giving her a ‘nerd chic’ look while her crisply buttoned blouse had its sleeves rolled up. This, of course, was to provide a dramatic frame for her hands as she did shuffling tricks for the amusement of some of the guests.

The display was interrupted by Marc and Felicity’s entrance, and Joan Stanhope immediately abandoned her awe of the card tricks as she swept across the room, beaming in delight. “Felicity,” Gregory’s latest wife said, spreading her arms as if she were going to pick Felicity up and fly off with her. “Darling, it’s been so long!”

“Joan,” Felicity said, the warmth in her voice as she hugged the other woman back hiding the mild disdain she actually held for the woman. She’d told Marc before the problem wasn’t technically Joan herself, more just the position that the woman had put herself in. Felicity was friends with Melissa, Greg’s third wife who he was still with when Marc had started bringing her to functions and introducing himself as her escort for the evening. She was also friends with Wendy, who she hadn’t known while Greg was married to her, but who was still very active in the philanthropic and art scene in the city. Being friends with two of Gregory’s ex-wives, and Joan being something of a pretty airhead, meant that Felicity had to put in just a touch of effort to be her utterly pleasant, completely engaged self.

It also didn’t help that Joan was twenty-three, younger than both of Greg’s two eldest children, and Felicity swore that the woman had been in one of the big first-year university courses she’d TA’d for while she was doing her Masters degree. She hadn’t been able to find any proof of that (she’d been mostly interested to know if the woman had written a solid essay or not), but the weird feeling was still there that she was simply too young for Greg.

The only saving grace was that Andrea, Greg’s youngest, the only Stanhope heir living at home, and the focus of the evening, had developed a good relationship with her new ‘stepmother.’

It took moments for Felicity to be getting led off by Joan, and Marc smiled a little as Felicity clung to his fingers for just a moment and looked back at him with that same warm smile, but a playful little, ‘No, don’t let me go!’ tease in her eyes before she laughed and followed Joan. Marc had already spotted Lucia Randolph in a conversation across the room, and they’d traded friendly nods, so he knew Felicity wouldn’t be getting tired of the gathering any time soon. Lucia was more his date’s speed, a fellow academic though she’d made the transition to the private sector a few years ago.

“How are things, Marc?” Gregory asked, gesturing over towards the fully serviced bar on one end of the parlour. Marc nodded and followed, knowing Gregory had some whiskey or scotch in mind for him to try. He always did.

“Things are stable, Gregory,” Marc said, patting the older man on the shoulder. “Which is exactly what we hope for, this time of year.”

“Too true, too true,” Gregory chuckled.

It was Scotch this time, from some corner of Scotland Marc had never heard of. Gregory’s passion, beyond making money and women too young for him, was finding little ‘liquid gems’ as he travelled and sharing them with his friends back home. And he had the fully renovated Tasting cellar to prove it in the basement. They didn’t get that far from the small party, though, and it was only a few minutes of chit-chat before the final guests arrived, Paul and Penny Ballinger, old money socialites that edged closer to Gregory’s age than Marc’s.

With all the guests, playing or not, arrived, Gregory called everyone to the table and the dealer explained the rules of Baccarat for the uninitiated, which was most of them. Marc knew of the game but paid attention to remind himself of the rules, which then reminded him why he didn’t pay much attention to it anyway. Unlike poker or even blackjack, Baccarat wasn’t really a game of skill. It also really wasn’t a game you would want to play anywhere other than a Casino. There were only ever two hands, the ‘Player’ and the ‘Dealer,’ and you had to place your bet for which would get closest to nine points without ever seeing a card. That was the only decision point for the player, everything else had a strict set of rules for when each hand received another card or not, all managed by the dealer.

Marc’s mind immediately spotted the obvious way to ‘win’ at the game - always bet Player (since betting Dealer usually came with a small cut to the Casino on a win), and if you lost, double your bet over and over until you won. You could, in a vacuum without other factors and enough resources to make it happen, make it statistically unlikely to ever ‘lose’ in the long run. Of course, a Casino could screw with those efforts, the most obvious being putting betting caps on someone. If you weren’t allowed to double your bet over a certain amount, you couldn’t make back the amount you had already lost.

But all of that made the game both an excellent social game that someone could barely pay attention to, but also an utter bore if you weren’t playing against the House because you were never competing in any meaningful way.

Marc started the evening as one of the eight players there was room for at the table, along with Gregory, Andrea, Paul Ballinger, and a few other guests. Andrea was taking the game seriously and Marc could immediately tell she was likely doing some form of counting cards, though he wasn’t quite sure how effective that would be - he knew the basic maths behind counting cards for Blackjack, but wasn’t sure how they translated when there were only ever two hands so the decks cycled much slower.

There was no money on the table, just chips and bragging rights, so Marc found himself making idle chat with whichever player was next to him for the first hour or so of the party, occasionally finding his drink had been refilled by a magnanimous Gregory as he puttered around doing his hosting duties. The man did love a good, old-fashioned party even if he was a frequent attendee of the more extravagant Fundraisers in the city.

Marc found himself distracted, though, over time. From both the game and the conversation.

Felicity was effortless as she moved through this world. She wasn’t the thinnest, or the youngest, woman in the room. She wasn’t the richest, the most accomplished. Didn’t come from old money, or carve out her fortune. Yet she was… radiant. A star that others orbited around. Marc had never noticed that before. Felicity didn’t just work the room, the room adjusted and worked for her. Whether it was by choice or by will, Marc watched her direct the flow of conversation partners like a police officer directing traffic, except she made it an art form. And she did it humbly, never stepping on Joan’s toes, never letting a hint of friction develop.

And, thinking about it, Marc couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t seemed this… poised. She’d been nervous, the first few times she’d donned a ballgown he’d bought her and took his arm as they stepped into a major fundraiser. And she certainly hadn’t been a natural leader of the wealthy elite in her quiet way at first; it had taken time for that to happen. But it was that poise, that perfect balance of grace, good humour and friendly flirtatiousness that got them all on her side.

“What is it, dear?” Felicity asked. She’d caught him watching her and he’d left the game table, crossing the parlour to her. She’d slipped from her conversation effortlessly and met him partway, and smiled questioningly as Marc side-stepped behind her and wrapped his arms around her, hugging her gently and leaning down to press his lips to her ear.

“I was just admiring you, ma petite fée,” he murmured.

“You were?” she asked, turning and smiling at him again. “I don’t know what you would need to admire, darling. You picked every piece of this outfit and were very thorough in making sure each piece was in its proper place.”

Marc grinned, remembering how he had rained kisses, and spankings, over Felicity as she’d gotten ready for the evening. How he’d chosen her lingerie and the dress. Her jewellery. She loved that he enjoyed pampering her that way, and he loved that she delighted in giving her both soothing kisses and sharp, teasing slaps to the ass, thigh or breast. She’d had to change her panties before they ended up leaving.

“I admire you in that way often, Felicity,” he said. “But just now? I was admiring the woman behind the beautiful face, and the body of a Goddess. I was simply admiring you. Tu ne te rends pas compte à quel point tu illumines la pièce.”

“Thank you,” she said simply and brought up a hand to hold him still as she kissed him lightly. She kept it demure - they were at a salon party, after all - but it was more than a peck. It lingered. It spoke of the things that were more than envelopes and business deals and payment for services.

It spoke of more than the games that felt less and less like games between the two of them. Especially now that he was playing with Sinead.

“I’m going to miss this,” Felicity said gently, leaning back against him as she revelled in being held in his arms. She was looking across the room at the game table where Andrea was in a teasing argument with Gregory, and the Ballingers were egging them both on.

“Miss it?” Marc asked in mild confusion.

“Eventually, dear,” Felicity said, patting his hand. “When it’s gone, I’ll miss this. Everything ends eventually.”

Marc wasn’t sure he liked that thought.