The Model Spy

Chapter 6 - Girl in the Rain and the Model Pain

Like Zach promised, I got the whole upstairs of the suite. He slept in the room downstairs, probably wishing he could get even further away from me than he already was.

It was late once I unpacked my many bags, so I went to bed. I knew that I probably wouldn’t be getting much rest once the mission really started, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I tossed and turned in my large bed, never seeming to get comfortable. After a few hours, I resulted to staring at the high ceiling, studying the exquisite mouldings in its corners and counting the pieces to the glass chandelier dangling above my pillow.

Zach, probably just to prove that he was a better worker than me, sat at the dining table looking over his laptop and files. Papers were stacked high, organized into piles scattered around the table. Headshots, resumes, police records, mug shots. He sighed loudly several times, banged coffee mugs on tables, and even threw something across the room once.

Of course it was all an act. He was trying to make me feel guilty, trying to force me out of bed in an attempt to help him. And it worked. Three times I trudged down the spiral staircase and offered him my help, but he told me to leave every single time. He was trying to irritate me, trying to get me to leave Paris for good. Well, it wasn’t going to work.

Sometime in the early morning, I fell asleep. The deep sleep only lasted a few hours before the alarm on my bedside table began to ring, its shrilling bell rattling my eardrums. I groaned and turned it off, but I couldn’t pull myself out of the warm covers.

I laid in the soft bed for a few minutes going over everything. This wasn't going to be easy. Especially starting out with nothing to work with. There were no fingerprints, no faces, no names. I would have said it was like finding a needle in a haystack, but that would have been an understatement. This was twenty times harder.

I got dressed, contacts, teeth, and all, and went downstairs. Zach was asleep, snoring away in his room. His door was closed tightly, probably locked too. The only sounds were the soft footsteps of my bare feet against the hardwood floor. The sky outside the window was a bright blue. I opened the mezzanine’s sliding door, allowing the relaxing fall breeze to make its way into the room.

For breakfast, I ordered the safest sounding thing on the room service menu. I decided to be nice and order breakfast for Zach. I decided to be extra nice and not poison it (my CIA chemistry class would have definitely come in handy in that scenario).

With Zach still sound asleep, I ate my breakfast in silence and read over my schedule. At ten that morning, I had a photo shoot for a popular French magazine. At three, I had a fitting. It seemed simple enough. Well, once you got past the fact that there was a murderer among us and it was up to me and Mr. Cranky to find him. Or her.

I heard Zach fumble with the locks on his bedroom door before he finally walked out in sweatpants and a t-shirt. He rubbed his eyes with his fists and yawned loudly, stretching his arms above his head. His t-shirt rose with his arms, giving me a small glimpse of rock-solid abs that made me catch my breath. He glared at me mid-yawn. "I thought I told you to get out of my space."

"Good morning," I said cheerfully, pulling my eyes away from his abs, now hidden behind the white cotton of his shirt.

With only a grunt in reply, he plopped down at the table and picked up a croissant.

"Where did this come from?" He looked at it closely, examining it like he was in a science lab.

Hadn’t he seen a croissant before? "I ordered room service. I thought you might want breakfast."

He threw it back down on the plate. "I'm not hungry."

I really didn’t feel like getting into another argument. "Well," I sighed as I got up from the table, "get dressed. I have a shoot in less than an hour."