Without bothering with anything else, he stalked back to his room for his clothes and his phone.

He had planning to do.

The glare from the sun was almost blinding as Kate spilled out of the cathedral, blinking hard against the sudden onslaught of light. She fumbled at her side for the new bag she’d picked up at a random stall that morning and kept tucked close against her body all day. Winding her way through the crowd milling around the exit, she managed to lay her hands on the cheap plastic sunglasses she’d bought from the same vendor and slid them up her nose. Vision thus shielded, she cast a glance up and back.

Notre Dame Cathedral, real and in the flesh. Well, stone. It was another sight to cross off her list of must-sees, and she was glad she’d made the time to check it out. The stained glass had been as beautiful as promised. The arching ceilings and tile.

It hadn’t been as much fun as the Louvre, though. None of the places she’d visited on her own had been.

Frowning to herself, she slipped her way between the clusters of people milling about the square, scanning until she spied an open bench. She made for it and plunked herself down, resting her purse in her lap and looking around. There were so many things to see, so many people to look at, languages to hear. Rylan would probably have had an interesting comment about them all.

Rylan. She’d see him in a couple of hours, provided he showed—and that she could follow his cryptic directions to their meeting spot. Part of her wished she’d gotten his number, that she could ask him to meet up with her sooner. But no. It was better this way. He was good company, sure, but nothing worth getting attached to. Even if he wasn’t just after a one-night stand, everything about him screamed casual.

It also screamed confident in bed. And didn’t that send a shiver of anticipation up her spine?

A lonely night in a room with a bunch of other people who’d shared none of her compunctions about having intimate relations around strangers had made her rethink her prudishness from the night before. No, she wasn’t usually the type to sleep with people she didn’t know, but she was on vacation, and he was gorgeous, and she just knew. He’d know his way around a woman’s body. He’d live up to the promises he’d whispered in her ear and pressed against her lips.

Later.

For now, she had come to Paris with a purpose, and this was it. Opening up the main compartment of her bag, she drew out the sketchbook and pencils she’d brought with her for the day. She was still pissed about having lost a brand-new book the day before, but she was grateful, too. Fresh pages could be replaced, if for a small fortune. Near-full books? They were priceless, for the story that they told.

She flipped through the one in front of her for a moment, watching as faces and scenes and still-life illustrations flew by. She’d been slowly filling it over the last couple of years, and she’d been proud of it—proud of all the things she’d made in her final semesters of school.

And yet, looking at it now, all she could hear were the words her mentor, Professor Lin, had said in their last critique session.

“Mastery of every style, Kate. It’s an impressive thing.” Lin had tapped her fingertip against the frames of her glasses. “But unless you make a style your own . . . it’s all just imitation.”

A sour pit opened in the bottom of Kate’s stomach. She’d played with so many different styles in this book. There were faithful renderings, near-perfect photorealism. Fauvist color studies and gestures intended to capture movement. Impressionistic smudges decorated a few, and she’d even ventured into abstraction. By and large, they were good, she’d concede. But they could have been done by anyone. They could have been done by fifteen different someones.

You had to have a voice in art. A vision.

And that was the quiet secret of this trip, the one she hadn’t dared reveal to anybody before she’d gone.

It was her last-ditch hope that she could find a vision of her own. One she could take to graduate school with her.

She had to stop herself from crumpling the page in her grasp. If she couldn’t find it, she’d have to settle down. Take the corporate job she’d been so, so lucky to land, and go sit in a cubicle for the rest of her goddamn life, surrounded by gray, fabric-covered walls. She shuddered. Soullessness and stagnation and the only thing her father had ever let her believe she’d be good enough for.

She’d spent her whole life trying to prove him wrong. But deep down inside, sometimes, she believed him.

Not today, though. Not here.

Squaring her shoulders, she skipped past the rest of her completed sketches, turning to one of a handful of bare white pages and lifting her gaze to the city around her. Paris had something so vital to it, an energy and a romance. The city felt like she wanted her paintings to look, and if she could only capture that . . .

Maybe she’d have something worth fighting for.

Kate’s first sign that time had started flying on her was the angle the sun made with the horizon. She sketched it in behind the cathedral’s tower, then frowned to herself. Absently, she flipped to her first study, and yup. The sun had been a lot higher then. She went instinctively for her crappy little flip phone, but the thing had kept resetting itself to New York time, and she didn’t trust it.

Crap. How the hell did she ask a stranger for the time?

Frowning to herself, she turned to the person sitting on the other end of the bench. “Pardon?” she asked.

The man turned around, giving her a quick up and down before smiling and rattling something off in French.

She’d known this phrase, back a half dozen years ago. “Quelle . . .” What . . . Shit, what was the word for time again? In frustration, she tapped her empty wrist.

The man laughed. “Trois heures et demie. Three thirty.”

“Thank you.” She corrected herself. “Merci.”

He said something else, but she was too busy stuffing her things into her bag, a little pang of regret beating inside her chest. She’d needed just another fifteen minutes or so to play with that last sketch she’d been working on. Three times, she’d drawn the same basic view of Notre Dame, the first with an eye for accuracy, and the second with a quicker hand. That last one, though, she’d felt certain she was onto something. There’d been a different quality to her line work, a life to the planes of stone. It had felt better than the other drawings. Better than any of her work had felt since she’d graduated.

But she’d have to sort it out another time.

The Tuileries Gardens were only a handful of blocks away, but her sense of direction had never been good, and worse, Rylan hadn’t exactly given her a cross street. She might need the whole hour she had left to figure out where she was going and find the statue he’d told her to look for. What the hell had he even meant by that? Our statue?

She snagged a Wet-Nap from her purse and took a quick swipe at getting the charcoal dust off her fingers before she stood. With a little nod of her head toward the guy who’d given her the time and a wistful glance back at the cityscape, she slung her bag over her shoulder and headed off in the direction she was pretty sure she was supposed to go.

To her surprise, she even turned out to be right.

Feeling a little more confident, she slowed her pace as she entered the garden. She was smart enough to keep her eyes peeled and her bag clutched to her chest as she combed the pathways, but the bulk of her attention was on any hunk of granite or marble or bronze she happened to cast her sight on. They were all gorgeous, all epic in their scale and in their subject matter, but not a one of them screamed me and Rylan at her.

As she searched, despair coiled up tightly behind her sternum. Rylan had seemed so genuine, but if he’d really wanted to see her again, he could have given her something more specific than some twenty square blocks to scour. Or maybe a phone number. An email address. A last name. Anything that might help her out right now.