Free Hotel Vendome by Danielle Steel

basket, bacon, orange juice, and coffee. They were outside the door in twenty minutes, and Billy devoured the whole meal in ten. And then she told him they had to leave. He looked gratefully at her as he put on his ragged coat, but he looked infinitely better than he had the night before when he came in. And the night had passed without event. All she had to do now was get him out.
    They went down the back stairs quietly after Heloise locked up the room. It was just two short flights, so not much time for the security cameras to spot them, and she hoped they wouldn’t. She was going to come back and clean up after he left. Just before they reached the middle landing, she pulled the hood of her jacket up and turned her face, in case security was watching the video cameras. She didn’t want them to recognize her. She opened the back door and followed Billy out. They were standing on the street outside the back door of the hotel. It was still dark. And he looked at her with so much gratitude that it brought tears to her eyes.
    “I’ll never forget what you did for me last night. You’ll go to Heaven for that one day for sure,” he said, and gently touched her arm. “I’ll remember it forever.” Then pulling his coat around him, with his blanket and sleeping bag under his arm, he shuffled off. He turned the corner a minute later, as Heloise watched him, and then she went back upstairs to clean the room. She knew where the maids kept their carts, she had helped them a thousand times before. She knew just what to do. Half an hour later she had changed the bed and cleaned the bathroom, and no one would have suspected the room had been used. She put the cart away and headed back upstairs to their apartment. It was almost eight when she let herself in. Her father was reading the paper over breakfast and looked immaculate in a dark suit.
    “You girls got up early,” he said, looking surprised. “Where’s Marie Louise?”
    “She takes ballet on Saturday mornings, so she had to leave early. I serviced the room. Josephine didn’t come, she was sick,” she said nonchalantly, picking at a blueberry muffin just like the ones she had ordered Billy two hours before.
    “You didn’t have to do that, but it was nice of you.” Her father smiled at her. He was expecting a busy day—several of their VIPs were coming in, and the foreign president.
    As soon as he got to his office, Bruce Johnson, the head of security, came to see him. Hugues assumed it was to discuss their arrangements and coordinate with the Secret Service for their foreign dignitary. Bruce was a huge man and had worked for Hugues since they opened. He had a tape from one of the security cameras in his hands and a serious look on his face.
    “There’s something I want you to see,” he said quietly.
    “Something wrong?” Hugues asked. Bruce looked more serious than usual, as he put the tape into a machine Hugues kept in his office. They had gone over tapes together many times when an employee was suspected of stealing, drinking, or taking drugs on the job, or had behaved inappropriately in some way.
    “I’m not sure. You tell me. Back door, last night. I didn’t catch it till this morning. I came in early and I ran the tapes from last night. I think entry was right after seven P.M. Exit was just before seven A.M. this morning. I think we had an unexpected guest last night. I checked all the other cameras after I saw this, and I don’t pick him up anywhere. Whoever got him in and out of the hotel knows this place pretty well.”
    Hugues’s blood ran cold as Bruce said it and he wondered if Heloise had sneaked a boy in last night and not been with the innocent Marie Louise. If so, a new day had dawned, and it was not one he was going to like. Hugues braced himself for what he would see.
    Bruce Johnson turned the tape on, and they watched a disheveled, dirty-looking homeless man come in through the back door. He was accompanied by a slight figure in a hooded