Free The Art of French Kissing by Kristin Harmel

we’ll find it.”
    Poppy hesitated for a moment, opened her mouth as if she was going to say something to me, then shrugged. She spoke quickly to the driver, who glared at me for a moment in the mirror then, shaking his head, twisted the wheel sharply to the left and turned down the side street just before the hotel.
    “Voilà!”
the cabbie said, screeching to a halt at the curb of a dark alleyway.
“Vous êtes contente?”
He smirked at me in the rearview. Obviously, sarcasm translated.
    “Yes, very content, thank you,” I chirped back. Poppy shot me a look and paid the driver. He screeched away the moment we tumbled out of the cab into the darkness.
    “Why did you want to find the back entrance?” Poppy asked as we made our way toward the hotel. “Shouldn’t we just go in and face the music, so to speak? No point in delaying the inevitable.”
    “We may need to claim that we’ve been with Guillaume all along, and therefore the things he was accused of can’t possibly have happened,” I said slowly. “If that’s the case, we can’t be seen arriving.”
    Poppy was silent for a minute. “You know,” she said. “That just might work.”
    We found a back door that was slightly ajar and made our way into what appeared to be the hotel kitchen.
    “Is there anything else I need to know about Guillaume?” I asked as we hurried through a silent, dimly lit space filled with massive refrigerators, industrial-size stoves and ovens, and a series of prep stations, toward a small sliver of light behind a doorway that I figured was the hotel lobby. “Other than his apparent clinical insanity?”
    Poppy chose to ignore the last half of my statement. “Just that he’s actually pretty nice once you get past all the craziness,” she said, hurrying along after me. “And wildly talented.” She paused and added, “I know this must feel ridiculous to you.”
    “That’s an understatement.” I stifled a cry as I smashed my hip bone against the edge of a counter that I hadn’t seen in the dark.
    “But believe me, Emma, he’s going to be so big!” Poppy enthused. “He really has it all!”
    “Including a mental problem,” I muttered as we slipped out of the kitchen and through the darkened dining room, which was closed and silent at this late hour. We silently hurried toward the lobby, keeping our faces turned away from the press mob and trying to look casual. But as soon as we rounded the corner and saw the elevator all the way across the room, we groaned in unison.
    “We’ll never be able to get to it without the reporters seeing us,” I said.
    Poppy nodded and rolled her eyes. She looked around for a moment. “There’s a stairway over there.”
    I darted after her. She pulled open the heavy doorway, and we both slipped inside.
    “I hope you’re in shape,” she said as we began to climb. “Guillaume is in the penthouse suite on the twelfth floor.”
    “The twelfth floor?” I groaned, craning my neck to look up at stairs that seemed to go on forever. “I didn’t think the French built tall buildings.”
    “Evidently, they made an exception here,” Poppy said drily. “It’s where Guillaume always stays when he’s writing music.”
    Six minutes and a dozen excruciating flights of huffing and puffing later, we emerged to find the maroon double doors at the far end of the hall flanked by two enormously beefy, stern-looking men, one of whom had a Salvador Dalí–style mustache that looked designed for twirling, quite an odd sight on a man who could probably snap me in half if he so desired.
    “Thank God,” Poppy said, still panting from our climb. “Edgar and Richard are here!”
    “Who?” I asked, gazing skeptically at the two strange-looking giants who stood between us and our errant rock star. This was getting weirder by the moment. But Poppy was already striding down the hall toward the enormous men, smiling and saying something in rapid French to the Dalímustached man. He stared at her for