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carved out for himself.
    There was nothing for me to do but flatten myself against Luc’s back. His shirt was flapping against the skin on my cheek, whipped up by the wind and the velocity. At home, in the city, a ride like this would have been virtually impossible without a police car intervening in a matter of minutes. But speed wasn’t an issue in this part of the world.
    I wanted to be off the motorcycle, and I wanted to be anywhere but clinging to the back of a man I thought I loved but barely knew. I shook off that thought and tried to be rational. What if these two guys weren’t chasing him? He was putting us both in danger, and I was getting dizzier from the combination of those ideas and the swinging motion of the bike as Luc steered it back between the two heaviest lanes of traffic.
    The next three minutes on the highway seemed like an hour.Cars were honking at us now as we cut them off to keep up the pace, and the honking continued behind us as the men in black must have done the same.
    I knew the exit was coming up in another quarter of a mile. Luc veered in front of two lanes of cars to go from the left-hand passing lane toward the ramp that would take us down to the route that led to the village. As he leaned to the right to make the exit, both bikers behind us followed suit. We were hugging the right side of the pavement so closely that I feared we would slam into the road sign announcing Mougins.
    Then, as though turbocharged with an extra measure of juice, Luc jammed on the brakes, leaned sharply to his left with me hanging on tight, and turned the Ducati a full one-eighty, as on a dime, regaining the shoulder of the highway to continue northbound.
    One of the bikers wiped out completely in an effort to copy Luc’s move. I saw him hit the ground and skid along, trapped beneath the deadweight of the heavy motorcycle, which slammed with him into the base of a tree. The other guy swerved off the ramp to avoid a car coming directly at him. The last time I looked back, he had come to a stop beside his fallen mate, whose screams I could hear over the roar of Luc’s racing engine.

EIGHT
    Luc must have seen the accident in his rearview mirrors. His whole body, which had stiffened with tension somewhere early along the route, relaxed against me. He took his place in the line of cars—as though it was an ordinary ride—until we reached the next exit, on the far side of Mougins.
    “Stop now,” I said, practically screaming into his helmet as we turned onto the tranquil road a mile north of the village. There were brasseries and small shops and endless places with parking lots in which Luc could have pulled over to explain to me what set him off.
    “Home” was the only word I understood when Luc responded.
    I was sitting upright behind him, distancing myself as far from his body as one could on a motorcycle. It was another five minutes before we finished the circular climb up to the center of town, and Luc nosed the bike down into the alleyway to park it beside the door to his property, right where I had found the stack of bones.
    I ripped the helmet from my head and was off the bike before he had it positioned. “That was insane. That ride was terrifying and unnecessary and totally insane, Luc. Do you see how I’m trembling? Can you make any sense of this to me?”
    I turned away from him and pushed open the heavy door. Bythe time he’d locked the Ducati and followed me inside, I was sitting on the old stone wall that overlooked the valley. Gaspard, the sloppy basset hound, was cuddled beside me offering solace.
    “Are you all right, Alex?” Luc came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “I apologize for alarming you.”
    “Alarming me? Alarming me would have been telling me you had a hair-raising ride home this afternoon. I wasn’t alarmed, Luc. I thought we were going to die—at your hands or theirs, whoever they were. What have I walked into here? What is it you aren’t telling me