Blame It On Paris

by Jennifer Greene

  "What do you mean, I'm next?"

  "I mean…maybe I landed in your life at this specific time for a reason, too."

  "Yeah. Fabulous luck."

  She kissed him. Clearly reluctantly. But she couldn't let the compliment pass, and even after a long, long lip suck, that elephantine memory came back. "Maybe fate brought us together because we were both meant to solve our father issues."

  "I'll go along with the fate thing. But I think fate had incredible sex on its mind. That we'd find each other for this moment of time. And it'd be earth-shatteringly fantastic."

  "Okay," she murmured. "That, too." And did the lip-suck thing again. "Will?"

  "What now?"

  "I'm so hungry I can't think. And it's been an awful day."

  "So you want to-"

  "Make love," she finished, as if that made perfect sense to her.

  It did to him, too.

  WHEN KELLY woke up the next morning, the impossibly bright sun matched her mood perfectly. In spite of everything, she'd slept like a child, one of those healing, safe sleeps that renewed her spirits.

  And that was a good thing, because nerves promptly gnawed on her conscience the instant she sat up. What should she do about her father? How was she going to handle Jason? What should she say to her mother? What should she do next? Why had her mom never told her the truth? Was there one thing in her life that made sense anymore?

  So much for a restful night's sleep. The whole mess was overwhelming. She sank back against the pillows and pulled the sheet over her head.

  A few minutes later, though, she felt the sheet being tugged off her. Will was standing naked with a skillet in his hand. The aroma reached her even before she saw the contents. Technically, breakfast was just scrambled eggs, but he'd added herbs and cheese. "Coffee, too."

  "Am I still dreaming, or did you turn into a hero while I was sleeping?"

  "You're not still dreaming. It's me. Your hero." But he looked at her hard before teasing any further. "Yeah, I figured you'd be chewing your fingernails before even getting out of bed, Ms. Guilt Queen. So come on. I'm serving breakfast on the balcony. And after that, I have a plan."

  "I'd follow that cute butt anywhere," she told him.

  "Don't embarrass me before breakfast."

  "You're walking around naked. Is it even possible to embarrass you?" It was easy to tease him, yet Kelly still felt a headache threatening behind her temples. Her whole spirit felt trounced from yesterday's revelations. Or maybe from the whole week of traumas. Five days. She'd been in Paris five days.

  In those five short days, she'd lost her identity- physically and emotionally. She'd been mugged. She'd lost the life she'd had. She'd taken an irrepressible, unforgettable lover, when she'd never been the kind of woman to "take lovers." Or even to find lovers.

  Will set down the tray on the metal table on the bitsy balcony before he even seemed to think about putting on clothes. She grabbed a robe before stepping outside. "I told you I was the repressed type, didn't I?"

  "Yeah." Will said. "I think you mentioned it. Just before we fell in bed the first time."

  "You want to hear about my fiancé?"

  "No."

  "I think I should tell you," she said honestly, as she lifted the carafe to pour coffee for both of them.

  "Nope. No interest. You're with me. When you're in Paris, you're with me. When you leave Paris…" His gaze shot to her eyes, so hot and blue. "Then there's nothing I can do. You'll be there. I'll be here."

  "That was the agreement," she concurred.

  "But you do need to shake that guy. He's not right for you."

  "Now, come on, Will. You really have no basis to know he's not for me."

  "I'm three hundred percent sure. You're going to break it off when you get back to South Bend." Will made it sound more like an absolute statement than a question. The sky was blue. Her broken engagement was a given.

  Kelly didn't respond. Thinking about Jason and going home just tangled her up again. She was tangled up enough.

  Besides, just below their balcony, Paris was waking up. An old man was hawking the morning newspapers. Another vendor was pushing fresh flowers- he stopped below, saw her and raised a bouquet to her, peeling off a whole speech so fast she couldn't follow.

  "What's he saying?" she asked Will.

  "He says if you'll come down, he'll give you a bouquet for free, because you are a beautiful woman, a darling, where I am but a canard for hiding you from the world up in this apartment. He wants to kiss your hand. He wants to adore you. He wants you to be with a man who knows how to love a woman-a man such as himself."

  "Oh." Tugging her robe closed, she bent over the balcony and threw the flower man a kiss. "Merci, monsieur! Je vous aime! Toujours!"

  The man grinned.

  Will shook his head. "You'll have him on our doorstep every morning."

  "I had to be polite, didn't I?"

  "Uh-huh. You picked up the French flirting thing really well. But onward…here's the plan for the day. I don't have to go to work, because work, after all, is irrelevant to life. But I do have a couple things I should do there. So you could either come with me- shouldn't take me more than an hour-or you can stay here for that hour. After that, well, you can't be in Paris and not do certain things."

  "Like…?"

  "You're a girl, so you have to do a parfumerie or two. Then there's the old Halles marketplace near the Centre Pompidou. That's like hell on earth. You know. Shopping. Little shops, zillions of them. If you like cooking stuff, Le Creuset is there. Or Sabatier knives. Or copper cook ware…"

  "Please don't look at me when I'm drooling. It's embarrassing." She made a vague gesture. "You'd actually shop with me?"

  "With you, yes. With anyone else, no. Then after that…well, you have to see the Marmottan Museum.

  God knows, there are a hundred museums around here. But that's the one with the Monets. Then there's the Musée Rodin, which I swear is seriously cool. Then there's Sacré-Coeur. I don't know if it's a mortal sin to be a Catholic and miss Sacré-Coeur, but it's gotta be close. And we have to hit a garden or two. Boulogne or Tuileries or Monceau. It's spring. The gardens here are an absolute."

  She looked at him and kept on looking. He was beyond good-looking. His eyes alone were mesmerizing. Not dark blue, not light blue, but kind of a clear, lake-blue. He had such a strong, sharpjaw-a measure that he was more stubborn than a bulldog, she realized now. And she figured he wore that rumple of blond hair a little on the long side to illustrate that he didn't care, was a lazy wastrel type.

  He wasn't a lazy wastrel type.

  When she didn't immediately respond to his plan, he hesitated. "I know, Kel. You didn't really come here to sightsee. And I don't even do sightseeing. But the thing is, you've had a major stress load. So you've got to balance it. You're stuck waiting until some things happen, like getting your passport back-"

  "After which. I have to go home."

  "I know you do. So we have to schedule your time, find a way to make the most of it."

  Truthfully, Kelly didn't need to do another thing to know she'd never forget a second of Paris…or a second she'd spent with him.

  "But," he said, as if that single word were a sentence in itself.

  "But?"

  "But maybe you have something else you want to do? Or something you want to add to that agenda?"

  She nodded. "I'd like to do everything you said. Will. But I'm afraid I can't think, can't do much of anything, without doing something more about my father. What to do. I don't have a clue. But right now, I'm just feeling…"

  When she couldn't come up with a word. Will said. "The French have a word. Dérailler. Feeling derailed. Thrown off track."

  "Exactly."

  "Okay." He thought. "So we'll start out the day at my work. Leave there, hit a library, research some background information about your father. After that, you can decide if you want to try to make another face-to-face connection. If you do, I'll go with you
."

  Very casual, her Will, she mused. He never made anything sound serious. Certainly there was no protective tone in his voice, but that quality was there. From the instant he'd met her, he'd relentlessly found ways to help her with each and every mess she'd landed herself in.

  "I need to do this alone, Will," she said gently.

  "Why?"

  "Because it's my problem."

  He made a Gallic gesture. "How can my being there make it any worse? It's already awkward and upsetting. And if I drive you, we'll be able to cut and run and go get drunk on bad wine if it turns out wrong. Why not have some company if you're going to be miserable?"

  "That's like saying you should get a tetanus shot if I'm stuck getting one. There are some things you shouldn't ask someone else to share."

  "Damn right. I'm not volunteering for the tetanus shot, so don't even try asking."

  "I wasn't!"

  But somehow it all ended up just like he said. It was a long day of discovering Will was a manipulative son of a gun. He used charm and subterfuge and tricks-like ignoring her, or agreeing to something she'd said and then just bulldozing in the same direction he'd planned from the beginning, or kissing her every once in a while. Out of the blue. In a way that bamboozled her thought train so completely that she forgot whatever she'd been staunchly arguing about.

  Even before noon, Kelly had his newfound character flaws inked in her brain. Her mother loved quoting the old saying, make a fool of me once, shame on you…make a fool of me twice, shame on me. So Kelly planned to have her guard up tight before Will was ever successful with those underhanded methods again.

  But she changed her mind in the afternoon. Some of his underhanded, manipulative methods seemed to unexpectedly work out.

  By then, of course, they'd been to his work. She'd met Yves, his boss, a little guy with a fuzzy head of hair who treated Will like a god. And then there was the receptionist. Marie, who clearly ruled the office with gum-popping efficiency and a snappy tongue. There were only a handful of others-it wasn't that big a facility-but whenever or however Yves had hired Will. Will was clearly the one making the business decisions. All of them.

  "You realize you're running the place?" she asked when they left there.

  "Not really. Yves has outstanding products. And he's a good guy. He just never had Business One-O-One."

  "Will. You're doing a lot more than Business One-O-One for him."

  That was one of the times he kissed her. Right in the middle of the street-and God knows, the traffic was homicidal on a Paris street during a workday. At the time, she forgot that she'd been trying to get him to talk more about his job, to explain the complete lie he'd told her. He had so clearly said that he couldn't stand going into his father's business, that he wanted nothing to do with business ever in his life-when she saw for herself that business was as natural for Will as milk for a baby.

  After that, though, he rushed her off into an elegant old library, where they hung out in the research section, diving into old Paris newspapers. Normally research was her bread-and-butter, her love, and being nosy had always been a boon in her job. but she'd never tried researching anything in French. Or had a reason to experience research directly in another country.

  After the research binge, Will insisted on feeding her. He picked a bistro in the Latin Quarter, where they had something called Bresse chicken, washed down with a liter of wine.

  "I don't drink during the day," she objected.

  "You haven't had anything to feel guilty about so far. You know you won't survive a whole day unless there's something you're wringing your hands about. So guzzle it, baby."

  She didn't want to guzzle it. She needed a clear head to process all they'd learned about her father and the Rochard family. Her head was already reeling and dizzy, long before she'd had the first sip of wine.

  "Will," she said, "he's rich."

  "I'd call that a pretty good understatement," Will said. "The French would use the word rupin. As in, filthy rich."

  "You knew."

  "Not knew. The Rochard name is too common here to be sure your family was one of the badass rich ones. But the address made it pretty impossible for your father to be basic middle class. No one can afford that community who isn't pretty much rolling in it." He refilled her wine, and when he saw a pastry tray circulating, motioned for the waitress. "You ready to call him?"

  "In a minute."

  "Kel, there's no point in postponing this if you want to see him again directly. You only have a few days."

  "I know, I know. And if there's any chance he might be willing to see me today. I need to call immediately. But, Will, I'm still dizzy. And it's not the wine."

  In her job. Kelly had tracked enough missing persons and stolen identities to know how to get to the bottom of things.

  Money was always at the bottom of things.

  She could read more French than she could speak, and Will had helped interpret any material where she'd stumbled. Apparently her grandfather, Pierre Rochard, had some Jewish blood. He'd been injured in WWII, had been found and taken in by a Catholic family who'd hidden him for the duration of the war. When it was over, he discovered that he'd lost his entire family…and when he came home to the only place he'd ever lived, he found the house in shambles, his art and family treasures all stolen.

  Until the war, the Rochards hadn't had big wealth, but they'd been furniture makers, successful, thriving. Her grandfather had turned his loss and anger into a cause-seeking out old art treasures.

  She'd found two magazine articles highlighting different aspects of her grandfather's life. Initially, justice had been Pierre Rochard's motivation for finding things that had once belonged to his family, and then he had wanted to help others do the same. But over the next couple decades, finding stolen treasures became his life's work.

  "You know what I found amazing?" Kelly mused to Will. "That's what I do, too. I mean…I don't do anything as big or fascinating as what my grandfather did. But there's still a similarity. Tracking down credit card theft and fraud-it's all about the hunt, the search and the love for that kind of thing. You have to like poking into corners, people's private lives. You think that could be an inherited trait?"

  Will appeared to consider this question, then gravely shook his head. "At a guess, I'd say nosiness at your level is probably a lot more of a practiced, perfected art form."

  And then, just as she was about to smack him. he leaned over and came through with another kiss. It was another one of those forget-where-she-was, who-she-was kind of kisses, and she knew he'd done it deliberately.

  "I'm on to you now," Kelly said, vaguely aware that the waitress was hovering with a tray.

  "On to me about what?"

  "About your wicked, manipulative ways."

  "Yeah?" A quiet flush seeped up his neck. He was clearly delighted by the praise.

  "Anyway," she said vaguely, and then picked up a spoon, unsure how a lemon ice had appeared in front of her. Her lips still felt kiss-stung. But eventually her mind wandered back on track to her father.

  Her dad, Henri, had grown up with that background-only unlike his father, he tackled the treasure-hunting bug from a different angle. His work was insurance-insuring art treasures-while he developed a major collection of his own along the way. Kelly still hadn't grasped how that amounted to tons and tons of francs, but apparently it did.

  "Thirty million. Isn't that what that last article claimed he was worth?"

  "Something like that," Will concurred.

  Bucks, francs, euros, who could keep them all straight? And Will didn't seem particularly impressed by the figure, but then his family already had money. Kelly was used to having none.

  She motioned with her spoon. "I can't fathom how that number is supposed to mean something. I don't even know how many zeroes are on the end of that. I'm used to thinking in terms of clearance sales. I'm a hard-core T.J. Maxx-er. When I was little, my mom was a rummage-sale addict."

  Will
frowned. "What's a T.J. Ma-?"

  "Nevermind. Trust me, you wouldn't understand. The point is I don't understand how my mom fit into this. I mean…some of what she told me had to be true. How else could she have met a Frenchman if she hadn't been over here studying at the Sorbonne? But from everything she said, even if she invented a bunch. I never had the impression she thought he had any money."

  "Maybe he wasn't the kind of guy to show off his wealth. Your grandfather certainly sounded like a quiet, reclusive type. Every article we found on him made a big deal out of how quietly he lived, not wanting to be noticed."

  Another thought occurred to her. "Now it makes more sense why my brothers-my half brothers-took such an instant dislike to me. I couldn't understand why they leaped to the conclusion so fast that I was a gold digger, but that was before I realized how much money there was. Now I get their attitude. And I have to tell my father that, Will. Now! Today! That I don't care about the money, that was never why I tracked him down, that I never even knew about that-oh my God!"

  "Oh my God. what?"

  "I just called him my father. As if I really believe it."

  Will lifted a hand across the table and took hers. Met her eyes. "Now," he said gently, "I think you're ready to try calling him."

  "No."

  "Yeah, you are. You're ready to see him again, too."

  "No, I'm not!"

  "Uh-huh. I'll be right with you." He stood up, as if expecting her to rise, too. Granted, they'd finished eating ages ago and they'd already argued about the bill and then Will had paid it, and they couldn't very well sit there all afternoon.

  But her eyes narrowed. Nobody bullied Kelly Nicole Rochard. Nobody. She wasn't going to do this until she was downright good and ready.

  Only then, of course. Will kissed her again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "DID I MENTION before that you're a manipulative, sneaky, underhanded son of a gun?" she asked him.

  "Not in the last five minutes," Will assured her, and managed to park his Citroen in a space that couldn't possibly be more than five inches by six. She didn't notice his incomparable skill. She was too busy looking belligerent and strong-and grabbing his arm in a killer vise when he came around to her side of the car.