Blame It On Paris

by Jennifer Greene

  A few clouds fluttered overhead, but mostly the sky was a pure blue, with a warm sun beating on their heads…and the view. The 7th and 16th arrondissements were traditionally the most expensive real estate in Paris. They were only a skip away from the Eiffel Tower and Musée d'Orsay, but Will didn't suspect Kel would be up for sightseeing after this.

  The Rochard house was classic-tall with a steep gabled roof, oriel and bay windows, leaded stained glass. Sculpted shrubbery framed the long steps to the front door, and a wrought-iron fence protected the Rochards privacy.

  The place wasn't remotely ostentatious. It just looked like serious old money-well kept, well cherished. Somebody loved that house.

  "Will," Kelly said firmly, "it's not fair that I dragged you into this."

  "Sure it is. The man is nothing to me. If he's mean to you or makes you uncomfortable, I can deck him. No qualms. And if you two get on fine, then I'll go sit on the front step and smell the aristocratic air for a while. Great spring day, no sweat."

  "I'm no coward."

  "I know that, cookie. Cowards don't travel across the Atlantic alone."

  "He can't really want to see me."

  "He had a chance to say no when you called. Instead, he agreed to another meeting, so he must be willing to see you."

  "But now I remember the way he looked at me the first time…believe me, he doesn't like me. Or want to believe I exist. He probably only agreed to see me this time because he was afraid I was going to be trouble."

  "Honey, you are trouble. And if you're his daughter, you're damn well entitled to be trouble. Look at me." At the door, before knocking, he straightened her collar, pulled up her shoulders, smoothed her hair. Then he kissed her nose. "Let's do it."

  He knocked. He didn't have a clue what she was barging into, but he was damn well positive no one was going to attack her. No, he didn't intend to deck anyone, but he knew exactly how rude the French could be-and how nontough Kel could be. Whether the meeting became awkward or awful or both, he wasn't about to let her face it alone.

  Yet when the door opened, Will was tempted to gape. Maybe before, Kelly's story had seemed halfway like a fairy tale to him. but the man who opened the door was somewhere around his early sixties. His hair was distinctly brandy-brown. He was tall, no pansy in build, but still unusually fine-boned. And he had brown eyes so startling they made you want to stare. Like Kelly's. Exactly like Kelly's.

  He had a thin mouth, sharply defined. Like Kel's.

  He had the same perfect skin.

  His nose was bigger, but the slant of cheekbones and the shape of his chin…hell. They were all Kel's.

  No one could doubt the relationship. And from the sudden change of color in Henri Rochard's face, he realized exactly who Kelly was.

  "Bonjour. Et vous êtes…?" Henri looked at him.

  Will introduced himself. Rochard took his measure, then ushered them into a room off to the left. Double doors led to a front parlor decorated with heavy drapes, crystal, antique chairs, lots of ornate gold work. It looked to Will as if the room was done in one of those Louis periods. Louis XIV or whatever.

  He had ample time to look around, because Henri's attention was on Kelly. He could barely take his eyes off her.

  "Demitasse?" he asked, inquiring whether either of them wanted coffee.

  "Non, merci," Kelly said.

  She finally let go of his hand, but likely only because her palm was slicker than a slide. Henri motioned her to sit in a chair close to him. She opted for a love seat that looked harder than a rock, but at least he could sit next to her.

  "Kelly…" Henri started to say, his voice so low he sounded hoarse. "This is difficult. Ce n'est pas facile…"

  "It's not easy for me, either. Could you just tell me… Did you know my mother was pregnant? Did you knowI existed? What really happened between you and my mother? What-"

  Henri looked at Will for the first time, showing a hint of humor.

  "Kel," Will said gently. "I think you might want to give him a chance to answer one question before you pelt him with the next thirty."

  Yet Henri spoke up, with his own agenda. "You will need a DNA test."

  "Why?"

  Again, Henri looked at Will. "To verify if we are relative. Related."

  "You look at me-I look at you-and you can doubt the relationship?" Kelly said disbelievingly.

  "Non. Not exactly. But legally, there must be verification. And I would appreciate knowing why you came to France now. How you found me, how you knew about me."

  "I knew about you from my mother! But I thought you died before I was born. That's what I was told."

  "Then how did you happen to come here? If you thought there was no one to find, no father." He steepled his hands, sank into a chair that seemed to swallow him.

  "I had three letters that you wrote to my mom- I thought this was after you two were married, that you'd gone back to France for some reason and my mom had stayed in the United States. Now…well, I'm just saying that I thought you and my mom were married…" Kelly's voice caught. "But that was another lie, wasn't it? You were never married."

  "Non. Ce n est pas possible. A marriage was never possible."

  "Because you were already married?"

  Henri took a long, slow breath. "Oui. Because at the time I met your mother, I had a wife and two sons. Divorce was never even a remote option." Again, Henri glanced at Will, then quickly returned his attention to Kelly. "Where are these letters?"

  Kelly stiffened up like a coiled spring. "You think I made them up?"

  "Non, non. No sense for you to invent this. You had to have means to know this address, to know about me. So I am asking you. Where these letters are."

  Henri revealed little emotion in his expression, but from his language. Will could readily discern he was upset. Henri was fluent enough, but when Kelly said something that troubled him, his English seemed to deteriorate. And his eyes never left Kelly's face, as if he couldn't stop looking at her.

  Will kept trying to read the man. There seemed more suspicion than any fatherly love in his behavior, but that didn't seem totally odd under the circumstances. More than anything, Henri simply acted as if he'd been thrown by a wallop of a shock from his past, and he was doing his damnedest to determine what it meant, what to do about it.

  Kelly, on the other hand, had turned into one hundred percent estrogen. She was absolutely clear about where she was coming from. She suddenly had a live father in her life. All the lies she'd been told were being painted with bold strokes, the color of anger. And loss. And feelings of abandonment. And plain old temper.

  She rose like a tight spring when he brought up the letters again. "Do you think I'd use them? To blackmail you or get money out of you? Henri… Dad…for God's sake. I don't even know what I should call you! Whatever. Try and get it through your thick head that I don't want anything material from you. I just wanted to know something about who my father was. That's the only reason I came here. To get a sense of family, the part of my blood I never had a chance to know. I'm not here to cause you any kind of trouble-"

  When Kelly stood up, so did Henri. And just as fast. Will lurched to his feet. Kelly had tears spitting from her eyes.

  "Kelly," her father said calmly. "I want you to have a DNA test."

  "You want a DNA test? Fine. I'll have your test and then you can shove the results where the sun doesn't shine." More tears. She whirled around, bumped into Will, whirled back again. "If you don't want a daughter, believe me, you don't have one-"

  "Kelly. I didn't say that. Ma chère-"

  "You haven't asked me one thing. About my life, who I am, what I do. You don't want me in your life. I get it. It was mighty inconvenient for me to show up-"

  "Mighty-" Henri looked at Will.

  "Maybe not the easiest thing to translate," Will murmured.

  "You think this is inconvenient for you?" Kelly ranted on. "I didn't know you were alive. I'm just finding out that my mother apparently had an affair
with a married man. That she fabricated a whole life about you that wasn't true. You think that's convenient for me? I've got brothers. My God, I have family. Only apparently, thanks to you and my mother both, I'll never have a chance to know you. Or my brothers, who seemed to hate me on sight."

  Henri shot Will a frantic glance now. Kelly was clearly talking too fast for him to completely follow, but like any man-and certainly a Frenchman-he recognized a woman's meltdown when he saw one.

  "Kelly. Ma chère. I have perhaps not handled this well-"

  "Damn right, you haven't. You've handled this totally badly. And that's just fine. But I'm not going to stay here and get beat up for something that was none of my fault, none of my doing. And damn it! Those letters were the only thing I ever had from you!"

  This time she spun around and headed for the door, clearly intent on leaving immediately.

  As it happened, she aimed for the wrong door- some door that led deeper into the house.

  But Will cut her off at that pass, did a defensive play he'd learned in football, scooped her under his arm in a shielding position and redirected her toward the front door. "I think it's probably best that we cut this visit short," he said to Henri.

  "This is very, very difficult-"

  "Yeah. But it's not going to get better right now."

  "I can talk to him. Don't you talk to him. I can handle this myself." Kelly said.

  He knew she could. But there was so much anguish on her face, and her voice was so thick with tears, that he figured she needed out of there. Now. Any way he could get her out.

  And that worked. Sort of. Except that once he had her stashed in the car and immersed in the fury of rush-hour Paris traffic, she put her spring jacket over her head. That was goofy enough, but underneath she was crying. Not making a lot of noise, but her body was shaking with it. and he could hear the massive gulps.

  At one point a hand reached out from under the jacket.

  He handed her a tissue.

  She took it back into the jacket cave, honked her nose and started again.

  He wanted to pull over. Wanted to disappear into Austria or Australia. Wanted to pretend she wasn't crying as if someone had broken her heart. Wanted to go back and kill her damn father.

  But midafternoon traffic in Paris was a lot like NASCAR back home. You just didn't have a choice about paying attention. It was that or die. The other drivers were a lot more homicidal than suicidal.

  "He didn't want me. At all," Kelly said from the muffled, dark depths of her jacket.

  "Now. Kel. That's not necessarily true. Finding out about you was obviously a shock."

  "Well, it's a shock for me, too! Everything's been a shock for me since I got here. He didn't even say once that he was glad I was his daughter, or glad he had a daughter."

  Oh, yeah. He liked these kinds of conversations. Not that he'd ever had one exactly like this before, but a guy didn't need to be shot to know a bullet wasn't fun. "Now, cookie," he said gently, "those were complicated waters you two were trying to wade into. Even if he'd felt that way, there might not have been a chance for him to say it."

  "Horse spit. He found plenty of chances to bring up DNA. That's all he wanted to talk about. Proof. When all I had to do was look at him to know we were related. He had to know the same thing, looking at me! But he was so…cold."

  "Now, Kel." Other drivers were shooting him fingers right and left. And sweat was clustering at the nape of his neck, not from the drivers, but the stress of this whole type of emotional conversation. "I don't know that he was cold. I really think he was just stunned, that he wasn't sure what to do, what to say, how to react."

  "And I had magic answers for those things? How would you like it if you found out your mom had slept with a married man? And I don't even know if she knew. But he sure as hell knew he had a wife and kids when he seduced my mom. And then to just drop out of the picture before even wondering if she could be pregnant-although, of course, maybe he did know. Maybe he thought she'd get an abortion. Or maybe he didn't care. Or maybe she didn't tell him. I mean, how does he get credit for suffering more shocks than me?"

  Her hand reached out from under the jacket again. He handed her another tissue, and hoped that'd be enough, because there were no more. Ten more minutes and they'd be home. Ten more. She just had to hold it together for ten more.

  Finally they got there, but he'd barely squeezed into the parking place before she'd flown out of the car. When she yanked off the jacket, he saw her face.

  She'd stopped crying by then.

  She'd stopped talking.

  Usually that made him feel grateful, but now he wished she'd chatter up a storm. The look on her face killed him. The gorgeous eyes and nose were all red. No color in her cheeks at all. She looked so damned…sad. Sad and lost. From the inside out.

  "It's okay," she said. "Don't look so scared. I know I was having an emotional fit, but I'm through now, honest."

  Maybe she was. but that didn't really help him. He started to say something, then realized, for the dozenth time in the past hour, that he didn't have a clue what to say. What she needed. What would help.

  He'd been rescuing his sisters-and other damsels-since he was in diapers. Granted, he was fed up with that. But for the first time in a blue moon, he actually wanted to rescue a female, and he didn't know how.

  He turned the key, pushed open the door. She ran inside first, and said. "I'm going to call my mother."

  He'd barely hung up the keys and scooped up the mail before she returned from the living room.

  "Well, that's not going to work. I dialed. But then I hung up. Darn it, I can't talk to her. Not until I'm a lot less upset and can be a whole lot clearer about how I want to bring all this up."

  When she scrubbed her face with a tired hand, something snapped in him. That was it. He'd had enough. He crossed the room in four long strides.

  She saw him. In fact, she cocked her head when she saw him slamming across the room, but she still looked surprised when he suddenly grabbed her. When he lifted her up, she just naturally wrapped her legs around his waist for balance, which enabled him to take off with her down the hall at a hell-bent pace.

  "Will-"

  Yeah, yeah. He could guess all the crap she wanted to say. She was miserable. Not the right time. Not in the mood. And he didn't pull cavemen stuff, because he wasn't a caveman type. That Rhett Butler scene in Gone with the Wind where Gable carts Scarlett up the stairs-not for him. He liked to know he was wanted ahead of time. He liked an engraved invitation. He hated sticky stuff, never dove in until he'd thoroughly tested the waters, got queasy when he thought of pushing a woman to do anything.

  But this wasn't like that.

  That was more like…a guy had to do what a guy had to do.

  She wasn't crying anymore today. He couldn't fix her complicated life. In the long run, probably it'd all work out, anyway. It was just now, this week, this day, these past hours, that had her so twisted up and confused. It would have helped if Henri Rochard had at least given her a hug. Or said a simple hello to his daughter. Or said something, anything, the son of a bitch, that indicated he noticed that she was a beautiful woman. Beautiful, interesting, wonderful, independent and courageous.

  Okay, so she wasn't so courageous at just this second.

  But that was the point.

  That was precisely the reason why, right then, he dropped her on the bed. Dove in. Dove on.

  Strips of hot afternoon sunlight striped her face, so bright she had to close her eyes, which made it all the easier to kiss her long and hard.

  She didn't reject the kiss. Didn't scream or rant at the behavior or anything, but she didn't do much of anything until he took her tongue.

  Then, suddenly, she unraveled. All that miserableness seemed to gather up inside her. transform into another kind of energy altogether. That long kiss he was coaxing from her turned into a bite-a bite coming from her-and then she was pulling, yanking on his clothes.

  He
twisted around to help her. only his movements enabled her to climb on top of him instead of the other way around. She'd played the inciter before, but not the aggressor. It wasn't so easy for her, being vulnerable that way, admitting what she needed, going after it. She was raw-new at it. elbows appearing where no one wanted them, her knee threatening his groin, her hair tangling in his fingers…amazing, how all the awkwardness inspired them both.

  At least it inspired him. And for sure she was responding.

  Her skin needed cherishing, he thought. And once he had her naked, he obliged. The curve of her shoulder. The tender crease under her breast. The inside of her thigh-oh. mama. She all but sprang off the bed for a tongue there, and hell, he hadn't even started.

  THE SHARP, HARSH ribbons of sunlight seemed to soften. Outside, traffic started to quiet down. The air stilled… They must have napped after the first time, because when he opened his eyes next, the ambient light was the fuzzy violet of dusk.

  She was draped over his body like a blanket, her cheek carved into his shoulder. He turned his head, kissed her forehead.

  It was enough to wake her. "You hungry?" she murmured sleepily.

  "Beyond belief. I could eat a pair of steaks."

  "Me, too."

  Big talk, he noted, for a woman who stretched like a lazy cat and then curled right back on top of him and closed her eyes again.

  "Will?" she murmured.

  "Hmm?"

  "You make it all go away."

  "Make all what go away?"

  The piker was only pretending to be sleeping. She eased up. her eyes open and alert and aware, her mouth still swollen red from all that endless kissing. "I have a lot to face. A lot I have to figure out. But the way you love. Will…at least the way you love me…makes me feel whole. In every way."

  Well, hell. Dinner would have to wait.

  He was already hard. From the sound of her voice, from the lazy winsomeness in her eyes, from her fingertips curled around his neck. Her body was already warm, for him. with him. from him.