Blame It on Paris
Blame It on Paris
Jennifer Greene
Kelly Rochard is determined to have one last adventure before settling down to married life!Still, being mugged at the Louvre is not what she had in mind for her long-awaited trip to Paris. Until Will Maguire comes to her aid, and she finds herself completely distracted by the handsome stranger in the Notre Dame sweatshirt.Kelly can’t seem to resist the world’s most romantic city or Will, who is determined to show her all its treasures, from the top of the Eiffel Tower to strolls along the Seine. But will their love last when they’re back in plain old South Bend, Indiana, or will they end up blaming their breathless fling on the city of love?“ well-written, emotionally rich story… fairly simmers with sexual tension. ” —Library Journal on Blame It on Cupid “Greene writes a charming…new, fun-filled spin on romance with the boy next door. ” —Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Blame It on Cupid
Praise for the work ofUSA TODAYbestselling author
JENNIFER
GREENE
“A book by Jennifer Greene hums with an
unbeatable combination of sexual chemistry and
heart-warming emotion.”
—New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips
“Written with a deliciously sharp sense
of humour and her usual superb sense of
characterisation… Greene’s latest romance is a
sweetly sexy, thoroughly satisfying, and
simply sublime literary confection.”
—Booklist on Blame It on Chocolate
“A warm-hearted romance with endearing
characters, simmering sensuality, and a very
interesting subject matter. A book to curl
up with on a cold night.”
—Rendezvous on Blame It on Chocolate
“The characters are likeable, the plot is realistic,
and the book is fantastic.”
—Romance Reviews Today on Blame It on Chocolate
Also available from Jennifer Greene and MIRA
BLAME IT ON CHOCOLATE
Dear Reader,
I’ve been to Paris only once, but I’ve never forgotten it. It’s a mesmerising, magical city like none other – a city of lights and legends, of sights and smells and sounds just made for fantasies and lovers.
Over the years, those memories kept brewing in my mind…just waiting for a story to weave around them…and finally it came.
I needed a special man, the kind of man who could make a girl want to throw away all that was safe and sure, everything she thought she believed about herself…just for the chance to be with him. And I needed a special woman, the kind of woman who could challenge and entice a man to be more than he was, more than he thought he could be…just for the right to be with her.
So I created Kelly…who meets the wrong man at absolutely the wrong time. And then I found Will…who has such a code of honour that he can’t possibly seduce Kelly, much less become involved with her.
But in Paris, what seems wrong anywhere else can be impossibly, wonderfully right – if my two lovers will just take that huge risk and leap off a cliff together.
I loved writing this story…and love having the chance to share it with you. hope you enjoy it!
All my best,
Jennifer Greene
JENNIFER GREENE
Blame It on Paris
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To my lar
For being MY Paris
CHAPTER ONE
GUILT WAS so much fun.
Kelly Rochard grabbed her shoulder bag and bounded down the cracked porch steps of the centuries-old bed-and-breakfast. She couldn’t wait a second longer to inhale all the sights, smells and sounds of Paris in the springtime.
Who’d have thunk it? That a gregarious, nosy, hopelessly open person such as herself could possibly have managed to keep a secret this big?
No one even knew she was here.
Of course, in a week, she’d go back home to South Bend, confess everything to her new fiancé, never tell another fib again as long as she lived, and probably do penance for two or three aeons. As her mother loved to say, you could take the Catholic out of the girl, but you were stuck with the guilt for life.
But today, she just plain didn’t care. Guilt or no guilt, she was thrilled to be here.
Blithely she stepped off the curb—and a dozen horns shrieked at her mistake. She backed up fast, heart pounding. A couple taxi drivers yelled as they passed by—something about connarde and ballot and une tête de linotte. She was pretty sure the insults were aimed at her specific genetic heritage, with a few general references about her being an American scatterbrain, as well.
Okay, okay. So she was suffering jet lag, not at her brightest, and it was going to take her a while—and a map—to figure out how to get around…preferably without getting herself killed.
The small inn where she was staying didn’t seem located in exactly the newest, safest part of town, but the neighborhood still exploded with color.
Three street vendors in a row tried to woo her into taking a bouquet of fresh flowers. The next one sold café—which she fumbled with her brand-new euros to buy, and then sipped as she ambled on. Pedestrians bustled past, clearly on their way to work. All the women looked so savvy—their clothes not necessarily expensive, but even basic styles jazzed up with an interesting scarf tied the right way. A man winked at her. She gawked at an open-air grocery, where the smell of fresh fruits mixed with a luxurious array of fresh flowers.
The grin on her face just kept getting bigger and sillier. She was free. This was Paris. In May. The city of romance. The city of lights.
Her father’s city.
The open door of a bakery drew her inside. A single look at the croissants and baguettes made her realize she was starving to death. Euros were exchanged—too many, she was positive—but the first taste was better than sin, and well worth whatever the baker had cheated her out of. The pastry was buttery, light, a puff of sweetness on her tongue.
Juggling the pastry and the coffee and her bag, she stepped back into the throng of pedestrians…when a stranger suddenly grabbed her arm.
Initially Kelly reacted with more exasperation than fear.
When the mugger tugged, she tugged back. And no, tangling with a thief wasn’t the wisest thing Kelly Nicole Rochard had ever done—particularly when the jerk was a good half foot taller than her five feet five inches and easily outweighed her by fifty pounds. But, as her mother had noted during labor, Kelly was as naturally stubborn as a goat.
Her roll went flying. Coffee splattered everywhere. She was so busy struggling just to keep her balance—and free herself—that she didn’t originally realize why the mugger was yanking so hard on her arm. But then she did. Fast. Her engagement ring did tend to glitter in the sun, which was probably what caught the jerk’s attention. He yanked on her finger so hard she almost cried, but that was just pain.
When he managed to wrestle off the ring, Kelly let out a war cry worthy of a marine. “You give that back, you rotten son of a flea-bitten scumbag!”
She couldn’t finish because the mugger suddenly jerked her around and yanked her tight against his chest. Her courage suffered an instant and complete crash. She forgot the ring. Forgot the dazzling day and the wonder of Paris.
When the bony arm cut off her windpipe, she forgot just about everything.
Faces and storefronts blurred. Sounds muted to a distant cacophony. She’d never tasted fear this acid, this consuming. Her entire consciousness was zoned in on her thief. The man wasn’t huge, but he was still a ton bigger than she was, and he stank of drugs and desperation. His breath blew fetid on her neck, his body reeking of old sweat. He hissed something to her in French.
Four years of high school French didn’t seem to address his particular choice of vocabulary. Still, she was ninety-nine percent certain that she understood him. He seemed to feel that her mother lacked morals, that she herself was a worthless bitch and that her life wasn’t going to be worth dog breath if she didn’t give up her purse.
She was more than willing to.
Almost.
“Look,” she said desperately, and then stopped. He tightened the choke hold on her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She was panicked enough to suffer a heart attack. Or pee in her pants. Or hurl.
Or possibly all three.
At the same time. Her mugger hissed another command, this one angrier and more urgent than the first.
She got it, she got it. She didn’t have an hour or two to think up a plan. Either she released her death grip on her purse, or just maybe he was going to break her neck.
“Look,” she blubbered. “You don’t understand. You can have all my money. I don’t care. You can take every euro, every dollar. And all the credit cards. Everything. My passport—you want my passport? You can have that, too. But I really need some papers in that purse. You couldn’t possibly want those papers. Please, I—”
On her last gulp of oxygen, her voice quit. Completely quit, like a cell phone with no battery. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. He probably couldn’t speak English, so why was she even trying to reason with him?
It was just…there were some very old, very private letters in her purse. They were her father’s. The only thing she had, or would ever have, of her dad’s. They were the whole reason she’d made this impulsive trip to Paris. She couldn’t give them up. She just couldn’t.
His other hand clamped on her left breast and squeezed. Hard.
She dropped her hold on the purse faster than a hot coal.
The mugger grabbed it and then shoved her, hard. She toppled on the cement walk, stunning both her knee and elbow when she crashed on the hard surface.
It had all happened so quickly. The mugger disappeared into the crowd. Some pedestrians kept on walking, acting as if she were invisible, but a few rushed over to her, jabbering sympathetically in French. Someone yelled for a gendarme—she understood the word for police, but by then she didn’t care. It was too darn late for that.
She was fine. Her heart didn’t know it yet; she was still gulping down air like a panicked beached whale…but really, she knew she was okay. Her engagement ring, her passport, her money—losing all of it was a nightmare, but she was alive and the jerk was gone.
Everything was survivable except for the loss of those letters. No one even knew she had them, even her mom. Especially her mom. And no one would likely recognize the ratty old envelopes as remotely valuable, because they weren’t.
To anyone but her. Unfortunately, they were irreplaceably valuable to her, and the loss hit her like a blow.
“Mademoiselle…” A mustached man in a uniform pushed through the onlookers, bent down to her. A cop. But what good could he possibly do? Find a thief in this kind of city traffic? The guy was probably at the Eiffel Tower by now. And when he got around to opening her purse, he’d undoubtedly take the loot and credit cards and passport and throw out everything else.
Like the letters.
A raw, rusty sound came out of her throat. Kelly told herself to get a grip and turn back into her usual strong, sturdy self, but man, somehow she couldn’t find the on switch. Caving was totally unlike her. She’d always been a go-to woman, the kind of woman who could cheerlead through a tornado, who saw problems as opportunities rather than crises. She never had meltdowns. She wasn’t the meltdown type.
But damn. The loss of those old letters really, really, really hurt.
“Mademoiselle,” the cop repeated, and reeled off some questions in French.
She pushed a hand through her hair, struggling to understand, flunking, struggling again. She could see he was getting impatient. Hell’s bells, so was she—with herself. But she was shook up, and the gendarme was speaking so fast.
But then…somewhere in the sea of strange faces and confusion, she heard an American accent.
An American Midwestern accent like hers.
A man.
“Hey,” he said, “are you in some kind of trouble here?”
Her head shot up. One glance gave her a jolt. The guy was tall and lean and blond, with a Matthew McConaughey angular face and come-on baby-blue eyes. He wasn’t just killer good-looking. He was to die for.
But that wasn’t what snagged her attention. His clothes did. Filling out a Notre Dame sweatshirt were brawny wide shoulders.
The logo wasn’t for Notre Dame, as in the French cathedral. But as in Notre Dame football. As in the golden dome. As in South Bend, Indiana.
As in home.
She fell in love so fast it made her head spin—of course, her head was already spinning. And it wasn’t like she thought it was real love…but it was real enough for that moment.
She pushed toward him, never losing eye contact, and said breathlessly, “You can’t imagine how much I’d appreciate some help. I know a little French, but not enough to communicate, at least as fast as I need to. If you’d play translator for just a few minutes…it couldn’t possibly take long….”
WILL MAGUIRE, at age thirty-one, had done all the bailing out and damsel saving and white-knight crap he ever intended to do in this lifetime.
But hell. He had noticed the commotion from all the way down the block, and when he heard the sudden, sharp, panicked yell—obviously a woman’s voice—he instinctively hustled toward the sound. The instinct wasn’t heroic. It was lunatic.
He’d lived in Paris long enough to know getting involved in a tourist brouhaha was complete lunacy. Yet still he came closer.
It took only seconds for him to interpret the scene. She’d been ripped off. Moments before, a gendarme had shown up, and typical of Paris, so had every busybody bystander. Most of them figured an American tourist, being anan American tourist, had done something stupid. A few wanted to whine about the danger of Paris streets these days. The gendarme was trying to question her about exactly what happened.
In those same few seconds, he snared a quick look at her.
Very quick.
But that was all it took for him to feel a potent kick in the gut.
He didn’t get it. A pale purple sweater cupped her small boobs. Dark pants fit snug enough to clarify that she had skinny legs and no ass. Since he’d always tended to like more breasts and less bone, there was nothing below her neck that should have rattled his hormones. Yet his pulse was kabooming like a freight train.
Heightwise, she came up to his chin. And that was where she stopped being ordinary. The eyes were mesmerizing, almond shaped, tea-brown, looking right at him. The details included a small, thin nose; pink mouth; and a sweep of almost-shoulder-length brown hair. Only brown wasn’t an accurate description of the color. The sixty-five-degree morning was drenched in sunshine, and that’s how her hair looked—lustrous, full of light, shiny in the sun.
Okay, so she was adorable. But that alone didn’t explain the kaboom thing. There were fabulous-looking women all over Paris.
There was something else about her, something he couldn’t define. A zest. A glow. A female thing. Will didn’t need to identify it to know it was a serious problem.
Ever since he’d devoted himself to a life of decadence and vice—that’d be the last four years—he’d fine-tuned his sonar to beware of women who meant trouble.
She meant trouble.
On the other hand, all she’d asked him to do was translate for her for a couple of minutes. How could that possibly be any kind of risk?
“Sure,” he said. And immediately discovered that helping her wasn’t going to be quite that simple.
The gendarme shot him a look as if a savior of the universe had just shown up. The bystanders kneed in closer, all hot to participate. Everybody claimed to have seen the thief close-up. One said he was tall and burly. One said he was lean as a stick. One said he had a beard, like a homeless person, and another said he’d just been a guy walking down the street who suddenly sprang into this deviant behavior, far too fast for anyone to stop him or come to the girl’s aid.
Still, for all the confusion, it didn’t take forever to get the basic questions asked and answered. Her name was Kelly Rochard. She was twenty-seven. From South Bend, Indiana. Here for ten days. Vacation.
Something flickered in her eyes when she said “vacation,” but Will just dutifully translated—it wasn’t any of his business whether she was telling the truth or not.
“So the thief took off with your purse,” he said. “Can you give the cop a list of the critical stuff in the bag?”
Hell, she said, her whole world was in the damned bag. Passport, money, credit cards. Oh yeah, and then she got around to mentioning that the thief had also taken off with her engagement ring.
“What?” she said, when Will and the gendarme exchanged a quick look.
Will didn’t answer. It was obvious that the cop had immediately thought the same thing he did. What sense did it make for a beautiful woman to be traveling to Paris alone in the spring? Her so-called fiancé was either a jerk or an idiot. Probably both.
“…and there were some private papers in the bag, too. That’s the worst. That those records are probably gone forever. I have no way to replace them, no way to…”
“Hey,” Will said gruffly. Tears suddenly magnified her eyes, making them look extra huge and exotic. “Take it easy there. It’ll all get straightened out.”
Well, it wouldn’t, of course. Losing a passport in a foreign country was a guaranteed nightmare. Times fifty.
The cop heard about the “private papers,” but he was tuned to the same practical channel that Will was. It didn’t really matter what Kelly had lost, because the mugger was long gone. She’d still need a police report, which was a pain for the gendarme to fill out when there was about zero chance in a zillion they’d ever find the guy. But he’d get her one so she could pursue a replacement passport.
That wasn’t going to happen overnight.
“Je sais,” Will said drily. He knew. American bureaucracies and French bureaucracies—even if the French didn’t like to think so—were kin. Ghastly. Time-consuming, inefficient, frustrating, etc., etc.
The cop had some questions for him to translate… Did Kelly have enough funds to survive, someone who could wire her money, a way to live until the paperwork got sorted out, what was the address where she was staying. All that yadda yadda.
“You’re from South Bend, too?” She motioned to his sweatshirt.
“Yeah.” Like it mattered? He suffered a gulp when he heard the address for her hotel. She was damned lucky she hadn’t been ripped off there, too.
“Oh my God. The key to my room was in my purse, too. I can’t even get into my room.” She’d been doing okay, or reasonably okay. But now the more she realized how much she’d lost, the more panicked she got. “I don’t have anything. I don’t even have money to buy lunch. Or dinner. Or enough to buy another hairbrush. Or lipstick. Or even to wire home. I don’t even have my coat—”
The more panicked she got, the faster the gendarme talked. “What does she think we can do? We can’t even get a clear description of the perpetrator. You know these Americans, now she’ll be saying nothing’s safe in France. I’ll file a report, of course, but God—” he crossed himself “—couldn’t get her a replacement passport this instant. Where was her common sense, to have all her money in one place? And a bag she was carrying on her besides?”
Kelly was on a completely different track. “I carried those letters on me all the time,” she said mournfully. “They’re all I ever had of my dad. I don’t care about the rest….”
Will fished in his pocket for a tissue. Came through. But after she blew her nose, she looked at him expectantly.
As if there was some insane kind of magic between them, he found himself looking back. At those eyes. That mouth. That glow of hers.
He told himself firmly to look away.
He told himself that the gendarme would transport her to the embassy or consulate or wherever she needed to go, and the rest of her mess wasn’t his problem. She’d be okay. That’s what embassies and consulates and cops were for, taking care of people. It wasn’t his problem. She couldn’t possibly, remotely, be his problem.
He told himself that his sisters had irrevocably taught him to steer clear of damsels in distress. At the same time he was analyzing her looks again. Her hair was this glossy mass of loose dark waves, not a style exactly. It just looked all soft and silky. Naturally sexy.
“Monsieur?” The gendarme growled at him impatiently, as if he’d asked him a question a few moments ago and Will had failed to pay attention.
Which was possible.
Possibly she’d been talking, and he hadn’t been listening to her, either.
And then he made his third mistake of the day—this one far worse than stopping to help, far worse than failing to pay attention.
“She can’t very well just stand here in the street,” he told the gendarme. “I’ll take her.”
The instant those three words came out of his mouth, Will realized that he’d completely lost his mind. “I mean for a little while. I’ll go feed her. Lunch. But you have to promise to get the police report done pronto, so she can go to the consulate for her passport.”
“Bien, bien,” the gendarme said. He probably would have promised anything now that he was off the hook.
He disappeared faster than lightning. Ditto for the bystanders.
And Will was left alone with her.
CHAPTER TWO
“I’M ENGAGED. I told you that, didn’t I?” Kelly asked him.
“Yup. About three times in the last half hour.”
Now, that couldn’t have been true, because Kelly knew she hadn’t been nervous a half hour ago. It was only now, as they turned down his street and were aiming directly for his place, that her nerves started suffering major hiccups.
Earlier, it seemed like a superb idea to leave the scene of the crime with a nice, tall, big, tall, strong, tall, protective guy. Especially when the guy was a fellow American. Her judgment had nothing to do with his being cute. Or sexy. It was only about her feeling terrified out of her mind from her mugger experience.
Only now, approaching his front door, her judgment didn’t seem to be quite the same. It was a cool front door. Old, old oak. Shaped with an arch. The handle was a weathered brass lion. Like Will. Not the weathered and brass part, but the tawny lion part. “I have to admit, it feels a little weird, being here,” she said with a laugh. “For one thing, it’s just crazy for you to feel stuck with me, someone you don’t know from Adam.”
“Kelly. You’re not worried this is a pickup, are you? The only reason I suggested coming here was because it was nearby. It was the fastest we could get you to a place where you could put your feet up, have a cup of coffee in one hand and a phone in the other. It’s not like there isn’t another way to handle this, but you’ve got a bunch of calls to make, no easy way to do it on the street.”
“And you’re from South Bend besides.”
“And I’m from South Bend besides.”
“Which practically makes you like family.”
He stuck a key in the lock and pushed open the door so she could enter first. She did, grazing his arm as she walked past him, thinking that Will would feel like “family” when it rained cats.
She knew perfectly well she’d been blathering on like a goose. Another time she’d feel embarrassed or guilty, but the truth was, she’d started shaking about fifteen minutes ago and hadn’t stopped yet. It wasn’t every day a woman got mugged. She kept remembering the creep’s stinky breath and body odor, the feel of his arm choking her neck, and that started the shakes all over again.
They were just little shakes. Not big ones. It wasn’t that she was a wimp or anything. At least she never had been before this, and Kelly kept telling herself she was mighty grateful that Will had offered to help her. Being suddenly penniless and without ID in a foreign country would have been pretty darn daunting if she’d been alone.
Yet she only caught a single glance at the inside of his apartment before some silly instinct made her whirl around and back out again—or try to back out. Will was still standing in the doorway, blocking her escape. Her nose was suddenly an inch from his chin. She was only a breath’s distance from those killer blue eyes. And those shoulders. And those disreputable blond whiskers.
“I’m engaged. Did I mention that?”
“Yeah, you did. What’s wrong now?”
“Nothing. Nothing. You’ve really got an interesting place.” But interesting wasn’t the word for it. One look, and she labeled it bachelor lair. The whole place shouted single guy on the prowl.
His flat took up the second floor of an old building. She could only see so much from the narrow hallway, but there seemed to be a bunch of rooms, all small. The main living area, off to the right, had long, thin windows; old, rich woodwork; carved tin ceilings. He’d left the French doors open a crack, leading to a step-out balcony. The sunlight and erotic, exotic breeze drifted through the open door.
Well, possibly it was just a plain old spring breeze, and possibly her mind had totally invented the erotic, exotic thing, but Kelly didn’t think so. Reality was that sex appeal poured off Will in sheets.
She tried to concentrate on being nosy, which should have been natural for her. The living room was tiny, with a soot-stained corner fireplace and an elegant tiled hearth. The couch was old leather, all wrinkled and soft. The Persian rug looked seriously ancient, thick and fringed, in reds and dark blues. One wall had built-in shelves, with books heaped to the ceiling.
The dust wasn’t more than half an inch thick, and Will swooped a shirt off a chair. “Look around, make yourself at home, okay? The bathroom’s off to the left. I need to call work, and I’ll start some coffee. Then we’ll concentrate on what you need to do from here.”
He squeezed her shoulder as he ambled past—an erotic, exotic squeeze, totally inappropriate for an engaged woman.
Or more likely it was her response to him that was inappropriate. Splashing her face with cold water right then seemed a great idea, so she took off for the bathroom.
Naturally, she nosed around. The toilet had an antique pull chain from the ceiling—interesting, once she was sure she could make it work. The white pedestal sink and tub were the old-fashioned kind with feet. He used a straight razor, she noted. Didn’t have much in the medicine cabinet but deodorant and first-aid stuff and one medicine. She thought it was for colds, nonprescription and more than two years old; he should have thrown it out. It was outdated.
Her conscience chided her for being so shameful, but really, nosing around was better than musing that the tub was big enough for orgies. Not that she’d ever participated in an orgy. Or spent a lot of time thinking about them. Or planned to take up thinking about them.
Impatiently she splashed her face with cool water, then grabbed a navy-blue towel to dry off. The towel was almost the size of a bedsheet. A thick blue rug covered most of the marble floor. No question that Will liked the color blue and his creature comforts.
She opened the door, which gave her away with a telltale creak.
Will immediately called out, “Across the hall and one door down. I’m in the kitchen.”
So…it wasn’t her fault she got to see more of the apartment en route. To the left, an archway led to an alcove. Impossible to guess what the odd-sized space was for, but Will had squished in a small desk, lamp, chair, laptop, so it worked as a miniden. Still, it wasn’t ordinary. The walls had some kind of linen-like finish; the carved ceiling looked hand done. Everywhere, the creaky floors were covered with old Oriental rugs. Nothing seemed new. Everything about the architecture seemed older than a few centuries, practically older than America. Will’s love for blues and comfortable textures followed through everywhere. And he might not be into dusting, but he was basically a put-away tidy kind of guy.
“What? Did you get lost?” He stepped out of the kitchen.
“No. I’m just dawdling around. No amount of guilt ever seems to stop me from being nosy. And I love your place—it’s really interesting.” Looking around had also given her a chance to catch her breath. Maybe she didn’t have a full-bore grip yet, but the adrenaline had finally quit pumping. “Will…thank you for helping me. Really, thank you.”
“Yeah, well, I stumbled around plenty when I first moved to Paris. Might have gotten into real trouble if a few people hadn’t offered a hand. Anyway…” He turned away, started pouring steaming water into pottery mugs. “Did he hurt you?”
She blinked. His tone was so casual that she almost missed it, but then Will wasn’t an in-your-face kind of caretaker. Instead he was subtle, found a way to slip in a disturbing question and get it out of the way. Most strangers wouldn’t have cared, much less made the effort to steer into a potentially awkward problem.
She thought that just maybe her attraction to him was more than ordinary old sex appeal. Damned if he wasn’t coming through like a seriously good guy.
And then she tried to answer the question. “I’m bound to have a few bruises show up tomorrow, maybe even a nasty one on my neck. But I don’t need a doctor. Nothing serious.” Yet suddenly she needed to snug her arms tight under her chest. “I have to admit, though, that I keep feeling…weird. I was never mugged before, never had anyone touch me with the intent to hurt me. I can’t seem to shake it off. There’s just a high…ick…factor.”
“Sit. I was going to make coffee, then figured that was stupid. You need caffeine like a hole in the head. So it’s tea. French-style. With a bunch of sugar. Sugar for shock, right?”
“Actually, I never need an excuse to use sugar, but that’ll do.”
The kitchen was mostly copper and blue, with white trim. There was no dishwasher, and no place for one, she noticed with shock. The sink was messy, but cleaned fairly recently, and the counter just looked typical of a guy, dishes reproducing since the night before. Her scrutiny kept picking up details. A small fridge, a couple bottles of unopened wine, the luxuriously sexy smell of fresh bread, a heap of fresh fruit in a bowl. The eating table only had room for two chairs, was hardly big enough to put plates on, but it overlooked the boulevard below, the whole view of thick, old trees, the steady snake of cars and street traffic. Sunlight ribboned through fresh green leaves.
“Ever since I got here,” she murmured, “I keep seeing the same things I could see at home. Cars. People. Buildings. Spring flowers and smells. But somehow it’s incredibly different.”
“It’s Paris,” he said, as if that explained everything.
And maybe it did. Heaven knows her response to Will was unlike her response to any other stranger. She couldn’t seem to pin down a reason. Maybe being mugged had just thrown her normal reactions off-kilter. Maybe shock and fear just made her senses more acute, inflamed her emotions.
And maybe burning her tongue on the hot tea would distract her from these idiotic thoughts about him.
“Better,” she pronounced, after she gulped down three long sips of the strong brew.
He leaned against the counter. “Okay, I figure we’d better organize a plan of attack here. Obviously the first priority is getting you a new passport. Somewhere, do you have your original passport number, and other ID like a birth certificate or driver’s license?”
“Well, I did have. But that stuff was all in my purse.”
“Okay. But did you leave that kind of information with someone back home? Like a copy of your passport?”
She nodded. “I left some obvious information in an envelope with my mom—the address where I’d be staying, copies of credit cards, a copy of my birth certificate. I’ve never traveled outside the country before. It didn’t occur to me that I’d need to do more than that.”
“Normally, you wouldn’t. So the first thing you want to do is call your mom, get her to fax that information here. By then we should have the police report. That’s the stuff we need to take to the consulate, get the process going to get you an immediate temporary passport.”
She frowned. “Temporary?”
“Well, if you want a regular passport, it’ll take a while. The bureaucracy here is no faster than it is in the United States. But you can fly home right away with a temporary, no waiting or hassle.”
“And that would be great,” she said slowly, “but I don’t want to go home immediately. Will, it wasn’t my fault this happened. And I didn’t come here on a whim. I’ve waited a long time for a chance to make this trip.”
“Okay…well…” For a long moment, he studied her, as if suddenly realizing she hadn’t come here to Paris just to do the tourist thing. “The way you’d attack a new permanent passport takes basically the same steps. Get the ID records, then the police report, then go to the consulate. If I remember right, a regular replacement passport’ll cost you around eighty-five, ninety bucks. But I’d be amazed if the paperwork went through for that in less than two weeks, and it could take longer.”
“But as long as I could get money wired here, replacement credit cards and all that, there’s no reason I couldn’t stay?”
“I’m no expert, Kelly, but my understanding is that, yes, you’d be fine as long as you stayed in France. It’d probably be pretty dicey to leave the country without an active passport in your hand.”
“That’s okay. This is the only place I wanted to come to.” When she swallowed the last sip of tea, she realized that the adrenaline had quit pumping; the shakes had disappeared. Talking to Will, being with Will, she’d forgotten the mugger. Yet, when she met his eyes, her heart rate still seemed determined to heat to an edgy simmer. “You know a lot about this,” she said.
“Not a lot. But I lost a passport once. And I’ve been living in Paris for the last four years, so naturally I’ve learned a few survival tricks.” He shot her to Will a wry grin. “You can take it to the bank—from replacing credit cards to getting money wired to getting the cop report and the application, you’re going to learn a whole bunch of French swearwords over the next couple days.”
She chuckled, but she thought it was about time to stop gazing into those sexy blue eyes and move her butt. For Pete’s sake, right now she didn’t have a brush or deodorant or even the means to buy herself lunch.
Will had been a hero, but he certainly owed her nothing. He’d already gone the long mile to help her out. “Okay,” she said brightly. “If you’d just let me use your phone…”
He gave her a look she didn’t understand. Then he steered her into the room with the balconies and the high tin ceilings, handed her a phone and left.
She appreciated the privacy. But twenty minutes later, she was pretty close to curling up in a ball under a couch. Any couch.
Will showed up in the doorway. “Not doing too great?”
She sighed. “I couldn’t seem to make a direct connection, so I had to use an operator. She didn’t speak much English. Or want to.”
“Yeah. You’re in France.”
“Got past that. But my mom wasn’t home. I tried her landline, her cell. Twice. Left messages. Twice.”
“Okay.” He scratched his chin. “I thought you said you had a fiancé.”
She straightened. “I do.”
He looked at her. She wasn’t sure what he was thinking, why a sudden silence fell between them, but whatever wheels were turning in that interesting brain of his, he suddenly seemed to come to a decision. “Come on. We’re getting out of here.”
FOUR HOURS LATER, Will still wasn’t sure what he was doing. She wasn’t his problem, he kept telling himself. And once she brought up the fiancé, he’d normally have backed off faster than lightning.
It had taken him a long time to cultivate an irresponsible, don’t-give-a-damn, love-’em-and-move-on kind of lifestyle. Poaching was a bad idea. Not because it was right or wrong but because it was inviting trouble.
Only this was different. Really. The thing was, Kelly kept bringing up this so-called fiancé, but the infamous fiancé wasn’t the one she wanted to call for help, wasn’t the person she’d left records with, wasn’t the person she wanted to ask for money.
As far as Will could tell, if the fiancé existed, he was in the toad class.
Maybe that didn’t totally explain how they ended up at Pont d’Alma on the Left Bank, with Will forking over major euros at the ticket counter, but by then the day had been so irretrievably awful that he needed a pick-me-up.
“A boat ride?” she questioned.
“Neither one of us has had food all day. You have to be hungry by now.”
She was intently trying to read the signs. “This is for a riverboat cruise of the Seine?”
“Yeah. One of the worst tourist traps in the whole city. But we were close.” A complete lie—he’d driven forty minutes out of his way. But she didn’t know that, and who cared, anyway? “It’ll get your mind off the rest of the day. That was quite a scene at the your hotel.”
The understatement of the year, he thought. When he realized her lodging was in the 20th arrondissement, he almost had a heart attack. Times three.
“Well, I thought I’d researched places to stay quite intensively on the Internet. This one looked clean in the pictures. And it was the cheapest I found, for sure. And when I looked up the area, it said the place was going through a major renewal, so I just didn’t expect it would be quite so…”
“Rough.” He put it in spades as he ushered her up the gangplank of the riverboat.
“It was okay. Mme. Rossarde seemed nice enough last night.” Kelly lifted exhausted eyes. “Not like this afternoon.”
“In French, we’d call her…un peau de vache.”
She thought. “The side of a cow?”
He chuckled. “Well, literally, it means hide of a cow, I guess. Meaning…tough. Unyielding. A bitch,” he clarified. The fiasco at her hotel kept replaying in his mind. He was still on a steam. The damn woman hadn’t wanted to give Kelly her clothes or anything else unless Kelly came through with a week’s worth of rent. This, after being told Kelly’s passport and money had been stolen.
Will had intervened. Kelly had a major conniption about his paying all that rent for her, but she obviously had to have her stuff. And whether or not she realized how bad the neighborhood was, he did. The other boarders looked like they were fresh out of jail or rehab. By contrast, Kelly looked milk-and-honey fresh. Leaving her there would be like leaving a kitten in a jungle.
So now all her gear was in the back of his car, safe enough, but she’d just gotten more agitated as the day wore on.
“I have to call my mom again. I have to reach her. And then I promise, I’ll return all the money I borrowed from you immediately.”
“This may be killing you, Kelly, but it’s not killing me. And I know you’ll return the loan. Quit having a stroke.”
“But I don’t borrow money. From strangers. From anyone.”
“Think of it from my perspective. If I were in a bind in a foreign country, I’d like to think someone would step up and help me.”
“But not like this. You’ve given up the whole day. Your work. Your place. And you’re still stuck with me.”
“You know what? You need a drink. We both do.”
She opened her mouth as if she were going to object to that, too, but then…for the first time… she suddenly seemed to open her eyes. Forget the all-consuming anxiety that had been eating her up.
A few moments later, he wrapped her hands around a glass of wine. A Syrah from the Rhone Valley, red as a ruby in the fading daylight.
She took a sip without looking, likely without tasting.
The boat had just started moving, the buzz of Paris traffic and tourists fading away. The other cruisers fell silent, too. No one could seem to help it on these Seine riverboats, even the Parisians. Paris really was the city of lights…and as dusk fell and the monuments lit up, so did all the ancient bridges. Those diamonds of light glittered in the Seine.
They passed the Musée d’Art, but all the good stuff was a distance away yet. The guide would do his tourist thing, identify the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre and all the usual great historical stuff…but that was later. Dinner was now. Wine. The lights. The textures and sounds of Paris.
At some point he accepted being in just a wee heap of trouble. Denial wasn’t doing any good. You couldn’t pretend you weren’t in a swamp if you were knee-deep in mud. He wasn’t in mud. He was just suffering from a mighty, mighty pull toward her.
He’d get over it, he assured himself. He’d just met her, for Pete’s sake. What was the harm in an evening together? So he liked looking at her. Liked the itchy charge of chemistry. Liked those liquid brown eyes of hers. So?
Once they were seated for dinner, she did all the tourist-sucker oohing and aahing for the Tour Eiffel, Jardin des Plantes, the Louvre, Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Notre Dame was on Île de la Cité, though. And he knew she’d get into Notre Dame because of being a South Bender. But by the time they’d passed the real Dame, he’d ordered a second bottle of wine, a Puligny-Montrachet from 2002, and they were almost finished with the fabulous flammenkueche.
“What is this dish again?” she asked.
“Well…it’s kind of a cross between a pancake and a pizza. It’s got cream and herbs and ham and cheese. You like it?”
“You’ve watched me gobbling it down and you have to ask? It’s to die for. Like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. But I think one taste of escargot is enough for me.”
“Hey, you came all the way to France. You might as well try all the French things you can.”
“True,” she murmured.
Everyone on the cruise was more dressed up than them. They’d never had a chance to change. Hell, Will hadn’t even come up with the impulsive idea to do the cruise until late in the day. But now, as they wandered back on deck—Kelly wanted a clearer view of the cathedral on shore, and God knew, they were both stuffed from dinner and needed a walk—she shivered in the sudden damp night breeze.
Her pants and thin V-necked sweater weren’t warm enough. Her throat was bare, no jewelry at all, just her skin glowing in the moonlight and distant city lights.
He didn’t put an arm around her, but he shifted closer. Close enough so their shoulders and arms touched, a way of simply offering some of his body warmth. But his heartbeat thought there was an implication because his pulse leaped like a pole vault.
Or maybe the leap was caused by the way she suddenly looked at him.
Music from the live trio playing inside drifted back to their part of the boat. He heard it, but like the buzz of other passengers’ conversation and bursts of laughter, all sounds seemed to be coming from miles away. Every nerve ending in his body focused on her.
“I can’t believe I’m really here, really seeing this.”
“You mean the real Notre Dame?”
She chuckled. “The one in South Bend is real, too. Which is funny, because we’re here, yet this is the one that seems like a fantasy. It’s all so…magical.”
The old cathedral wasn’t remotely magical, he thought, but she was. And when another spring breeze whisked at her hair and made her shiver again, she didn’t fight his arm scooping around her shoulder, nudging her closer.
He knew at that instant they would sleep together.
“You said you’d been in France around four years now? So all these monuments and museums are old to you. You’ve probably been inside Notre Dame a zillion times.”
“Museums, yeah. But Notre Dame, I’ve never been there.”
“Really? But it’s so beautiful.”
“Yeah, well, might as well get this right on the table. I’m allergic to churches. Especially Catholic churches. My dad had two career goals for me. One was to become a priest, which he must have realized was highly unlikely when he found me sleeping with the babysitter when I was fourteen. I’m pretty sure that incident set off my Recovering Catholic phase. I’m still in it.”
“Hard work, this recovery?” Humor glinted in her eyes.
“You can’t imagine. I’ve had to be really vigilant. Guilt sneaks up on you when you’re not looking. You see a nun, you get this instinct to stand up and recite catechism. You have to fight it all the time.”
“You’re so funny,” she murmured.
“Yeah, so they say.”
She cocked her chin. “I’m a rebel in a different way.”
“Yeah? What way?”
“I stayed with the Catholic fold. Have to admit that. But my senior year, I was suspended from school, almost didn’t graduate. Kind of staged a party at a friend’s house. The party got a little out of hand. Ended up with a car in the swimming pool in the backyard.”
“Uh-oh.”
“A major uh-oh. My friend was the dean’s daughter.”
Will winced on her behalf.
“Yeah,” she said. “So don’t be thinking I’m a saint.”
“Oh, no,” he assured her. “I took one look at you and thought, Now there’s a wild woman. A hard-core rebel.”
“A lot of others don’t seem to recognize it.”
“Imagine that.” A strand of hair drifted across her cheek, mesmerizing him, for no reason that he could imagine. “I attended Notre Dame, actually. The university. Since we’re confessing sins and all.”
“That’s quite a biggie.”
“It was my dad’s choice of school. Naturally. Played tight end.” He added, “That’s an offensive football position.”
“Like there could be anyone raised in South Bend who didn’t know that. Only darn, we can’t talk anymore now that I know you’re a god.”
“Not. Team didn’t do well in those years.”
“Ah. And that was all your fault?”
“Probably. I know it’s sacrilegious to admit it, but I wasn’t that into football. It was just a way to get a scholarship, so I could pay my own way.”
“A scholarship? To Notre Dame? There’s another wow. I’m impressed.”
“Good, good. No one else is, so I’m glad you are.” He still hadn’t brushed away the silky strand of hair on her cheek, but he was thinking about it nonstop. The moonlight. Her cheek. Her eyes. That strand of hair. “It was an athletic scholarship, not an academic one.”
“I get it. You don’t want to take credit for having a brain, just brawn.”
“Actually, the only thing I wanted credit for was paying my own way, however I could do it. Didn’t have to jump for anyone else’s strings that way.”
“Who was trying to pull your strings?”
“Are you always this nosy?”
“Always,” she warned him. “It’s what I do for a living.”
“You make money being nosy?”
“Yeah, that’s me. I’ve got a title. Forensic accountant. Sounds like I do taxes for the dead, doesn’t it? But no. My job’s tracking down credit card fraud. To most people, I suspect it’s not too thrilling. Some might even call it tedious. But if you’re really, really
nosy, and like prying into people’s lives and stuff that’s none of your business…well, it’s probably the perfect job.”
“Okay.” He lowered his head.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’ve waited as long as I can possibly stand it.”
“Waited for what?”
“To taste you,” he said. And then did.
With his first taste of her, the first kiss…Will heard the music. It was a woman singer with a low, smoky voice belting out a haunting ballad. All the other sensory details around him suddenly came into focus. The endless lights of Paris rippling in the black waters of the Seine, the waves lapping at the boat. He turned to Kelly, as if he were spinning her in a waltz. And kept turning. With his lips glued on hers.
She tasted like the rich, warm wine they’d been drinking.
And like innocence.
Her hands climbed up, up his arms, then up around his neck and hung on, as if she were dizzy from all the spinning. Or from him.
Will thought this had to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done…and then went back for another taste.
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Jennifer Greene
Kelly Rochard is determined to have one last adventure before settling down to married life!Still, being mugged at the Louvre is not what she had in mind for her long-awaited trip to Paris. Until Will Maguire comes to her aid, and she finds herself completely distracted by the handsome stranger in the Notre Dame sweatshirt.Kelly can’t seem to resist the world’s most romantic city or Will, who is determined to show her all its treasures, from the top of the Eiffel Tower to strolls along the Seine. But will their love last when they’re back in plain old South Bend, Indiana, or will they end up blaming their breathless fling on the city of love?“ well-written, emotionally rich story… fairly simmers with sexual tension. ” —Library Journal on Blame It on Cupid “Greene writes a charming…new, fun-filled spin on romance with the boy next door. ” —Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Blame It on Cupid
Praise for the work ofUSA TODAYbestselling author
JENNIFER
GREENE
“A book by Jennifer Greene hums with an
unbeatable combination of sexual chemistry and
heart-warming emotion.”
—New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips
“Written with a deliciously sharp sense
of humour and her usual superb sense of
characterisation… Greene’s latest romance is a
sweetly sexy, thoroughly satisfying, and
simply sublime literary confection.”
—Booklist on Blame It on Chocolate
“A warm-hearted romance with endearing
characters, simmering sensuality, and a very
interesting subject matter. A book to curl
up with on a cold night.”
—Rendezvous on Blame It on Chocolate
“The characters are likeable, the plot is realistic,
and the book is fantastic.”
—Romance Reviews Today on Blame It on Chocolate
Also available from Jennifer Greene and MIRA
BLAME IT ON CHOCOLATE
Dear Reader,
I’ve been to Paris only once, but I’ve never forgotten it. It’s a mesmerising, magical city like none other – a city of lights and legends, of sights and smells and sounds just made for fantasies and lovers.
Over the years, those memories kept brewing in my mind…just waiting for a story to weave around them…and finally it came.
I needed a special man, the kind of man who could make a girl want to throw away all that was safe and sure, everything she thought she believed about herself…just for the chance to be with him. And I needed a special woman, the kind of woman who could challenge and entice a man to be more than he was, more than he thought he could be…just for the right to be with her.
So I created Kelly…who meets the wrong man at absolutely the wrong time. And then I found Will…who has such a code of honour that he can’t possibly seduce Kelly, much less become involved with her.
But in Paris, what seems wrong anywhere else can be impossibly, wonderfully right – if my two lovers will just take that huge risk and leap off a cliff together.
I loved writing this story…and love having the chance to share it with you. hope you enjoy it!
All my best,
Jennifer Greene
JENNIFER GREENE
Blame It on Paris
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To my lar
For being MY Paris
CHAPTER ONE
GUILT WAS so much fun.
Kelly Rochard grabbed her shoulder bag and bounded down the cracked porch steps of the centuries-old bed-and-breakfast. She couldn’t wait a second longer to inhale all the sights, smells and sounds of Paris in the springtime.
Who’d have thunk it? That a gregarious, nosy, hopelessly open person such as herself could possibly have managed to keep a secret this big?
No one even knew she was here.
Of course, in a week, she’d go back home to South Bend, confess everything to her new fiancé, never tell another fib again as long as she lived, and probably do penance for two or three aeons. As her mother loved to say, you could take the Catholic out of the girl, but you were stuck with the guilt for life.
But today, she just plain didn’t care. Guilt or no guilt, she was thrilled to be here.
Blithely she stepped off the curb—and a dozen horns shrieked at her mistake. She backed up fast, heart pounding. A couple taxi drivers yelled as they passed by—something about connarde and ballot and une tête de linotte. She was pretty sure the insults were aimed at her specific genetic heritage, with a few general references about her being an American scatterbrain, as well.
Okay, okay. So she was suffering jet lag, not at her brightest, and it was going to take her a while—and a map—to figure out how to get around…preferably without getting herself killed.
The small inn where she was staying didn’t seem located in exactly the newest, safest part of town, but the neighborhood still exploded with color.
Three street vendors in a row tried to woo her into taking a bouquet of fresh flowers. The next one sold café—which she fumbled with her brand-new euros to buy, and then sipped as she ambled on. Pedestrians bustled past, clearly on their way to work. All the women looked so savvy—their clothes not necessarily expensive, but even basic styles jazzed up with an interesting scarf tied the right way. A man winked at her. She gawked at an open-air grocery, where the smell of fresh fruits mixed with a luxurious array of fresh flowers.
The grin on her face just kept getting bigger and sillier. She was free. This was Paris. In May. The city of romance. The city of lights.
Her father’s city.
The open door of a bakery drew her inside. A single look at the croissants and baguettes made her realize she was starving to death. Euros were exchanged—too many, she was positive—but the first taste was better than sin, and well worth whatever the baker had cheated her out of. The pastry was buttery, light, a puff of sweetness on her tongue.
Juggling the pastry and the coffee and her bag, she stepped back into the throng of pedestrians…when a stranger suddenly grabbed her arm.
Initially Kelly reacted with more exasperation than fear.
When the mugger tugged, she tugged back. And no, tangling with a thief wasn’t the wisest thing Kelly Nicole Rochard had ever done—particularly when the jerk was a good half foot taller than her five feet five inches and easily outweighed her by fifty pounds. But, as her mother had noted during labor, Kelly was as naturally stubborn as a goat.
Her roll went flying. Coffee splattered everywhere. She was so busy struggling just to keep her balance—and free herself—that she didn’t originally realize why the mugger was yanking so hard on her arm. But then she did. Fast. Her engagement ring did tend to glitter in the sun, which was probably what caught the jerk’s attention. He yanked on her finger so hard she almost cried, but that was just pain.
When he managed to wrestle off the ring, Kelly let out a war cry worthy of a marine. “You give that back, you rotten son of a flea-bitten scumbag!”
She couldn’t finish because the mugger suddenly jerked her around and yanked her tight against his chest. Her courage suffered an instant and complete crash. She forgot the ring. Forgot the dazzling day and the wonder of Paris.
When the bony arm cut off her windpipe, she forgot just about everything.
Faces and storefronts blurred. Sounds muted to a distant cacophony. She’d never tasted fear this acid, this consuming. Her entire consciousness was zoned in on her thief. The man wasn’t huge, but he was still a ton bigger than she was, and he stank of drugs and desperation. His breath blew fetid on her neck, his body reeking of old sweat. He hissed something to her in French.
Four years of high school French didn’t seem to address his particular choice of vocabulary. Still, she was ninety-nine percent certain that she understood him. He seemed to feel that her mother lacked morals, that she herself was a worthless bitch and that her life wasn’t going to be worth dog breath if she didn’t give up her purse.
She was more than willing to.
Almost.
“Look,” she said desperately, and then stopped. He tightened the choke hold on her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She was panicked enough to suffer a heart attack. Or pee in her pants. Or hurl.
Or possibly all three.
At the same time. Her mugger hissed another command, this one angrier and more urgent than the first.
She got it, she got it. She didn’t have an hour or two to think up a plan. Either she released her death grip on her purse, or just maybe he was going to break her neck.
“Look,” she blubbered. “You don’t understand. You can have all my money. I don’t care. You can take every euro, every dollar. And all the credit cards. Everything. My passport—you want my passport? You can have that, too. But I really need some papers in that purse. You couldn’t possibly want those papers. Please, I—”
On her last gulp of oxygen, her voice quit. Completely quit, like a cell phone with no battery. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. He probably couldn’t speak English, so why was she even trying to reason with him?
It was just…there were some very old, very private letters in her purse. They were her father’s. The only thing she had, or would ever have, of her dad’s. They were the whole reason she’d made this impulsive trip to Paris. She couldn’t give them up. She just couldn’t.
His other hand clamped on her left breast and squeezed. Hard.
She dropped her hold on the purse faster than a hot coal.
The mugger grabbed it and then shoved her, hard. She toppled on the cement walk, stunning both her knee and elbow when she crashed on the hard surface.
It had all happened so quickly. The mugger disappeared into the crowd. Some pedestrians kept on walking, acting as if she were invisible, but a few rushed over to her, jabbering sympathetically in French. Someone yelled for a gendarme—she understood the word for police, but by then she didn’t care. It was too darn late for that.
She was fine. Her heart didn’t know it yet; she was still gulping down air like a panicked beached whale…but really, she knew she was okay. Her engagement ring, her passport, her money—losing all of it was a nightmare, but she was alive and the jerk was gone.
Everything was survivable except for the loss of those letters. No one even knew she had them, even her mom. Especially her mom. And no one would likely recognize the ratty old envelopes as remotely valuable, because they weren’t.
To anyone but her. Unfortunately, they were irreplaceably valuable to her, and the loss hit her like a blow.
“Mademoiselle…” A mustached man in a uniform pushed through the onlookers, bent down to her. A cop. But what good could he possibly do? Find a thief in this kind of city traffic? The guy was probably at the Eiffel Tower by now. And when he got around to opening her purse, he’d undoubtedly take the loot and credit cards and passport and throw out everything else.
Like the letters.
A raw, rusty sound came out of her throat. Kelly told herself to get a grip and turn back into her usual strong, sturdy self, but man, somehow she couldn’t find the on switch. Caving was totally unlike her. She’d always been a go-to woman, the kind of woman who could cheerlead through a tornado, who saw problems as opportunities rather than crises. She never had meltdowns. She wasn’t the meltdown type.
But damn. The loss of those old letters really, really, really hurt.
“Mademoiselle,” the cop repeated, and reeled off some questions in French.
She pushed a hand through her hair, struggling to understand, flunking, struggling again. She could see he was getting impatient. Hell’s bells, so was she—with herself. But she was shook up, and the gendarme was speaking so fast.
But then…somewhere in the sea of strange faces and confusion, she heard an American accent.
An American Midwestern accent like hers.
A man.
“Hey,” he said, “are you in some kind of trouble here?”
Her head shot up. One glance gave her a jolt. The guy was tall and lean and blond, with a Matthew McConaughey angular face and come-on baby-blue eyes. He wasn’t just killer good-looking. He was to die for.
But that wasn’t what snagged her attention. His clothes did. Filling out a Notre Dame sweatshirt were brawny wide shoulders.
The logo wasn’t for Notre Dame, as in the French cathedral. But as in Notre Dame football. As in the golden dome. As in South Bend, Indiana.
As in home.
She fell in love so fast it made her head spin—of course, her head was already spinning. And it wasn’t like she thought it was real love…but it was real enough for that moment.
She pushed toward him, never losing eye contact, and said breathlessly, “You can’t imagine how much I’d appreciate some help. I know a little French, but not enough to communicate, at least as fast as I need to. If you’d play translator for just a few minutes…it couldn’t possibly take long….”
WILL MAGUIRE, at age thirty-one, had done all the bailing out and damsel saving and white-knight crap he ever intended to do in this lifetime.
But hell. He had noticed the commotion from all the way down the block, and when he heard the sudden, sharp, panicked yell—obviously a woman’s voice—he instinctively hustled toward the sound. The instinct wasn’t heroic. It was lunatic.
He’d lived in Paris long enough to know getting involved in a tourist brouhaha was complete lunacy. Yet still he came closer.
It took only seconds for him to interpret the scene. She’d been ripped off. Moments before, a gendarme had shown up, and typical of Paris, so had every busybody bystander. Most of them figured an American tourist, being anan American tourist, had done something stupid. A few wanted to whine about the danger of Paris streets these days. The gendarme was trying to question her about exactly what happened.
In those same few seconds, he snared a quick look at her.
Very quick.
But that was all it took for him to feel a potent kick in the gut.
He didn’t get it. A pale purple sweater cupped her small boobs. Dark pants fit snug enough to clarify that she had skinny legs and no ass. Since he’d always tended to like more breasts and less bone, there was nothing below her neck that should have rattled his hormones. Yet his pulse was kabooming like a freight train.
Heightwise, she came up to his chin. And that was where she stopped being ordinary. The eyes were mesmerizing, almond shaped, tea-brown, looking right at him. The details included a small, thin nose; pink mouth; and a sweep of almost-shoulder-length brown hair. Only brown wasn’t an accurate description of the color. The sixty-five-degree morning was drenched in sunshine, and that’s how her hair looked—lustrous, full of light, shiny in the sun.
Okay, so she was adorable. But that alone didn’t explain the kaboom thing. There were fabulous-looking women all over Paris.
There was something else about her, something he couldn’t define. A zest. A glow. A female thing. Will didn’t need to identify it to know it was a serious problem.
Ever since he’d devoted himself to a life of decadence and vice—that’d be the last four years—he’d fine-tuned his sonar to beware of women who meant trouble.
She meant trouble.
On the other hand, all she’d asked him to do was translate for her for a couple of minutes. How could that possibly be any kind of risk?
“Sure,” he said. And immediately discovered that helping her wasn’t going to be quite that simple.
The gendarme shot him a look as if a savior of the universe had just shown up. The bystanders kneed in closer, all hot to participate. Everybody claimed to have seen the thief close-up. One said he was tall and burly. One said he was lean as a stick. One said he had a beard, like a homeless person, and another said he’d just been a guy walking down the street who suddenly sprang into this deviant behavior, far too fast for anyone to stop him or come to the girl’s aid.
Still, for all the confusion, it didn’t take forever to get the basic questions asked and answered. Her name was Kelly Rochard. She was twenty-seven. From South Bend, Indiana. Here for ten days. Vacation.
Something flickered in her eyes when she said “vacation,” but Will just dutifully translated—it wasn’t any of his business whether she was telling the truth or not.
“So the thief took off with your purse,” he said. “Can you give the cop a list of the critical stuff in the bag?”
Hell, she said, her whole world was in the damned bag. Passport, money, credit cards. Oh yeah, and then she got around to mentioning that the thief had also taken off with her engagement ring.
“What?” she said, when Will and the gendarme exchanged a quick look.
Will didn’t answer. It was obvious that the cop had immediately thought the same thing he did. What sense did it make for a beautiful woman to be traveling to Paris alone in the spring? Her so-called fiancé was either a jerk or an idiot. Probably both.
“…and there were some private papers in the bag, too. That’s the worst. That those records are probably gone forever. I have no way to replace them, no way to…”
“Hey,” Will said gruffly. Tears suddenly magnified her eyes, making them look extra huge and exotic. “Take it easy there. It’ll all get straightened out.”
Well, it wouldn’t, of course. Losing a passport in a foreign country was a guaranteed nightmare. Times fifty.
The cop heard about the “private papers,” but he was tuned to the same practical channel that Will was. It didn’t really matter what Kelly had lost, because the mugger was long gone. She’d still need a police report, which was a pain for the gendarme to fill out when there was about zero chance in a zillion they’d ever find the guy. But he’d get her one so she could pursue a replacement passport.
That wasn’t going to happen overnight.
“Je sais,” Will said drily. He knew. American bureaucracies and French bureaucracies—even if the French didn’t like to think so—were kin. Ghastly. Time-consuming, inefficient, frustrating, etc., etc.
The cop had some questions for him to translate… Did Kelly have enough funds to survive, someone who could wire her money, a way to live until the paperwork got sorted out, what was the address where she was staying. All that yadda yadda.
“You’re from South Bend, too?” She motioned to his sweatshirt.
“Yeah.” Like it mattered? He suffered a gulp when he heard the address for her hotel. She was damned lucky she hadn’t been ripped off there, too.
“Oh my God. The key to my room was in my purse, too. I can’t even get into my room.” She’d been doing okay, or reasonably okay. But now the more she realized how much she’d lost, the more panicked she got. “I don’t have anything. I don’t even have money to buy lunch. Or dinner. Or enough to buy another hairbrush. Or lipstick. Or even to wire home. I don’t even have my coat—”
The more panicked she got, the faster the gendarme talked. “What does she think we can do? We can’t even get a clear description of the perpetrator. You know these Americans, now she’ll be saying nothing’s safe in France. I’ll file a report, of course, but God—” he crossed himself “—couldn’t get her a replacement passport this instant. Where was her common sense, to have all her money in one place? And a bag she was carrying on her besides?”
Kelly was on a completely different track. “I carried those letters on me all the time,” she said mournfully. “They’re all I ever had of my dad. I don’t care about the rest….”
Will fished in his pocket for a tissue. Came through. But after she blew her nose, she looked at him expectantly.
As if there was some insane kind of magic between them, he found himself looking back. At those eyes. That mouth. That glow of hers.
He told himself firmly to look away.
He told himself that the gendarme would transport her to the embassy or consulate or wherever she needed to go, and the rest of her mess wasn’t his problem. She’d be okay. That’s what embassies and consulates and cops were for, taking care of people. It wasn’t his problem. She couldn’t possibly, remotely, be his problem.
He told himself that his sisters had irrevocably taught him to steer clear of damsels in distress. At the same time he was analyzing her looks again. Her hair was this glossy mass of loose dark waves, not a style exactly. It just looked all soft and silky. Naturally sexy.
“Monsieur?” The gendarme growled at him impatiently, as if he’d asked him a question a few moments ago and Will had failed to pay attention.
Which was possible.
Possibly she’d been talking, and he hadn’t been listening to her, either.
And then he made his third mistake of the day—this one far worse than stopping to help, far worse than failing to pay attention.
“She can’t very well just stand here in the street,” he told the gendarme. “I’ll take her.”
The instant those three words came out of his mouth, Will realized that he’d completely lost his mind. “I mean for a little while. I’ll go feed her. Lunch. But you have to promise to get the police report done pronto, so she can go to the consulate for her passport.”
“Bien, bien,” the gendarme said. He probably would have promised anything now that he was off the hook.
He disappeared faster than lightning. Ditto for the bystanders.
And Will was left alone with her.
CHAPTER TWO
“I’M ENGAGED. I told you that, didn’t I?” Kelly asked him.
“Yup. About three times in the last half hour.”
Now, that couldn’t have been true, because Kelly knew she hadn’t been nervous a half hour ago. It was only now, as they turned down his street and were aiming directly for his place, that her nerves started suffering major hiccups.
Earlier, it seemed like a superb idea to leave the scene of the crime with a nice, tall, big, tall, strong, tall, protective guy. Especially when the guy was a fellow American. Her judgment had nothing to do with his being cute. Or sexy. It was only about her feeling terrified out of her mind from her mugger experience.
Only now, approaching his front door, her judgment didn’t seem to be quite the same. It was a cool front door. Old, old oak. Shaped with an arch. The handle was a weathered brass lion. Like Will. Not the weathered and brass part, but the tawny lion part. “I have to admit, it feels a little weird, being here,” she said with a laugh. “For one thing, it’s just crazy for you to feel stuck with me, someone you don’t know from Adam.”
“Kelly. You’re not worried this is a pickup, are you? The only reason I suggested coming here was because it was nearby. It was the fastest we could get you to a place where you could put your feet up, have a cup of coffee in one hand and a phone in the other. It’s not like there isn’t another way to handle this, but you’ve got a bunch of calls to make, no easy way to do it on the street.”
“And you’re from South Bend besides.”
“And I’m from South Bend besides.”
“Which practically makes you like family.”
He stuck a key in the lock and pushed open the door so she could enter first. She did, grazing his arm as she walked past him, thinking that Will would feel like “family” when it rained cats.
She knew perfectly well she’d been blathering on like a goose. Another time she’d feel embarrassed or guilty, but the truth was, she’d started shaking about fifteen minutes ago and hadn’t stopped yet. It wasn’t every day a woman got mugged. She kept remembering the creep’s stinky breath and body odor, the feel of his arm choking her neck, and that started the shakes all over again.
They were just little shakes. Not big ones. It wasn’t that she was a wimp or anything. At least she never had been before this, and Kelly kept telling herself she was mighty grateful that Will had offered to help her. Being suddenly penniless and without ID in a foreign country would have been pretty darn daunting if she’d been alone.
Yet she only caught a single glance at the inside of his apartment before some silly instinct made her whirl around and back out again—or try to back out. Will was still standing in the doorway, blocking her escape. Her nose was suddenly an inch from his chin. She was only a breath’s distance from those killer blue eyes. And those shoulders. And those disreputable blond whiskers.
“I’m engaged. Did I mention that?”
“Yeah, you did. What’s wrong now?”
“Nothing. Nothing. You’ve really got an interesting place.” But interesting wasn’t the word for it. One look, and she labeled it bachelor lair. The whole place shouted single guy on the prowl.
His flat took up the second floor of an old building. She could only see so much from the narrow hallway, but there seemed to be a bunch of rooms, all small. The main living area, off to the right, had long, thin windows; old, rich woodwork; carved tin ceilings. He’d left the French doors open a crack, leading to a step-out balcony. The sunlight and erotic, exotic breeze drifted through the open door.
Well, possibly it was just a plain old spring breeze, and possibly her mind had totally invented the erotic, exotic thing, but Kelly didn’t think so. Reality was that sex appeal poured off Will in sheets.
She tried to concentrate on being nosy, which should have been natural for her. The living room was tiny, with a soot-stained corner fireplace and an elegant tiled hearth. The couch was old leather, all wrinkled and soft. The Persian rug looked seriously ancient, thick and fringed, in reds and dark blues. One wall had built-in shelves, with books heaped to the ceiling.
The dust wasn’t more than half an inch thick, and Will swooped a shirt off a chair. “Look around, make yourself at home, okay? The bathroom’s off to the left. I need to call work, and I’ll start some coffee. Then we’ll concentrate on what you need to do from here.”
He squeezed her shoulder as he ambled past—an erotic, exotic squeeze, totally inappropriate for an engaged woman.
Or more likely it was her response to him that was inappropriate. Splashing her face with cold water right then seemed a great idea, so she took off for the bathroom.
Naturally, she nosed around. The toilet had an antique pull chain from the ceiling—interesting, once she was sure she could make it work. The white pedestal sink and tub were the old-fashioned kind with feet. He used a straight razor, she noted. Didn’t have much in the medicine cabinet but deodorant and first-aid stuff and one medicine. She thought it was for colds, nonprescription and more than two years old; he should have thrown it out. It was outdated.
Her conscience chided her for being so shameful, but really, nosing around was better than musing that the tub was big enough for orgies. Not that she’d ever participated in an orgy. Or spent a lot of time thinking about them. Or planned to take up thinking about them.
Impatiently she splashed her face with cool water, then grabbed a navy-blue towel to dry off. The towel was almost the size of a bedsheet. A thick blue rug covered most of the marble floor. No question that Will liked the color blue and his creature comforts.
She opened the door, which gave her away with a telltale creak.
Will immediately called out, “Across the hall and one door down. I’m in the kitchen.”
So…it wasn’t her fault she got to see more of the apartment en route. To the left, an archway led to an alcove. Impossible to guess what the odd-sized space was for, but Will had squished in a small desk, lamp, chair, laptop, so it worked as a miniden. Still, it wasn’t ordinary. The walls had some kind of linen-like finish; the carved ceiling looked hand done. Everywhere, the creaky floors were covered with old Oriental rugs. Nothing seemed new. Everything about the architecture seemed older than a few centuries, practically older than America. Will’s love for blues and comfortable textures followed through everywhere. And he might not be into dusting, but he was basically a put-away tidy kind of guy.
“What? Did you get lost?” He stepped out of the kitchen.
“No. I’m just dawdling around. No amount of guilt ever seems to stop me from being nosy. And I love your place—it’s really interesting.” Looking around had also given her a chance to catch her breath. Maybe she didn’t have a full-bore grip yet, but the adrenaline had finally quit pumping. “Will…thank you for helping me. Really, thank you.”
“Yeah, well, I stumbled around plenty when I first moved to Paris. Might have gotten into real trouble if a few people hadn’t offered a hand. Anyway…” He turned away, started pouring steaming water into pottery mugs. “Did he hurt you?”
She blinked. His tone was so casual that she almost missed it, but then Will wasn’t an in-your-face kind of caretaker. Instead he was subtle, found a way to slip in a disturbing question and get it out of the way. Most strangers wouldn’t have cared, much less made the effort to steer into a potentially awkward problem.
She thought that just maybe her attraction to him was more than ordinary old sex appeal. Damned if he wasn’t coming through like a seriously good guy.
And then she tried to answer the question. “I’m bound to have a few bruises show up tomorrow, maybe even a nasty one on my neck. But I don’t need a doctor. Nothing serious.” Yet suddenly she needed to snug her arms tight under her chest. “I have to admit, though, that I keep feeling…weird. I was never mugged before, never had anyone touch me with the intent to hurt me. I can’t seem to shake it off. There’s just a high…ick…factor.”
“Sit. I was going to make coffee, then figured that was stupid. You need caffeine like a hole in the head. So it’s tea. French-style. With a bunch of sugar. Sugar for shock, right?”
“Actually, I never need an excuse to use sugar, but that’ll do.”
The kitchen was mostly copper and blue, with white trim. There was no dishwasher, and no place for one, she noticed with shock. The sink was messy, but cleaned fairly recently, and the counter just looked typical of a guy, dishes reproducing since the night before. Her scrutiny kept picking up details. A small fridge, a couple bottles of unopened wine, the luxuriously sexy smell of fresh bread, a heap of fresh fruit in a bowl. The eating table only had room for two chairs, was hardly big enough to put plates on, but it overlooked the boulevard below, the whole view of thick, old trees, the steady snake of cars and street traffic. Sunlight ribboned through fresh green leaves.
“Ever since I got here,” she murmured, “I keep seeing the same things I could see at home. Cars. People. Buildings. Spring flowers and smells. But somehow it’s incredibly different.”
“It’s Paris,” he said, as if that explained everything.
And maybe it did. Heaven knows her response to Will was unlike her response to any other stranger. She couldn’t seem to pin down a reason. Maybe being mugged had just thrown her normal reactions off-kilter. Maybe shock and fear just made her senses more acute, inflamed her emotions.
And maybe burning her tongue on the hot tea would distract her from these idiotic thoughts about him.
“Better,” she pronounced, after she gulped down three long sips of the strong brew.
He leaned against the counter. “Okay, I figure we’d better organize a plan of attack here. Obviously the first priority is getting you a new passport. Somewhere, do you have your original passport number, and other ID like a birth certificate or driver’s license?”
“Well, I did have. But that stuff was all in my purse.”
“Okay. But did you leave that kind of information with someone back home? Like a copy of your passport?”
She nodded. “I left some obvious information in an envelope with my mom—the address where I’d be staying, copies of credit cards, a copy of my birth certificate. I’ve never traveled outside the country before. It didn’t occur to me that I’d need to do more than that.”
“Normally, you wouldn’t. So the first thing you want to do is call your mom, get her to fax that information here. By then we should have the police report. That’s the stuff we need to take to the consulate, get the process going to get you an immediate temporary passport.”
She frowned. “Temporary?”
“Well, if you want a regular passport, it’ll take a while. The bureaucracy here is no faster than it is in the United States. But you can fly home right away with a temporary, no waiting or hassle.”
“And that would be great,” she said slowly, “but I don’t want to go home immediately. Will, it wasn’t my fault this happened. And I didn’t come here on a whim. I’ve waited a long time for a chance to make this trip.”
“Okay…well…” For a long moment, he studied her, as if suddenly realizing she hadn’t come here to Paris just to do the tourist thing. “The way you’d attack a new permanent passport takes basically the same steps. Get the ID records, then the police report, then go to the consulate. If I remember right, a regular replacement passport’ll cost you around eighty-five, ninety bucks. But I’d be amazed if the paperwork went through for that in less than two weeks, and it could take longer.”
“But as long as I could get money wired here, replacement credit cards and all that, there’s no reason I couldn’t stay?”
“I’m no expert, Kelly, but my understanding is that, yes, you’d be fine as long as you stayed in France. It’d probably be pretty dicey to leave the country without an active passport in your hand.”
“That’s okay. This is the only place I wanted to come to.” When she swallowed the last sip of tea, she realized that the adrenaline had quit pumping; the shakes had disappeared. Talking to Will, being with Will, she’d forgotten the mugger. Yet, when she met his eyes, her heart rate still seemed determined to heat to an edgy simmer. “You know a lot about this,” she said.
“Not a lot. But I lost a passport once. And I’ve been living in Paris for the last four years, so naturally I’ve learned a few survival tricks.” He shot her to Will a wry grin. “You can take it to the bank—from replacing credit cards to getting money wired to getting the cop report and the application, you’re going to learn a whole bunch of French swearwords over the next couple days.”
She chuckled, but she thought it was about time to stop gazing into those sexy blue eyes and move her butt. For Pete’s sake, right now she didn’t have a brush or deodorant or even the means to buy herself lunch.
Will had been a hero, but he certainly owed her nothing. He’d already gone the long mile to help her out. “Okay,” she said brightly. “If you’d just let me use your phone…”
He gave her a look she didn’t understand. Then he steered her into the room with the balconies and the high tin ceilings, handed her a phone and left.
She appreciated the privacy. But twenty minutes later, she was pretty close to curling up in a ball under a couch. Any couch.
Will showed up in the doorway. “Not doing too great?”
She sighed. “I couldn’t seem to make a direct connection, so I had to use an operator. She didn’t speak much English. Or want to.”
“Yeah. You’re in France.”
“Got past that. But my mom wasn’t home. I tried her landline, her cell. Twice. Left messages. Twice.”
“Okay.” He scratched his chin. “I thought you said you had a fiancé.”
She straightened. “I do.”
He looked at her. She wasn’t sure what he was thinking, why a sudden silence fell between them, but whatever wheels were turning in that interesting brain of his, he suddenly seemed to come to a decision. “Come on. We’re getting out of here.”
FOUR HOURS LATER, Will still wasn’t sure what he was doing. She wasn’t his problem, he kept telling himself. And once she brought up the fiancé, he’d normally have backed off faster than lightning.
It had taken him a long time to cultivate an irresponsible, don’t-give-a-damn, love-’em-and-move-on kind of lifestyle. Poaching was a bad idea. Not because it was right or wrong but because it was inviting trouble.
Only this was different. Really. The thing was, Kelly kept bringing up this so-called fiancé, but the infamous fiancé wasn’t the one she wanted to call for help, wasn’t the person she’d left records with, wasn’t the person she wanted to ask for money.
As far as Will could tell, if the fiancé existed, he was in the toad class.
Maybe that didn’t totally explain how they ended up at Pont d’Alma on the Left Bank, with Will forking over major euros at the ticket counter, but by then the day had been so irretrievably awful that he needed a pick-me-up.
“A boat ride?” she questioned.
“Neither one of us has had food all day. You have to be hungry by now.”
She was intently trying to read the signs. “This is for a riverboat cruise of the Seine?”
“Yeah. One of the worst tourist traps in the whole city. But we were close.” A complete lie—he’d driven forty minutes out of his way. But she didn’t know that, and who cared, anyway? “It’ll get your mind off the rest of the day. That was quite a scene at the your hotel.”
The understatement of the year, he thought. When he realized her lodging was in the 20th arrondissement, he almost had a heart attack. Times three.
“Well, I thought I’d researched places to stay quite intensively on the Internet. This one looked clean in the pictures. And it was the cheapest I found, for sure. And when I looked up the area, it said the place was going through a major renewal, so I just didn’t expect it would be quite so…”
“Rough.” He put it in spades as he ushered her up the gangplank of the riverboat.
“It was okay. Mme. Rossarde seemed nice enough last night.” Kelly lifted exhausted eyes. “Not like this afternoon.”
“In French, we’d call her…un peau de vache.”
She thought. “The side of a cow?”
He chuckled. “Well, literally, it means hide of a cow, I guess. Meaning…tough. Unyielding. A bitch,” he clarified. The fiasco at her hotel kept replaying in his mind. He was still on a steam. The damn woman hadn’t wanted to give Kelly her clothes or anything else unless Kelly came through with a week’s worth of rent. This, after being told Kelly’s passport and money had been stolen.
Will had intervened. Kelly had a major conniption about his paying all that rent for her, but she obviously had to have her stuff. And whether or not she realized how bad the neighborhood was, he did. The other boarders looked like they were fresh out of jail or rehab. By contrast, Kelly looked milk-and-honey fresh. Leaving her there would be like leaving a kitten in a jungle.
So now all her gear was in the back of his car, safe enough, but she’d just gotten more agitated as the day wore on.
“I have to call my mom again. I have to reach her. And then I promise, I’ll return all the money I borrowed from you immediately.”
“This may be killing you, Kelly, but it’s not killing me. And I know you’ll return the loan. Quit having a stroke.”
“But I don’t borrow money. From strangers. From anyone.”
“Think of it from my perspective. If I were in a bind in a foreign country, I’d like to think someone would step up and help me.”
“But not like this. You’ve given up the whole day. Your work. Your place. And you’re still stuck with me.”
“You know what? You need a drink. We both do.”
She opened her mouth as if she were going to object to that, too, but then…for the first time… she suddenly seemed to open her eyes. Forget the all-consuming anxiety that had been eating her up.
A few moments later, he wrapped her hands around a glass of wine. A Syrah from the Rhone Valley, red as a ruby in the fading daylight.
She took a sip without looking, likely without tasting.
The boat had just started moving, the buzz of Paris traffic and tourists fading away. The other cruisers fell silent, too. No one could seem to help it on these Seine riverboats, even the Parisians. Paris really was the city of lights…and as dusk fell and the monuments lit up, so did all the ancient bridges. Those diamonds of light glittered in the Seine.
They passed the Musée d’Art, but all the good stuff was a distance away yet. The guide would do his tourist thing, identify the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre and all the usual great historical stuff…but that was later. Dinner was now. Wine. The lights. The textures and sounds of Paris.
At some point he accepted being in just a wee heap of trouble. Denial wasn’t doing any good. You couldn’t pretend you weren’t in a swamp if you were knee-deep in mud. He wasn’t in mud. He was just suffering from a mighty, mighty pull toward her.
He’d get over it, he assured himself. He’d just met her, for Pete’s sake. What was the harm in an evening together? So he liked looking at her. Liked the itchy charge of chemistry. Liked those liquid brown eyes of hers. So?
Once they were seated for dinner, she did all the tourist-sucker oohing and aahing for the Tour Eiffel, Jardin des Plantes, the Louvre, Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Notre Dame was on Île de la Cité, though. And he knew she’d get into Notre Dame because of being a South Bender. But by the time they’d passed the real Dame, he’d ordered a second bottle of wine, a Puligny-Montrachet from 2002, and they were almost finished with the fabulous flammenkueche.
“What is this dish again?” she asked.
“Well…it’s kind of a cross between a pancake and a pizza. It’s got cream and herbs and ham and cheese. You like it?”
“You’ve watched me gobbling it down and you have to ask? It’s to die for. Like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. But I think one taste of escargot is enough for me.”
“Hey, you came all the way to France. You might as well try all the French things you can.”
“True,” she murmured.
Everyone on the cruise was more dressed up than them. They’d never had a chance to change. Hell, Will hadn’t even come up with the impulsive idea to do the cruise until late in the day. But now, as they wandered back on deck—Kelly wanted a clearer view of the cathedral on shore, and God knew, they were both stuffed from dinner and needed a walk—she shivered in the sudden damp night breeze.
Her pants and thin V-necked sweater weren’t warm enough. Her throat was bare, no jewelry at all, just her skin glowing in the moonlight and distant city lights.
He didn’t put an arm around her, but he shifted closer. Close enough so their shoulders and arms touched, a way of simply offering some of his body warmth. But his heartbeat thought there was an implication because his pulse leaped like a pole vault.
Or maybe the leap was caused by the way she suddenly looked at him.
Music from the live trio playing inside drifted back to their part of the boat. He heard it, but like the buzz of other passengers’ conversation and bursts of laughter, all sounds seemed to be coming from miles away. Every nerve ending in his body focused on her.
“I can’t believe I’m really here, really seeing this.”
“You mean the real Notre Dame?”
She chuckled. “The one in South Bend is real, too. Which is funny, because we’re here, yet this is the one that seems like a fantasy. It’s all so…magical.”
The old cathedral wasn’t remotely magical, he thought, but she was. And when another spring breeze whisked at her hair and made her shiver again, she didn’t fight his arm scooping around her shoulder, nudging her closer.
He knew at that instant they would sleep together.
“You said you’d been in France around four years now? So all these monuments and museums are old to you. You’ve probably been inside Notre Dame a zillion times.”
“Museums, yeah. But Notre Dame, I’ve never been there.”
“Really? But it’s so beautiful.”
“Yeah, well, might as well get this right on the table. I’m allergic to churches. Especially Catholic churches. My dad had two career goals for me. One was to become a priest, which he must have realized was highly unlikely when he found me sleeping with the babysitter when I was fourteen. I’m pretty sure that incident set off my Recovering Catholic phase. I’m still in it.”
“Hard work, this recovery?” Humor glinted in her eyes.
“You can’t imagine. I’ve had to be really vigilant. Guilt sneaks up on you when you’re not looking. You see a nun, you get this instinct to stand up and recite catechism. You have to fight it all the time.”
“You’re so funny,” she murmured.
“Yeah, so they say.”
She cocked her chin. “I’m a rebel in a different way.”
“Yeah? What way?”
“I stayed with the Catholic fold. Have to admit that. But my senior year, I was suspended from school, almost didn’t graduate. Kind of staged a party at a friend’s house. The party got a little out of hand. Ended up with a car in the swimming pool in the backyard.”
“Uh-oh.”
“A major uh-oh. My friend was the dean’s daughter.”
Will winced on her behalf.
“Yeah,” she said. “So don’t be thinking I’m a saint.”
“Oh, no,” he assured her. “I took one look at you and thought, Now there’s a wild woman. A hard-core rebel.”
“A lot of others don’t seem to recognize it.”
“Imagine that.” A strand of hair drifted across her cheek, mesmerizing him, for no reason that he could imagine. “I attended Notre Dame, actually. The university. Since we’re confessing sins and all.”
“That’s quite a biggie.”
“It was my dad’s choice of school. Naturally. Played tight end.” He added, “That’s an offensive football position.”
“Like there could be anyone raised in South Bend who didn’t know that. Only darn, we can’t talk anymore now that I know you’re a god.”
“Not. Team didn’t do well in those years.”
“Ah. And that was all your fault?”
“Probably. I know it’s sacrilegious to admit it, but I wasn’t that into football. It was just a way to get a scholarship, so I could pay my own way.”
“A scholarship? To Notre Dame? There’s another wow. I’m impressed.”
“Good, good. No one else is, so I’m glad you are.” He still hadn’t brushed away the silky strand of hair on her cheek, but he was thinking about it nonstop. The moonlight. Her cheek. Her eyes. That strand of hair. “It was an athletic scholarship, not an academic one.”
“I get it. You don’t want to take credit for having a brain, just brawn.”
“Actually, the only thing I wanted credit for was paying my own way, however I could do it. Didn’t have to jump for anyone else’s strings that way.”
“Who was trying to pull your strings?”
“Are you always this nosy?”
“Always,” she warned him. “It’s what I do for a living.”
“You make money being nosy?”
“Yeah, that’s me. I’ve got a title. Forensic accountant. Sounds like I do taxes for the dead, doesn’t it? But no. My job’s tracking down credit card fraud. To most people, I suspect it’s not too thrilling. Some might even call it tedious. But if you’re really, really
nosy, and like prying into people’s lives and stuff that’s none of your business…well, it’s probably the perfect job.”
“Okay.” He lowered his head.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’ve waited as long as I can possibly stand it.”
“Waited for what?”
“To taste you,” he said. And then did.
With his first taste of her, the first kiss…Will heard the music. It was a woman singer with a low, smoky voice belting out a haunting ballad. All the other sensory details around him suddenly came into focus. The endless lights of Paris rippling in the black waters of the Seine, the waves lapping at the boat. He turned to Kelly, as if he were spinning her in a waltz. And kept turning. With his lips glued on hers.
She tasted like the rich, warm wine they’d been drinking.
And like innocence.
Her hands climbed up, up his arms, then up around his neck and hung on, as if she were dizzy from all the spinning. Or from him.
Will thought this had to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done…and then went back for another taste.
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Jennifer Greene
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Kelly Rochard is determined to have one last adventure before settling down to married life!Still, being mugged at the Louvre is not what she had in mind for her long-awaited trip to Paris. Until Will Maguire comes to her aid, and she finds herself completely distracted by the handsome stranger in the Notre Dame sweatshirt.Kelly can’t seem to resist the world’s most romantic city or Will, who is determined to show her all its treasures, from the top of the Eiffel Tower to strolls along the Seine. But will their love last when they’re back in plain old South Bend, Indiana, or will they end up blaming their breathless fling on the city of love?“[A] well-written, emotionally rich story… fairly simmers with sexual tension. ” —Library Journal on Blame It on Cupid “Greene writes a charming…new, fun-filled spin on romance with the boy next door. ” —Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Blame It on Cupid