Blame It on Paris (10 page)

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

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

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

“Exactly.”

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

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

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

“Why?”

“Because it's my problem.”

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

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

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

“I wasn't!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will,” she said, “he's rich.”

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

“You knew.”

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

“In a minute.”

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

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

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

Money was always at the bottom of things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On to me about what?”

“About your wicked, manipulative ways.”

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

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

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

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

“Something like that,” Will concurred.

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

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

Will frowned. “What's a T.J. Ma—?”

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

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

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

“Oh my God, what?”

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

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

“No.”

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

“No, I'm not!”

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

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

Only then, of course, Will kissed her again.

“D
ID
I
MENTION
before that you're a manipulative, sneaky, underhanded son of a gun?” she asked him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'm no coward.”

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

“He can't really want to see me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had the same perfect skin.

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

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

“Bonjour. Et vous êtes…?”
Henri looked at him.

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

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

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

“Non, merci,”
Kelly said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

“You look at me—I look at you—and you can doubt the relationship?” Kelly said disbelievingly.

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

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

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

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

“
Non. Ce n'est pas possible.
A marriage was never possible.”

“Because you were already married?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kelly, I didn't say that.
Ma chère
—”

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

“Mighty—” Henri looked at Will.

“Maybe not the easiest thing to translate,” Will murmured.

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

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

“Kelly.
Ma chère.
I have perhaps not handled this well—”

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

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

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

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

“This is very, very difficult—”

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

“I can talk to him. Don't you talk to him. I can handle this myself,” Kelly said.

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

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

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

He handed her a tissue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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