Blame It on Paris (8 page)

He ushered her into his choice—Le Petit Saint-Benoit, in the Saint Germain. It was distinctly a French place, not so touristy, more a place that the locals guarded for themselves. It was a night spot, with a good share of tables set up outside, even though it was ball-bustingly chilly by then. Still, the decor inside was from the thirties, and the food was basic French, which meant damn good if not outright fabulous. They had all the basics. Shellfish. Good wines. Filet mignon so tender it could melt in your mouth.

“All day, everywhere I went, the women were wearing scarves,” Kelly, who'd already proved she could talk and look at everything in sight at the same time, noted. “And what really irritates me is that they all know how to tie the scarves to look really chic. I mean, the
real
chic, not the cliché chic. I stick out like a sore thumb, don't I?”

“Sore thumb, no. Uniquely attractive woman, yes.”

“You don't have to butter me up. We're already sleeping together. And I meant, I stick out because I look like an American. Not like a Frenchwoman.”

He started to loosen his tie, then remembered he didn't have one on. It was the question that was constricting his airflow. “I don't know. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?”

She chuckled and pointed a shrimp at him. “Are you afraid to answer the question, Maguire?”

“Of course I'm afraid. When women ask certain questions, a guy tends to feel like he's stepped in cow manure. No matter what he answers, he's gonna be in trouble.”

“But you're not going to step in cow manure if you tell me what the big deal is about your living in Paris. I realize I'm prying, but come on, what possible difference could it make if you tell me? I'm not telling a soul. You can get it off your chest. No one'll ever know.”

“There's nothing to get off my chest.”

“Fine,” she said. “Be a martyr.”

The waiter returned to pour more wine. He took one look at Will's face and brought another liter. “Did I know before sleeping with you that you could be a complete pain in the butt?”

He thought it was a pretty good insult, but she only chuckled. “Hey, I'd have 'fessed up to being a pain in the butt if you'd just asked. But it's okay. You can keep your secrets. I was just thinking of all the reasons why you might not want to go home. A warrant out for your arrest. Like for a murder rap. Or drugs—”

“Oh, for Pete's sake. It's nothing like that.” He reached for the bread at the same time she did. Naturally the bread was fresh out of the oven, still warm, still wonderful. But every other woman he knew fretted whether stuff like bread went straight to their thighs. Kelly inhaled it faster than he did.

“My dad and I don't get along. Think of two quarterbacks from opposing teams,” he said finally.

“Opposing quarterbacks play together every Saturday,” she noted. “And you already told me that you and your dad have a really conflicted relationship. But it's still a stretch from not being close to feeling you have to live a whole continent away.”

Hell. It went on. Past the bread and salad. Past a liter and a half of wine. Past the filet mignon, and then, when she saw the pastry tray, past watching her salivate as she made her choice.

Correct that. Choices.

“I've got three sisters. No brothers. So I'm the only male. My dad started Maguire's, built it into a monster-size corporation. But now he wants to retire, and he wants to do it by my taking it on.”

“But pretty obviously you didn't want to, so you told him no.”

“I've been telling him no since I was old enough to talk. He's heard it. He doesn't give a damn. Aaron Maguire wants me to do what he wants me to do.” Will pushed away the plates, went for the demitasse. “And back when I was a boy, I really cared. I did everything but stand on my head to win his approval, his respect.”

“But it was impossible?” she asked gently.

“Oh no. I got it just fine. As long as I do exactly what he wants, everything's always been hunky-dory. And that's the point. He doesn't just want me to run the company. He wants me to do it
his
way. Eighty-hour workweeks. Him involved in all the decisions. And then there are my sisters.”

“Your sisters work at the company, too?”

“No. That's exactly the point. They don't. They want to live in the style he's let them become accustomed to. Lots of money, no responsibility. Bail them out whenever they lift a finger or run up a credit card bill or want a trip to Goa.”

He wished she would look at him with a little more sympathy. Instead she kept asking more questions. “So you told your dad how you felt about that, too.”

“I've talked to him about all this fifty ways from Sunday. I also always met him more than halfway—like going to Notre Dame because he wanted me to. That was a smooth stretch, but the minute I graduated, the pressure started up again about my coming into the company with him. He wouldn't give up. He won't give up. And I just plain got tired of fighting all the time.”

She fell silent, which was damned scary. She never shut up if given the opportunity to talk. By then she'd finished three desserts—three—explaining that they were pastries, after all, and she was only in France for a short time, and anyway, she couldn't help herself.

He found the crumb of Napoleon at the corner of her mouth and grinned. She just did everything so two hundred percent. And he was bringing her back here tomorrow, if he had anything to say about it. In the meantime, she claimed he'd have to carry her out of the place, because she was that stuffed.

He drove them back to his place, but then, instead of going in, he suggested taking a stroll down the boulevard. It was midnight by then. He had to work tomorrow, he knew. But it was a starry night, and even though she'd nagged him into talking about stuff he really didn't appreciate, he still didn't want the evening to end.

“A walk sounds good,” she agreed.

So he wrapped his jacket around her shoulders and stuffed his hands into his pockets. They walked, hip to hip, working off dinner, doing a boulevard loop.

Finally, when they were almost back to his place, he said, “All right. Spill it out. I can't take much more quiet.”

She obviously caught the long-suffering teasing tone in his voice, because she chuckled and deliberately bumped hips with him.

Then she answered. “I think you need to find a way to solve this problem with your dad. Because you're an American, for heaven's sake. You can't want to give up your country.”

“Hey. I'm not. I wouldn't. I never said I was going to do anything like that.”

“Okay. But then it means that you intend to come home, not live here forever. And
that
means you have to find a resolution with your dad.”

There was a reason he never talked about this. With anyone. He was a grown man, had been for a long, long time. When you were a kid, talking about problems sometimes helped. But when you were an adult, talking often simply meant giving someone else the power to interfere. And somehow it thorned even deeper because Kelly seemed to think he needed to be interfered with.

“For now, this
has
to be the resolution. Moving a serious distance away was the only way to stop the constant war with him. I didn't want my mom upset all the time. And I won't and can't live the life my father insists on.”

She said firmly, “And that would be fine, if living here was working for you, but it isn't. You're camping out here. You can't commit to a relationship, get married, have kids, set up house—not if you really don't want to stay here. So you've set yourself up in limbo. It sucks.”

“Hey. It's not exactly a hardship to live in Paris,” he said drily.

“It wouldn't be. Except that in the meantime, you don't get to see your family. Your sisters, your parents and friends. All the people and things you loved. How much pressure could your father possibly put on you?”

He said flat out, “Twenty million bucks' worth of pressure. Not counting compound interest and a few spare assets here and there.”

Finally, something that took that wind out of her sails. “Whew. Okay. I have to admit that's some fair-size pressure.” He heard her take a big, long breath. “But even so, that's just about some stupid money. It's not about anything that matters.”

They seemed to be back at his front door. In the shadowed arch, he dug out his key. While she waited, Ms. Hardcore-Idealist lifted her head, taking the moment to smell the fresh spring leaves, to savor the crescent moon cradled in a wisp of clouds. She was relaxed and happy, now that she'd scratched all his emotional allergies.

“Did anyone ever tell you,” he said, “that maybe it's easier to give advice when you've never had to walk in their shoes?”

“Oh, yes. Lots of times. I've ticked off reams of people with my nosiness and my opinions. Zillions. Hordes. Trust me, I've just irritated you this time. If I really got going, I could probably tick you off enough to throw me out forever—”

There seemed only one way to shut this down.

He moved her against the old brick, in the shadow of the doorway. When her head shot up—mouth still open, of course—she stilled, just for a second, when she saw his eyes.

Then he bent down and took her mouth. Feasted on it, more like. For a kiss that was clearly intended to communicate some annoyance and impatience and maybe even a little temper, it somehow turned out wrong.

It turned out tender.

Damnably tender.

She looped her arms around his neck, closed her eyes and sank into him on a sigh.

He couldn't understand it. One minute he was ticked off at her. The next, she was his whole world. Times ten. He couldn't kiss enough, taste enough, touch enough.

He fumbled with the key, groped to turn it, not severing the connection to her mouth for even a second. The door finally creaked open, then crashed against the far wall. He kissed her in, kicked the door shut, kissed her down the hall, kissed her into the velvet shadows of the bedroom, kissed her as he started peeling off layers of clothes. His. Hers.

The clothes fell in a matching heap.

And so did they.

S
HE STIRRED
the next morning before Will. Half-awake, she slowly became conscious of the pale sun filtering through the screen, the first horn on the street, a tufty breeze, the sounds of a sleepy Paris coming to life. She stayed cuddled up to Will, not wanting to move, not wanting to think, just wanting to absorb the feel of her lover…until she felt his gaze on her face.

“You're awake,” she murmured.

He was studying her, not with sleepy eyes but with an ultraquiet expression. “You're still feeling guilty,” he said.

She didn't try lying. Didn't have to lie, not to Will. “That's my life,” she admitted. “By everything I've ever believed this is wrong.” Yet she added softly, “But I've never even remotely felt this way about anyone. Just you.”

“So does that make it wrong or right?”

“It makes it something I can't walk away from.” She felt his thumb brushing her cheek. Her eyes wanted to close, to absorb the simple intimacy. “How about you?”

Suddenly he sat up. “Oh, no. We grilled Will for dinner last night,” he said wryly. “It's gonna be all about you today.”

Before he went to work, she got a complete, complex list of instructions. Directions. Money. Key. Food. Stuff she could do, stuff she couldn't. Places she could go, places she needed to steer clear of. “This is a city, remember. You can't go smiling and saying hi to strangers on the street.”

On and on. “All these orders,” she grumped.

He chuckled, but he stopped smiling at the door. He knew her schedule for the day. To pick up the wired money from her mom, then to head for her father's old neighborhood. It was the latter that clearly bothered him. “Kelly, the neighborhood where you're going…it's more than safe. You won't have to worry about that. But maybe you should wait to do this until I get home from work.”

“Heavens, no.”

It was the second time Will had expressed uneasiness about Kelly visiting her dad's old neighborhood alone. She did all her chores, felt enormous relief when she had her own money in her hands, fumbled around with public transportation, picked up a sandwich from a French bistro and made it to her father's old house just before noon.

When she stepped out of the taxi at the corner, Will's uneasiness shot back into her mind. It seemed especially crazy, once she saw the neighborhood. She'd expected…well, anything. An old house, some kind of neighborhood where families raised kids, schools close by, maybe a corner grocery store.

She'd never expected…elegance.

Her step slowed and then stopped when she reached the exact address. Architecture wasn't her thing, but she was pretty sure the style of the Rochard house was Beaux Arts. Long stone steps led up to a multiple-arched doorway. A couple of lions framed the entrance. It wasn't the Smithsonian. It wasn't even a castle. But it was a darn fancy house, three stories of marble and stone.

She stood there, bewildered, racking her brain to make sure this was the correct address. Without the old letters, she couldn't be positive—but she was. She'd read and reread those letters a zillion and a half times.

All she'd really wanted to do was see the house, see the neighborhood. Maybe in the back of her mind, she thought she'd find someone to talk to, someone who could tell her about the Rochard family…or that she might be able to walk around, see the school her dad might have walked to, see the church he might have attended on Sunday.

Now she took a step toward the house…stopped again.

Suddenly it wasn't so easy to simply go up and knock on the door, but then she noticed the carved emblem on the door. An intricate vine shaped into the letter
R
. Her lips firmed. Maybe they'd throw her out, call the gendarmes, slam the door in her face. But she'd come all this way, and no matter what happened, she couldn't just turn away.

She marched up the steps, took a breath for courage and knocked softly. Then knocked again.

She was about to knock a third time, when a man opened the door. The look of him startled her so much that her jaw must have dropped ten feet.

He looked around her age, give or take a few extra years. Rich brown hair, thick, with a little unruly wave. Tea-brown eyes. Slim to the skinny side, fine boned, medium height.

“Bonjour,”
she began in her schoolgirl French, telling herself she had to be an idiot to think they looked so much alike. “I'm sorry to bother you.
Je m'appelle Kelly Rochard. Je sais…
this sounds…odd…but the thing is, my father—
mon père
—grew up at this address. His name was Henri Rochard. I wonder if there is any chance someone in the house might have known the family or anything about him….”

Her voice trailed off.

She'd expected her stumbling language to be a problem…. Instead, her appearance seemed to provoke the man in an entirely different way. She didn't stop talking because she ran out of things to say, but because he started to look so…angry.

Red flushed up his neck to his cheeks—the same icky-splotchy red that happened to her when she was overheated or upset.

And then he let loose a torrent of words, far more than she could possibly keep up with. She caught
menteusse,
which she was pretty sure meant
liar
. When he yelled,
“Ça va barder,”
Kelly was pretty sure there was going to be trouble, and instinctively started backing up.

She recognized another term—
les couilles
—that in another universe might have made her laugh. She believed he was suggesting that she had balls, which wasn't just an anatomical impossibility, but a curious thing to insult her with besides. He spewed out a few other choice words, all in the same angry tone.
Vache. Chameau.

She'd backed up four more steps when another man, about the same age, showed up in the doorway, clearly curious about what all the commotion was about. They talked to each other, a mile a minute, for a few seconds, and then the second man looked at her. Really looked.

And suddenly no one was talking.

 

W
ILL HEADED HOME
,
wiped from a killer workday and annoyed by the frazzle of traffic…yet still feeling his pulse jump when he finally parked in the driveway, knowing he was going to see Kelly.

The damn woman. In just a few short days, she'd managed to irritate him, challenge him, exhaust him. She poked her nose where she wasn't wanted or invited. She could outtalk a magpie. She was the last kind of woman he even wanted to be near.

But he couldn't wait to see her.

He'd connected with her twice that morning, so he knew she'd gotten the wired money, knew she was headed on her “dad quest” after that. He'd intended to catch up with her in the afternoon, but business nonsense kept intruding on his time.

He always intended to spend a lazy workday with his feet propped on the desk. But his boss was such a…well, such a baby. Yves had come from the country with big hopes of selling his gourmet cheeses—some so outstanding he'd caught the attention of several famous chefs. Yves had outstanding products but no clue what to do about them.

He'd needed a brand. A marketing strategy. A manufacturing and production and advertising and distribution plan.

That was what Will discovered when he first took the job. It wasn't
real
work. It paid the rent; it was easy. Mostly he just had to set stuff in motion and then sit down with Yves, explain what to do, where to go from there. There was nothing about the job tying Will down. The stuff was stressful for Yves, a guy who could be reduced to tears by the simplest business decisions—who could figure? But occasionally, like today, Will was forced to exert a little serious energy.

Calls had come in from Canada, Germany, Denmark. Then something had gone wrong with a shipment arrival. Then certain packaging decisions had to be made. Yves got upset at that kind of thing.

Didn't bother Will. It was just business, but he was still fairly wrung dry by the time he vaulted the steps and pushed open the door.

“Kelly?”

He stopped almost immediately. Something was wrong. The place looked the way it had before Kelly showed up here. It was all…tidy. No lights, no smells, no messes, no sounds. No ultragirl perfume invading his space.

Alarm stole the smile from his face. “Kelly?”

He dropped the newspaper, his jacket. Poked his head in the living room, thinking maybe she was outside on the balcony and that's why it was all so quiet—but no. He checked the bathroom, thinking maybe she was taking a long soak in the tub, but she wasn't there, either.

“Kel?”

“I'm in here, Will.”

He saw her even before he heard her voice. That single glance, though, made a double dose of alarm quicken his pulse.

Kelly wasn't
quiet
.

She was curled up in the desk chair in his mini office. The alcove was about the only place in the whole flat that was windowless and dark, nothing nice about it. It was just a hole to locate his computer and work with no distractions. At a glance, he could see she wasn't crying. She was sitting absolutely still in the dim light, with her legs tucked under her.

Motionless…Kelly. Quiet…Kelly. No animation, no wild zest for life, no heart hanging out there for any fool heart-thief to take advantage of. Like him.

Hell. The look of her hurt Will like a stab in his gut.

“What happened?”

He hunkered down next to her, wanting to be at her eye level. Her expression reflected that something had seriously shaken her.

She said, “I met my father.”

“The one who's dead?”

“Yeah.” She gulped. “It was quite a shock.”

“Well, hell. I imagine it was for him, too.”

She looked startled at his humor, but then the shocked stiffness seemed to loosen in her shoulders and she let out a little laugh. Very little, but still a laugh. “Oh God, Will, I'm so glad I had you to come home to, you to tell.”

He lurched back to his feet, fetched glasses, a wine bottle, the opener. He could have opened it in the kitchen, but that would have taken a minute or two. He wasn't willing to leave her for that long, so he carried it back to the office and immediately started working on the corkscrew.

“I was afraid of your going alone there,” he admitted.

“Why? You couldn't possibly have known—”

“That your dad was alive, no. Of course not. I don't know anything about your family. But when you told me the address, I was kind of taken aback. That neighborhood is known for money. Big money. No piddling millionaires. I mean the serious, major-fortune people.” He wrenched the cork free, poured a glass for her, handed it over. “Nothing bad about anything in that picture. But somehow I didn't think you were expecting…”

“A fortune in the family history? You've got that right. You know what else? I've got two brothers. Two half brothers, anyway. Who hated me on sight. I didn't pick up all the language, but I'm pretty sure they immediately concluded that I was a gold-digging, lying bitch. Well. Either a bitch or a camel. I've always gotten those two words in French confused for some reason….”

Will forgot all about pouring his own wine. The idea of someone, anyone, hurting Kelly put a growl in his throat. Growing up with three sisters, he'd gotten over any desire to save damsels in distress. Chivalry was nothing more than a land mine. It was designed to heap trouble and responsibility on a guy's head until he sank from the weight of it, so the sudden instinct to bash Kelly's half brothers was disturbing. He hadn't slid into his old, bad habits for years now.

“Maybe you'd better start at the beginning,” he said.

“That's just the problem. I thought I
knew
the beginning. The story my mom told me was that my parents met when my mom was in college, doing a year at the Sorbonne. I thought they fell in love, got married, moved back home to South Bend. I thought my dad made a trip back to Paris to see his parents when my mom was pregnant. I thought there was some kind of train accident. That he died along with his parents. That there were no Rochard relatives left.”

Will wanted to wince on her behalf. “Hmm…I take it a few of those things aren't exactly true?”

“Will?”

“What, honey?” He couldn't believe he was using the word
honey
. As if they'd known each other a bunch of years. As if he were into comforting her, instead of having a red-hot illicit affair. Yet, what the hell. He got up, took her—and the wine—and settled them on his lap in the office chair.

“My mom and dad weren't married. They were never married. In fact, my father—the one who's still alive—already had a wife. Not now, because she died about four years ago. But he was married to her way back when, which is exactly how I have two brothers who are older than me.”