Honeymoon with a Stranger

by Frances Housden

  He gave a quick nod to Gaspard, who manned the reception desk, and clanged the elevator door shut behind him.

  His thoughts turned to Roxie as the elevator creaked its way to the sixth floor. He could see now she was extremely passionate about what she did. She wouldn’t have risked her life otherwise.

  How would the resignation letter he’d sent in the diplomatic pouch to Washington look to her? Like cowardice, or exactly what he deserved?

  Her opinion assumed an importance he’d allowed no other, not even his parents. Not even Jason Hart, who would be in Paris within days, hours…

  Mac’s suite was at the far end of a wide but poorly lit corridor near the fire exit. During the day the window on the end wall helped dispel the gloom, but on a rainy November evening it didn’t stand a chance.

  To cap it off, the flame-shaped glass sconce closest to his door had burned out again. He’d just begun to blame the colder weather when his scalp began to prickle.

  Mac had been playing the smoke-and-mirrors game long enough to trust his senses. He shortened his stride, slowing his pace without making it obvious.

  A shape in the darkness of the far corner began to unfold like a vision in a bank of charging thunderheads. Javier!

  His fingers closed round the butt of the gun in his shoulder holster as the figure emerged from the gloom.

  Backing into the closest doorway, Mac drew the gun.

  The stranger was wearing a long black trench coat, and had shoulders that took up most of the red-carpeted corridor. The look was intimidating, at odds with the slight edge of humor in his voice when he said, “You can put that away, Josh.”

  Josh?

  No one but his parents and schoolteachers ever called him Josh. And though the guy spoke English, Mac had trouble making out the accent.

  “That is you, isn’t it?” he asked, “Joshua S. McBride?”

  “That middle initial doesn’t stand for stupid.”

  “Look, I don’t want trouble. I’m not armed. I just want a few minutes of your time, then I’ll be on my way.”

  Unarmed? As if Mac was dumb enough to fall for that. Mac voiced the question that was on his mind. “Did Javier Sevarin send you?”

  Palms open, the man held his hands out from his sides. “Never heard of the guy.”

  Still unconvinced, Mac stepped out the doorway and brought his Glock 9 mm into the open. “Keep your hands where they are. As you’ve already gathered, I am armed.”

  Edging closer, he signaled the guy to move back to the wall with a couple of flicks of the gun barrel. “Who the hell are you and what do you want?”

  Even with his hands up and his back to the wall while staring down the muzzle of a loaded firearm, the stranger didn’t appear to be fazed. “I have some information you’re going to want to hear.”

  Keeping his eyes and gun trained on the stranger, Mac slipped his room key from his pocket and edged closer to his suite door. “I’m not in the market for information tonight. And if it’s money you’re after, I only carry pocket change.”

  Mac reached behind and slotted his key in the lock. A second later he swung the door open and reached for the light switch.

  “I don’t want your money, and the information is free. You see…I’m your brother.”

  With the light switch at his fingertips Mac hesitated then barked out a course laugh. “Hah, you’ve got the wrong Josh McBride. I don’t have any brothers…or sisters.”

  Light flooded the dark corridor as clicked the switch. “Well it so happens, you actually have four brothers and a sister, all of them dying to meet you.”

  Now he could see him properly, Mac was thankful he was armed.

  The guy was big, broad shouldered, around the same size as his own six feet five. Still, maybe the Glock wouldn’t stop an elephant, but he knew it would take this guy down.

  The long trench coat he wore added to the impression of bulk. Mac noticed it was wet on the shoulders. Obviously he hadn’t been hanging around long enough for impatience to bite him, which explained the easy attitude.

  The guy’s dark hair was a thousand times darker than his own reddish-brown mane, and his eyes were almost black compared to Mac’s dark gold. But with the subject under discussion, the dimple on the stranger’s chin appeared far too familiar and gave him a moment’s pause for reflection.

  Then Mac remembered. It had been more than a year since they’d met in Nepal, when Mac had gone to collect IBIS translator Chelsea Tedman after her adventure on Everest, so it had taken a moment to recognize the guy’s face. Kurt Jellic.

  “Now I know you. We met in the Himalayas, at Namche Bazaar.” He was a mountaineer who had married Chelsea Tedman after helping recover her sister’s body from Mount Everest.

  “You’re Kurt Jellic.” Mac relaxed his hold on the Glock, letting his arm fall to his side. A short harsh laugh ricocheted from his throat. “What is all this crap?”

  Mac looked over his shoulder. “Did Chelsea send you up first to play a trick on me?” He and Chelsea had been good friends until she left IBIS to sort out the mess left by the murder of her sister and brother-in-law on the mountain. But he’d thought she’d settled for a quiet life in New Zealand.

  The man claiming to be Mac’s brother shook his head. “No, sorry, mate, you’ve got it wrong.”

  “So where is she? I didn’t see her as I passed through the lobby.” He’d had other things on his mind—namely Roxie and resignations. And now this…

  It didn’t take the guy long to set the mistake straight. “I’m not Kurt. I’m his twin Kel. I wasn’t aware you knew him or Chelsea. But I’m definitely your brother, and so is Kurt. Mind if I come in and explain?”

  Still suspicious that it was some sort of trick, Mac waved him through the door. “After you.”

  “Don’t mind if I do. Can’t say this is the most redolent hallway I’ve ever waited in,” Kel said, as if hanging around in hallways was something he did regularly.

  “But all told, I was glad to come in out of the rain. Paris looks pretty miserable after San Francisco.” That said, Kel Jellic stepped through the door without hesitation, as if the gun at his back was of no consequence.

  Showed how little he knew.

  Mac was finding it hard to suspend disbelief. Gun by his side, he followed Jellic as if untroubled. As if his heart wasn’t beating rapidly.

  But hiding his feelings was key in his business, and he was a professional.

  Closing the door behind them, he promised Kel, “If nothing else it will give my parents a laugh when I tell them they have five other children they know nothing about.”

  At least, Mac hoped it would.

  After Kel left, Mac decided to do nothing until he could speak to his parents, face-to-face. He wished he could dismiss the information Kel had given him as a fairy tale, but there had been a ring of truth to the story he related.

  The story of a cop called Milo Jellic, a widower, who had fallen for the wife of some guy named Magnuson, a vicious criminal he’d had sent down for ten to fifteen years. That woman was supposedly his birth mother.

  Mac’s stomach had roiled in protest at that piece of news. She sounded so far removed from who and what he was, or had believed himself to be.

  A McBride, of the Philadelphia McBrides.

  Then, to learn that his birth mother’s legal spouse had reached out from prison and had Milo Jellic murdered…? All of this while blackening his name, and branding him a bent cop and drug dealer, and making his death look like suicide.

  Mac didn’t feel he could be blamed for wondering if the story came from a movie scenario.

  From the way Kel told it, Mac had had the better deal.

  Milo had been dead before Mac was even born, and to protect him from Magnuson, his mother had arranged a private adoption to an American couple, through a lawyer.

  Though Kel didn’t belabor it, after Milo’s death the family must have struggled, as much from their father’s bad reputation as from a lack of funds.<
br />
  But they’d managed, and if it turned out he was related to them, Mac knew it would be something to be proud of.

  Jo, the only daughter, was the youngest, hardly more than two years older than Mac. She’d been the one to discover Mac’s existence.

  A detective sergeant of police at Auckland Central, Jo had never believed the lies told about her father, and for a wedding present her husband, Rowan McQuaid Stanhope, had promised to put all his resources and connections at her disposal to discover how her father had really died.

  It helped that the guy was one of New Zealand’s richest men.

  Mac hadn’t been surprised to find that Kel worked in a similar line of business to himself—the GDEA, Global Drug Enforcement Agency. Kel had that look about him.

  He had a tougher edge than Mac remembered on Kurt, his twin—though that guy had taken out an assassin on Everest and saved Chelsea’s life.

  It had been Kel who’d tracked Mac to IBIS and Paris. All too easily, it seemed to Mac, considering IBIS’s existence was an closely guarded secret.

  As for the rest of his so-called brothers, Franc was an entrepreneur and electronics whiz, while Drago, the eldest brother, was a master of wine and traveled the world judging wines and writing articles on them.

  Of all the brothers, only Drago wasn’t married. That said, they all sounded very successful and happy for a family that must have had to claw its way up by its fingernails.

  Yeah, just like a fairy tale.

  Almost too good to be true.

  It was the last Mac was counting on. The Jellic family sounded like good folks, but he’d gotten comfortable with who he was.

  Josh S. McBride of the Philadelphia McBrides.

  Mac, to all his friends.

  He prayed that wasn’t about to change.

  Chapter 16

  With the sound of the doctor’s praising her excellent constitution ringing in her ears, Roxie returned home only a week after they carried her into the hospital.

  But twenty-four hours later the walls of her tiny apartment off rue Bonaparte were closing in on her and she was dying to get back to work. Something Charles Fortier refused to consider until he was satisfied she was well enough.

  She’d countered by saying, “How much effort does it take to sit down and sketch out ideas? It’s my left shoulder that hurts, not my right.” He still wouldn’t budge.

  Roxie had taken her first trip downstairs this morning. A trek to the nearest newspaper kiosk to prove she could manage on her own. And had, despite Nieve, the Portuguese concierge, throwing up her hands, protesting that Roxie would kill herself.

  Back in her apartment, she scanned the headlines. The Sevarin scandal had taken two days after she’d landed in hospital to emerge, and still hadn’t abated.

  But was the public indictment enough?

  Folding the newspaper, she picked up Michel Sevarin’s diary, the one she’d found in the château.

  She’d read it from cover to cover, many times. It still disgusted her, but at last she stopped dithering and made a decision.

  There was a journalist she knew…

  Certainly, he dealt mainly in fashion and gossip, but if she knew Jules, he would relish an exclusive, and the diary was certainly that.

  She huffed out a long breath.

  The movement pulled at the newly healed wound on her back, an added incentive to use what she had found.

  Yes, she would do it. Not for herself alone. For Grandmère and Madame Fortier, plus all the members of their Resistance cell alive or dead that Michel Sevarin had betrayed.

  They deserved some portion of revenge.

  Three days later, the red roses in Mac’s hand performed the old open-sesame trick and let him into Roxie’s apartment building.

  Madame liked the idea that “la petite” had a lover. And there was no other way to get past the fierce concierge guarding Roxie’s privacy.

  However, Mac decided the lady didn’t have enough teeth to prevent Javier if he’d a mind to go after Roxie.

  That’s why he was there.

  What had she been thinking by releasing Sevarin Senior’s diary to a journalist who dealt in scurrilous speculation?

  The day after the story came out, every form of media, print, radio and television had leapt on the story like wolves.

  There was no way Javier Sevarin could have escaped knowing what she’d done. Especially since it hadn’t taken long for Roxie’s name to come out.

  He supposed that’s why her phone was off the hook.

  Six flights up without a lift later, Mac demanded entrance, with the back of his knuckles against her impossibly flimsy door.

  No reply.

  “Come on, Roxie. It’s Mac, let me in.”

  It took her less than a minute to throw open the door and demand, “What do you want?”

  He hadn’t seen her in ten days, and anything she wore would have looked fantastic, and did. But her rosebud-pink wraparound ballet top that matched the round-toed pink slippers peeking out under slim-fitting black pants made her look smaller than he remembered.

  Her eyes lighted on the roses he was holding as she stepped back to let him enter. “Reduced to bribery now, are you?”

  “Reduced to groveling, but not to you, to the concierge.”

  He stopped in the middle of the floor and looked around. The room felt cramped. “You couldn’t swing a cat in here.”

  She pouted at his insult to her residence and said, “I’ve no wish to. Its beauty is that for this close to boulevard St. Germain, the rent is reasonable, and I can walk everywhere but to work. For that I take the Metro.”

  “There are a lot of stairs here.”

  “I know, but look at the rooftop view. I can see the Eiffel Tower.”

  He strode to the window and looked over the crowded hodgepodge of metal roofs to the tower, then cast his gaze down into the street. “No place to park your car around here?”

  “Doesn’t matter, it didn’t belong to me.”

  “Ah,” he nodded. “FIS undercover carpool. We have those, too,” he said for the sake of making conversation. For the first time since he’d arrived, he’d taken a clear look at Roxie without the window backlighting her silhouette and it hurt.

  She looked fragile. No way could he leave her in this mouse hole to defend herself.

  But dammit, that wasn’t all. It had taken only one glance to convince him how much he’d missed her, a fact that had already pressured him to do his utmost to keep her safe.

  So far, he’d been too busy following up leads on Javier to attend to that himself. Instead, he’d had a regular rotation of men watching her apartment since she’d left hospital.

  He’d bundled the costs in with the rest of the expenses of their search for Green Shield.

  His resignation was hanging fire. Floating somewhere in limbo until Jason Hart, who had been delayed, found the time to speak with him personally, meanwhile…

  On top of everything else, he’d just found out that he wasn’t actually the person—the son—he’d thought himself from the moment he could see.

  It was as if life just had to get another kick in while he was down. But dammit, he still wasn’t out. No way!

  It might take another few days, but sooner or later he’d get his head around the news, and he’d told his parents not to come to Paris until then.

  Mac dived into the subject he knew Roxie would hate. “You know you can’t stay here, don’t you? Javier will find you sooner than later.”

  He stated with assurance, “My place would be more secure.”

  He didn’t have to wait for her protest. She hardly gave him time to draw breath. “But he knows your address in Le Sentier!”

  “No, he knows where Jeirgif Makjzajev lives. Mac McBride resides in the Seventh arrondissement. The Hotel Margeaux on rue Montalembert.”

  Mac could tell from her expression she’d never heard of it; not many people had. That was the beauty of the place, where most residents, like him, had
long-term bookings.

  “You don’t honestly expect me just to take off and go stay at your place?” She laughed up at him as he crooked an amused eyebrow at her. “Just as I thought, I’ve got it wrong.”

  He stepped closer before saying, “No, it was my mistake you found the suggestion amusing. I don’t simply expect you to come with me, I demand that you do, and if need be, I’ll put you over my shoulder and carry you.”

  The scent of her filled his head, made him ache, but now, as with their first meeting, when he’d had to react quickly to save her life, he had no time for distractions.

  She tilted her chin at him, challenged him. “So bold and brave now, with your demands, when you’ve never come near me since that day at the hospital.”

  “Since Dumont warned me off, you mean? I’ve known where you were every second of the day.” He slipped a finger under her chin so he could look into the depths of her eyes, into her soul.

  The pale pink she wore today made her look younger, like a sign that flashed “hands off.”

  He ignored it. “Did you really think I wouldn’t?” he asked, dipping closer to brush his lips against hers.

  It wasn’t enough.

  He gathered her to him, until the whimper she made cleared his head. “God, chérie, I’ve hurt you. That’s not what I wanted.”

  Her eyes were bright with tears and he cursed himself for his clumsy-handed overture. To make amends, he softly brushed the back of his fingers down her wan cheek. “Please, bébé, help me out here, come with me.”

  “Did…” she started uncertainly, “did you mean what you said at the hospital?”

  His heartbeat quickened as he remembered the hash he’d made of his declaration. Not the dab hand with the ladies he’d imagined when it came to the real thing. “That I loved you?”

  She nodded, and he said, “More than ever. Why do you think I want you to stay at my place?”

  “To get me back in your bed.”

  A wry grin surfaced and he let it show. “Yeah, well that, too, but honestly, I think Javier will be out for revenge and I couldn’t bear him to get to you.”

  He touched a finger to her lips to put a halt to the protest he saw in her expression. “I know you’re hurt, and I promise I won’t make any demands while you aren’t fit. After? Well, it will still be up to you. I can’t say fairer than that.”