The Frenchman (Crime Royalty Romance Book 1)

by Young, Lesley

  “Oh thanks.” My face flushed. No, it was not intended as a double entendre meant to stick it to a certain someone so he might think I was out on the market dating. It just ended up reading that way.

  She stepped over in her robe, and I placed the notebook on my chest so she couldn’t read it. “I hope you still like Toulon? After the arraignment tomorrow things will settle down. You can go back to work. Make new friends. And I am going to work less. We will visit the countryside if you like?”

  “That sounds great,” I said, meaning it. She kissed my head and left the room.

  My heart was doing a crazed two-step.

  I clicked refresh, not really expecting a response so soon, but—

  July 22

  To: Fleur Smithers

  From: Monique Richeau

  Re: this is pretty friggin’ important

  Oui?

  Oh my God. Was that him? Was she with him? She must have been.

  Nothing. No greeting. No signature.

  It pierced me how cold he could be, even virtually. My hands shook. Anger, which I thought I had let go of, fired my rapid reply.

  July 22

  To: Monique Richeau

  From: Fleur Smithers

  Re: this is pretty friggin’ important

  Dear Mister Rude Pants:

  I need B.V.’s help with something (he knows what) re: our deal. Can you ask him to help me as soon as possible? You understand the urgency.

  Fleur

  I had debated using the word “make” him help me, but was too chicken.

  July 22

  To: Fleur Smithers

  From: Monique Richeau

  Re: this is pretty friggin’ important

  Ask him yourself.

  Whoa. I clutched the notebook to my heart. He’d sucker punched me again. Tears that I had been holding in for weeks and weeks escaped as I sat up. A sob popped out.

  I mean I didn’t expect much from him, but that kind of indifference . . .? He didn’t care enough to save me from Bastien when once he couldn’t stand the idea of him near me?

  But wait. Of course, he’s wounded still. Plus, he didn’t understand why I needed his help. I had no choice but to try one more time. The alternative was too—I winced—terrible.

  July 22

  To: Monique Richeau

  From: Fleur Smithers

  Re: this is pretty friggin’ important

  I did ask him.

  I guess my mother’s salvation is worth one blow job.

  Never mind.

  After I hit send, I regretted suggesting I had doubts about Marie, because I still wasn’t sure she had done anything wrong. But then, I had to trust him and pull out the stops. After all, he’d trusted me to free his brother.

  I held my breath and, my ears ringing, I finally exhaled when I couldn’t bear it any longer.

  I kept hitting refresh but there’d been no response.

  My eyes darted around the room, at the photos I had put of up Jess, Tammy, my mom, and my dead cat. My heart pounded.

  Still nothing.

  Five brutal, heart-clenching minutes passed. I exhaled nothing but toxins, from the anguish and adrenaline swarming around my body.

  Maybe he didn’t care enough.

  Maybe, and this is what I feared the most, he never really cared enough.

  Oh God, would he hurt Marie, then? Or me? Would we become Messette mincemeat?

  Coffee. Go make coffee. Coffee makes everything better.

  It tasted bitter, like my life, I realized, standing in my bedroom doorway, eyes watering, holding a lukewarm cup and staring at the notebook on my bed, shivering in boxers and a tank.

  I could not blow Bastien. Could I? Maybe I could promise a BJ upon delivery of goods, and renege. That might work.

  I rubbed my face. Was I mad? What had happened to my life? To me?

  I tried to push aside the anguish.

  I’m definitely heading home, I decided. In the next week or so. I’m just going to book a flight and go home. I felt wizened like a raisin.

  I wiped the tears from my face. Mom, who Marie and I continued to keep in the dark, had picked up on my mood and suggested a visit. Yes. It was time to return to trailer food, English action-movie marathons, and Domain shopping. Austin seemed like Disneyland compared to my life right now.

  Shower.

  Take a shower.

  But . . .

  I’d check one more time, I negotiated with myself, like a smoker reaching for just one more cigarette, and then I’d shut down the account forever.

  Dread tingled in my fingertips as the wi-fi refreshed my inbox.

  An email.

  July 22

  To: Fleur Smithers

  From: Monique Richeau

  Re: this is pretty friggin’ important

  Dear Fleur:

  He left in a hurry. He says to tell you it’s taken care of.

  Laetitia

  P.S. I am sorry for delay. My phone was in the wall.

  Chapter 25

  I heard the light knock on the door four and a half hours later. I jumped off the sofa, where I was browsing through Cook’s Illustrated fried chicken recipes. (I could not wait to go home.) I peered through the peephole. Bastien. My heart flowered—Louis had helped.

  My heart slipped. What had I done? I was scared of the truth.

  I searched in the peephole far left and right to make sure my guards were still standing. I opened the door a crack.

  Bastien would not make eye contact. He passed me a memory stick. “I apologize for my shameful, disgusting behavior. I am a—” he cleared his throat and I noticed his voice seemed extremely light, and raspy, as if he had swallowed glass “—snake.”

  I stared after him open jawed. He’d fled the second the words were out. The guards outside my door were as shocked as I was. One of them murmured, “What did he just say?”

  I just shook my head. “Nothing,” I murmured back.

  I closed the door quietly and leaned against it, hugging the memory stick to my chest. No doubt Louis made him apologize. How? No. I didn’t want to know. And if that made me immoral, I was willing to pay the price on my day of reckoning. Bastien deserved to have his neck throttled.

  My gut churned on the bumpy road of conscience, fretting over what was on the memory stick. If it was proof Marie had framed Georges, I had today, tonight, maybe tomorrow to do something about it. And if it was proof, I assumed Louis had already bought or forced Bastien’s silence—otherwise I wouldn’t put it past the dirty cop to threaten my mother with it someday. I would email Laetitia later to confirm Louis had done so.

  Perched on a bar stool, I opened my laptop, heart thumping, and stuck in the memory stick. I clicked on the icon that appeared. Inside the folder were three more folders labeled with the time-stamps I’d requested.

  I was shaky as I clicked the first one. But . . .

  . . . as the minutes ticked on, it occurred to me that I could be at this for hours. The feed included four camera vantage points at one time, and it took all my concentration to watch all four windows for Marie.

  I stretched my back and moved to the sofa. I began with the most likely day she would have done what Louis had accused her of—the day she arrested Georges. There wouldn’t have been a lot of time either, because it had all happened quickly. After our world blew apart in Louis’s penthouse, she’d escorted me back down to our apartment, ordered me to remain inside and posted two cops outside the door. She headed to the station, I’d assumed, to process the arrests, manage media, and, I’d believed, to get away from me—

  There!

  My stomach spun on speed wash.

  At 5:22 p.m.

  A blond . . . yes, it was Marie. I leaned right into the screen. She signed in, carrying a box under her arm, and placed her box on a table. Next window she walked down the hall, pulled a box from a storage slot and returned with it. She was, my mouth hung open, loading eight white bricks, tagged with
red and black numbers, from one box into the other. Cocaine.

  She placed the lids back on top, returned the old box empty and filed the new one. On her way out, she chatted with the officer on duty in the last window. And disappeared from view.

  Jesus.

  No.

  That’s how she’d done it? Just shifted drugs from one case to another? I watched the sequence two more times. What if they’d checked the other box? No, Casolaro had been pled out. The case was closed. No one would go back and check on inventory. But Marie would have known she was on camera. Did she not get around to deleting it? Or was she confident no one would ever suspect?

  Oh, Mom. Why? Why would you do this?!

  Because of me. That’s why.

  Her words came back to me—when she’d arrested Louis, how she told me he was a thief, a murderer, and a con man. She’d said, “it is better you should know now before it is too late.” At the time, I’d thought it was too late. But she hadn’t been talking about me. In that moment, she had intertwined our scornful stories: her love for my father, and how he had abandoned her in some dreadful tormented place, conned her, left her to wrestle with an unfulfilled love that grew brittle and thorny; and my love for Louis, who’d used me, defiled me, left me heartbroken.

  Maybe she’d dedicated her life to putting criminals behind bars because she couldn’t punish Laurent Gautier. And then—when her greatest enemy hurt me—she’d had enough. She’d framed Georges, because this time someone was going to pay.

  I hated Laurent Gautier, my father, singularly in that moment, for what he’d done to my mother. To me.

  He’d screwed us both.

  He destroyed Marie’s life—and was still doing so. A dead man. A heartless dead man.

  I shoved aside the laptop and motored down the hall to Marie’s bedroom. At the threshold, I hesitated only momentarily.

  I went straight for the closet, where I suspected she kept her box of letters from my father. Yup, right there. Without thinking, I reached for it, and yanked it down as hard as I could. It crashed to the floor, its contents spilling out like guts. Good. Their love was nothing but entrails! I threw the empty box across the room and shuddered on the spot, folding down onto the paper memories, crunching her dried-out rose-heads.

  And I cried, cross-legged, head in my hands, freely.

  When I was done I wiped my face and assessed the carnage. I wouldn’t have minded if Marie walked in just then and found me like this among her precious box of memories. It would be a fitting scene for the confrontation I knew had to happen.

  I’d be damned if I’d let her hurt herself for revenge. But, I exhaled, I wasn’t sure how she could undo what she had done without getting caught, for I would not let her go down for framing Georges either. She loved being a cop. And she was a good cop. She was. This was one misstep. A misdeed of passion, one she regretted. I’d seen it in her feeble posture, her skittish stares and her sad eyes over recent weeks. We’d figure out a way to make this right. I’d help her. I’d do whatever was necessary.

  Realizing there was no time, and therefore no way for me to push off the confrontation, I collected the letters and shoved them back into the box without care, since she would know I had been in them anyway. That was the least of my concerns.

  When I was done, I paused, and held the last letter to my nose. Old libraries. A thought popped into my mind out of nowhere: What had my father looked like? I examined the handwriting, as if that would give me any signs. Who had this almighty man been? How might my life, our lives, have been different if he had not left Marie? Guilt and longing competed for my heart. This was her private love. But . . . he had also been my father. And part of me wished, wholly irrationally, with ardent, pathetic yearning, that there was a letter in there somewhere for the daughter he never knew he had. A letter that explained it all.

  I hated him even as I wanted to love him.

  I slid the one I was holding out of its envelope, and traced over his neat words without reading them, knowing it was the closest I would ever be to—

  Oh my God.

  My finger hovered over the last sentiment; the way he signed off his letters.

  His pet name for Marie.

  A terrible feeling, like I’d left the oven on, slid over me.

  Ma petite palourde.

  My little clam.

  A remembrance, twice over, ricocheted in my head.

  No.

  Possibly.

  Yes.

  Oh my God.

  Goosebumps of horror prickled my skin.

  My father was still very much alive.

  The conniving, rotten bastard.

  • • •

  “Come on, Marie. We’re almost there.”

  “Ma belle, are you certain there is a restaurant here?”

  We were both glistening with sweat having climbed five balmy flights of stairs. My slip dress was not light enough. Marie had removed her blazer. Even my two guards today, Jean and Hugues, were panting.

  I was waiting on the landing, and as Marie appeared, I eyed her gun and gun holster nervously. I had called her at work and said to meet me outside this building in la vielle ville. My explanation: I wanted to go to a restaurant for my blog. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was not thrilled, given how busy she was preparing for the arraignment tomorrow.

  “Yes, I’m positive. It’s just one more flight.”

  Anxiety, dread, and a terrible case of loss clung to me. If I was right—and it wasn’t too late to set Georges Messette free—the deal I had made with Louis would be complete. He would have to let me go, and part of me believed he already had.

  Why had I not asked for what I really wanted in Corsica, instead of criticizing what he was offering? Because you can’t ask someone to open their heart, I reminded myself for the gazillionth time. And because he would never have let me go otherwise. From the moment I met Louis, he had been closed off, hiding from me, playing his own game to manipulate me, to use my love like a toy. Why? Maybe because he knew I would never have gotten involved with him if I knew who his family was, regardless of my attraction for him. Maybe he didn’t want to give. Maybe he only wanted to be a taker.

  I would probably never know.

  All I could do was help Marie, be grateful to Louis for giving me that—yes, he had given that—and . . . carry on.

  I wanted to believe that time would be medicine, a painkiller if not a cure. With enough of the salve, I might forget the feelings until everything we had shared was just a painting in my mind. A singular, two-dimensional artistic representation that portrayed, in a forty-second glance, the brief love affair gone wrong. A brokenhearted, naive peasant girl.

  I climbed the last steps, glanced at the restaurant sign, La Petite Palourde, and prayed it was air-conditioned inside. I also hoped, looking back over my shoulder, Marie would not make the connection just yet.

  I thought of the Michel Gatineau who had introduced himself at the chef’s home dinner event Chloé had arranged. How he’d said he was a restaurateur. How he called his girlfriend ma petite palourde.

  How no one in my life seemed to be who they said they were.

  I unclenched my fists. What a rat bastard. As soon as I’d made the connection earlier today, I knew. Why I had felt a certain comfortableness with the friendly stranger in the chef’s home kitchen. How he’d asked about my mother, to get a read on me. How he had probably tried to wiggle his way into my French MeetUp tutoring sessions (had he been tracking my phone?), and invited me to meet him here. Why had he canceled that day? Had he realized I’d been followed by one of Louis’s men?

  I had called the restaurant an hour ago, and left a message for a reservation for two under LaSalle. No more games, Dad. I would know what kind of man he really was any minute now. He had a lot to account for, least of all to me. He owed Marie. He owed me to help her now.

  I didn’t wait for her to get to the top step. I turned the door knob—it wasn’t locked—and let myself into a dimly l
it room, breathless. The wall of windows declared it was dusk, and as Marie joined me from behind, I quickly scanned the elongated room. It was empty, except—my eyes narrowed—for one table set for three, glowing with candlelight.

  Oh my God. At least Laurent Gautier wasn’t a coward. I found this far more consoling than I ought to have.

  Sheer fear cut me to the quick. Had I done right thing coming here? Would Marie survive this? The man she thought was dead, being alive, back in our lives?

  Too late now.

  “Oh,” I heard Marie exclaim, arriving behind me.

  “Yes, I booked the whole restaurant,” I muttered as cover, “so we could be alone. Can you two wait outside this time?” I said to my guards in French. “Sorry, I will order something for you to go.” They hesitated, and looked to Marie, whose face was full of disagreement.

  “Marie, I wanted to surprise you. It is a celebration of all your success, and a way to thank you. Privately.” I had never asked for anything before. She owed me this after all her late nights and I could tell this crossed her mind.

  She pursed her lips, nodded at the officers, and we proceeded to the table. We sat down across from each other, and the silence in the space was a sort of delirium. I sat on the edge of my seat strained with nauseating anxiety.

  A man moved out from the kitchen, and I stiffened. He was carrying a water jug. Not Laurent. “Fleur, what is this really about?” she asked me, after dabbing the sweat on her lip and brow. The waiter poured water in our glass. “Who is this third person joining us?” She motioned to the place setting.

  I cleared my throat. “Mom, I—”

  Her eyes popped open wide. That was the first time I’d called her mom, at least, that she’d heard. I grabbed my water glass and took a big gulp.

  “Fleur, you make me nervous.” She looked around, half smiling.

  “I had a hunch,” I started. “I had a couple of hunches, actually, and I think I was right . . .”

  My voice trailed off as I watched a tall debonair man, the one and the same from the at-home chef dinner, come out of the kitchen. His hair was full and silver, his features a tad too refined for the less fair sex. He was so well groomed one would instantly assume he went to a spa weekly for massages and manicures. Crushing anxiety stole my breath. This was a mistake. Mom, heeding my wide open eyes, turned to look, and—as recognition hit her—her body physically jolted.