He’d poured considerable resources into returning the property to its former glory, reintroducing the stable and horses, installing a firing range and a movie room, updating the kitchen and recovering many of the antiques that had been sold by his father along the way. But coming to Corsica meant dealing with his father, and it was a trade-off he never quite reconciled.
He made his way up the steps of his terrace, studying his father’s body language for clues about his state of mind. The hat and sunglasses told Christophe his father was hungover, his sprawling pose at the iron table a clue to the apathy that often sat in after an abandonment.
“Bonjour,” his father said as Christophe took the seat across from him.
“Good morning.” Christophe poured himself a cup of coffee and reached for a piece of baguette.
“Pourquoi dois-je parler anglais dans ma propre maison?”
Christophe leveled his gaze at his father. “But this isn’t only your home, Papa. Have you forgotten?”
His father’s mouth flattened into a thin line, and Christophe felt a moment of shame. He didn’t like holding his financial stake in the chateau over his father’s head. Women were his weakness, and they'd cost the Marchand estate virtually everything in the years before Christophe came of age and began insisting on prenuptial agreements, in the years before he’d joined the Syndicate and began putting their legacy back together piece by piece.
Christophe reached across the table, squeezed his father’s hand. “Je suis désolé, Papa.” He looked down at his plate. “English is how I remember her.”
“Remembering her is painful,” his father said.
“Yes,” Christophe acknowledged. “But not as painful as forgetting.”
Christophe wasn’t surprised when his father didn’t reply. Nothing had eased his suffering in the sixteen years since Veronica Marchand’s death. Not money. Not booze. Not the endless string of young women he’d brought back to the chateau.
But that didn’t stop his father from trying.
Christophe didn't bother. Nothing had been the same since his mother’s death. She’d been the wildflowers to his orchids, the storm-tossed sea to his father’s placid lake. Christophe hadn’t fully realized her influence until she was gone. Until he — and his father and brother — had been forced to live without her. She took with her all their laughter, all their hope. Without her, the color seemed to drain out of the island property, the three men left stunned by her absence.
There was no help for it, but Christophe had vowed early on not to make his father’s mistakes, the first of which was to fall so deeply in love that life seemed meaningless without the person of your heart. The second was to try and fill the hole in his soul with a woman.
They were too unpredictable. Impossible to trust.
He filled his time with work instead, with rebuilding the legacy of the Marchand name and seeking out the beautiful objects his father had sold along the way, filling in with new acquisitions when necessary. It wasn’t exciting, and that was the way he liked it. Exciting was dangerous. Exciting meant you were carried away by emotion.
And emotion was not to be trusted.
He turned back to his father. “How have you been, Papa?”
HIs father waved the question away, poured himself more coffee. “Fine, fine.”
“And Tiffany?” Christophe forced himself to say the words. He couldn’t have cared less about his father’s latest woman, an aspiring actress nearly three decades his junior. But he had learned that it was more prudent to swallow his distaste in an effort to maintain a handle on his father’s personal situation. Doing so allowed him to head off trouble at the pass.
“Gone,” his father said, drinking from the steaming mug.
“For good?” Christophe asked, forcing himself to keep a note of hope from creeping into his voice.
“They all leave for good eventually.”
“I’m sorry,” Christophe said.
“No need to lie,” his father said.
Christophe sighed. “I’m not lying, Papa.”
He wasn’t. He was sorry. Sorry for the loneliness lurking in his father’s voice if not for the fact of Tiffany’s absence. She hadn’t been horrible, simply young and ambitious, hoping marriage to a French Duke would somehow advance her in life. Americans were particularly vulnerable to the outdated title represented by his family name. They’d read too many fairy tales and not enough history; titles were meaningless in modern day France, any money or property once held by the estate long since sold off. The Marchands were lucky to have retained the estate on Corsica, the house in Paris. They would both be gone if not for the massive influx of cash afforded them by Christophe’s business interests.
“You didn't like her,” his father said. “And you brought up your loathsome prenuptial agreement last time you were here.”
“I didn’t dislike her,” Christophe said. “And the agreement is always for your protection. You know that.”
“You scared her away.” His father had turned petulant. “We hadn’t even finalized a wedding date.”
“The right woman will not be scared off by a prenuptial agreement that protects your interests, Papa.”
“So she was after my money?” His father’s words were laced with bitterness. “Haven’t you forgotten? I don’t have any. It all belongs to you now.”
Christophe felt the familiar surge of anger rise in his chest, then tamped it down, forced his voice calm. “That’s not true. My money belongs to me. Money I have earned. Money I have used to restore the houses, refinish them, staff them. Money I use to maintain this property so that you might still live here, so that Bruno may still call it home. Nothing was stolen from you by me.”
His father’s eyes flashed, and Christophe watched as he struggled for an argument that made sense. He settled back in his chair with a sigh a moment later. There was no argument, and they both knew it. Christophe spoke the truth, however distasteful it might be to his father.
“How is Bruno?” his father asked, changing the subject.
“Fine, as far as I know,” Christophe said. “I saw him two days ago, although I don’t see him often these days.”
“How are the restaurants doing?”
It took a moment for Christophe to backtrack through his memory, lay his hands on the story Bruno had told their father some months ago about investing in a number of restaurants in Nice. It was a lie, of course. Bruno made most of his money siphoning business from Christophe, a pursuit Christophe only allowed in the name of family. Still, he always covered for Bruno, allowing his brother to save face with their father by claiming to have his own business interests rather than riding on the coattails of Christophe’s.
“I’m not sure,” Christophe said. “We didn’t talk about it. But he seems well.”
His father nodded. “Good. And you?”
“What about me?” Christophe asked.
“How are you?”
Christophe looked out over the fields. “Fine.”
“You need a woman,” his father said.
“A woman is the very last thing I need.” His father didn’t answer, and Christophe turned to face him, wishing he would remove his sunglasses so Christophe could see his eyes. “A woman isn't the answer to everything, Papa.”
“I disagree,” his father said. “In fact, I would go so far as to say there is no ailment, no trouble, no problem in the world that can’t be solved by the right woman. Or at least made more bearable.”
That’s what got you into this mess.
He held back the words. “I’m too busy for a woman,” he said instead.
His father lowered his sunglasses, looked at Christophe over the dark rims of the Versace frames. “That’s only because you haven’t met the right woman.”
8
Charlotte slid onto the work table and set down her wine glass. Joelle was long since gone, the store dark except for the dim light emanating from the desk lamp near the darkened computer, the slight glow le
aking in from the street outside. Figures loomed in the shadows — the nineteenth century sofa her father had planned to reupholster, the French farm table bound for a buyer in New York’s Hudson Valley, the shelves lined with cleaning and restoration supplies. She wasn’t afraid. The store was her second home, every corner familiar to her, every creaking floorboard, every rattle of the old window panes.
She leaned back on her elbows, her thoughts drifting to Christophe Marchand for the hundredth time since she’d left his home in Saint Germain the day before. It had been over a year since she’d dated someone seriously — if seeing an up-and-coming actor once a week when he wasn’t filming could be called seriously. It had lasted less than six months and had been without declarations of affection on either side.
She hated the men in L.A. They were all either actors or tech geniuses. Neither was very inspiring to her — so far, at least. She thought back over the men she’d dated in the years since completing her masters. Every one of them looked uninspiring in hindsight — particularly after meeting Christophe Marchand.
They lacked soul. That was the problem.
It was something her father had often proclaimed about the less than exciting pieces that made it into the shop. It didn’t happen often — her father had culled his pickers in the field to those that would send only the pieces that were suitable to him. But every now and then, something would slip though the cracks, appearing in a shipment with others from the same part of the world. Then her father would stand back, surveying the piece with consternation, rubbing his chin as if trying to solve a complicated problem.
“What is it, Papa?” she would ask when she was little.
“Cette pièce n'a pas d'âme,” he would proclaim.
This piece has no soul.
She hadn’t understood at first, but she’d grown to feel the sentiment deeply. Some pieces — and some people — had soul.
Others did not.
It had nothing to do with age or provenance. Nothing to do with patina or value. It was something deeper, something that shined through a person’s eyes, that radiated from within.
She’d made a point not to think too hard about her lack of a love life. She was busy, her days filled with work and gallery openings for acquaintances and the few people she called friends, visits with her mother that forced her to brace herself against an onslaught of criticism and too much information about the current man in her mother’s life, too many complaints about how Hollywood was shallow, how it was next to impossible to find good roles if one was over the age of fifty.
Debra Hughes wasn’t wrong, but she also wasn’t very open-minded, holding out for leading roles long after the age when they were plentiful. Right or wrong, Hollywood rewarded the young and beautiful. But as with everything that was displeasing, her mother refused to accept it. She chased beauty treatments that promised to make her look younger, men that promised to make her feel younger, roles that would take her back to a time when she was an ingenue, a sex kitten, a femme fatale.
Charlotte didn’t care about youth. It was soul that attracted her, and she had a flash of Christophe Marchand’s cold-water eyes, the depth lurking in them despite the coolness of his gaze. He was obviously wealthy, although an internet search turned up very little about him other than an old mention that his family still held some kind of title.
She thought of the men in the foyer at the house in Saint Germain. Their size and the weapons lurking under their jackets indicated they were bodyguards of some kind. And yet if Christophe had been well-known, he would have appeared in her online search.
She considered the other possibilities, but there was only one that made sense; Christophe Marchand was involved in something secretive. Something criminal. Drug running? Illegal weapons sales? Terrorism?
No, she refused to believe the last one. He was too refined, too obviously enamored with beauty, as evidenced by the exquisite art and furnishings in his home. People like Christophe Marchand didn’t deal in destruction.
But crime of another sort… She couldn’t rule it out.
She waited for the disgust to roll through her and was surprised when it didn’t. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t muster anything but intrigue when thinking about him. He was like the dusty pieces that appeared in her father’s shop, forgotten until they were uncovered, brought to life again by loving hands.
She shook her head in the empty room. She knew nothing about the man, and if he was a criminal, his appealing exterior didn’t forgive his line of work. She was assigning him qualities she had no reason to believe existed. And it didn’t matter anyway. Christophe Marchand was a more refined version of her father — a man who collected beautiful things just so he could gaze upon them. A man more comfortable in the company of the inanimate than with people who lived and breathed and felt too deeply.
She pulled the ring from her pocket and turned her attention to it instead, sliding off the desk and crossing the room to the computer. She waited while it connected to the WIFI, then clicked on the page she’d brought up when she researched the ring the night before. Her eyes traveled over the translated version of the original article.
RECLUSIVE COLLECTOR MURDERED IN HOME
Stefan Baeder was murdered in his Vienna home last night, police reported. Baeder was well known in the art world as a discerning collector of fine art and antiquities. Notoriously private, Baeder had lived in Wieden in the 4th District for the past thirty years, amassing a collection that appraisers now say is worth more than $10m Euro.
Mr. Baeder’s death has been ruled a homicide. The investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information is urged to contact the police.
It was a short article in a Vienna paper, dated less than two months before, but dread had spread like an oil slick in her stomach when she’d found it. It didn’t mention the ring, but another article listed it as sold to Stefan Baeder at auction nearly ten years ago.
None of it would have mattered if not for the brown dust stuck in the cracks of the ring’s filigree. Dust that looked more and more like blood.
Of course, she had no way of knowing if Stefan Baeder was still in possession of the ring when he’d died. It was possible he’d sold it in the ten years since he’d bought it.
But Baeder had been a collector, not a dealer. And if it was blood, and if the desk had been purchased from Stefan’s estate after his death…
She jumped as something crashed near the front of the store, then stood up, her heart racing as she looked toward the doorway leading to the rest of the shop. Training her ears on the familiar sounds of the store, she waited, trying to stay calm. The building was old, surrounded by others, including two bars and three cafes. It was more than possible the front door had been hit by a passing drunkard on his or her way home.
Something thudded at the front of the store, and this time she was sure: someone was in the shop.
9
Charlotte dropped the ring back in her pocket and looked around the work room, her gaze coming to rest on an andiron. She moved toward it and grabbed it tightly in her hands. It was large and unwieldy, but it was better than nothing. She stepped against the wall next to the doorway.
She swallowed hard, wondering at her chances if she dialed the police. But she couldn’t even remember the number for emergency services in Paris, and her phone would make noise, drawing the intruders to her. Better to wait. Maybe they would take what they wanted and leave. There wasn’t much of value left, and what was left in the gallery was unsold. They could have it as far as Charlotte was concerned.
Except now she heard footsteps just beyond the work room. More than one person. Two? Three? They were definitely coming toward her, the footfalls slow and deliberate, but not quiet. Whoever it was wasn’t at all concerned about being caught.
She clutched the andiron tighter, forcing herself to breathe quietly as the steps grew louder, the intruders traveling through the overflow room toward the work room. And then they were right there, just beyond the threshol
d. She lifted the andiron in her hands, waited until the first big figure stepped through the door, then lowered the heavy metal object.
She knew immediately that she was in trouble. The man was big. Too big. Her aim would have landed the andiron on his back, not his head where it would count.
If she’d been able to land it at all.
Instead he spun easily toward her, grabbing her wrist in the iron vise of his grip, squeezing until she cried out, dropping the andiron onto the floor with a crash as two more men muscled their way through the door. Everything happened so fast, she didn’t have time to be afraid. There was only the big man, his sheer size and power eliminating any belief she might have had that she could escape.
And then, the cold tip of a knife pointed at her throat as the other men fanned out, their movements slow, almost casual, like this wasn’t at all unusual.
The overhead lights came on and she blinked against the sudden glare as she looked up at the man who still had her in his grasp like she was a small animal in an iron trap.
He was tall and broad shouldered, meaty in a way that suggested he lifted weights. There was something vaguely familiar about the set of his eyes, the high cheekbones under empty brown eyes. She tried not to move, all too aware of the knife digging into the tender flesh of her neck.
“What do you want?” she asked, forcing her voice calm.
“We’ll get to that, ma cherie.” His gaze flickered to the other two men. “Is she alone?”
“Seems that way,” the smaller of the two men said.
“Seems that way isn’t good enough,” the man holding her wrist said. “Check upstairs.”
She had to stifle the flood of anger that consumed her as she watched the man make his way up the narrow staircase leading to her father’s private quarters above the shop. She abhorred the thought of these criminals — whomever they were — stepping through the doorway of the small, neat apartment, with its worn furniture, the old French press still on the counter from her coffee that morning, the two modest bedrooms.
Covenant (Paris Mob Book 1) Page 4