Honeymoon in Paris

by Juliette Sobanet

  Lexi’s cheeks blushed the shade of a cherry tomato as she nodded, then batted her long eyelashes up at Nicolas.

  Oh man, she had it bad.

  “But what about Dylan? Have you told him yet?” I wasn’t about to beat around the bush. I’d had enough secrets to last a lifetime.

  “We broke up on Sunday,” Lexi said. “I didn’t want to tell you earlier because you were already so worried about what happened with the tabloids, and I was afraid you’d think it was your fault.”

  Lexi and Nicolas kept their hands tightly intertwined, and all the while the dreamy gaze in Nicolas’ eyes told me that he had it bad too.

  “The truth is that the minute Dylan and I moved in together, everything went to crap. You know that, Char. The tabloid debacle was just the icing on an already stale cake. Dylan is moving out this week, which is why I wanted to get out of Paris for a few days. And when Nicolas invited me down to Lyon, I could hardly refuse.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, Charlotte,” Nicolas said. “We were planning to tell you tonight when you came to the hotel, but you caught me off guard when you arrived early.”

  “So, on Saturday night, the picture of the couple kissing on Marcel’s balcony—it was you two?” I asked.

  Both of their heads shook violently. “No, that wasn’t us,” Nicolas said.

  “Nothing like that happened between us Saturday night. As much as Dylan and I were having trouble, and I knew we were nearing the end, I wasn’t going to cheat on him,” Lexi said.

  “I took Lexi for a late-night stroll around Paris, and we talked all night long. I brought her back to Marcel’s apartment around three in the morning.”

  I remembered Lexi’s excited face when she’d received that call on Sunday morning on the Paris Metro. She’d had that same secretive smile the day before when we’d shared dessert and wine.

  It was all coming together now, except for one slight problem.

  “You’ve been saying this entire time that you didn’t remember anything that happened on Saturday night, Lexi. But you did remember,” I said. “You remembered everything.”

  Lexi nodded. “Nicolas and I didn’t have quite as much to drink as the rest of you. I’m sorry I lied, Char. I—”

  “It’s okay. I understand, and I’m glad the two of you have found each other. But I have to ask, do either of you know who was photographed kissing Marcel on the balcony that night?”

  Judging from the topless mess Fiona had been when I’d awoken her in Marcel’s bed, I was still certain she’d been the intoxicated culprit, but with her recent pregnancy scare, she needed to know for sure.

  Lexi shook her head. “After Nicolas and I came back from our walk, the apartment was silent. We said good-bye, and I passed out on the bed beside you, Char. At least I thought it was you. The room was so dark—I can’t remember why I thought it was you and not Fiona.”

  I turned to Nicolas. “Do you know who it was?”

  Nicolas’s hesitation told me he knew something—something he didn’t want to spill.

  “Please, Nicolas,” I said. “It’s important.”

  He sighed. “My brother was definitely with a woman on the balcony that night, but I’m certain it wasn’t either of your friends,” he said to me, a solemn look on his face.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you saying…?” I couldn’t even finish my sentence, because what I thought he was implying was too sickening for me to acknowledge.

  Had it been me on that balcony kissing Marcel Boucher?

  “Was it Charlotte?” Lexi blurted.

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said quickly.

  My hand shot to my chest. “Oh, thank God. You just about gave me a heart attack.”

  “If it wasn’t Charlotte or Fiona, then who was it?” Lexi asked, placing a hand on Nicolas’ arm.

  “It’s a woman he’s been seeing for a while now… in secret.”

  “Is it Brigitte?” I asked.

  “Wait, isn’t Brigitte dating your dad?” Lexi said to Nicolas.

  A look of disgust passed through Nicolas’ eyes. “Yes, Brigitte is dating my father, and while I do believe she has tried to lead my brother Marcel on, he’s not buying it. He never was. It wasn’t Brigitte on the balcony that night. It was a woman named Isabelle.”

  Holy shit.

  “You’re certain?” I asked Nicolas.

  “Yes, I’m positive,” he answered.

  “Thank you, Nicolas. You have no idea how much you’ve helped,” I said before taking off for the door.

  “Charlotte, where are you going? Is everything okay?” Lexi asked.

  Right before I jetted out, I nodded at her. “Not yet, but it will be.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I charged through the gates of Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and headed toward the School of Management, which housed the finance courses. The last time I’d walked these halls was when I’d taken classes here as an undergraduate, back when my biggest concerns were deciding which Lyon bar my girlfriends and I would be partying at that night and making sure we woke up in time for class the next day.

  My, how things had changed.

  Pushing past a loud group of college students lingering in the hallway after class, I rounded the corner into Luc’s department. The administrative assistant was just hanging up the phone as I stormed into her office out of breath.

  “Bonjour, I’m looking for Luc Olivier, Professor of Finance,” I said in French. “Do you happen to know if he’s in class right now?”

  She tilted her head and raised a confused brow. “I’m sorry, which professor did you say you were looking for?”

  “Luc Olivier,” I said more slowly this time. Then I remembered to smile. And breathe.

  “You must have the wrong department,” she said. “We don’t have any professors here by that name.”

  My smiled wilted. “I’m certain this is the correct department. I’m his wife, Charlotte. He just started teaching finance courses here this semester. Perhaps you’re not familiar with his name since he’s new to the university teaching staff.”

  The woman rustled around on her messy desk, finally plucking up a sheet of paper underneath a stack of notebooks. “Here is a list of all of our finance course offerings this semester, and to the right you’ll see the professors’ names. I assure you, madame, you will not find the name Luc Olivier on this list.”

  I took the paper from her, scanning it frantically for my husband’s name.

  But it wasn’t there. Professor Luc Olivier was nowhere to be found.

  Nicolas’ words came rushing back to me. He told me he’d tried to find Luc at the university… and then he’d trailed off, as if he didn’t want to tell me the rest.

  He didn’t want to tell me the rest because it meant that Luc had been lying to me all along about his job.

  With a shaky hand, I placed the course list back on the receptionist’s desk. “Merci, madame,” I managed to say before turning and walking slowly out of her office.

  Students’ light-hearted banter echoed through the hallway, but I barely noticed.

  How could Luc have lied to me about something as basic as where he worked? Even if I could excuse all of the other secrets he’d been keeping—about Brigitte, his father, his relationship with the Boucher family—how could I overlook this one?

  And if he hadn’t been spending his long “teaching” days here, where in the hell was he?

  Tears stung my eyes as I pushed through the double doors of the university wondering if, once again, I’d given my heart away too rashly, only to be left in the dust by another man who wasn’t who he said he was.

  I gazed down at the sparkling diamond on my left ring finger, wondering if our promise to love and stand by each other forever had really meant as much to Luc as it had to me. It certainly didn’t seem that way.

  My feet crunched over the newly fallen leaves as I walked numbly away from the university, saddened that my happy memories o
f this school would forever be replaced with Luc’s lie, with his betrayal. How had I made such a colossal mistake to marry someone without finding out who he really was before I tied the knot?

  Had I learned nothing from the cheating debacle with my ex-fiancé the year before?

  Or from the disaster of my parents’ marriage?

  I’d been planning to take the envelope and the recording to Luc, and tell him about Isabelle’s potential involvement in Vincent and Marcel’s bijoux scheme. I was going to turn all of the evidence over to my husband, without asking him to explain to me what he already knew.

  I was planning to trust him. To stop questioning him. To believe that he had some sort of plan to deal with Brigitte and the Bouchers. To trust that he would take whatever steps necessary to protect me and Adeline.

  But how could I trust Luc, how could I help him, when I didn’t even know where to find him?

  I reached the quai of the Rhône River and watched as the late afternoon sun cast a yellow shimmer over the choppy waters. I pulled out my phone to call Lexi, but before I dialed, it buzzed in my hand.

  It was Sandrine, Luc’s sister.

  “Hello, Sandrine?” I answered.

  She spoke hastily, her voice all high-pitched and frantic. “I just went to pick up Adeline at the crèche, and they said she’d already been picked up by some other woman who was claiming to be me. What’s going on, Charlotte? Do you know where Adeline is?”

  Panic seized my chest. “That’s impossible,” I said.

  “Could it have been one of your friends?” she asked.

  “No, my friends don’t know where Adeline’s school is, and even if they did, they would never have lied and said they were you.”

  “Well, who would?” she snapped.

  “I don’t—” A startling realization silenced me.

  Only one other person knew I’d arranged for Sandrine to pick up Adeline today.

  “Isabelle,” I whispered.

  “Who’s Isabelle?” Sandrine asked.

  I scoured the tree-lined boulevard for the nearest cab. “Isabelle is the owner of this lingerie store I love, Chez Isabelle. Luc bought me something from her shop when we first got back together, and since then, she and I have become really good friends—or so I thought. She’s the only other person who knew you were picking Adeline up for me today. And she’s the only one with a reason to do this.”

  “What are you talking about, Charlotte? Are you in some kind of trouble? Tell me what’s going on.”

  A sleek black cab with tinted windows swerved up to the curb. “Sandrine, if you talk to Luc, tell him I know he isn’t a professor, and tell him Isabelle has Adeline. I have to go.”

  I hung up the phone and swung the cab door open.

  But just as I stepped one foot into the car, a strong hand wrapped around my wrist. I tried to yank my arm back, but the man who pulled me into the backseat was much quicker. He slammed the door behind me as the car screeched down the street.

  I only managed to steal a brief glance at the man’s salt and pepper hair and severe hazel eyes before he pushed me down into the seat, growled at me in French to stop screaming, then dealt me a violent blow to the head.

  A whiff of familiar, flowery perfume wafted past my nose, making me suddenly and acutely aware of the pain shooting through my head and drumming away at my temples.

  I tried to bat open my eyelids, but the jarring ache behind my eyes stopped me.

  Where am I?

  A drop of something wet rolled down my cheek, and when I tried to lift my hand up to wipe it off, I realized my wrists were tied behind my back.

  What the—?

  “Putain!” shouted a familiar male voice. “What in God’s name are you doing, Isabelle?” he continued in French.

  At the mention of that name, my eyes popped open.

  Isabelle’s long, sandy-blond hair came into focus as she argued with a fuming Marcel amid the racks of silky lingerie in her store.

  “You’ll understand when you hear this,” she snapped before messing with something in her hands.

  I tried to move my legs, but realized my ankles were tied to a chair; I presumed that the liquid still rolling down my face was blood.

  Before I could summon up the energy to speak, the tense argument I’d recorded earlier between Marcel and Vincent played loudly through the store, their voices only serving to intensify the pounding inside my head.

  I cast a quick glance at my surroundings and noticed they’d placed me in the very back of the store. It also looked as if the blinds on the front window had been drawn shut.

  As the recording finished, I remembered something.

  Adeline.

  “Where is she?” I called out, my voice scratchy and hoarse. “Where is Adeline?”

  Isabelle swiveled around, revealing a wild, unhinged look in those gorgeous blue eyes of hers. “Don’t worry, Charlotte. Adeline will be fine.”

  She walked toward me, her pace oddly calm despite the fact that she was clearly losing her mind.

  “Then why did you take her? What do you want from me?” I asked.

  “I need to know if you’ve let anyone else hear this recording. And I needed to find out what Nicolas was going to give to you.” That’s when I noticed the manila envelope in her hands.

  “No one else has heard the recording, Isabelle. I promise. You can delete it right now, and it will never see the light of day. And I haven’t even looked inside that envelope, so I have no idea what Nicolas is up to either.”

  “How can I trust you?” Isabelle asked, continuing her cool, slow pacing.

  “Isabelle, we’re friends. I would never want to do anything to hurt you.” Judging by the fact that she’d had me followed, kidnapped, and tied up against my will, it was clear that Isabelle and I were not on the same page with where our friendship lies. “You have what you want, so let me go and take me to Adeline, please.”

  Isabelle placed a hand on her hip and thought for a moment, then lowered her deranged gaze back to me. “I think it’s too late for that now, Charlotte. If only you would’ve stayed out of it all along.”

  Marcel stepped in front of Isabelle. “This is a mistake,” he said sternly.

  Isabelle waved my cell phone and the manila envelope in his face. “Were you planning on telling me about any of this, Marcel? Or were you just going to leave me high and dry while you left the country with your father?”

  He grabbed her wrist, then wrenched the phone from her hands. “I was going to protect you, Isabelle. I love you. You know that. But now you’ve done this.…” He shook his head in my direction, clenching his jaw as anger soared through his eyes. “It has to be over. It’s all over now.”

  She pulled her wrist from his grasp and stormed toward me. “Tell me who else has heard the recording!” she yelled. “If you were so quick to play it for me—someone you’ve only known for over a month—then I don’t believe you would’ve kept it to yourself.”

  How could I have gotten so close to Isabelle this past month without noticing how crazy she was?

  “No one else has heard it, Isabelle. I swear. I was going to give it to Luc, but I… I couldn’t find him at work. I don’t know where he is.”

  “What about Nicolas?” she snapped. “Did you play it for him?”

  I shook my head. “No. I told you earlier that I didn’t trust him either. Please just calm down. I’m sure we can figure this all out.” I pulled at my wrists, but they wouldn’t budge. If Isabelle had hurt Adeline, I would never forgive myself. How could I have been so stupid as to trust her?

  “Is that what you want me to do, too, Marcel? Calm down?” Her shrill voice echoed through the store, rattling my frazzled, throbbing head.

  I wouldn’t let her win, though. I had to get the hell out of there and find Adeline. “Isabelle, think about your daughters,” I said. “You don’t want to do anything you’d regret. Just untie me and take me to Adeline, and we’ll forget any of this ever happened.”


  “Think about my daughters?” she screeched. “That’s what I’ve been doing all along. That’s why I got involved in this business in the first place!” She charged back over to Marcel, squaring her gaze in front of his face. “I didn’t want to support your father’s fancy little prostitution ring, but with my store on the brink of closing, you knew I had no choice but to take your offer. The money from those orders has helped me keep my apartment and has kept food on the table for my girls. And you promised me, Marcel. You promised no one would ever find out. That’s why we agreed to keep our relationship secret. But the secret is out, and now we need to fix it so everything can go back to the way it was before Miss Charlotte over here started playing detective.”

  “No one else besides Charlotte has any clue you’re involved, Isabelle. You have to trust me on that,” Marcel said, but the doubt in his movie-star eyes told me he knew more than he was letting on.

  “Then why did you tell your father it’s all over? And why did you tell him to leave the country?” she hissed. “You would only say those things if you knew we’d been busted.”

  Marcel lowered his voice. “We haven’t been busted, but my father has. I felt it was only right to give him the chance to leave France before he gets arrested.”

  “I see where your loyalty lies,” she huffed. “And what about Les Bijoux? What will happen?”

  Marcel shook his head. “It’s over, Isabelle. I’m sorry, but it’s over.”

  Isabelle’s face froze in panic. “My beautiful lingerie line and your father’s precious girls—his so-called jewels? All of it?”

  “Oui. The prostituées, the lingerie—everything,” Marcel said, his shameful gaze meeting the floor. “It’s finished.”

  Isabelle hurled the envelope across the room, then paced frantically through the aisles of lingerie. “I had the bijoux lingerie line tailored specifically for this dirty operation of your father’s, and I just placed a massive order at your request. This is my livelihood, Marcel. You know that! What will I do now? How will I support my girls?”

  “I’ll help you, mon amour,” Marcel said, stopping her with a firm hand on the shoulder. “I won’t let anything happen to you or to your girls. I love you, you know that.”