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.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE 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.
WILL 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."
"Uh-oh." Will murmured, and stroked a hand through her tumble of hair. "A little shock. Finding out you're illegitimate?"
"Cripes, I don't care about that. This isn't the Middle Ages. Mistakes happen. So I was a mistake. That's all right. But it's killing me that I didn't know I had a father all these years…that my mom lied to me all this time."
"A pretty big lie," Will admitted.
"She slept with a married man."
"Maybe she didn't know he was married."
"Maybe she didn't. But she knew he was alive. She knew I had a living father."
He couldn't say anything to that.
"My brothers… Well. It seems my father has a ton of money. And he's developed a heart condition. His two sons were visiting him today, that's how they saw me, although I'm pretty sure I'll have to come up with DNA for them to believe we're related. But I think they knew the truth, because for damn sure. I knew, the minute we looked at one another. We have the same eyes, same hair, same mouth, same coloring. Will?"
"What, honey?"
"They thought I was showing up because I was after my father's money."
"It's a shame your brothers are stupid. You must have gotten all the IQ genes from your mom."
"Don't make me laugh. This is awful. They didn't want to let me in the door, just started yelling at me in French right off the bat. In fact, it was the yelling that brought my father from somewhere upstairs in the first place, to see what was going on. He took one look at me-"
"Listen. No crying allowed here. We talked about this before, remember?"
"He didn't get it. Until I mentioned my mother's name. Then there was this look on his face. He knew. He knew I was his daughter."
Will winced again. It didn't take a super brain to figure out the cretin had hardly greeted her with open arms.
"It was such a mess." Kelly dragged a hand through her hair, turned to him with tear-blurry eyes. "Obviously his sons never knew there was a sibling from the wrong side of the blanket. They started yelling at him, then. I couldn't stay. Couldn't leave. Didn't know what I was supposed to do."
"So what did you do?"
"I gave him a piece of paper with my e-mail address and asked for his. I couldn't give him my cell-phone number because that was stolen, and I didn't want to give him my mom's address in South Bend for obvious reasons. But I wanted some way to contact him, and where he could contact me. Even though I don't think he will or wants to."
One gulp of a sob, so big it scared the hell out of him. He splashed more wine in her glass, spilling a bit on her jeans and his.
"But right then…he needed to talk to his sons, you know? I mean, he had more to sort out than just me. And I didn't know what else to say,
anyway-I'm glad you're not dead, even if you happened to be a coldhearted adulterer who left a pregnant woman alone to fend for herself?"
"Probably that would have been a tough thing to communicate with your French, cookie."
Again she looked startled at his irreverent humor, yet again she laughed. Another weak one, but a laugh nonetheless.
'Then I came back here. Didn't know what else to do. I wanted to call my mother and ask for an explanation, yell at her for lying to me all these years. But more than that…I keep thinking that I'm not me, Will. Three weeks ago. I had a job, an apartment, I was engaged. I never doubted who I was. I thought I understood my mom, how she felt after losing my dad, the one man she really loved, turning into a single parent. Now…"
"Now what?"
"Now," she said slowly, "it's not just that I was lied to. It's that everything I knew about myself suddenly seems to be in doubt. I thought I had the genes of a quiet-professor type who was good in math-not the genes of a tycoon. I thought I came from this tragic, romantic history, not from a plain old sordid affair. I was raised to believe honesty was everything. That was another lie. I thought I was mostly like my dad, or the image I had of my dad. But that's all a sham, too. I feel totally confused. Nothing about my life is what I thought it was."
Will put down her glass. His. She was already curled up in a ball in his lap, with her head under his chin. His right thigh muscle was falling asleep. He didn't care.
"Maybe." he said, "that's really why you came to Paris."
"What do you mean? I couldn't possibly have known about my dad."
"No. But you had questions about your life, right? You were looking for something. You knew something wasn't right at home." Like the fiancé. Will thought. But she'd gotten touchy when he brought up the creep before, so he didn't want to mention him again.
"Maybe I did. In fact, I think you're right."
"Ye gods. A woman who admitted a man was right?"
She cocked her head back, nearly cracking his chin. "Don't rub it in. You're next."
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