Blame It on Paris (9 page)

“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.”

“What do you mean, I'm next?”

“I mean…maybe I landed in your life at this specific time for a reason, too.”

“Yeah. Fabulous luck.”

She kissed him. Clearly reluctantly. But she couldn't let the compliment pass, and even after a long, long lip suck, that elephantine memory came back. “Maybe fate brought us together because we were both meant to solve our father issues.”

“I'll go along with the fate thing. But I think fate had incredible sex on its mind. That we'd find each other for this moment of time. And it'd be earth-shatteringly fantastic.”

“Okay,” she murmured. “That, too.” And did the lip-suck thing again. “Will?”

“What now?”

“I'm so hungry I can't think. And it's been an awful day.”

“So you want to—”

“Make love,” she finished, as if that made perfect sense to her.

It did to him, too.

 

W
HEN
K
ELLY WOKE
up the next morning, the impossibly bright sun matched her mood perfectly. In spite of everything, she'd slept like a child, one of those healing, safe sleeps that renewed her spirits.

And that was a good thing, because nerves promptly gnawed on her conscience the instant she sat up. What should she do about her father? How was she going to handle Jason? What should she say to her mother? What should she do next? Why had her mom never told her the truth? Was there one thing in her life that made sense anymore?

So much for a restful night's sleep. The whole mess was overwhelming. She sank back against the pillows and pulled the sheet over her head.

A few minutes later, though, she felt the sheet being tugged off her. Will was standing naked with a skillet in his hand. The aroma reached her even before she saw the contents. Technically, breakfast was just scrambled eggs, but he'd added herbs and cheese. “Coffee, too.”

“Am I still dreaming, or did you turn into a hero while I was sleeping?”

“You're not still dreaming. It's me. Your hero.” But he looked at her hard before teasing any further. “Yeah, I figured you'd be chewing your fingernails before even getting out of bed, Ms. Guilt Queen. So come on. I'm serving breakfast on the balcony. And after that, I have a plan.”

“I'd follow that cute butt anywhere,” she told him.

“Don't embarrass me before breakfast.”

“You're walking around naked. Is it even possible to embarrass you?” It was easy to tease him, yet Kelly still felt a headache threatening behind her temples. Her whole spirit felt trounced from yesterday's revelations. Or maybe from the whole week of traumas. Five days. She'd been in Paris five days.

In those five short days, she'd lost her identity—physically and emotionally. She'd been mugged. She'd lost the life she'd had. She'd taken an irrepressible, unforgettable lover, when she'd never been the kind of woman to “take lovers.” Or even to find lovers.

Will set down the tray on the metal table on the bitsy balcony before he even seemed to think about putting on clothes. She grabbed a robe before stepping outside. “I told you I was the repressed type, didn't I?”

“Yeah,” Will said. “I think you mentioned it. Just before we fell in bed the first time.”

“You want to hear about my fiancé?”

“No.”

“I think I should tell you,” she said honestly, as she lifted the carafe to pour coffee for both of them.

“Nope. No interest. You're with me. When you're in Paris, you're with me. When you leave Paris…” His gaze shot to her eyes, so hot and blue. “Then there's nothing I can do. You'll be there. I'll be here.”

“That was the agreement,” she concurred.

“But you do need to shake that guy. He's not right for you.”

“Now, come on, Will. You really have no basis to know he's not for me.”

“I'm three hundred percent sure. You're going to break it off when you get back to South Bend.” Will made it sound more like an absolute statement than a question. The sky was blue. Her broken engagement was a given.

Kelly didn't respond. Thinking about Jason and going home just tangled her up again. She was tangled up enough.

Besides, just below their balcony, Paris was waking up. An old man was hawking the morning newspapers. Another vendor was pushing fresh flowers—he stopped below, saw her and raised a bouquet to her, peeling off a whole speech so fast she couldn't follow.

“What's he saying?” she asked Will.

“He says if you'll come down, he'll give you a bouquet for free, because you are a beautiful woman, a darling, where I am but a
canard
for hiding you from the world up in this apartment. He wants to kiss your hand. He wants to adore you. He wants you to be with a man who knows how to love a woman—a man such as himself.”

“Oh.” Tugging her robe closed, she bent over the balcony and threw the flower man a kiss.
“Merci, monsieur! Je vous aime! Toujours!”

The man grinned.

Will shook his head. “You'll have him on our doorstep every morning.”

“I had to be polite, didn't I?”

“Uh-huh. You picked up the French flirting thing really well. But onward…here's the plan for the day. I don't
have
to go to work, because work, after all, is irrelevant to life. But I do have a couple things I should do there. So you could either come with me—shouldn't take me more than an hour—or you can stay here for that hour. After that, well, you can't be in Paris and not do certain things.”

“Like…?”

“You're a girl, so you have to do a
parfumerie
or two. Then there's the old Halles marketplace near the Centre Pompidou. That's like hell on earth. You know. Shopping. Little shops, zillions of them. If you like cooking stuff, Le Creuset is there. Or Sabatier knives. Or copper cookware…”

“Please don't look at me when I'm drooling. It's embarrassing.” She made a vague gesture. “You'd actually shop with me?”

“With you, yes. With anyone else, no. Then after that…well, you have to see the Marmottan Museum. God knows, there are a hundred museums around here. But that's the one with the Monets. Then there's the Musée Rodin, which I swear is seriously cool. Then there's Sacré-Coeur. I don't know if it's a mortal sin to be a Catholic and miss Sacré-Coeur, but it's gotta be close. And we have to hit a garden or two. Boulogne or Tuileries or Monceau. It's spring. The gardens here are an absolute.”

She looked at him and kept on looking. He was beyond good-looking. His eyes alone were mesmerizing. Not dark blue, not light blue, but kind of a clear, lake-blue. He had such a strong, sharp jaw—a measure that he was more stubborn than a bulldog, she realized now. And she figured he wore that rumple of blond hair a little on the long side to illustrate that he didn't care, was a lazy wastrel type.

He wasn't a lazy wastrel type.

When she didn't immediately respond to his plan, he hesitated. “I know, Kel. You didn't really come here to sightsee. And I don't even
do
sightseeing. But the thing is, you've had a major stress load. So you've got to balance it. You're stuck waiting until some things happen, like getting your passport back—”

“After which, I have to go home.”

“I know you do. So we have to schedule your time, find a way to make the most of it.”

Truthfully, Kelly didn't need to do another thing to know she'd never forget a second of Paris…or a second she'd spent with him.

“But,” he said, as if that single word were a sentence in itself.

“But?”