Blame It on Paris (12 page)

An hour later, Will teased her, “People are going to think you're weird if you keep smelling your wrist.”

“It's just so wonderful!”

“That's the thing. It's your scent alone. That's the whole point….” He'd managed to put together a mini picnic with bread, cheese, wine, a blanket. There were so many fantastic gardens in Paris, but Will had claimed this was a favorite of his—a spot he'd discovered the first month he moved here. It was a place in the lee of some giant old trees, where yellow and blue flowers peeked through the soft grasses, catching the warm sun beams.

They lay head to head, after eating. “Just a twenty-minute nap, no longer,” he warned her. “We still have miles to go today.”

Midafternoon, they caught a mime show in a park. Then Will insisted they needed to take one last run through Notre Dame, and since she knew how allergic Will was to churches, she was touched he was willing to do that for her. After that came a winding walk on the rue Monge, with all its Latin Quarter flavor.

From the old Halles market, he bought her a scarf—blue and white, silky and long—and then a silly, touristy Eiffel Tower key ring, and then, it was on to dinner. The restaurant had neither a sign nor a name. The place was perched high, where the windows overlooked the night lights of Paris. Inside was candlelight, a rich merlot and the chef who informed them what they were going to eat—and that they were going to love it beyond anything they'd ever tasted before.

Dinner was delicacy after delicacy. Then they drove back to Will's place and walked around. He got suckered into buying a bouquet of flowers from a vendor who was closing down, so she carried those in one hand, sniffing them every few moments, clasping Will's hand with her free one. Dusk faded into night, night into long past midnight. Yet still they walked, block after block, until their feet were tired.

She knew they had to go back, knew she had to pack, but she knew they'd make love one last time in his apartment, and she didn't want there to be a
one last time
.

Around three in the morning, a mist settled, making the streets glow and the night lights shine like diamonds. They looked at each other, and finally turned around and started the return to his place. Neither said anything…until Will was turning the key in the lock, and she had the hopeless, helpless thought that this was the last time she'd ever see him do that.

So she charged in, as if she had energy, determined to turn this mood around. He offered to pour her a glass of wine while she headed straight in to pack her belongings, which were scattered all over his apartment.

“We've only got two hours before we have to leave for the airport,” he warned her.

“Eek.” There, she'd made him smile. She put him to work folding, a job he was amazingly awful at, while she flew around gathering her things.

At least, that was her intent. And it worked, her busyness, until she dove in her bag for her tickets…and came across the blue vial of perfume. The scent of it, the sentiment of it, the uniqueness of it, reminded her of everything she'd found in Paris.

Especially Will.

When she looked up, he was motionless in the doorway.

“Look,” she said, “I have to go.”

“I know you do.”

“My entire life is in chaos at home. I have to get it straightened out. It can't be done from here.”

“Like dumping the fiancé,” Will said. He'd been folding a sweater. It looked somewhat like an accordion with arms.

She tried a watery laugh, took over the folding job. She didn't comment about dumping Jason, any more than she ever did when he brought up her fiancé. Jason was her problem, her business. She tried for a more cheerful note.

“And you, Mr. White Knight, are going to be glad to get your place back to yourself, aren't you? No more girly shampoos in your shower, no more earrings on the table, no more hogging your covers. When you saved me from the mugger crisis, it's not as if you planned on taking in a boarder indefinitely, huh?”

She thought he might laugh. Instead he hooked her hand, the one that held a handful of thongs and bras. She dropped them at the look in his eyes. “Not a boarder,” he said huskily. “A lover.”

“Yeah…a lover,” she whispered back. And then out it came, the aching pain in her heart. “How am I supposed to leave you, Will?”

The suitcase got shooshed to the floor. With the overhead light on, her clothing draped on the spread and chairs and everywhere else, he reached for her as fast, as hopelessly, as fiercely as she reached for him.

It wasn't like the other times. She wanted to beguile him with kisses, enchant him with touch, cajole his heart. She wanted to be inseparably part of him. She wanted this to be the best sex he'd ever had. She wanted him never to forget her. She wanted to be loved, by him, only by him, forever and ever.

The first part of that was easy enough.

It was the last part she couldn't have. When it was over, when they were both lying there, damp and out of breath, she wrapped her arms around him and refused to let go.

Except, of course, the clock was ticking.

Will seemed to realize the time at the same moment. “Hell,” he grumbled. “We might just make your flight if we start moving at a dead run.”

T
HERE WAS NO GETTING
around fast anywhere in Orly. It was one of those discombobulated, crazy airports where you walked miles to get nowhere, stood in lines that never ended, had your nerves and temper frayed before you even started.

On the other hand, Will thought, he'd gotten her here. His plan for the whole last day had been just this. To keep both of them running a hundred miles an hour so she wouldn't have a chance to cry, to get upset and emotional, before they had to split up.

Both of them looked like wrecks. No sleep at all. But she looked like a cute wreck, with her fly-away hair and whisker-burned cheeks and lopsided sweater. He was standing with her through the initial check-in procedure, which was going—naturally—slower than molasses.

And that was when—instead of doing the emotional thing he'd been trying to avoid—she did the nosy, prying thing.

He almost wished she'd have cried instead.

There were still six passengers ahead when she started. “Will…you know, if I'm stuck straightening out this impossible relationship or nonrelationship with my father, I think you should feel stuck working out something with your father, too.”

When he'd fallen insanely in love with her, he'd forgotten that part—the part where she opened emotional doors without knocking and talked in completely feminine sentences. “One plus one does not equal Q, Kelly. Your issues with your father are a universe different than the issues I've got with mine.”

She moved up a spot, but her gaze was on him, not on the line. “Actually, they're really similar. They're both impossible situations. They're both our fathers. And our unresolved issues with them have defined who we are. And…”

“And what?” He was getting miffed.

“And if you decide to mend fences with your dad, then you'd have to come home to South Bend.”

But he couldn't go home.

Suddenly it was her turn in the line, and then she had to go through security, past the gates where he couldn't go.

He kissed her, long and hard and hopelessly. She walked backward, as if she wanted every last second of looking at his face that she could have. And when she was hustled through the last gates, out of sight, he searched for a waiting area with windows where he could watch her plane take off.

The spring morning was still misty and damp. Rude travelers jostled for spots at the window and he just jostled back, watching until the plane turned into a bird, then disappeared in the sky altogether.

He couldn't go home, he repeated to himself. But the sudden hole in his gut felt like nothing in the known universe could fill it.

There was nothing really new about that hole. He already knew he'd fallen in love with her. In love, like he'd never been in love. Love, like he'd never known love. A woman…like no other woman.

Bleary-eyed, zombie tired, he battled his way through the crowd toward the exit.

People think they fall in love in Paris every spring, he told himself firmly. It was a fantasy. It didn't mean it was real.

It was just…Paris.

And spring.

And her unforgettable brown eyes.

He put his hands in his pockets and stalked outside, trying to remember where he'd parked the car. The late-night mist had turned into a steady morning drizzle that soaked his head and blurred his vision. His thoughts were just as dark.

He couldn't go back to South Bend. Kelly didn't know, couldn't know, how bad it was for him there. It wasn't an option.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

 

W
HEN
K
ELLY CLIMBED
off the plane in South Bend, the clock claimed it was two in the afternoon, but Paris time would be nine at night…and since she hadn't slept on either of the flights home, her body didn't know what time of day or night it was.

While she waited for her luggage, her stomach kept lurching and her head refused to stop pounding—possibly because her body was so mixed up, but more probably because being home felt like landing on an alien planet.

She was supposed to be Kelly Nicole Rochard. Or she assumed she'd feel like herself when she got home again. The impossible, crazy, wonderful love affair with Will should have felt like a distant dream, a fantasy.

This was supposed to be her real life. Right?

A young woman with spiked red hair hurled through the doors near baggage claim and shrieked when she saw her. “Kelly! I'm so glad you asked me to come! You look
wonderful!
”

Kelly figured she actually looked what she was, tired and crumbling from the inside out. But Brenna, the girl Friday in the office, was an ideal chauffeur for this venture.

Originally Kelly had thought to have her mother to pick her up, but she'd changed that plan. She needed to talk to her mom, soon and seriously, but not yet. Her first crisis had to be a confrontational talk with Jason, come hell or high water, sick or not sick, tired or not tired. And Brenna was perfect company, first because she was thrilled to have the excuse to get out of the office, and second, because she was impossibly easy to be with.

Skinny as a rail, tottering on four-inch heels, Brenna yanked all Kelly's luggage away from her, wrapped her hands around a fresh chai and chattered the whole drive. How was Paris? Were the men hot? Did Kelly hate not being able to eat American food? How scary it must have been, to get mugged and lose her passport. She'd been missed; her desk was heaped to the ceiling, and no one could calm down Myrna in a snit the way she could. Myrna could be getting a divorce. Everyone knew her husband was fooling around. Sam had got a new dog. He'd brought it in to the office one day and it had peed all over the place.

“Do you want me to come in and help you unpack?” she asked at the apartment, looking hopeful.

“Thanks, Brenna, but I can take it from here. I can't thank you enough for picking me up. I owe you a dinner. And I'll see you at the office tomorrow.”

Brenna looked crestfallen at not being able to cop more time out of the office, but her expression brightened almost immediately. “You're probably hot for the reunion with Jason, huh? You two lovebirds haven't seen each other in two weeks now! I'll bet you can hardly stand it!”

“Hmm,” Kelly said.

And then there she was. Alone, standing in front of the apartment. The place was just a few miles from the Notre Dame campus, and a mile from the infamous shopping on Grape Road. It was one of those typical complexes for young professionals. Most of the occupants were single, a few married, but nobody had kids yet. The place could get pretty rowdy on a Friday night, but midafternoon, like now, there was barely a car in sight except for her white Saturn, sitting, dusty, in the spot next to Jason's.

She lugged her gear up the walk, turned the key and pushed open the door. Her heart sank lower than sludge when she let herself inside.

The only sound in the place was a ticking clock, a clock she'd bought herself two months ago, on sale. It had been Jason's apartment before hers. She'd moved in because there came a point where it seemed ridiculous not to. He'd given her the ring. They'd been sleeping together. Their families and friends had been expecting the marriage announcement for years—probably close to a decade. It just didn't make sense to pay two separate rents when they were consolidating what they had together.

She swallowed hard, looking at everything that should have been familiar, but it was as if she were wearing glasses with a tint. Nothing looked the same.

The red couch was hers, the leather recliner his. The plasma TV and terrific sound system, his. The two museum prints on the far wall, the vacuum cleaner, the massive pot of shamrocks—dead, she noted, from lack of watering—hers.

The place was small, just a living room with an el for a dining table, a kitchen, two small bedrooms. A pretty patio led out to a long, glossy lawn area, though. And the living room got a ton of light. They'd bought the bookshelves together. The splashy rug under the TV.

She wandered into the kitchen, the one room that was almost entirely her doing. She'd chosen the dishes and decor in a flurry of nesting, picked out blue-and-white china, a French-looking pattern, which struck her as ironic now. The blue goblets still wore their price tags. She'd been planning on putting blue-and-white tile behind the porcelain sink herself, planned on throwing out Jason's decrepit college silverware and choosing her own pattern, something they could register for as a wedding gift. And she desperately wanted copper pots, knew perfectly well how insanely expensive they were, but she loved them so much, and thought…

All her musings suddenly seemed light-years past. Kelly sank against the counter in the kitchen, remembering the plans she'd had only a short few weeks ago, and felt a sharp, raw pain in her throat.

It was almost two hours later when she heard the front door open. The sound made her jump. By that time she was back in the main bedroom, mainlining her third mug of coffee, filling a suitcase full of shoes. There were already two suitcases and various bags stuffed in her car. Clothes, not furniture. Toiletries, nothing that was mutually bought or used. She'd emptied the bathroom and the bedroom, but only of her own personal things.

“Hey, Kelly—”

Jason's familiar voice jolted her a second time, but then there was a sudden silence. She squeezed her eyes closed. Jason, being Jason, had likely figured things out a millisecond after walking in.

She found him in the kitchen. He'd put two glasses—mismatched—on the table, was fumbling in the cupboard over the fridge. When he turned around, he had a dusty bottle of whisky in his hand, left over from at least the Christmas before. When he saw her, his shoulders were already slumped, his eyes flat as dull coins.

“Somehow I figured your homecoming would work out a little differently,” he said.

“So did I.” A thousand memories stood between them. She'd known him from first grade, gone trick-or-treating with him at Halloween, hurled on him in fifth grade, gone to proms and movies and football games with him. His parents loved her. She adored them. He looked like a younger version of his dad, soft dark hair, bright dark eyes, good-looking in a quiet way. What killed her, though, was knowing that she loved him. Had always loved him. Probably always would love him.

The way she'd love a brother.

How come it had taken her so long to figure it out? And man, it
hurt
to hurt him.

He watched the play of emotion on her face, in her posture, and said, “Whatever it is, we can fix it, Kelly.”

She said softly, “No. We can't. I only wish. I wish from my heart.”

“That's bullshit. You haven't even told me what the trouble is.”

Jason never had much of a temper, but she saw it now, the control of it, in a flash of his dark eyes.

He splashed the liquor in both glasses, drank his, and then refilled his glass. “You met some guy in Paris, is that it? You screwed around?”

“That's not it.”

“Come on, I've known you forever—that
has
to be it. You left here two weeks ago ready to marry me. We set up the apartment to live together, be together. Our families were part of it. It's what we've been working for, waiting for, since we were riding our two-wheelers around the block, for God's sake. You never said anything before this, so don't waste your time lying to me. It has to be another guy.”

“No. Not in the sense you mean,” she said quietly, and saw another flash of anger in his eyes, so sharp it made her flinch.

She suddenly saw their history together as one-sided. Jason had always pursued her. Always made sure he was in the same room, same corner, same place—always there, before another guy could walk into the picture. He'd been patient and kind and loving. But relentless. He'd always been that sure he wanted her, sure they belonged together.

He threw back the second shot of Jim Beam. “It'd be
insane
to throw it all away. We've been part of each other's lives forever.”

“I know.”

“I know every flaw you've got, inside and out. I'm still here. I know what you look like with the flu. I know your moods.”

“I know, Jason,” she said quietly.

“Your mother loves my mother. My family all love you. Everyone in the old neighborhood, the schools we went to, everything—they're all part of this. Part of us. You wouldn't just be hurting me by breaking up. You'd be hurting a ton of people, all the people who are part of our lives. And for what? I hope to God you've got a damned good reason.” He snapped, “You couldn't
have
a good enough reason.”

She took a breath, and tried to speak. Couldn't find her voice. He had every right to yell, to be angry. To try to reason with her. To be hurt.

She had every reason to feel guilt and anguish over hurting someone who'd been nothing but good to her.

Worse yet, she looked at him and still loved him. The way she'd always loved him. She wasn't just losing a fiancé out of this mess. She was losing her oldest friend.