Blame It on Paris. Jennifer Greene
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wanted to see the house, the neighborhood where he grew up. I can’t imagine anyone would remember him after all this time…but I still wanted to do it. Just walk that street. See it, feel it, smell it. I don’t have any other way to know him. And the whole idea popped into my mind when I got engaged. I mean…suddenly my whole life was going to change. And I just wanted to know more about who I came from.”
He tried to steer her to something practical and solvable, so the tears would dry up. “So now you’ve lost the address? We could find a way to track that down, Kel—”
She blinked. “Oh…no, no need for that. I’ve had the address memorized for years. What upset me was losing the letters. His handwriting. The words. It was the only thing I ever had of his. I never cared about losing my passport or money or anything like that. But darn it…”
“Don’t cry again.” This time Will made it a stern order.
“I’m not.”
“You are. Quit it.” He fumbled for another diversion. “Okay, so what’s your father’s old address?”
She reeled it off. The street was in the 7th arrondissement, which was the name of the absolute last suburban area he expected her to say. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.” She cocked her head. “What’s wrong? Is there something odd about the address? Or the neighborhood?”
“Not exactly,” he muttered, and sucked in an uneasy breath. This was getting mighty complicated.
She was mighty complicated.
Will didn’t do complicated. Didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t. Yeah, he felt this wild, insane pull toward her—didn’t know why, didn’t care why, was just more or less enjoying it. He sure had enjoyed making love with her the night before.
But now, he wanted to extricate himself before he got any more embroiled. Particularly when he sensed she might have a world of hurt coming—nothing to do with him, nothing he could do about it. But there was no point in two of them lying down on a train track if one of them could get out of the way.
“Something’s wrong,” she insisted. “Just say it. Whatever’s on your mind.”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, there is. You looked tense all of a sudden.”
“Well, yeah. The weather’s gone south on us fast.”
Now there was an understatement. The morning drool hadn’t been bad, but the sun just couldn’t seem to stay out for long. Temporarily it was just misting hard, but from the look of the dirty clouds, they were minutes away from the day turning into a soaking deluge. A crack of thunder echoed his forecast.
Kelly looked up, startled, and then simultaneously seemed to realize their heads were damp, rain sluicing off their jackets. How long had they been oblivious to the weather? She suddenly started to laugh.
And darn it, because her laughter was so infectious, he started to laugh, too.
Then, of course, they found their wits and ran for shelter. Or that’s where he thought they were running….
EXHAUSTED, LAUGHING, soaked to the skin, Kelly burst into the flat as soon as Will unlocked the door. Although it was only early evening, the apartment was midnight dark. Outside, the sky was still grumbling with thunderclouds. Traffic hissed on the wet streets below. Streetlights swayed in the wild wind.
“Good grief! I feel kin to a fish!” she yelped, as she pushed out of her soggy shoes. Pulling off her light spring jacket made rain spatter everywhere, including on Will, who jerked upright when he heard her sneeze.
“We’ve got to get you to a shower before you catch your death.”
They both seemed to reach the same decision—that it was better to peel off their soaking clothes right there, in the dark, not waiting. There was no point in dragging the ocean of wet stuff all through the apartment. And Will’s teeth were chattering as hard as hers were.
Still, she was exhilarated. “I can’t believe how much we saw!”
“Yeah, well, I should have listened to my better sense and dragged you home hours ago.”
“But you said you were stuck doing some work tomorrow. And even if it’s Sunday, I still have to push through the passport nightmare. And this way, we had the whole day for you to show me Paris.” Her mind was still reeling with the wonders. Île Saint-Louis and the Hotel de Ville. Sacré-Coeur. The Eiffel Tower. The Jardin du Luxembourg.
“You don’t see gardens in the pouring rain, not if you have a brain.”
“But it was perfect. All rain-clean. And nobody else there but us—oomph.” Her fanny seemed to connect with his elbow. It would have helped if they both weren’t fumbling to get off wet things in the cramped foyer.
Her head shot up at the same time he tried to get out of the way. And then her head seemed to somehow bump into his chin.
They both let out a responsive howl, and Kelly was inclined to convulse in laughter again. She’d shucked off both shoes, where he still had one on. Both their jackets were draped and steaming on chairs. She’d managed to pull off her damp sweater, but she couldn’t wait to get the clammy wet socks off, and it was impossible to do anything fast. Both of them had chilled-clumsy fingers, and every time they bent down, they seemed to collide again.
It was such an easy problem to solve.
All they had to do was turn on a light.
Move into the larger space of the apartment.
Instead, in their shivering, laughing scuffle, there was an instant—at least for Kelly—when she suddenly remembered the night before. Remembered him as a lover, naked, evocative, demanding, challenging. Lusty.
It wasn’t as if she’d forgotten that for a second all day.
It was just that all day she’d been good at blocking it out.
Denial was a learned skill. She’d practiced her whole life. And she was safe, she’d thought, because neither of them could possibly be in the mood. They were both cold and tired and had sore feet. He couldn’t possibly want her. She looked like a drowned rat.
And she was about to sneeze again.
Then in the blink of a second, his eyes met hers.
There was a second of silence. A second when the laughter died. A second when the shivers and exhaustion and rain pelting the windows in torrents seemed to fade out, as if they were all background colors in an old picture.
He was all foreground. Even in the shadowy foyer, she caught the clear shine in his eyes, heard his breath catch, could swear she actually saw the sudden arc of lightning between them.
She didn’t mean to suck in a breath, but he seemed to take that as an invitation.
Maybe it was.
She was in his arms like that. As if she’d die if she couldn’t touch him that very minute. As if she’d die if she couldn’t have him. As if nothing in her life had created need like this, fire like this, a hunger to live like this. Until him.
She surely accumulated a dozen bruises navigating the hall toward his bedroom, and him probably more. Darkness and dampness were only two of the obstacles. She refused to stop kissing him—to stop being kissed—refused to be severed from him for even a second.
“We’re going to kill ourselves,” he muttered against her mouth.
“You can always say no.”
And then, when they finally reached the bedroom, when she finally had him naked, he mentioned, “You know, we don’t have to go this fast.”
“You want slow?”
“No.” His voice turned thick, just like that. Thicker than honey. Thicker than molasses. Thicker than a bluesy sax on