The Paris Caper (26 page)

“It couldn’t have been
her.”

Pierre paused. “How do
you know? Were you with her last night?”

His mouth thinned. “No.”

“Did you at least have
eyes on her?”

“No.”

“Well, then. My information
says she was in Marseille and she pulled this job. And my information is
reliable.”

Jean-Marc slammed his
eyes shut and fought the roiling knot that twisted in his stomach as he
listened to his partner systematically crush each and every one of the hopes
and dreams he’d so recently entertained about the extraordinarily talented
Ciara Alexander.

She hadn’t lied to him.
Not exactly. But God help him, he’d never asked.

Putain de merde
!

All the time they’d been
making love...had she been laughing at him the whole time? Knowing she had a
fortune of jewels sitting right in her purse, practically within plain sight of
the detective superintendent in charge of bringing her to justice? Did it turn
her on knowing she had duped him so thoroughly? Did she have a hard time
keeping a straight face as he’d begged her to move in with him and have his
baby?

Putain de
fucking
merde
.

Did he fucking
never
learn?

Obviously, this was why
she’d kept saying no to his pursuit. She had no intention of stopping her
illegal activities. She would never reform. She was just using him. As she had
from the very first night at the club.

“All right,” Jean-Marc
bit out. “What’s the plan?”

♥♥♥

Ciara woke with a start.
She looked around swiftly, disoriented from her bad dream. She’d dreamt Beck
had locked her in a tiny, filthy cell then beaten Sofie in front of her,
laughing as they both screamed for him to stop.

Ciara took a deep breath.
She was safe. On a train. With Jean-Marc. She glanced around again. Where was
he? Her purse was sitting on his seat next to her and she grabbed it, jumping
to her feet. It looked like they were coming into
Gare du Lyon
. She
remembered he’d gone to the club car for a— There! She spotted him leaning
against the wall by connecting door to the next car, watching her.

She smiled and waved, and
started toward him. But he didn’t smile back. She faltered at his dark
expression. Something was wrong.

The loudspeaker announced
that the train was approaching the Paris station and suddenly everyone got up
from their seats, blocking her path to him.

Heart pounding, she
fought her way through the crowd, tripping over luggage to get to him.
Something
was wrong
. She had reach him! She wanted to be safe in his arms again.
Needed that terrible look on his face to go away. Dregs of the awful dream
swirled through her mind as the crowd jostled her, but Jean-Marc’s pitiless
expression was the worst of all. Terror crawled through her veins.

Something was terribly
wrong.

“Jean-Marc!” she called.

She saw him hesitate for
a split second, then he raised his outstretched hand to her.

“
Oui
,” he said.
“Come to me, Ciara.”

 The train slowed, metal
wheels screeching like giant fingernails on the steel rails of the track. She
covered her ears, her pulse screaming just as loudly. Every instinct shrieked
at her to run.
Run from him. Run from whatever was about to happen. Save
yourself and run like hell.

“Come to me, Ciara,” he
repeated, eyes cold as ice, his hand still outstretched, steady as a hangman’s.

Tears stung, blurred her
vision.

She was betrayed.

Oh, God, Jean-Marc had
taken her love and betrayed her.

When she reached him at
last, she looked up into those impenetrable eyes. And knew the bitter truth.

The train jolted to a
stop. The door flung open. But she would not run. She would not give him the
satisfaction.

She took his hand.

The sound of heavy boots
clattered up the steps. Shouts. Whistles. And the familiar timbre of his
partner,
Lieutenant
Rousselot’s voice saying, “Ciara Alexander, I have a
warrant to search your purse. Please surrender it at once.”

She didn’t protest when
he ripped it from her shoulder, jammed his big hands inside and groped around.
Wasn’t even surprised when one hand instantly reappeared holding something
shiny and gold, sparkling in blood red.

She searched Jean-Marc’s
impassive face with tears trickling down her own. And found nothing but
contempt staring back at her. He let go of her hand.

She ripped her gaze from his,
swiped the moisture from her cheeks and faced
Lieutenant
Rousselot with
head held high. She didn’t even blink when he said the words she knew were
coming.

“Ciara Alexander, you are
under arrest.”

There wasn’t a trial.

Ciara didn’t have the
heart to fight the charges. Of which, ironically enough, she was innocent.
She’d had nothing to do with stealing those rubies. And Jean-Marc, the fucking
bastard, must have known it all along.

The pain of that nearly
brought her to her knees.

At first she’d thought it
was Jean-Marc who’d actually planted the stolen necklace and earrings in her
purse. But when
Lieutenant
Rousselot let it slip at the preliminary
hearing that their informant had been a Paris beat cop, she’d had the belated
realization that it must have been Beck. Beck or one of his minions must have
gotten onto the train at the last stop before Paris, put the jewels in her
purse as she slept, then called the DCPJ on her. She had to give the little
shit credit—she had truly underestimated his cleverness.

On the other hand, she
had given Jean-Marc far too much credit. Her heart had blinded her to his true
colors. Jean-Marc had believed the lying Beck without reservation. He hadn’t
confronted her, hadn’t asked to hear her side. Not once during the
interrogations had he even spoken to her. It had all been
Lieutenant
Rousselot.

That spoke volumes about
how much her lover really cared about her.

He didn’t. It had all
been lies.

Ciara thought she didn’t
have any more tears left. She’d cried a river that first night in jail when
Jean-Marc didn’t come to see her. In the morning, when she realized he wasn’t
ever
going to come, she dried her eyes, straightened her spine, and determined to
put the manipulating bastard out of her mind forever.

She didn’t cry at the
pitying looks during questioning when she claimed Beck had framed her; she
didn’t cry when the Orphans came to see her and Sofie broke down and Ricardo
and Davie said they had to tackle Hugo to keep him from bursting into
36 Quai des Orfèvres
and slashing
Jean-Marc to ribbons; she didn’t cry when her lawyer threatened to quit if she
didn’t use her personal relationship with Jean-Marc to force all charges
against her to be dismissed even though the prosecutor wasn’t charging her with
anything but the rubies for lack of concrete evidence on her other thefts.

She didn’t cry when the
judge sentenced her to eighteen months in prison.

Only once did she give in
to her feelings and cry. It was three-and-a-half weeks after her arrest, in the
lonely confines of her cement cell. On the day she got her period.

Eighteen months was a
hell of a lot of days—five-hundred-forty-seven-and-a-half to be exact—to hold
onto your anger.

Jean-Marc did his best.
He managed to make it through Ciara’s arrest and interrogation.

Just.

He’d naturally expected
her to cry rape, or at least drag out all the sordid details of their
spectacularly ill-advised affair for all of France to snicker over. He was
holding his breath waiting for her to announce that
Commissaire
Lacroix
was the father of her unborn child.

He’d been so
disillusioned by her deception in Marseille, he’d barely been able to look at
her during Pierre’s interrogations. Convinced of his impending professional
disgrace and dismissal at any moment, Jean-Marc didn’t even bother to formally
resign from the case. Instead he handed it all over to Pierre and waited
stoically for the boom to fall.

But as days went by, and
then weeks, and it still didn’t happen, Jean-Marc grew more and more uneasy.
And finally on a crisp autumn day in early October, looking like a beautiful
fallen angel, Ciara stood wordlessly in the courtroom at the
Palais de
Justice
on the Ile de la Cité and listened to her sentence, and was quietly
led off to prison.

And that was the precise
moment when Jean-Marc was struck by a creeping, horrible certainty.

He’d been completely
wrong about Ciara Alexander.

Eighteen
months later

11:59
am, February 14

Outside la maison d'arrêt des femmes, Paris, France

Jean-Marc lounged against
his Saab, arms crossed over his stomach, eyes closed and face tipped up to
catch the stingy warmth the winter sun. He’d been standing like this for close
to twenty minutes when a soft beep sounded from the fancy wristwatch he’d given
himself this past Christmas.

Finally.

He opened his eyes,
unpropped his butt from the front fender and turned to face the prison’s
entrance. Five seconds later, the front gate swung wide and a woman walked
through it carrying an oversized purse.

Ciara.

A jumble of conflicting
emotions wrestled in the pit of his stomach as he watched her stride
purposefully out to the sidewalk and glance around. She was wearing the same
jeans and T-shirt she’d worn when they arrested her. A stab of guilt hit him
square in the gut, followed swiftly by a punch of arousal a bit lower.
Dieu
,
she looked good.

She spotted him.

Halting abruptly, she
threw him a glaring scowl, then just as abruptly resumed striding down the
street.

He pushed out a sigh,
walked over and stepped in front of her, ready to do battle.

“Ciara—”

“Get out of my way,
Lacroix.”

“We need to talk.”

“What part of leave me
alone don’t you get?” She attempted to move by him, but he wasn’t about to let
her escape.

“We need to talk,” he
repeated. He had things to say. Answers to get.

“I wouldn’t talk to you
in prison,” she said tartly. “What makes you think I’ll talk to you now?” She
tried to shove past him more forcefully.

After his unsettling
revelation at her sentencing, he’d gone to the prison to see her. To find out
the truth. And ask about the baby. But she wouldn’t see him. Twice a month like
clockwork he’d gone to see her, for eighteen months. Each time she’d refused
his visit.

He didn’t really blame
her. But enough was enough.

“Because you don’t have a
choice,” he ground out, and grasped her arms.

Her brows shot up.
“Police harassment? Not really your style, Lacroix. Or...maybe this is
stalking?”

He clamped his jaw.
“Neither. This is a man picking up his lover who just got released from
prison.”

Her jaw dropped. “His
lover
?
Are you kidding me?
You
put me in there, in case you’d forgotten!”

“You put yourself in
there, Ciara. Not me. And you were lucky to get away with as little time served
as you did,” he reminded her pointedly. “Real lucky.”

They glared at each other
for a long moment before she looked away. “I suppose it was you who arranged
for my release a day early,” she said resentfully.

“Tomorrow was going to be
a media circus. Thought I’d spare you the ordeal.”

She snorted, studying the
ground beneath her sandals. She rubbed her arms. “Let me go, Jean-Marc. I have
nothing to say to you, and I’m cold.”

He took off his jacket
and put it around her shoulders. For a second he thought she might toss it to
the sidewalk and stomp on it. But she just jetted out a breath and said a clearly
reluctant, “Thanks.”

“
C’est rien.
Now
get in the car before you catch pneumonia.”

“I don’t want to go
anywhere with you, Jean-Marc. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I
hate you,” she said, attempting vehemence, but the fight had gone out of her.
The words came out breathy and petulant.

Like a lover’s.

“No, you don’t,” he
refuted calmly, squeezing her shoulders. “You love me. You told me so
yourself.”

“In your dreams,
Lacroix.”

“Not what I recall.
Ciara, what happened to the baby?” He waited for an endless silent moment.
Putain
.
“Did you...?”

Under his hands her
shoulders fell. She shook her head. “There was no baby,” she whispered.

He slowly let out the
painful breath he’d been holding. Sweet relief flooded through him, washing
away the last of his uncertainty. She hadn’t gotten rid of it.
Dieu merci
.
He didn’t think he could have forgiven her for that.

“
Viens
,” he said,
wanting badly to take her in his arms. To take comfort in her arms. “Come home
with me now.”

“Not a chance.”

“You’ve nowhere else to
go.”

“I’m going to the
Orphans’.”

“And spoil the surprise
party tomorrow? They’ve been working on it for weeks.”

Her eyes shot to his,
narrowed. “How do you know that?”

“I promised you I’d take
care of them, Ciara. I always keep my promises.”

That took her by
surprise. He’d had kept in regular touch with the kids while Ciara was in
prison, even attending Sofie’s graduation, as well as CoCo’s, and Ricardo’s
just last month. He’d also kept a close eye on Beck as promised.