We'll Always Have Paris (4 page)

“You're staying here?”

“Yes.” She looked up at him. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I'm staying here, too.”

“This place isn't even in the guidebooks. The only way you could possibly know about it is if Aunt Celeste—”

She stopped.

They locked eyes.

She pulled the key to Room 625 from her bag.

He pulled the key to Room 625 from his back pocket.

“Houston,” she said, “we have a problem.”

“C
ELESTE
,”
Kate said as they rode the elevator up to the sixth floor. “She set us up.”

“She wouldn't do that,” Ryan said, as the elevator doors slid open and they exited into the hallway. “She's almost ninety. She must have made a mistake.”

“This isn't a mistake. Aunt Celeste knew exactly what she was doing.”

Her great-aunt was a born matchmaker who had tried to set up the undertaker with the hospice nurse at her husband's funeral.

“She wouldn't do that.”

“Oh yes, she would,” Kate said, “and I'll prove it.”

The elevator doors slid open and they exited into the hallway.

“Okay, here's a question. Did Aunt Celeste have anything to do with that interview you did in London?”

The look of disbelief on Ryan's face was starting to be replaced by one of shock. “She put me in touch with the footballer.”

“I rest my case.” She couldn't keep the smug note of triumph from her voice. “This was a setup.”

“The guy announced his retirement to me. I don't think your Aunt Celeste had anything to do with that.”

“Don't bet on it,” Kate said. “When it comes to romance, she's Patton in pearls. Nothing gets in her way.”

“Let's not jump to conclusions. Maybe the desk clerk gave me the wrong key by accident.”

“Right,” said Kate as she slid the old-fashioned brass key into the lock and opened the door. “And I suppose your bags were put here by accident, too.”

A familiar leather carry-on and a duffel bag had been left in the hallway adjacent to the escritoire.

“Believe me now?” she asked.

He dragged his hand through his hair and whistled low. “I didn't think she had it in her.”

“That's because you're a man. She can work right there in plain sight and you'd never see it coming.”

“Hey, Nancy Drew, you didn't see it coming, either.”

She stalked across the room and picked up the phone.

“What are you doing?” He had the look of a man who had been dropped behind enemy lines without a battle plan.

“I'm calling Celeste. I want you to hear it from her own lips.”

The phone rang twice at the inn. A woman answered with a cheery
“'Allo!”

Kate, cheeks flaming with embarrassment, stumbled through a mixed-up mess of English and high-school French as she tried to get the woman to take the phone to her aunt.

“Non! Non!”
This was followed by a stream of rapid-fire French that made Kate dizzy.

“Madame Beaulieu, s'il vous plaît,”
she tried again.
“Je m'appelle Kate Donovan. Je suis sa niece.”

“
Madame Beaulieu
away…”

Kate thanked the woman and hung up. She turned to Ryan. “The inn says she's not there.” She then said something she would have punished her daughters for saying when they were ten years old.

He had been her husband long enough not to laugh.

“You think she's ducking your call?”

“What else?” She handed him the phone. “You call and say there's a wedding emergency.”

“Like hell. I like Celeste.”

“Do you like what she did to us?”

Wait a minute! What if he did like what Celeste did? Wouldn't that be something.

He took the phone from her and dialed 0, which effectively brought that line of conjecture to a halt.

“
Je m'appelle
Ryan Donovan in six twenty-
five. There's been…
une erreur.
” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “How do you say ‘change my room' in French?”

She scrambled through her carry-on for her French-to-English dictionary. “
Chambre
is room,” she offered, flipping through the pages. “Try
une chambre autre
with a question mark in your voice and see what happens.”

He shot her a “fat lot of good that's gonna do me” kind of look.

“It doesn't matter,” he said into the phone.
“Une petit…un autre chambre s'il vous plaît.”
He looked over at Kate. “He put me on hold.”

“Hang up.”

He didn't.

“Hang up,” she said again then wrestled the phone from his hand just as the clerk came back on line.
“Merci,”
she said, “but
ma chambre est parfait…bien…au revoir.
” God only knows what she had really said to the desk clerk but it seemed to have worked.

Ryan, however, was less than thrilled.

“Now how the hell am I going to get another room?”

“Thanks to Celeste, you already have a room. We're not children. We should be able to make the best of this situation.”
I don't want you to leave, Ryan. This is the best thing Aunt Celeste ever did for me.

“There must be thousands of rooms out there. I'm going to—” He yawned behind his hand. “Sorry.”

“That's okay.” She stifled her own yawn. “I haven't slept in two days.”

“Make it one and a half,” he said, yawning again.

“I'm too tired to argue. Why don't you at least grab a nap before you go looking for a room,” she suggested, hoping she sounded more nonchalant than she felt. “You're out on your feet.”

“So are you,” he said. “You look wiped out.”

“You take the sofa,” she said. “I'll dig up a pillow for you.”

She couldn't help but notice that he didn't seem at all unhappy with the suggestion. She also couldn't help but notice her own delight. Maybe she was more like her aunt than she had ever realized.

“Skip the pillow. I'm so tired I could sleep standing up.”

“There's only the one bathroom,” she said, pointing to the doorway beyond the bedroom. “If you'd like to use it first…”

“Thanks.” He disappeared into the other room.

If she wasn't so hideously tired, she would be proud of them for being so adult and pragmatic about the situation, but the truth was the whole thing suddenly made her terribly sad. They had lived together as husband and wife for almost thirty years and here they were as stiff and formal as strangers on a train.

They hadn't lived together for almost two years. They were the blink of an eye away from signing final divorce papers. You would think she would be used to the idea by now, but she wasn't. Their secret lovemaking on the night of the engagement party had reawakened feelings she had believed dead and buried, and seeing him today hurt more than she cared to admit.

She liked seeing the light glowing under the bathroom door. She liked the sound of him belting out Motown oldies in the shower even if he was the world's worst singer. She liked the shoes in the hallway, the comb and wallet and keys on top of the nightstand. It all felt so familiar, so right, so dangerous.

That was the word for it.
Dangerous.
He was seeing someone else. Some unnamed twinkie who worked at the station and whose only goal in life was to rock his world. Though why her children thought she needed that piece of information was beyond her.

They had had plenty of time to work things out and it hadn't happened. Look at the incident in the rented Toyota. He could have run after her when she leaped from the car. He could have followed her into the house and tried to make sense out of what had happened. But he didn't do anything and, to be fair, neither did she. The weeks and the
months rolled on as they let their lawyers and their daughters do their talking for them.

And now there she was, sitting on the edge of Aunt Celeste's lovely sofa in the middle of Aunt Celeste's lovely suite of rooms in painfully lovely Paris, listening to her husband take a shower. She hadn't been this happy since that night in the rented Toyota when she went temporarily insane.

* * *

R
YAN STOOD
naked in the middle of the luxuriously appointed bathroom and considered the problem.

His clean clothes were in his bag in the hallway, which wouldn't be a big deal if Kate weren't out there waiting to claim the bathroom for herself.

What the hell was the right thing to do? It wasn't that they hadn't seen each other naked thousands of times over the years. They knew each other's bodies intimately. Every sweet curve, every slender—

Hold on, pal. This is about your body, not hers.

He regrouped. In another time and place, he wouldn't have thought twice about walking naked from point A to point B. But those days were long gone. He wasn't in bad shape for his age but—

Scratch naked.

He was surprised there wasn't a terry-cloth robe hanging behind the door. That would have made life a hell of a lot easier. So that left the towel. Unfortunately it wasn't a big towel. Just your average
bath towel, the kind you had to hang on to to keep it in place.

Hey, fool, it isn't brain surgery.
All he had to do was stroll nonchalantly through the bedroom, the sitting room, grab his bag from the foyer, then reverse the process with Kate watching every move.

She was an artist. She noticed everything. Those sharp eyes would zero in on the inevitable signs of age, but he knew that her compassionate heart would look the other way.

He was starting to understand why she had fled from him the night of Alexis's engagement party. Sometimes running was the only option.

He tugged the towel around his middle and held it with a death grip.

Time to face the music.

* * *

A
STOLEN MOMENT
in the backseat of a car was one thing.

Watching a man cross the room wearing nothing but a towel was something else again.

He was beautiful. So beautiful it took all of her self-control to keep from grabbing a sketch pad and vine of charcoal and capturing him before the image vanished. She was trained in the architecture of the human form. She had put in her time at life classes. It was all angle and curve, light and shadow.

She had seen more perfect bodies, faces so ex
quisitely balanced they stole your breath away. But none of those perfect bodies or heavenly faces had ever made her heart feel like breaking the way it did right now as Ryan walked past her into the hallway to get his bag.

“Sorry,” she said as he made his way back toward the bathroom. “I should've realized you'd need your stuff.”

“No problem,” he said. “I don't expect you to pick up the slack for me.”

Was he telling her he didn't need her or was he saying he didn't expect maid service from his estranged wife? She wasn't sure.

He stopped in the doorway. “I didn't mean that the way it sounded.”

“I know that.”

She scrupulously maintained eye contact, not letting her gaze move down over his broad chest, and still-flat stomach, and—

Full stop.

“I'll be out in a minute,” he said. “You look like you're ready to crash.”

“Take your time,” she managed. “I'm fine.”

Although if he wanted to stand in the doorway in that towel for an hour or two, she wouldn't complain.

He touched her heart. He had from the first moment they met a hundred years ago. Nothing had changed that fact. Not time. Not distance.

And probably not even divorce.

* * *

H
E WAS ASLEEP
by the time she washed her face and brushed her teeth.

She slipped out of the bathroom in a T-shirt and a pair of silky drawstring pants and padded softly to the archway that separated the bedroom from the sitting room. He was sprawled on the sofa with his back to her. She smiled to herself at the sight of his bare feet propped on the armrest. In all the years they had been together, they had never found a sofa he could stretch out on without making an accommodation.

He shifted position and she ducked back into the bedroom, feeling strangely guilty and more than a little aroused.

Well, too bad for you,
she thought as she slid under the duvet. What was it her mother used to say about making your own bed? Clearly she had not only made her bed, now she was lying in it.

Alone.

R
YAN COULDN'T SLEEP
.

It wasn't the couch's fault. Or the fault of the bright late-afternoon sun streaming through the windows or the ancient creak of the elevator as it ferried guests between floors.

He couldn't sleep because the only woman he had ever loved was curled up in bed not twenty feet away from him and it might as well have been twenty miles.

He had sensed her watching him from the doorway. You didn't love a woman for as long as you could remember and not know when she was watching you. He heard the familiar sound of her footsteps as she stepped back into the bedroom, the silken rustle as she slid between the sheets, her soft rhythmic breathing when she finally drifted off to sleep.

It would have been an easy thing to climb into that bed with her. To sleep next to her one more time, wake up with her in his arms and slip
away before she awoke. His wife had slept through hurricanes. She would never have known.

Which was one big reason he stayed on the sofa. He wanted her to know. He wanted her to want him there next to her. Anything less was second best.

They had slept together every night for almost three decades. She would curl into him, her bottom against his groin, soft breasts warm against his arm, and he would listen to the rhythm of her breathing as it grew slower, more regular, and she dropped into sleep. Deep in the heart of the night he felt closer to her than he did during the day, more sure of his place in her heart.

Had he ever told her that? He couldn't remember. They had been thrown into the deep end of the pool right from the start. Pregnant, married, and barely eighteen years old—the odds had been against them, but somehow they had loved each other enough to make it work for a very long time.

They had survived three kids in seven years, more trips to the E.R. than either one of them could count, money problems, job stresses, changing priorities, answered prayers and then suddenly when it seemed like they had left the tough stuff behind and it would be smooth sailing from hereon out they fell apart.

And he hadn't even seen it coming.

Maybe he should have. Maybe she had been sending him signals for years and he hadn't been paying attention.

If he had a dollar for every
maybe
he could score them a suite at the Plaza Athenee for a year and have money left over to send his future grandkids to Harvard.

He wanted her. He wanted to feel her soft body against him, breathe in the smell of her hair, her skin, her breath. He wanted to make love to her, every inch, every secret place, until the separation, the upcoming divorce, all of it fell away and it was just the two of them alone with their dream of Paris.

But that wasn't the way life worked.

He lay on the couch while his wife slept sweetly in the other room, and he listened to the sound of an ancient elevator creaking its way past the sixth floor until, exhausted, he finally slept, too.

* * *

A
SURPRISE VISIT
from Helene, their chambermaid, startled them both awake a little after six o'clock. Helene didn't speak much English so they communicated through an amalgam of French, English and hand gestures as she bustled about the suite, fluffing pillows, swapping damp towels for dry fluffy ones, and doing anything else that needed doing.

“What's her problem?” Ryan asked as the door closed behind the maid. “She looked pissed off.”

“She's accustomed to Celeste,” Kate said after the woman left. “I think we're too self-sufficient for her taste.”

Ryan looked sleepy and rumpled. She was very partial to sleepy, rumpled men.

“I'd better push off,” he said, combing his hair with his fingers. “I need to find a place to stay.”

It was now or never.

“I think you should stay here.”

He looked as surprised as she was by her words. “You're playing right into Celeste's hands, you know that. If what you say is true, that's exactly what she wants.”

“It's a beautiful suite,” she said, refusing to heed the alarm bells going off inside her head, “and we're two mature adults. If you don't mind the couch…”

He studied her for what seemed like forever. “The couch is fine. If you don't mind the company.”

“There's safety in numbers. Between the two of us, we should be able to duck our daughters until we get to Milles Fleurs.”

Lame, Kate. Why don't you try something subtle, like throwing yourself into his arms?

“I don't know about you,” he said, “but I can't wait until ten or eleven o'clock to eat dinner. I'm on American time.”

She let out a huge theatrical sigh of relief. “I'm so hungry I'd brave an early-bird special.”

“Get dressed,” he said. “We're in Paris. Let's not waste it.”

* * *

S
HE LOOKED
like a girl as she dashed off to the bedroom to dress for dinner. Her curly auburn hair was soft and loose around her face. Her body, slender but curvy, was clearly visible through the thin T-shirt and silky pants. Thirty years and three children later and she was as beautiful to him now as she had been at the start.

He wasn't blind to the changes the years had brought with them. The faint lines at the outer corners of her eyes. The narrow white streak over her left temple. The sadness behind the easy smile. They had been through so much together. She had held him tight when he lost his parents. He had been there for her when her mother fought a losing battle with cancer. Nobody on earth knew him the way she did. Nobody else ever would.

In a few days they would gather with family and friends to celebrate their daughter's wedding. A few days after that they would show up at their respective lawyers' offices and sign the papers that officially ended their marriage.

How the hell had it gone this far?

He had never met a problem he couldn't solve, a wall he couldn't break through. When he set his sights on a goal, it was as good as done.

Except with Kate.

There had always been a tiny part of Kate, a spark of something indefinable, that he had never been able to capture long enough to understand. He
dealt with raw power and muscle, batting averages and earned-run averages, pass-rush averages and turnovers and receptions. Tangible things you could count up in neat rows and keep track of on a graph or pie chart.

Kate was quicksilver in his hands. There was nothing calculated about her, no artifice at all, but somehow she managed to keep him slightly off balance in ways he couldn't predict or defend himself against. She had been the most dependable wife and mother on the planet and still he had found himself waiting for her to wake up one morning and say, “This was fun but I'm out of here,” and take up the life of an artist.

Which in many ways was exactly what had happened when he took the job in Boston.

He should never have let her go.

* * *

T
HEY FOUND
a cozy little brasserie around the corner from the Plaza Athenee that the guidebooks all claimed made the best roast chicken with rosemary on the planet. A pair of chunky ivory candles glowed softly on the table. The Beaujolais shimmered like rubies in the heavy wine goblets. Music, unfamiliar but wonderful, floated toward them from some unseen source. A Cavalier King Charles spaniel slept at the feet of his owner at the table near the door.

“The eavesdropping would be great here,” Ryan said, “if I could understand a word they were saying.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Kate said with a laugh. “That couple over there—the ones with the baby asleep between them? You can tell they're talking about something serious, but so far the only words I've been able to make out are
chicken
and
butterfat.
”

“A serious discussion about chicken and butterfat?”

She pretended to be insulted. “Hey, I only translate. I don't analyze.”

They kept up the banter over a seriously delicious dinner of golden roast chicken, crisp
pommes frites,
and a frisée salad garnished with cornichons. The wine flowed freely and to their surprise so did the conversation.

He told her stories about the radio station where he worked, the crazy callers, the pressure to grow the ratings, adjusting to the rhythm of a different city.

I miss you, Katie. I miss our home, I miss New York, I miss the life we had together.

She told him about the leap her career had taken. She told him about the new portrait commissions, the small write-up in next month's
Art Journal.

I must have been crazy. I can paint anywhere on the planet. Why did I let you leave that way?
she thought.

He toasted her latest commission.

Are you in love with someone else, Katie? Am I too late?

She toasted his latest market share.

The girls worry that you might have found someone else, Ryan. Don't you ever wonder if we're making a big mistake?

Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the fact that she had nothing to lose. But she decided to throw caution to the wind.

“The girls told me you're seeing someone.”

“The girls are wrong.”

“They said she's a producer at your radio station.”

“Ellen?” He started to laugh. “We're friends. She's married with three kids.”

“So are you.” Great. Another
oops
moment for the memory book.

“I'm not seeing anyone, Kate.” He leveled her with a look. “What about you? Taylor said you went out to dinner with some Wall Street type you met at a gallery.”

“I did.” She paused for effect, liking the look of pained curiosity in his eyes. “He told me it was time I thought about planning for retirement. He actually deducted the cost of our dinner on his taxes.”

God, she loved his laugh. Maybe if they had taken more time to laugh in the past few years they would still be together.

“Looks like our girls were trying to stir things up a little.”

“I guess it comes with the territory.”

“For the record, there hasn't been anyone since you, Kate.”

She met his eyes across the table. “I don't know what to say.”

“Don't say anything. I wanted you to know.”

She nodded. It shouldn't matter to her but it did. “I've been concentrating on my painting. I haven't had time for anything else.” Was that relief she saw in his eyes? She hoped so.

“Things are good?”

“Things are good. I have more commissions than I know what to do with.” She knocked twice on the tabletop. “I think I'm finally on the right track.” She had finally stopped painting from her head and started painting from her heart and from that moment on her fortunes changed.

“And Manhattan puts you right in the middle of the art world.”

“Good for business, bad for work,” she said, polishing off the last of her wine. “I find myself driving out to the house whenever I want to settle down and concentrate.”

“I thought every artist dreamed about setting up a studio in a SoHo loft.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” she said, throwing caution to the wind. “Turns out I do my best work on our old back porch. I don't think I'll renew the sublet.”

“I miss writing my old newspaper column,” he said. “The radio call-in show is fun but I'm just the ringmaster.”

“Why can't you do both?”

“Because I don't have you.”

It wasn't the answer she had expected and she looked down at her empty dinner plate. It was the answer she had been praying for without realizing it for two years.

“Don't say anything,” he told her. “Just listen.”

He said things she had never heard before. At least she hadn't heard them the way she was hearing them tonight, with her heart wide-open. It wasn't that he hadn't told her a thousand times how much he loved her, how much he valued who she was and what she brought to his life. Somewhere along the way she had stopped listening, but she was listening now, letting the words slide past her defenses and find their mark.

The server wheeled over the pastry cart and they went a little crazy, choosing one of just about everything. They ate and they talked. They sipped after-dinner cordials and talked some more.

She heard herself telling him about her painting and realized it had been years since she had opened up to him this way.

“This is the age of photography,” he said, as they held hands beneath the table. “Why do people still sit for portraits?”

She launched into an art-school explanation of tradition and cultural expectations within certain economic demographics then laughed when he pretended to fall asleep with his face in the cheese platter.

“From the heart,” he said. “Why do they want what you can give them?”

She had taken dozens of classes, sat through scores of workshops while he watched the kids. She had let him see the brushes and the paints and the canvases but she had never once let him into the heart of it.

“Because sometimes it's magic,” she said at last. “People change when they sit for a portrait. When the chemistry is right, a portrait not only captures the subject's physical self, it reveals her heart and soul and maybe the artist's as well. Cameras can capture what was, but it takes the prism of an artist's creativity to see what might be.

“I know how crazy it sounds,” she said when she paused to take a breath, “but you asked.”

“I've asked before,” he pointed out gently, “but this is the first time you ever really answered.”

“Too much information?”

He shook his head. “Not even close.”

By the time they reached the dessert course, they were both pleasantly looped. The cordial served with coffee didn't help matters. Neither did the delicious rum-soaked cake.

“Do you think they'd mind if we spent the night here?” Kate asked as she finished the last of the cake. “I'd like to curl up and take a nap.”