Blame It on Paris

The grin on her face just kept getting bigger and sillier. She was free. This was Paris. In May. The city of romance. The city of lights.

Her father’s city.

The open door of a bakery drew her inside. A single look at the croissants and baguettes made her realize she was starving to death. Euros were exchanged—too many, she was positive—but the first taste was better than sin, and well worth whatever the baker had cheated her out of. The pastry was buttery, light, a puff of sweetness on her tongue.

Juggling the pastry and the coffee and her bag, she stepped back into the throng of pedestrians…when a stranger suddenly grabbed her arm.

Initially Kelly reacted with more exasperation than fear.

When the mugger tugged, she tugged back. And no, tangling with a thief wasn’t the wisest thing Kelly Nicole Rochard had ever done—particularly when the jerk was a good half foot taller than her five feet five inches and easily outweighed her by fifty pounds. But, as her mother had noted during labor, Kelly was as naturally stubborn as a goat.

Her roll went flying. Coffee splattered everywhere. She was so busy struggling just to keep her balance—and free herself—that she didn’t originally realize why the mugger was yanking so hard on her arm. But then she did. Fast. Her engagement ring did tend to glitter in the sun, which was probably what caught the jerk’s attention. He yanked on her finger so hard she almost cried, but that was just pain.

When he managed to wrestle off the ring, Kelly let out a war cry worthy of a marine. “You give that back, you rotten son of a flea-bitten scumbag!”

She couldn’t finish because the mugger suddenly jerked her around and yanked her tight against his chest. Her courage suffered an instant and complete crash. She forgot the ring. Forgot the dazzling day and the wonder of Paris.

When the bony arm cut off her windpipe, she forgot just about everything.

Faces and storefronts blurred. Sounds muted to a distant cacophony. She’d never tasted fear this acid, this consuming. Her entire consciousness was zoned in on her thief. The man wasn’t huge, but he was still a ton bigger than she was, and he stank of drugs and desperation. His breath blew fetid on her neck, his body reeking of old sweat. He hissed something to her in French.

Four years of high school French didn’t seem to address his particular choice of vocabulary. Still, she was ninety-nine percent certain that she understood him. He seemed to feel that her mother lacked morals, that she herself was a worthless bitch and that her life wasn’t going to be worth dog breath if she didn’t give up her purse.

She was more than willing to.

Almost.

“Look,” she said desperately, and then stopped. He tightened the choke hold on her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She was panicked enough to suffer a heart attack. Or pee in her pants. Or hurl.

Or possibly all three.

At the same time. Her mugger hissed another command, this one angrier and more urgent than the first.

She got it, she got it. She didn’t have an hour or two to think up a plan. Either she released her death grip on her purse, or just maybe he was going to break her neck.

“Look,” she blubbered. “You don’t understand. You can have all my money. I don’t care. You can take every euro, every dollar. And all the credit cards. Everything. My passport—you want my passport? You can have that, too. But I really need some papers in that purse. You couldn’t possibly want those papers. Please, I—”

On her last gulp of oxygen, her voice quit. Completely quit, like a cell phone with no battery. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. He probably couldn’t speak English, so why was she even trying to reason with him?

It was just…there were some very old, very private letters in her purse. They were her father’s. The only thing she had, or would ever have, of her dad’s. They were the whole reason she’d made this impulsive trip to Paris. She couldn’t give them up. She just couldn’t.

His other hand clamped on her left breast and squeezed. Hard.

She dropped her hold on the purse faster than a hot coal.

The mugger grabbed it and then shoved her, hard. She toppled on the cement walk, stunning both her knee and elbow when she crashed on the hard surface.

It had all happened so quickly. The mugger disappeared into the crowd. Some pedestrians kept on walking, acting as if she were invisible, but a few rushed over to her, jabbering sympathetically in French. Someone yelled for a gendarme—she understood the word for police, but by then she didn’t care. It was too darn late for that.

She was fine. Her heart didn’t know it yet; she was still gulping down air like a panicked beached whale…but really, she knew she was okay. Her engagement ring, her passport, her money—losing all of it was a nightmare, but she was alive and the jerk was gone.

Everything was survivable except for the loss of those letters. No one even knew she had them, even her mom. Especially her mom. And no one would likely recognize the ratty old envelopes as remotely valuable, because they weren’t.

To anyone but her. Unfortunately, they were irreplaceably valuable to her, and the loss hit her like a blow.

“Mademoiselle…” A mustached man in a uniform pushed through the onlookers, bent down to her. A cop. But what good could he possibly do? Find a thief in this kind of city traffic? The guy was probably at the Eiffel Tower by now. And when he got around to opening her purse, he’d undoubtedly take the loot and credit cards and passport and throw out everything else.

Like the letters.

A raw, rusty sound came out of her throat. Kelly told herself to get a grip and turn back into her usual strong, sturdy self, but man, somehow she couldn’t find the on switch. Caving was totally unlike her. She’d always been a go-to woman, the kind of woman who could cheerlead through a tornado, who saw problems as opportunities rather than crises. She never had meltdowns. She wasn’t the meltdown type.

But damn. The loss of those old letters really, really, really hurt.

“Mademoiselle,” the cop repeated, and reeled off some questions in French.

She pushed a hand through her hair, struggling to understand, flunking, struggling again. She could see he was getting impatient. Hell’s bells, so was she—with herself. But she was shook up, and the gendarme was speaking so fast.

But then…somewhere in the sea of strange faces and confusion, she heard an American accent.

An American Midwestern accent like hers.

A man.

“Hey,” he said, “are you in some kind of trouble here?”

Her head shot up. One glance gave her a jolt. The guy was tall and lean and blond, with a Matthew McConaughey angular face and come-on baby-blue eyes. He wasn’t just killer good-looking. He was to die for.

But that wasn’t what snagged her attention. His clothes did. Filling out a Notre Dame sweatshirt were brawny wide shoulders.

The logo wasn’t for Notre Dame, as in the French cathedral. But as in Notre Dame football. As in the golden dome. As in South Bend, Indiana.

As in home.

She fell in love so fast it made her head spin—of course, her head was already spinning. And it wasn’t like she thought it was real love…but it was real enough for that moment.

She pushed toward him, never losing eye contact, and said breathlessly, “You can’t imagine how much I’d appreciate some help. I know a little French, but not enough to communicate, at least as fast as I need to. If you’d play translator for just a few minutes…it couldn’t possibly take long….”

WILL MAGUIRE, at age thirty-one, had done all the bailing out and damsel saving and white-knight crap he ever intended to do in this lifetime.

But hell. He had noticed the commotion from all the way down the block, and when he heard the sudden, sharp, panicked yell—obviously a woman’s voice—he instinctively hustled toward the sound. The instinct wasn’t heroic. It was lunatic.

He’d lived in Paris long enough to know getting involved in a tourist brouhaha was complete lunacy. Yet still he came closer.

It took only seconds for him to interpret the scene. She’d been ripped off. Moments before, a gendarme had shown up, and typical of Paris, so had every busybody bystander. Most of them figured an American tourist, being anan American tourist, had done something stupid. A few wanted to whine about the danger of Paris streets these days. The gendarme was trying to question her about exactly what happened.

In those same few seconds, he snared a quick look at her.

Very quick.