Tracy Kelleher - The French Connection

Dear Reader,

Some of my most vivid memories stem from living in southern France. The breathtaking scenery. The dramatic archeological sites and art. The fabulous food and wine. The frustration of explaining in French over the telephone why I really needed to have the window of my ground-floor apartment on a busy street in Marseilles fixed immediately! Then there was the washing machine that managed approximately four items per load and took two hours.

I knew when I was writing this Flipside story that I had to incorporate some of my experiences. And while I didn’t run across any mystery or stolen works of art on my adventures, I was lucky enough to enjoy the generous hospitality of the local residents. Talk about a special part of the world!

Hope you enjoy your trip to Provence,

Tracy Kelleher

P.S. I love to hear from my readers. Check out my Web site: www.tracykelleher.com, or e-mail directly at tracyk@tracykelleher.com.

“I know it probably sounds ridiculous to someone like you, a Count, but the real reason I decided, no, I insisted on coming here was to prove that I could venture out of my airless office, that I could abandon my boring life of picking up dry cleaning for my ex-boyfriend and having my best friend lecture me on which fork to use and not complaining when the coffee guy gives me the wrong change in the morning. Because I want to confront the world head-on, even if it means risking failure.”

She was completely out of breath. Well, no one ever said confronting the world head-on was easy.

She waited for Edmond to say something. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, he took her clenched hand in his. “I don’t think it sounds ridiculous.”

“You don’t?”

“No.” He shook his head, and for the first time in the conversation, Edmond smiled. A real smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “I think it sounds…completely honest. And just like you, just like the Shelley that I find so…”

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A former newspaper reporter and editor, Tracy Kelleher swears by the benefits of writing to a deadline, wearing Italian shoes and occasionally glancing at a treadmill. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, two sons and a dog named Jack.

HARLEQUIN TEMPTATION

908—EVERYBODY’S HERO

949—IT’S ALL ABOUT EVE…

994—THE TRUTH ABOUT HARRY

To my agent, Paige Wheeler—the start of a beautiful friendship.

And to Jean-Paul and Mimi—many thanks for introducing me to a magical part of the world.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

W. C. FIELDS GOT IT WRONG, Shelley McCleery thought. All things considered, she’d rather be anywhere but in Philadelphia.

And that old adage about April showers bringing May flowers? Someone should have told the City of Brotherly Love. It was May and it was pouring buckets, enough to leave six inches of standing water at every major intersection in Center City. Shelley had actually seen someone attach pontoons to his wheelchair.

And, p-le-ease, if one more perky TV weatherman said the rain was good for the farmers, she was personally going to shove his Doppler radar where the sun didn’t shine. “Come off it,” she’d informed the cashier at Starbucks earlier that morning. “The nearest agricultural region is southern New Jersey, and nobody—I mean, nobody—cares about Jersey.”

He’d nodded and given her the wrong change.

Now inside, things weren’t much better. The conference room of Dream Villas Enterprises may have been dry, but it was so stuffy, even the philodendron perched atop the filing cabinet—a plant propagated to withstand the abuse of countless bank lobbies and orthodontists’ offices—had packed it in more than three weeks ago.

Shelley could sympathize. It wasn’t easy sitting in a room where the most distinctive feature was a beige filing cabinet. It set the tone for the whole office decor: cheap and nasty. Cheap, she didn’t have a problem with. Given her pitiful salary and unpaid college loans, Shelley couldn’t afford that kind of problem. But ugly—that was a whole other matter. Call her a throwback, but she was firmly of the opinion that the world would be a much better place if everything were rendered in tempera, covered in gesso and lit with a soft medieval glow.

Yeah, call her a throwback. She sighed.

“What was that, Shelley, dear?”

Shelley looked up. Sitting at the head of the conference table was Lionel Toynbee. Reading glasses slipped down his pencil-thin nose.

Lionel, founder and owner of Dream Villas, was checking the proofs for the latest newsletter of his travel firm that specialized in renting luxury European estates—estates that featured top-of-the-line plumbing against the backdrop of fading Flemish tapestries, grand marble staircases and massive gated entrances, preferably emblazoned with crests for families like Romanov and Medici, or even those parvenus, the Windsors.

“Shelley?” Lionel repeated, turning her two-syllable name into three, so that it became “She-el-ley.” It was a habit that she found particularly annoying, second only to the measly salary Lionel paid her. “The piece on the Montfort chateau comes across very well.”

Bowled over by Lionel’s rare outburst of praise, Shelley almost fell off her chair. But then she quickly realized the reference wasn’t to her prose. It was about the seventeenth-century villa built on the ruins of a medieval convent on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence in southern France.

“But take out that line about the cool, damp walls of the subterranean caves. They make the place seem old. I was just there recently, as I’m sure you recall, and the feeling was one of timeless grandeur, not moldy decay.” Lionel tsked. “In theory, customers say they like atmospheric old things like caves, but they don’t really want to know the details. Talk up the whirlpools in the bathrooms instead. More jet sprays, less caves.” He turned to the next page.

“Fewer caves,” Shelley corrected under her breath, the curse of having a mother who was a tenth-grade English teacher. She took her blue pen and deleted the line and was about to flip the page when her eyes rested on a quotation from Madame la Comtesse de Montfort herself. Shelley stared at the words: “To savor the snow-white blossoms of the almond trees that cover the hills in springtime is to tantalize the senses with a pleasure so exquisite, it marks the soul ever after.”

She saw the passage was missing a closing quotation mark and was about to make a notation when she stopped and reflected. Would she, Shelley wondered, ever be able to forget the world of missing punctuation marks and experience a pleasure so exquisite it would mark her soul ever after?