Diana Palmer - Once in Paris

He hadn’t thawed a bit. His eyes swept over her face and lingered on her straight, freckled nose. “What are you doing in France? Is Brauer working out of Paris now?”

She shook her head. “My mother’s pregnant,” she said. “I’m in the way, so they sent me over here to school.”

His eyebrows jerked together. “Then why aren’t you in it?”

She made a face. “I’m cutting home economics. I don’t want to learn how to sew and make pillows. I want to learn how to do accounts and balance spreadsheets.”

He made a sound in his throat. “At your age?”

“I’m almost nineteen,” she informed him. “I’m great in math. I make straight A’s.” She grinned at him. “Someday I’ll come and pester you for a job, when I get my degree. I swear, I’m going to escape from this ruffled prison one day and get into university.”

He actually smiled, even if it was reluctantly. “Then I wish you luck.”

She glanced down the way toward the Mona Lisa, where the line was still just as long, and the murmurs were louder and gruffer. “They’re all impatient to see it, and then they’re shocked that it’s so small and behind so much glass,” she confided. “I’ve been eavesdropping. They all expect to see some huge painting. I imagine they’re disappointed to have waited so long in line, and not to find it covering a whole wall.”

“Life is full of disappointments.”

She turned back to him and searched his eyes. “I’m really sorry about your wife, Mr. Hutton. They said you were married for ten years and devoted to each other. It must be hell.”

He closed up like a sensitive plant. “I don’t talk about private things—”

“Yes, I know,” she interrupted. “It needs time, that’s all. But you shouldn’t be alone. She wouldn’t want that.”

His jaw twitched, as if he was exercising a lot of restraint to keep his expression under control. “Miss…?”

“Martin. Brianne Martin.”

“You’ll find as you get older that it’s best not to be so outspoken with strangers,” he continued.

“I know. I always rush in where angels fear to tread.” Her pale eyes were smiling gently as she looked up at him. “You’re a strong man. You must be, to have accomplished so much in life already, when you’re not even forty yet. Everybody has bad times, and dark places. But there’s always a little light, even at midnight.” She held up a hand when he started to speak again. “I won’t say another word. Do you think he’s exactly in proportion?” she wondered, nodding toward the explicit painting of a man and a woman that he’d been looking through. “He seems a bit, well, stunted, don’t you think, for his size? And she’s exaggerated, but then, the artist was something of a connoisseur of plump nudes.” She let out a long sigh. “What I wouldn’t give to have her attributes,” she added. “I’m going to be two walnuts for the rest of my life.” She checked her watch, unaware of his start and the strange, reluctant smile that touched his eyes. “Gosh, I’ll be late for math class, and that’s the one I don’t want to cut! Goodbye, Mr. Hutton!”

She ran toward the steps that led down to street level without looking back, her braid flying like her long, thin legs. She was gangly and inelegant. But Hutton had found her a delightful diversion.

She’d thought he was displeased with the painting. He laughed shortly as his eyes fell to the cigar, unlit, in his left hand. He hadn’t come here to look at paintings, but to consider a plunge into the Seine after dark. Margo was gone and he’d tried and tried, but he couldn’t face the future without her. He wouldn’t see her blue eyes light up with laughter, hear her soft, French-accented voice as she teased him about his work. He wouldn’t feel her soft body writhing in ecstasy under his in the darkness of their bedroom, hear her pleas, feel her nails biting hungrily into his body as he brought her to fulfillment again and again.

He felt tears sting his eyes and blinked them away. There was a hole in his heart. Nobody had dared approach him since her funeral. He forbade the mention of her name in the quiet, empty mansion in Nassau. At the office, he was tireless, ruthless. They understood. But he was so alone. He had no family, no children, to console him. The greatest pain of all had been Margo’s inability to conceive after her tragic miscarriage. It didn’t matter. It had never mattered. Margo was everything to him, and he to her. Children would have been wonderful, but they weren’t an obsession. He and Margo had lived life to the fullest, always together, always in love, right until the very end. By her bedside, as she wasted away to a pale white skeleton before his anguished eyes, Margo had thought always of him. Was he eating properly, was he getting enough sleep? She even thought of the time afterward, when she wouldn’t be there to take care of him.

“You never wear a coat when it snows,” she complained weakly, “or use an umbrella in the rain. You don’t change your socks when they get wet. I worry so, mon cher. You must take care of yourself, tu comprends?”

And he’d promised, and wept, and she’d cradled him on her thin breasts and held him while he cried, unashamedly, there in the bedroom they’d shared.

“God!” he cried aloud as the memories rushed at him.

A couple of tourists glanced at him warily, and as if he’d only become aware of where he was, he shook his head as if to clear it, turned and walked down the steps and out into the hot Paris sunshine.

The routine sounds of traffic and horns and conversation restored him to some sense of normality. The noise and pollution in downtown Paris had made a high-strung population even more nervous, but the noise didn’t bother him. He clenched his big fist in his pocket, then relaxed and searched for a lighter. He took it out, looked at it there on the stone steps that led to the sidewalk. Margo had given it to him on their tenth wedding anniversary. It was gold-cased, inscribed with his initials. He carried it always. His thumb smoothed over it and the pain hit him right in the heart.

He lit the cigar, puffed on it, felt the smoke choking him for an instant, and then calming him. He took a breath and looked around at the glut of tourists on their way into the Louvre. Having holiday fun, he thought, glaring at them. He was hurting right down to his toes, and they were all smiles and laughter.

He thought then of the girl, Brianne, and what she’d said to him. How odd, to have a total stranger come up out of nowhere and lecture him on the healing of his broken heart. He smiled despite his irritation. She was a nice child. He should have been less curt to her. He remembered that her mother had married Brauer and become pregnant. Brianne had mentioned the painful loss of her father and her mother’s immediate remarriage and pregnancy. She’d know about pain, all right. She was in the way, she’d said, so they’d sent her over here. He shook his head. It seemed that everyone had problems of some sort. But that was life. He glanced at the Rolex on his wrist with a rueful smile. He had a meeting with some cabinet ministers in thirty minutes, and in the maddening traffic through the city at this hour he’d be lucky if he was only thirty minutes overdue. He walked to the curb and hailed a cab, resigned to being late.

Brianne sneaked into the building and into her math classroom, grimacing as haughty Emily Jarvis spotted her and began to whisper to her friends. Emily was one of the enemies she’d made in the little time she’d been at this exclusive finishing school. At least there was only another month to go, and she could be sent somewhere else. To college, hopefully. But for now she had to bear this la-di-da finishing school and the highbrow snobbery of Emily and her friends.