Assault and Beret Page 2

  “What?” I asked. “You did. Besides, maybe Suzette can help me figure out where to start.”

  “But of course, if there is anything I can do to help, I will do so gladly,” she said.

  “See?” I said to Viv. She continued glowering at me and I was pretty sure she growled deep in her throat but then she sipped her cocoa and seemed to settle back down again.

  “But do explain to me how you misplace a husband,” Suzette said. She smiled over the edge of her own cup. “I may need to know how to do that one day.”

  Chapter 2

  Our apartment was cold. I burrowed deeper under my thick duvet, trying to ignore the pale light coming through my window. It couldn’t be morning yet, I refused to accept it.

  I had almost drifted back to sleep when the door to my bedroom crashed open and Viv came dashing into the room.

  “Scarlett, wake up,” she cried. “I need to talk to you.”

  No, no, no! I clenched my eyes tight, refusing to be ordered about when I was unconscious and trying to remain that way. I didn’t move, hoping if she thought I was dead asleep, or perhaps plain old dead, she would go away.

  My covers were abruptly yanked off my body, exposing my flannel pajamas with the yellow rubber ducks on them to the crisp morning air. I yelped and scrambled to pull them back over me, although I wasn’t sure if it was the cold or the embarrassment over my sleeping attire that made me move faster.

  Viv wasn’t having it, however, and maintained her grip, forcing me into a tug of war over my own blankets.

  “Viv! Stop it!” I cried. “I’m going to freeze to death and it will be all your fault.”

  “Then pay attention, because I need you to make me a promise,” she said. “Wait. What are you wearing?”

  “Rubber duckies and they were a Christmas present from my parents. They’re cute so don’t be snarky,” I said.

  “Me?” She blinked at me.

  “You. Now, what’s the promise?”

  Honestly, I’d have agreed to shave my head and learn to play the bagpipes at that point as my teeth were chattering and goose bumps were rising on any exposed skin, but I knew better than to give my cousin a blind promise. I had done it last year and found myself wearing a hat that looked like a big pickle at one of the biggest social events of the season. Mortifying.

  Viv let go of her corner of the blankets and I fell back against my pillow and yanked the duvet up around my ears. Ah, blessed warmth.

  Viv was already showered and dressed and looking very professorial in a fitted gray tweed blazer with black suede elbow patches over a blue turtleneck sweater. Her long blond curls were tamed into a thick braid that hung over her shoulder. She wore a knee-length black skirt and black boots that molded to her calves but were low-heeled enough for a long day on her feet.

  “You look very pretty,” I said. I glanced at the clock. “And you’re disgustingly on time.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Monsieur Martin will be here shortly and I don’t want to keep him waiting. Listen, when you get up, I think you should take the day off. There’s no rush in finding William, and who knows, he could have forgotten all about me by now.”

  I peeked at her from behind the blanket. “He married you. I doubt he’s forgotten you.”

  “Maybe. Still I want you to promise me that you won’t make contact with him without telling me first.”

  I shook my head. I was so glad I hadn’t agreed to such a ridiculous promise.

  “It’s been almost two years. Possibly he had the marriage annulled and the whole thing is a moot point,” she said. “So there’s no need to bother him.”

  I shook my head again.

  “Or he could be dead,” she said. “Not that I think that’s an acceptable outcome, but it might have—”

  I shook my head again. “That didn’t happen,” I said.

  “You don’t know—”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “Look, I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to spook you, but I had our friend Inspector Simms do some digging. Your husband, Mr. William Graham, is alive and well and living here in Paris just as you suspected.”

  “Where?” she asked. Her bright blue eyes, one of the few features we shared, went round and she glanced from side to side as if she expected him to jump out at her from the shadows.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I called the place listed as his last known address and they said he had moved out with no forwarding address.”

  “That’s odd, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. I bit my lip. I hadn’t wanted to have this discussion until after I found him but maybe this was for the best. “It could be that he has moved in with someone and didn’t think to leave a forwarding address.”

  “Oh, God.” Viv slumped across the bed. My shins had to be digging into her back but she was apparently too distraught to care. “Maybe he left no information because he was afraid that I was going to come looking for him. Maybe he is hiding out from me. What am I going to do? This was a terrible idea. I can’t face him. He likely hates me.”

  “I don’t think he knows you well enough to hate you,” I said. “How long were you two together?”

  “Six weeks,” she said.

  “Yeah, he never got to see the real you. Trust me, there is no hatred there, confusion undoubtedly, but no hatred,” I said.

  “Apathy, then,” she said. “After all, if he doesn’t hate me, why didn’t he come after me?”

  “Because you ditched him?” I guessed. “If anything, I’ll bet he thinks you hate him.”

  “That’s awful!” Viv cried. “He must think me a complete nutter. How can I face him?”

  “Really?” I asked. “That never occurred to you before?”

  “Well, no,” she said.

  And that right there is the difference between me and Viv. She has an inability to think about how her actions affect others, whereas I spend most of my time thinking about making people happy. It’s the hospitality industry thing, you know, making sure people have what they need when they need it, turning every interaction with a customer into a positive experience.

  Frankly, it’s an exhausting line of work, but I’ve discovered that partnering with my artistic cousin, who tends to follow her own artistic whims instead of the desires of her customers, really lets me exercise that people-pleasing muscle. I’ve had to talk more than one woman out of shanking Viv with a hat pin when the hat Viv created for them was, perhaps, not quite what they were expecting. Good times.

  “And that is precisely why you need to let me make contact with him first,” I said. “I can make sure there are no hard feelings, grudges, or hits put out on anyone involved in your brief go at matrimony.”

  “A hit?” Viv frowned. “That seems overly dramatic.”

  “I was joking,” I assured her. I glanced at the clock. “Don’t you need to meet Mr. Martin now?”

  “Oh, drat.” Viv blew out an exasperated breath as she sat up. “Call me when you find him. I mean it, Scarlett. I want to talk to you before you talk to him.”

  “That I can do,” I said. I pulled the covers up over my head. “Now go away.”

  * * *

  Suzette was in the front room when I made my way downstairs. It looked as if she was just cleaning up from breakfast.

  “Good morning, Scarlett, did you sleep well?” she asked.

  Today she was wearing a bright red sweater over gray wool pants and stylish black suede half boots. She looked more like an executive than a bed-and-breakfast owner. Curious.

  “I did, thank you,” I said.

  “Café?” she asked.

  “Please,” I said. “Sorry I missed breakfast.”

  “Not at all,” she said. She placed a steaming cup of coffee down beside me with a small silver pitcher of steamed milk. “Your cousin h
ad me put aside two pain aux raisins for you. She assured me that is what you would have chosen for yourself.”

  “Viennoiserie?” I sat up straighter.

  “Oui,” she said.

  She turned to a sideboard, groaning with empty dishes, and brought back a plate covered in a blue and white cloth. When she took off the cloth, I might have wept a little.

  One of the things I love most about Paris is the breakfast pastry also called viennoiserie. As you might have guessed, I have a small bread problem, okay, bread and cheese problem, all right, it’s really a bread, cheese, and wine problem. Heck, I should probably just move to Paris.

  Pain aux raisins is a swirl of flaky pastry with raisins tucked inside. Its buttery goodness melts in your mouth and goes perfectly with a cup of hot coffee. To say I was in heaven was not an overstatement.

  What I learned on a trip to Paris several years before was the distinction between a boulangerie, a bread bakery, and a patisserie, a dessert bakery. The viennoiserie, which hovers somewhere between bread and pastry with its sweetened breads like the pain aux chocolate, is by far my favorite of all the delicious baked goods to be found in Paris and can usually be found in both.

  Viennoiserie is the style of Viennese pastry making. Turns out, the Austrians made the croissant first and brought it to Paris in 1770 when Austrian princess Marie Antoinette married King Louis XVI. The French bakers made the crescent moon–shaped pastries to honor her and then perfected them, making the croissant one of the most popular foods associated with France.

  Suzette sat down across from me while I tried to savor each bite of flaky pastry and resist the urge to stuff the whole thing in my mouth. She smiled at me as if she knew it was a struggle to maintain my good manners.

  “Monsieur Martin seemed very excited to have Vivian as a teacher,” Suzette said. “I believe this is the first time that his art school has offered hat making.”

  “Viv will do a wonderful job,” I said.

  I wondered if she heard the lack of confidence in my voice and I forced a smile to try and hide it. Judging by the way she tipped her head to study me, I was pretty sure I failed.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t think Viv could teach the class. I knew she could. It was just that the search for her husband was bound to make her more distracted than usual and Viv operated in a constant state of creative distraction as it was, so I was feeling cautiously optimistic about the class at best. Mostly, I was hoping it would keep her occupied and out of my hair while I tracked down her husband.

  “So, what’s your backstory?” I asked Suzette. I was desperate for a change of subject and she intrigued me.

  Her perfectly arched eyebrows rose on her forehead, not even causing a wrinkle. She really did have remarkable skin.

  “Backstory?” she asked. “Do you mean my life story?”

  “Yes, your history,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you don’t carry yourself like a landlord.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No, I don’t see you as a bucket-and-mop sort of woman so much as I see an executive,” I said. “A businesswoman.”

  “Running this place is a business,” she countered.

  “Yes, but you walk with a certain authority,” I said. “I get the feeling that you were the boss of many people at one time.”

  A small smile tipped the corners of her lips. “You are very astute, Scarlett. One might say that you walk with the same purpose and yet you work in a petite hat shop.”

  “Very true.” I laughed. “All right, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  She frowned and I realized I really had to cut back on the slang or pick up some French slang pronto.

  “I used to work in the hotel industry in Florida,” I said. “I managed a resort hotel with over one hundred employees.”

  She pressed the tip of her index finger to her lower lip and tapped it while she considered me. The look she gave me was sharp. She was the sort of person who didn’t miss much.

  “You are the party crasher, oui?” she asked. “The girl on the Internet who threw cake at the man who told her he was single but was still married.”

  “Ugh.” I groaned and dropped my chin to my chest. Someday, somehow, surely, I would leave behind my embarrassing past. Then again, they said that once something went viral on the Internet, it lived forever. Perhaps I just needed to embrace it.

  When I glanced up, she was biting her lower lip and trying not to laugh.

  “You know, people keep telling me that I will find that incident funny someday, but I’m still waiting,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am not laughing at you, truly.”

  “I know,” I said. “Now that my ex has been outed for his philandering, most people are laughing at him, as they should. But I dated him for so long and the whole time I thought he was separated and well on the way to divorce. I never would have gotten involved with him had I known. I don’t think I will ever forget the feeling of having my heart crushed when I walked into the reception hall of the hotel I managed for his family and found him with his wife, having an enormous anniversary party.”

  “What a bastard,” she said.

  “I prefer rat bastard,” I said. Then I smiled. “Of course, the look on his face when I threw that cake at him and nailed him, well, that has taken on a fuzzy, romantic glow for me.”

  I laughed and she joined me.

  “If it is any consolation, you made every woman who has ever been lied to or cheated on very happy. You took revenge for us all,” she said.

  “You sound as if you have some understanding of the situation,” I said.

  “You were right before, about me,” she said. “I was an executive for Magnifique, but I had to leave.”

  “Magnifique, the cosmetics company?” I asked.

  She nodded. I was silent. I didn’t want to pressure her into sharing if she wasn’t ready.

  “My boss . . .” She paused and I couldn’t help myself.

  “You had an affair with your boss?” I asked. Boy, did I get that one.

  She shook her head. “No, I had an affair with my boss’s husband.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He assured me that their marriage was over and he was just waiting for the right time to tell her,” she said. “I was stupid and believed him. She found out and I was fired.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It is no more than I deserved. When we think with our hearts instead of our heads, it seldom turns out well.”

  “And sometimes it really sucks,” I said.

  She laughed and I knew we both felt better for sharing our mutual shame. It made the burden lighter somehow.

  “And now you are off to look for your cousin’s husband,” she said. “I hope he proves worthy of the trouble.”

  I lifted my cup in a silent salute. I hadn’t said anything to Viv, or anyone else for that matter, but I had serious reservations about William Graham. A man who just let his wife walk away and never made any attempt to find her had to have some serious issues of his own, right?

  Chapter 3

  Viv, being Viv, was not a fountain of information on her husband. She knew his name, William Graham, his occupation, insurance investigator, and that he was an American living in Paris. She did not have a photo of him, an e-mail, or a telephone number.

  I had done several Internet searches on him and had found nothing—the guy wasn’t on any sort of social media, and the name “William Graham” brought up hundreds of men by that name but the only one in Paris was an accountant in Paris, Texas, who was seventy-five years old. I was pretty confident that this wasn’t our guy.

  After the public spectacle of my breakup, I had made my Internet footprint as small as possible, so I understood that not everyone wanted to live their life online for public consumption. Th
en again, I had decided to fly under the radar because of the humiliation of being labeled the party crasher, so what was William Graham hiding from? Vivian? Or was he just antisocial by nature?

  Even my friend Detective Inspector Simms of the Metropolitan Police Department hadn’t managed to dig up anything other than a last-known address in Paris for him with the flimsy information Viv supplied. I tried to console myself that at least William Graham wasn’t a wanted serial killer; even so, with almost no knowledge of him or his life, Viv had married him. It boggled.

  But this was Viv. When I had first landed in London, arriving on the ticket she had sent me when she insisted that I needed to get out of the States, I had been greeted by our business manager, Harrison Wentworth, or Harry as I liked to call him, because Viv was missing. So, the marrying on a whim thing, yeah, so Viv.

  Thinking about Harry made me feel a pang in my chest. I missed him. He was more than just our business manager to me. He was the guy I was determined would be my boyfriend as soon as I lifted my ban on dating, which was coming up in just a couple months.

  Why did I have a ban on dating? Well, my British mother in her very polite but cutting way had pointed out after my party crasher humiliation that perhaps I might take a break from dating for a year. Yes, a whole year. It was a bold maneuver for me as, up until then, I had never gone more than two weeks without a boyfriend.

  That sounds worse than it is, really. It’s just that I’m a very social person and I like boys, clearly. I mean, who doesn’t want to be taken out to dinner rather than sitting at home? Yes, one could argue that I have a problem being alone, but hey, I am ten months into this single thing and I’ve gotten pretty good at it, thank you very much. I mean, babies had been conceived and born in the time that I had been single.

  Whoa, that made me want to sit down and I would have, except I was outside walking to the nearest train station, and it was really freaking cold as the wind whipped down the street, curving its icy fingers into the collar of my wool coat as if it could freeze my skin with just its touch.

  Getting around Paris wasn’t really much different than London. We have the Underground; they have the Metro. One of the very first things I did when we arrived was to buy my Metro pass, since I used mine so much in London I would have felt naked without it.