We'll Always Have Paris. Barbara Bretton

losing control and if she didn’t get out of there right that second she would say something she would regret. Something like I still love you or Maybe we should give it another try, and she would have to endure the look of pity in his eyes.

      Kate scrambled into her clothes as if the car were on fire and she had ten seconds to save her own life.

      Which, come to think of it, may not have been that far from the truth.

      She had made a big fat mistake. One of those mistakes that happened to other, dumber women who ended up crying their eyes out on some relationship expert’s shoulder on national television.

      She hadn’t planned to sleep with her own husband. It was winter, for crying out loud. She hadn’t even shaved her legs.

      For three weeks afterward she held her breath, praying to God and all the saints that their stupidity hadn’t resulted in a middle-aged pregnancy. She had the feeling Ryan heard her sigh of relief all the way up there in Boston.

      Not that they had had any direct communication since the engagement party. They had been hiding behind Alexis and their lawyers, passing messages back and forth like grade-school kids behind their teacher’s back.

      If their daughters ever got wind of what had happened, they would immediately jump to the wrong conclusion. Her children were adults, but they clung to the childish hope that their parents would somehow get back together.

      She had bumped into Alexis as she ran upstairs after the incident in the Toyota. Kate had been wild with emotion, almost crazy. She had yanked her wedding ring off her finger and flung it into the deepest recesses of the top drawer of her old dresser. It wasn’t until she turned around and saw her middle child standing in the doorway looking both puzzled and horrified that she managed to pull in the reins on her romantic craziness and settle back down into being the mother of the bride.

      She thought about the ring sometimes, but she had yet to drive back out to the house and retrieve it. There was always something else to do, somewhere else she needed to be. She knew she could ask Taylor to FedEx it to her but she hadn’t done that yet either.

      Maybe there was something symbolic about tossing the ring into the darkness of a forgotten drawer. At first she had felt naked without her ring, but after a while she grew used to the feeling. Maybe she should gather up all of those old, troublesome memories and throw them into the darkness with the ring and be done with all of it.

      The truth was that fiery interlude in the rental car hadn’t changed a thing between them. The wheels of divorce kept on rolling as the weeks slipped away. In fact, they could have signed the final papers yesterday before she flew out of New York but somehow it didn’t seem right for parents to end their marriage one week before their daughter’s wedding.

      Weddings were about living happily ever after. Nobody wanted a reminder that sometimes not even love was enough to keep two people together.

      She wouldn’t be able to avoid him once Wedding Week began. That much was certain. They would walk their daughter down the aisle together. They would pose for pictures together. They would step out onto the dance floor together as the parents of the bride.

      Temptation would be everywhere, but this time she would be prepared.

      She would stay away from champagne, hide indoors when the moon was high and bright in the sky, and she would definitely stay away from rented Toyotas and the men who drove them.

      But it had been so wonderful to see him again at the party…to share a secret smile as they toasted their daughter’s happiness…to melt into his arms as she had in the beginning when it was all new and wonderful and Paris still beckoned them like a glittering golden dream….

      Laughter drifted up from the bistro on the corner and carried with it the intoxicating scents of old dark Gauloises, buttery onions and wine so deep and red it stained your lips when you drank it. If she closed her eyes and blocked out the traffic and the laughter, she could almost hear the wistful notes of La Vie en Rose.

      She brought herself up short. These trips down memory lane were getting her nowhere but depressed.

      She was in Paris, the most beautiful city in the world, and she wasn’t going to waste time mooning over the past. Who needed romance when she could window-shop Chanel?

      But first things first. If she was going to enjoy every minute, she needed a long shower, a huge pot of strong black coffee and an obscene amount of freshly baked goodies.

      The women she had noticed on the way into the city from the airport had all been slim and amazingly stylish. She could only hope it had something to do with pastries.

       CHAPTER TWO

      AS IT TURNED OUT, the number-one footballer in England wasn’t big on interviews and Ryan was finished in less time than it took to eat a Big Mac with fries. The superstar’s answers were, in random order, yes, no, I dunno and a firm maybe. Good thing the guy had been given a hard head and a great right foot, because clearly conversation wasn’t his strong suit. But the most important words, “I’m retiring at the end of the season” had come through loud and clear.

      Why Derek Brody chose to hand that exclusive to an American was Celeste Beaulieu’s secret. How his aunt-in-law even knew Brody was a mystery for the ages, but when she phoned Ryan in Boston and asked if he wanted a sit-down interview with the elusive sports star he didn’t have to think twice.