into buying a bouquet of flowers from a vendor who was closing down, so she carried those in one hand, sniffing them every few moments, clasping Will's hand with her free one. Dusk faded into night, night into long past midnight. Yet still they walked, block after block, until their feet were tired.
She knew they had to go back, knew she had to pack, but she knew they'd make love one last time in his apartment, and she didn't want there to be a
Around three in the morning, a mist settled, making the streets glow and the night lights shine like diamonds. They looked at each other, and finally turned around and started the return to his place. Neither said anything…until Will was turning the key in the lock, and she had the hopeless, helpless thought that this was the last time she'd ever see him do that.
So she charged in, as if she had energy, determined to turn this mood around. He offered to pour her a glass of wine while she headed straight in to pack her belongings, which were scattered all over his apartment.
'We've only got two hours before we have to leave for the airport,' he warned her.
'Eek.' There, she'd made him smile. She put him to work folding, a job he was amazingly awful at, while she flew around gathering her things.
At least, that was her intent. And it worked, her busyness, until she dove in her bag for her tickets… and came across the blue vial of perfume. The scent of it, the sentiment of it, the uniqueness of it, reminded her of everything she'd found in Paris.
Especially Will.
When she looked up, he was motionless in the doorway.
'Look,' she said, 'I have to go.'
'I know you do.'
'My entire life is in chaos at home. I have to get it straightened out. It can't be done from here.'
'Like dumping the fiance,' Will said. He'd been folding a sweater. It looked somewhat like an accordion with arms.
She tried a watery laugh, took over the folding job. She didn't comment about dumping Jason, any more than she ever did when he brought up her fiance. Jason was her problem, her business. She tried for a more cheerful note.
'And you. Mr. White Knight, are going to be glad to get your place back to yourself, aren't you? No more girly shampoos in your shower, no more earrings on the table, no more hogging your covers. When you saved me from the mugger crisis, it's not as if you planned on taking in a boarder indefinitely, huh?'
She thought he might laugh. Instead he hooked her hand, the one that held a handful of thongs and bras. She dropped them at the look in his eyes. 'Not a boarder.' he said huskily. 'A lover.'
'Yeah…a lover,' she whispered back. And then out it came, the aching pain in her heart. 'How am I supposed to leave you. Will?'
The suitcase got shooshed to the floor. With the overhead light on. her clothing draped on the spread and chairs and everywhere else, he reached for her as fast, as hopelessly, as fiercely as she reached for him.
It wasn't like the other times. She wanted to beguile him with kisses, enchant him with touch, cajole his heart. She wanted to be inseparably part of him. She wanted this to be the best sex he'd ever had. She wanted him never to forget her. She wanted to be loved, by him, only by him. forever and ever.
The first part of that was easy enough.
It was the last part she couldn't have. When it was over, when they were both lying there, damp and out of breath, she wrapped her arms around him and refused to let go.
Except, of course, the clock was ticking.
Will seemed to realize the time at the same moment. 'Hell,' he grumbled. 'We might just make your flight if we start moving at a dead run.'
CHAPTER SEVEN
THERE WAS NO GETTING around fast anywhere in Orly. It was one of those discombobulated, crazy airports where you walked miles to get nowhere, stood in lines that never ended, had your nerves and temper frayed before you even started.
On the other hand. Will thought, he'd gotten her here. His plan for the whole last day had been just this. To keep both of them running a hundred miles an hour so she wouldn't have a chance to cry, to get upset and emotional, before they had to split up.
Both of them looked like wrecks. No sleep at all. But she looked like a cute wreck, with her flyaway hair and whisker-burned cheeks and lopsided sweater. He was standing with her through the initial check-in procedure, which was going-naturally-slower than molasses.
And that was when-instead of doing the emotional thing he'd been trying to avoid-she did the nosy, prying thing.
He almost wished she'd have cried instead.
There were still six passengers ahead when she started. 'Will… you know, if I'm stuck straightening out this impossible relationship or nonrelationship with my father. I think you should feel stuck working out something with your father, too.'
When he'd fallen insanely in love with her. he'd forgotten that part-the part where she opened emotional doors without knocking and talked in completely feminine sentences. 'One plus one does not equal Q, Kelly. Your issues with your father are a universe different than the issues I've got with mine.'
She moved up a spot, but her gaze was on him. not on the line. 'Actually, they're really similar. They're both impossible situations. They're both our fathers. And our unresolved issues with them have defined who we are. And…'
'And what?' He was getting miffed.
'And if you decide to mend fences with your dad, then you'd have to come home to South Bend.'
But he couldn't go home.
Suddenly it was her turn in the line, and then she had to go through security, past the gates where he couldn't go.
He kissed her, long and hard and hopelessly. She walked backward, as if she wanted every last second of looking at his face that she could have. And when she was hustled through the last gates, out of sight, he searched for a waiting area with windows where he could watch her plane take off.
The spring morning was still misty and damp. Rude travelers jostled for spots at the window and he just jostled back, watching until the plane turned into a bird, then disappeared in the sky altogether.
He couldn't go home, he repeated to himself. But the sudden hole in his gut felt like nothing in the known universe could fill it.
There was nothing really new about that hole. He already knew he'd fallen in love with her. In love, like he'd never been in love. Love, like he'd never known love. A woman…like no other woman.
Bleary-eyed, zombie tired, he battled his way through the crowd toward the exit.
People think they fall in love in Paris every spring, he told himself firmly. It was a fantasy. It didn't mean it was real.
It was just…Paris.
And spring.
And her unforgettable brown eyes.
He put his hands in his pockets and stalked outside, trying to remember where he'd parked the car. The late- night mist had turned into a steady morning drizzle that soaked his head and blurred his vision. His thoughts were just as dark.
He couldn't go back to South Bend. Kelly didn't know, couldn't know, how bad it was for him there. It wasn't an option.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
WHEN KELLY CLIMBED off the plane in South Bend, the clock claimed it was two in the afternoon, but Paris time would be nine at night…and since she hadn't slept on either of the flights home, her body didn't know what
