Covenant (Paris Mob Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

she’d removed the ring from the case piece, the drawer had slid easily into place. It was perfect, ready for another four hundred years.
    “Do you have the address?” she asked Abel, one of the part time drivers and furniture movers her father kept at the ready.
    “We’ve got it,” he said.
    “Good. Wait outside until I get there.” Joelle had told her that Christophe Marchand was picky and difficult to please. She didn’t want Abel and his partner unpacking the piece until she was there to answer any questions that might arise.
    He nodded and stepped into the truck. It started with a cough and rumbled down the narrow cobblestone street. She turned the ring over in her pocket as she watched the truck turn the corner. She didn’t know why she was carrying it around, but she’d been unable to let it go after conducting her research on it the night before. It felt like a talisman of sorts, which didn’t make sense given the facts she’d unearthed about its previous owner.
    “Ready to meet the beast?” Joelle stepped up next to her.
    Charlotte laughed. “He can’t be that bad.”
    “He is,” Joelle said. “The worst.”
    Charlotte tried to imagine the man that inspired such blatant annoyance in Joelle. Was he obnoxious and sloppy? An aging aristocrat who smelled bad and had even worse manners?
    “I’ll deliver the desk and then it will be over,” Charlotte said.
    “So you’ve decided then?” Joelle asked.
    Charlotte turned to look at her. “Not definitively. But I just don’t know how I can keep it.”
    “I understand.”
    Charlotte knew that Joelle did understand, but she still felt bad. If she sold the shop, Joelle would likely be out of a job, either because the new owner would want to hire their own staff or because they would take the building and turn it into yet another coffee shop (the last thing Paris needed).
    “Let me give it some more thought,” Charlotte said, walking with Joelle into the store to get her bag before she headed to the metro. She was delaying the inevitable; she couldn’t leave her job in Los Angeles and move to Paris, and managing the shop from across the Atlantic, even with Joelle’s help, would be next to impossible. If she was smart, she would rip off the Band-Aid and be done with it.
    “Why don’t you take my scooter?” Joelle asked. “It will be easier than the metro.”
    Charlotte laughed. “Easier for whom?”
    Joelle looked perfectly natural jetting around Paris on the little purple scooter. Charlotte was fairly certain she’d break her neck. Other than her summers in Paris, she was Los Angeles born and bred, educated at Columbia in New York City where navigating the subways had quickly become second nature. She hadn’t even been near a bicycle since she was ten years old.
    “It’s fun,” Joelle said, dangling the keys in front of her.
    “I’ll pass,” Charlotte said, grabbing her bag. “But thank you.”
    “Good luck with the ogre,” Joelle said.
    “Thanks. See you in a couple hours.”
    She stepped stepped onto the cobblestone street and made her way to the metro. She’d been in Paris for two weeks. The first seven days had been occupied with grief and the arrangements for her father’s funeral and burial, both held privately per the will she’d found stored in his old desk. She’d spent the next seven days inventorying the shop, auditing the books, researching recent sales of other businesses in the area. She hadn’t expected the quandary of what to do about the shop to be so difficult. Hadn’t expected to have such an attachment, not only to her father’s business, but to the pieces he’d painstakingly purchased. She would toss and turn in the little bed in the apartment over the store, then go down the narrow staircase to the store and wander among the pieces in the moonlight. There was a nineteenth century painting by Robert Sliwinski, an original Satsuma bowl rendered in ivory and gold, a Regency side table. She ran her hand