The Last Time I Saw Paris Read Online Free

operation. These are only papers with stamps. If something goes wrong, not only have I never heard of you, Claire, no one else will have either.
    The roar of the engine and churning propellers filled the compartment as the plane skimmed across the water’s surface, then, with a lurch, took to the sky. Claire pressed back in her seat as she watched the airport then the skyline drop away. The last time she’d run, the very day Mama died, there had been a broken-down farmhouse behind her. She swore she’d never end up like that, worn down with nothing left but despair. Staring down at the Atlantic, Claire could still feel the packed dirt road beneath her bare feet.
    The plane straightened out and the noise dimmed to a roar. Claire pulled the diamond wedding ring off her finger and squeezed it in her palm. The bite of the stone against her skin didn’t diminish the ache growing in her diaphragm.
    It wasn’t the end of her marriage that hurt, she realized, but the waste of effort, of years. She slipped the band on the ring finger of her right hand and smiled grimly. It was the first diamond she’d been given as Claire Harris Stone. Too conventional for her taste and not the biggest rock, by far, but damn well paid for. Her marriage, after all, had always been one of convenience. Convenient for him to own a pretty, high-society wife he could cheat on; convenient for her to have the wealth and position she needed. She breathed in and welcomed the throbbing in her chest. It meant she was still alive. It meant another chance.
    She flipped open her new passport. A blurry photograph of a dark blonde, eyes shadowed, expression formal, passable for Claire caught on a rough morning. The adjacent page was filled with official looking stamps permitting travel to Europe. She looked out the window as the plane shifted its flight. Twenty-six hours to Lisbon. There she would drop off the end of the world. A train to Paris. Then Laurent and a new life.
    She’d met Laurent Olivier last summer at a gallery in Manhattan. Half-drunk and bored as hell, she was wasting the afternoon with a friend looking at photos of Paris: Old men with gnarled faces leaned against worn brick buildings in narrow streets. Children smoked cigarettes on street corners. Lovers kissed in shadowed doorways. Darkly romantic, yes, but not something to hang over the mantel. She beelined for the alcohol.
    Three cocktails later, Claire lost her friend to a married Texas oilman and found a quiet corner. She was about to hail a cab home when she saw it. All by itself, a small photo in a thick black frame.
    “This one is so different, it doesn’t fit with the others.” A delicious accent, the words formed deep in the mouth.
    She was so absorbed by the picture, it was a moment before she turned. Still, her body flushed when she saw him. Tall and lean; his lips, directly in front of her gaze, were full and brought to mind how they might feel on her skin. His features were angular, an artist’s sharp stroke for a cheekbone, a jaw, the nose. A half-empty glass was gripped in one hand, a burning Gauloises in the other. He squinted through the curling smoke.
    “You like it, no?” His warm brown eyes stared intently into hers. “Then I am glad I brought it. I am Laurent Olivier. This is my show.”
    She forgot the taxi.
    In the summer that followed, Claire hadn’t learned a lick of French, but she knew the bitter tar smell of a Gauloises and why her society friends had insisted for years she take a lover on the side. More importantly, she was reminded that, after five cold years of being another of her husband’s acquisitions, there was a living, feeling woman underneath all that polish. Of course, her friends hadn’t meant for Claire to chase off after anyone, no matter how talented he was in the sheets.
    Neither had Claire.
     
     
    C laire shifted in her seat as she remembered her last afternoon with Laurent. A hotel room like countless others in Greenwich Village. The