Chapter One
April 2015 – Paris
Basic Macarons
A circular meringue-based confection with a rounded top, smooth filling, and flat base
Without looking, Genna stepped off the curb and narrowly escaped being lobbed from the bumper of a speeding Citroën when a man grabbed her elbow and yanked her back.
“Gardez-vous, madame.”
Genna swung around and collided with the man’s other arm, sending his phone clattering to the pavement.
“Merde!”
“Désolée!” Genna’s heart twanged like an unbound bungee cord at the near miss.
Ignoring her, the man stooped to retrieve his phone and then cradled it between both hands.
Chiseled features, a South of France tan, dark hair speckled with gray, pushing fifty. He looked like he belonged on the cover of L’Urbane Parisien: Watch Him Smolder—Mature Edition.
Mais oui.
Wonder replaced terror. Genna could count on the fingers of one hand how often in recent years she’d been within ten yards of a man who had made her little heart flutter.
Actually, she didn’t need any fingers.
“Merci beaucoup!”
Still ignoring her, Monsieur Hottie looked down at his phone. The screen flickered. Sighing with relief, he bent low over the display, almost planting firm lips on the mirrored surface.
“Merci,” she said again. “La circulation . . .” The traffic.
“Ah, oui.” The man let loose a stream of French presumably about the dreadful state of the traffic in the nation’s capital. Genna pasted on her trying-to-understand-French smile, but only the odd word penetrated—voiture was car, extraordinaire—obvious, another merde—the one French swear word she knew.
The man cocked his head toward the pedestrian light, which was still green. After making a good show of looking both right and left, he started across the road. Genna followed a few paces behind, her heart still hammering, acutely conscious of how ridiculous she must look to him—a woman pushing fifty in sensible running shoes and with a purple daypack slung across one shoulder.
When they reached the safety of the other side, the man glanced back.
“Merci!” Genna said breathlessly. She smiled, and for a second, the man’s eyes widened, his lips twitching with amusement.
“De rien, madame.” It is nothing.
He raised one hand in a wave, then turned left into the narrow Rue de Grenelle. As Genna watched him go, an adrenalin-spiked elation flooded her. She felt like throwing her head back and laughing up at the sharp blue sky. She was in Paris! Everything was going to be fine so long as she watched where she was going. She’d been so right to come.
Genna carried on to Rue de Sèvres and from there along Rue Bonaparte to her apartment, steps from the Boulevard Saint-Germain and directly across the street from the fabled Café Les Deux Magots. As soon as she found a way to get online, she’d email Nancy and describe the dishy Frenchman who’d just saved her from Death by Citroën. Nancy was convinced that Genna had gone to Paris to find a new man.
Nancy was dead wrong, but no matter how many times Genna explained why she’d chosen Paris, Nancy had refused to believe her.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d said the day before Genna left. “After what you’ve been through? Besides, you can’t spend every minute of your day cooking.”
Oh yes, she could! Genna wrestled open the heavy wooden door to her building, crossed the quiet courtyard, and started up the circular staircase. Five flights later, her chest heaving, she rounded the last twist to come forehead to toe with two scuffed shoes.
“Bonjour, madame.”
She looked up to see a man who had long since bid au revoir to the back end of eighty.
“Ah, bonjour. Um . . .”
“Gustav Leblanc,” he said, raising one hoary eyebrow.
“Yes? Oh! I’m sorry. I mean, désolée. Please, come in.”
Genna squeezed past him, her shopping bags clanking. Monsieur narrowed his eyes. She unlocked the door and ushered him into the dingy apartment, feeling embarrassed about the hideous art, stained walls, and shabby furniture until she remembered that as the owner of the apartment, Monsieur Leblanc could hardly object to its decor.
He planted himself in the middle of the living room and stared as she deposited the bags on the couch. He exuded a feral, gnome-like quality wrapped in body odor laced with the stench of stale Gauloises.
“You are comfortable.” It was not a question.
“The apartment is fine. Thank you.” The attendant at the rental agency where Genna had picked up the key had told her that the owner was a recluse whom she’d likely never meet.
And yet, here he was.
Monsieur shuffled to a heavy sideboard next to the table, pried open a drawer, and extracted several sheets of paper. “You see?”
“Ah, no.” Genna walked toward him.
“Rules!” Monsieur Leblanc barked. “Les règles. Four languages! Anglais, allemand, italien, et, bien sûr, le français. Please to read them. This place, this appartement, belonged to my grand-mère.”
Genna wondered if old Grandma Leblanc had been responsible for the five-foot-wide needlepoint reproduction of La Grande Odalisque by Ingres fastened with steel pegs to the wall above the couch. The figure of the nude courtesan resembled Ingres’s painting in size, shape, and subject, but the resemblance stopped there. Checkered patches in three shades of pinky-orange wool made the courtesan’s skin look like a sunset on acid.
She started to read the faded, uneven type of Monsieur’s rules. The subject of water, or, more accurately, its lack, occupied the entire first page. Long hot showers were not something Monsieur countenanced for tenants, nor for himself, evidently.
“Thank you. Merci.”
He grunted. “Bon. Now, you see books?” He gestured to a dust-choked bookshelf under the window. Most of the books were English paperbacks and Parisian guidebooks, with spines showing dates in the eighties, almost three decades earlier. There was even one from the year she was born. The Beatles might still have been together.
“Books are for you, but please . . .” He wagged his finger under Genna’s nose. “Do not take them from the appartement. I have a list!”
“No, of course not.”
“And cooking.”
“What about it?” Genna edged in front of the shopping bags, hoping Monsieur wouldn’t notice the stainless-steel whisk slithering out of its bag and threatening to bounce across the threadbare carpet.
“Le gaz. You know how to use?”
“I have gas at home.”
“Do not use too much.”
She wondered what constituted too much. Now was probably not the best time to tell him she planned to cook a great deal during her stay in the apartment and that her shopping bags bulged with cooking utensils. Genna needed a well-equipped kitchen for the work she planned to do in Paris. The only cooking equipment in the dusty kitchen was a frying pan caked with the muck of a thousand dinners, a battered saucepan with its coating long stripped, and one knife warped into a corkscrew.
“Eh bien.” Monsieur grinned, showing brown teeth that tightened her stomach and made her glad she hadn’t eaten for several hours. He handed her a creased card. “I run the tabac on Rue de Grenelle. Come see me if you need anything. My son also. He is un avocat, a lawyer. He helps me when he can.”