Read Online Last to Know by Elizabeth Adler - Free Book Online Page B

square opposite, which she knew to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest in Paris, which information gave her a nice sense of history and of being part of a greater scheme of things. If only it were not for the phone ringing. Of course it was Harry.
    “What?” she asked, knowing it was trouble.
    “You know what,” Harry said. “Mal, it was unavoidable, I’d just finished talking to you when right before my eyes the house on the opposite bank burst into flames, and this girl with her hair on fire threw herself into the lake.”
    “And the brave detective rescued her.”
    “To serve and protect, that’s the police motto.”
    Mal listened while he told the whole story. Then, “Tell me something, Harry Jordan.” She signaled the waiter to bring another glass of the champagne with which she had been celebrating Harry’s imminent arrival. Now she might as well drown her sorrows in it.
    She said, “Tell me, Harry, do you find trouble? Or does it always just find you? And anyway, since you’ve already rescued the female swimmer with her hair on fire and I assume the house has burned down, what’s stopping you getting on that flight to Paris?”
    Harry held the phone away from his ear; he knew he should just get on a flight to Paris, that’s what he should do. But, “Her mother burned to a crisp,” he said flatly.
    “Oh, oh.” Mal was crushed, she felt small in the face of such disaster. “I hope the girl will be all right.”
    “She’s a survivor,” Harry said.
    It wasn’t what he said but the tone of voice when he said it that raised Mal’s female antennae. “I’ll bet she’s blond and nineteen,” she said, taking a swig of the fresh champagne, suddenly very much aware of being a woman alone in Paris, again. For a while, knowing Harry was coming to join her, she had lost that feeling. Now it was back in full force.
    “Twenty-one,” Harry told her.
    The cute guy she’d noticed earlier at the next table caught Mal’s eye and smiled. He looked so attractively French: lean, dark, mid-thirties, in jeans and an impeccable tweedy jacket, it even had leather elbow patches; and with a scarf tied that certain way all Frenchmen tied their scarves. Fuck it, she didn’t have to sit here and wait for Harry Jordan to get his ass on a flight, to join her in her petite Left Bank hotel room, to make love to her … she could trade him in for this French guy right now.
    “You’ve broken my heart, Harry Jordan,” she said, quietly so the Frenchman would not hear, if indeed he spoke English, which she guessed he did because somehow all foreigners did. Tears stood in her eyes and she blinked them away, turning her head, careful not to grab a tissue and blot them. She wanted no one to see her cry over a man.
    She had to shuffle in her bag for that tissue because those tears simply had to come out, and the Frenchman was gazing sympathetically, leaning toward her, offering a fresh supply, calling to the waiter for more champagne.
    “Please,” the Frenchman said, looking into Mal’s teary blue eyes with his concerned brown ones. “Allow me to help.”
    Mal thought maybe she should.
    At the same time, though, she was thinking if she wanted to hold on to Harry, she had better find out who exactly the new competition was. Harry had not mentioned the girl’s name but Mal was not a TV detective for nothing. She immediately texted her office. Her assistant, Lulu, would know what to do. Within hours, Mal would bet, she would know more about her new “rival” than Harry. Even sooner perhaps because she wasn’t caught up in “helping” the poor burned girl, though it was actually the poor mother who had, as Harry so succinctly put it, “burned to a crisp.”
    Mal’s sharp woman’s mind couldn’t help but wonder, among all the other questions currently crowding her head, how much the burned-to-the-ground house was insured for. It didn’t take a genius to know the poor-twenty-one-year-old-homeless blonde would