From USA Today bestselling author Kimberly Belle comes a deliciously twisty new thriller following a married couple vacationing in Paris whose trip takes a dark turn when the husband goes missing, dredging up secrets from both of their pasts, perfect for fans of The Paris Apartment.
When Stella met Adam, she felt like she finally landed a nice, normal guy – a welcome change from her previous boyfriend and her precarious jetsetter lifestyle with him. She loves knowing she can always depend on Adam, which is why when he goes missing during a random explosion in Paris, she panics. Right after what is assumed to be a terrorist attack, she’s interviewed live on TV by reporters, begging anyone who knows anything about her husband’s whereabouts to come forward and is quickly dubbed “The Paris Widow.”
As the French police investigate, it’s revealed that Adam was on their radar as a dealer in the black market for priceless antiquities, making deals with very high-profile and dangerous clients. Reeling from this news and growing suspicions about her husband, Stella can’t shake the feeling that she’s being followed. And with Adam assumed dead, she realizes that whoever was responsible for the bombing will come after her next. Everything – and everyone -- that Stella has tried to keep in her duplicitous past might be her only means of survival and finding out what really happened to Adam.
An irresistible and fast-paced read set in some of Europe’s most inviting locales, The Paris Widow explores how sinister secrets of the past stay with us – no matter how far we travel.
Prologue
Nice,
France
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.—Oscar Wilde
At Nice’s Côte d’Azur Airport, the pretty
woman coming down the jetway looked like every other bleary-eyed traveler.
Rumpled T-shirt over jeans with an indeterminate stain on the right thigh,
hair shoved into a messy ponytail mussed from the headrest. A backpack was
slung over her right shoulder, weighed down with items that weren’t technically
hers but looked like they could be. She’d sorted through them on the seven-hour
flight, just long enough to make the contents feel familiar.
“Don’t lose it,” the Turkish man said
when he hung it on her arm, and she hadn’t.
The jetway dumped her into the terminal,
and she trailed behind a family of five, past gates stretched out like spider
legs, along the wall of windows offering a blinding view of the sparkling Mediterranean,
a turquoise so bright it burned her eyes. The backpack bounced against her
shoulder bone, and her heart gave a quiet, little jingle.
She made it through passport control
without issue, thanks to her careful selection of the agent behind the glass. A
man, first and foremost. Not too old or too young, not too handsome. A five to
her solid eight—or so she’d been told by more than one man. This one must have
agreed because he stamped her passport with an appreciative nod. French men
were like that. One smile from a woman out of their league, and they melted
like a cream-filled bonbon.
She thanked him and slid her passport
into her pocket.
In it were stamps to every country in
Europe and the Americas, from her crisscrosses over every continent including
Antarctica, from her detours to bask on the famous beaches of Asia, Australia,
the South Seas. More than once, she’d had to renew the booklet long before it
expired because she’d run out of empty spots for customs agents to stamp. She
was particularly proud of that, and of how she could look any way you wanted
her to look, be anyone you needed her to be. Today she was playing the role of
American Tourist On A Budget.
At baggage claim, she slid the backpack
down an aching shoulder and checked the time on her cell. Just under six hours
for this little errand, plenty of time assuming she didn’t hit any unexpected
roadblocks. If she didn’t get held up at customs, if the taxi line wasn’t too
long, if traffic on the A8 wasn’t too awful, which it would be because getting
in and out of Monte Carlo was always a nightmare at this time of year. If if if. If she missed the flight to
London, she was screwed.
A buzzer sounded, and the baggage
carousel rumbled to a slow spin.
At least she didn’t look any more
miserable than the people milling around her, their faces long with jet lag.
She caught snippets of conversation in foreign tongues, German, Italian,
Arabic, French, and she didn’t need a translator to know they were bitching
about the wait. The French were never in a hurry, and they were always striking
about something. She wondered what it could be this time.
Thirty-eight eternal minutes later, the
carousel spit out her suitcase. She
hauled it from the band with a grunt, plopped the heavy backpack on top and
followed the stream of tourists to the exit.
Walk with purpose. Look the customs agent
in the eye. Smile, the fleeting kind with your lips closed, not too big or too
cocky. Act breezy like you’ve got nothing to prove or to hide. By now she knew
all the tricks.
The customs agent she was paired with was
much too young for her liking, his limbs still lanky with the leftovers of
puberty, which meant he had something to prove to the cluster of more senior
agents lingering behind him. She ignored their watchful gazes, taking in his
shiny forehead, the way it was dotted with pimples, and dammit, he was going to
be a problem.
He held up a hand, the universal sign for
halt. “Avez-vous quelque chose à
déclarer?”
Her fingers curled around the suitcase
handle, clamping down. She gave him an apologetic smile. “Sorry, but I don’t
speak French.”
That part was the truth, at least. She didn’t speak it, at least not well and
not unless she absolutely had to. And her rudimentary French wasn’t necessary
just yet.
But she understood him well enough, and
she definitely knew that last word. He was asking if she had something to
declare.
The agent gestured to her suitcase.
“Please, may I take a look in your luggage?” His English was heavy with accent,
his lips slick with spit, but at least he was polite about it.
She gave a pointed look at the exit a few
feet away. On the other side of the motion-activated doors, a line of people
leaned against a glass-and-steel railing, fists full of balloons and colorful
bouquets. With her free hand, she wriggled her fingers in a wave, even though
she didn’t know a single one of them.
She looked back at the agent with another
smile. “Is that really necessary? My flight was delayed, and I’m kind of in a
hurry. My friends out there have been waiting for hours.”
Calm. Reasonable. Not breaking the
slightest sweat.
The skin of his forehead creased in a
frown. “This means you have nothing to declare?”
“Only that a saleslady lied to my face
about a dress I bought being wrinkle resistant.”
She laughed, but the agent’s face
remained as stony as ever.
He beckoned her toward an area behind
him, a short hallway lined with metal tables. “S’il vous plait. The second table.”
Still, she didn’t move. The doors slid
open, and she flung another glance at the people lined up outside. So close
yet so far.
As if he could read her mind, the agent
took a calculated step to his left, standing between her and the exit. He swept
an insistent arm through the air, giving her little choice. The cluster of
agents were paying more attention now.
She huffed a sigh. Straightened her
shoulders and gave her bag a hard tug. “Okay, but fair warning. I’m on the tail
end of a three-week vacation here, which means everything in my suitcase is
basically a giant pile of dirty laundry.”
Again, the truth. Miami to Atlanta to LA
to Tokyo to Dubai to Nice, a blur of endless hours with crummy movies and soggy
airplane food, of loud, smelly men who drank vodka for breakfast, of kids
marching up and down the aisles while everybody else was trying to sleep. What
she was wearing was the cleanest thing she had left, and she was still
thousands of miles from home.
She let go of the handle, and the
suitcase spun and wobbled, whacking the metal leg of the table with a hard
clang. Let him lug the heavy thing onto the inspection table himself.
She stood with crossed arms and watched
him spread her suitcase open on the table. She wasn’t lying about the laundry
or that stupid dress, which currently looked like a crumpled paper bag. He
picked through her dirty jeans and rumpled T-shirts, rifled through blouses and
skirts. When he got to the wad of dirty underwear, he clapped the suitcase
shut.
“See?” she said. “Just a bunch of dirty
clothes.”
“And your other bag?”
The backpack dangling from her shoulder,
an ugly Tumi knockoff. Her stomach dropped, but she made sure to hold his gaze.
“Nothing in here, either. No meat, no
cheese, no forgotten fruit. I promise.”
She’d done that once, let an old apple
sink to the bottom of her bag for a hyped-up beagle to sniff out, and she paid
for it with a forty-five minute wait at a scorching Chilean airport. It was a
mistake she wouldn’t make again.
“Madame,
please. Do not make me ask you again.”
The little shit really said it. He really
called her madame. This kid who was
barely out of high school was making her feel old and decrepit, while in the
same breath speaking to her like she was a child. His words were as infuriating
as they were alarming. She hooked a thumb under the backpack’s strap, but she
didn’t let it go.
And yet what choice did she have? She
couldn’t run, not with those senior agents watching. Not with this pubescent
kid and his long, grasshopper limbs. He’d catch her in a hot second.
She told herself there was nothing to
find. That’s what the Turkish man had promised her with a wink and a smile,
that nobody would ever know. He swore she’d cruise right on through customs.
And she had, many, many times.
As she slid the backpack from her arm
with another dramatic sigh, she hoped like hell he wasn’t lying. “Please
hurry.”
The agent took the bag from her fingers
and emptied it out on the table. He took out the paperback and crinkled
magazines, the half-eaten bag of nuts with the Japanese label, the wallet and
the zippered pouch stuffed with well-used cosmetics that had never once
touched her face. He lined the items up, one after the other, until the
contents formed a long, neat row on the shiny metal surface. The backpack hung
in his hand, deflated and empty.
She lifted a brow: See?
But then he did something she wasn’t
expecting. He turned the backpack upside down, just…upended the thing in the
air. Crumbs rained onto the table. A faded receipt fluttered to the ground.
And there it was, a dull but discernible
scraping sound, a sudden weight tugging at the muscles in his arm, like
something inside the backpack shifted.
But nothing else fell out. There were no
internal pockets.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” With a clanging heart,
she pointed to the stuff on the table. “Can I put that back now? I really have
to go.”
The agent stared at her through a long,
weighted silence, like a held breath.
Hers.
He slapped the backpack to the table, and
she cringed when he shoved a hand in deep, all the way up to his elbow. He felt
around the sides and the bottom, sweeping his fingers around the cheap
polyester lining. She saw when he made contact with the source of the noise by
the way his face changed.
The muscles in her stomach tightened.
“Excuse me, this is ridiculous. Give it back.”
The agent didn’t let go of the backpack.
He reached in his other hand, and now there was another terrifying sound—of
fabric, being ripped apart at the seams.
“Hey,” she said, lunging for the
backpack.
He twisted, blocking her with his body.
A few breathless seconds later he pulled
it out, a small, flat object that had been sewn into the backpack lining. Small
enough to fit in the palm of his hand. Almost like he’d been looking for it.
“What is this?” he said, holding it in
the air between them.
“That’s a book.” It was the only thing
she could think of to say, and it wasn’t just any book. It was a
gold-illuminated manuscript by a revered fourteenth-century Persian poet, one
of the earliest copies from the estate of an Islamic art collector who died in
Germany last year. Like most of the items in his collection, this one did not
technically belong to him.
“I can see it’s a book. Where did you get
it?”
Her face went hot, and she had to steady
herself on the metal table—the same one he was settling the book gently on top
of. He turned the gold-leafed paper with careful fingers, and her mind
whirled. Should she plead jet lag? Cry or pretend to faint?
“I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
This, finally, was the truth. Today was
the first time she’d seen the book with her own eyes.
The agent looked up from the Arabic
symbols on the page, and she didn’t miss the gotcha gleam in his eyes. The way
his shiny forehead had gone even shinier now, a million new pinpricks of
satisfied sweat. His gaze flitted over her shoulder, and she understood the
gesture perfectly.
He was summoning backup.
She was wondering about French prison
conditions.
His smile was like ice water on her skin. “Madame, I must insist you come with me.”
Excerpted from THE PARIS WIDOW by Kimberly Belle. Copyright © 2024 by Kimberly Belle. Published by Park Row Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
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