A Perfect Paris Christmas - Mandy Baggot Page 0,69

gritted her teeth and willed herself to dig into special reserves. They had run maybe just over a kilometre. She hoped he wasn’t going to suggest more than three or four more of them…

They rounded a corner and Keeley let out a gasp. This time it wasn’t from the exercise, but because of the view ahead. A cobbled street had appeared like someone had just drawn away a curtain of modern times and revealed a scene from yesteryear. There were thick stone walls and iron gates, lumps of rock attached to the base of houses and old-fashioned gas-style lampposts glistening with frost. This didn’t look like the previous rich person’s city paradise, it seemed as if something rustic and ancient had been plopped right into the centre of Paris’s metropolis.

Keeley slowed her run to take it all in. ‘What is this road called?’ she asked.

‘Rue Berton,’ Ethan answered. He was back alongside her now, matching her running rhythm. ‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s like nothing I would have imagined finding in the middle of Paris, so close to the Eiffel Tower.’

‘I know,’ Ethan replied. ‘You can imagine how things were years ago, n’est-ce pas?’

‘Monks,’ Keeley answered, continuing to jog, being careful with the sheen on the cobbles here. Slipping for the second time this break wouldn’t be ideal.

‘Pardon?’

‘Sorry,’ Keeley said. ‘I just imagined monks walking down the narrow lanes, whispering in prayer or something. It’s so… atmospheric.’

*

Ethan had always thought it was atmospheric. The place of daydreams. When he was younger, when he used to escape, he’d made his way down here to roam the alleyways and paths imagining he was someone else. Not a monk perhaps, but someone who wasn’t a street kid from the orphanage. Someone who could be anyone he wanted to be. And that chance had come… in the shape of Ferne.

‘Do you live near here?’ Keeley asked him as they picked their way up the street. The road narrowed significantly, until it was all but a pathway. She dropped in behind him.

‘I live in the Opera District,’ he answered. ‘I have a small apartment above a bakery. I rented it simply because of the aromas.’ He stalled suddenly, acutely aware he had just said something wrong. ‘Oh… I am so sorry. I did not mean to mention the smell. I—’

‘It’s OK,’ she answered. ‘I recall the amazing scent of fresh bread.’

‘It was a ridiculous thing to say. Thoughtless!’

‘It’s OK,’ she insisted again. ‘Honestly.’

He kept running, passing flashes of festive in the windows of the houses not knowing how to pick the conversation back up after that faux pas.

‘So, I’ve been wondering, what you do… as a job I mean.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Do you work at the zoo?’

‘The zoo?’ He suddenly wondered if he might smell. He hadn’t managed a shower this morning. He had woken irritably at the early alarm call until he remembered who he was meeting for the run. Then it dawned on him. Pepe.

‘When we met you were chasing a penguin,’ Keeley reminded.

He wanted the pathway to widen again, so they could jog next to each other. As cute as her bobbing ponytail and rear view was, he really wanted to look into her eyes. ‘I was.’

‘So, you don’t work at the zoo?’

‘Not the zoo,’ he answered. And he couldn’t tell her the truth about why he had acquired Pepe. He didn’t want her to think he was juvenile. And it had been juvenile. In the end his prank had played right into Louis’s hands. ‘I… work in…’

Emerging from the narrow street and onto a bigger road there was the sudden sound of squealing brakes followed by a loud wail that sounded very much like a cry for help.

Thirty

For a second, Keeley froze. Those sounds. Metal on metal. A tell-tale crunch. And then she came-to as a cry hit the air.

‘Mon chien! Mon chien!’

There was a small boy in the middle of the road ahead, his body draped over the prostrate form of a shaggy-coated brown-coloured dog. Keeley’s heart was already in her mouth as she powered towards them. It was the dog, not the boy. The boy had shouted out. The dog was not barking.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

The boy cried out again, this time so loud and with such anguish that Keeley dropped to her knees onto the ground next to the possibly-ten-year-old. ‘It’s OK. It’s alright.’ She had no idea if it was going to be alright. The dog was very still and with the boy lying over it