Last Chance for Paris - Merry Farmer

Chapter 1

Paris – Spring, 1890

The Moulin Rouge was a swirl of sound and color, light and laughter. On the stage at the front of the grand theater, a dozen young women kicked up their skirts, showing their stockings and more to the ribald crowd of men and women that made up their audience. The music was loud, alcohol flowed freely, and barely-controlled chaos reigned.

It was the perfect environment for Solange Lafarge to commit a murder.

Solange moved carefully around the outer edges of the cabaret hall, keeping to the shadows and doing her best to blend in with the wallpaper. Compared to the majority of the patrons, she was dressed modestly, wearing dull colors and a bodice that buttoned all the way up to a high collar. She’d almost chosen to dress as vibrantly as any of the chorus girls and whores that moved through the crowd, teasing and entertaining men, enticing them into spending money for a few minutes alone, or picking the pockets of gentlemen who were too inebriated to notice and too rich to care if they lost a few francs. In the end, she’d decided that her dark skin would be too much of a draw and that modesty was best.

She slipped a hand carefully into one of the pockets of her skirt, closing her fingers around the handle of the small pistol she kept there. It was loaded, but not cocked. She was ready to use it, but wouldn’t until she had her target firmly in sight. He’d arrived half an hour ago, heading straight to the box where her other target—a man who deserved far worse than a quick death—always sat. The two of them sat there, high above the noise and heat of the floor, engaged in an intense discussion.

Solange narrowed her eyes at her target, Lord Louis Bramwell, Earl of Sinclair. She tightened her grip on her pistol, wanting to draw it from her pocket, aim, and get the dirty work over with. Everything about the man filled her with rage, from his too-handsome face to his broad shoulders and athletic build to the finely-tailored suit he wore. That suit was paid for by the sweat and blood of her family, of her people. She remembered the first time she’d laid eyes on him, three years before in Côte d'Ivoire, the moment she’d made the connection between Lord Sinclair and the man who had ruined her life. She’d vowed then that she would use him to exact her revenge on the man who had destroyed her life before it began.

“Do you plan to stare the man to death?”

Solange flinched and sucked in a breath as a middle-aged woman dressed all in black stepped up behind her, speaking in French. “Madame Boucher, you startled me,” she said, drawing her hand out of her pocket and clamping it over her heart.

Madame Boucher grunted and looked Solange up and down. “You’ll never be able to do what you need to do if you stand there, looking guilty as sin.”

Solange pressed her lips together, feeling that guilt in her gut and resenting the fact that she felt guilty at all. “I can do what I have to do,” she said, wishing it didn’t feel as though she were convincing herself.

It was Damien McGovern and Lord Gregory’s fault that she felt guilty about the one thing she’d believed with absolute certainty for three years. Everything she’d done since arriving in Paris—every clandestine mission into the city while her mistress, Lady Roselyn Briarwood, enjoyed the company of her cousins, every bribe and blackmail she’d been forced to pay, and every moment of danger she’d put herself into—had been cast into question, and all because Damien McGovern had told her she was better than murder. No one had ever told her she was better than anything before.

She shifted in place, fighting the well of nerves that rose through her. “You are certain he is Lafarge’s son?” she asked Madame Boucher, hating the uneasiness that roiled through her gut.

“What, him?” Madame Boucher nodded up to the box where Lord Sinclair argued with a silver-haired gentleman, Monsieur Lafarge. She laughed. “I’m certain of it.”

“But how do you know?” Solange asked. “He is an Englishman. His surname is Bramwell, not Lafarge. He is an earl.”

Madame Boucher shrugged. “The name he has and the rank he inherited are a matter of legality. We all know the truth. His mother was Lafarge’s mistress, and Lord Sinclair was born on the wrong side of the bed.”

Solange nodded,