CHAPTER ONE
RORY MORTON KNEW perfectly well she wasn’t supposed to be in this room of the extraordinarily posh Parisian private home she was meant to be cleaning. The many bedrooms, studies, and other public areas were to be dusted and carefully made even more beautiful than they already were. The kitchen was to sparkle, the bathrooms were to be left immaculate, and all the glass, chrome, and marble was to shine. The office—visible behind glass and neat as a pin—was not to be disturbed. The garage was not to be entered. The grounds on this parcel of land in the Golden Triangle, located in Paris’s upscale 8th Arrondissement, were tended to by a different service and should be left alone—unless, of course, Rory noted some cause for concern.
And the locked door on the second floor was to be read as a KEEP OUT sign and obeyed.
It had all been clearly laid out in the pages upon pages of instructions she’d received from the fussy assistant of whoever owned this surprisingly large property set down in the middle of the city that she’d been hired to clean.
Rory had come to Paris because it was Paris, which should have been reason enough. She liked to say it just like that and stare at whoever asked as if there could be no other possible answer.
But another layer to that truth was that she’d become deeply bored with her life, all of which had been lived in and around Nashville. She’d grown up in Nashville. She’d gone to college in Nashville. She loved Nashville—but Rory wanted to see more of the world than Tennessee.
When her two best friends moved to opposite coasts, Natalie to Los Angeles and Blair to New York, it was possible Rory had felt the need to throw down a power move in the shape of Paris. And yes, she now spent most of her life taking clever pictures to plaster all over her social media accounts to indicate, whenever possible, how much more amazing her life was on the Continent. #expatlife.
Once in Paris, she’d started a cleaning service because it was the most un-chic thing she could think of to do in the chicest city on earth, and therefore made her seem more authentic. It was a bonus that it also deeply horrified her parents—especially her mother, who liked to point out that she had come all the way to the States from the Philippines so her children could exceed expectations. Not clean up after other people.
Her long-suffering father preferred to drink his horror in the form of Tennessee whiskey, which he liked to say his people had been making in one form or another since they’d found their way to the Tennessee hills from Scotland or Ireland or both in the 1800s. But when he wasn’t drowning his sorrows, he was still Marty Morton, and his contacts through his decades of producing music provided Rory with a roster of wealthy clients who were only too happy to hire her to clean their Parisian second, or third, or fourth homes.
Rory liked to pretend that she was doing this because it was art. Everything is art if it’s done by an artist, she’d captioned one of her last posts, of her in profile near a priceless painting in a client’s flat, on her hands and knees with a sponge to scrub the floor.
She liked to be provocative. She could admit that. And so far it had gotten her hundreds of thousands of followers, so she figured she was doing something right.
And if Rory found she enjoyed the actual act of cleaning more than she’d expected—that it became almost meditative and reminded her in some ways of dancing—she wisely kept that to herself. It was one thing to do important work as a kind of digital performance artist. It would have been something else entirely to actually be nothing but a house cleaner.
Not that Rory was concerned about her art at the moment. Darlin, you can’t tell me cleaning a toilet is anything but cleaning a got-damn toilet, her father had said the one time she’d loftily used that word to describe her work in his hearing. And she didn’t bother rolling her eyes at her father from across the ocean because what she was concerned with was the very private room in this place that had been locked up tighter than a drum for three months now.
Frankly, she thought she deserved a medal for her restraint and respect of her client’s privacy.