A Second Chance at Paris Read online

  A SECOND CHANCE

  AT PARIS

  COLE McCADE

  A second chance at Paris. A second chance at love.

  BAYOU’S END #1

  Copyright © 2015 by Cole McCade

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher / author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at the address below.

  Cole McCade

  C/O Rockstar PR & Literary Consulting

  PO Box 29226

  CHICAGO IL 60629

  [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Louis Vuitton, Orion, Coke / Coca-Cola, Bic, Facebook, Mini Cooper, Fringe, Stargate Universe, Jolly Green Giant, Keds, Magic Marker, Lisa Frank, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SAIC, CERN, Devil’s Cut, Bluetooth, NYU, the New York Times, Barbie, Jimmy Choo, Tylenol, Visa, The Wizard of Oz, Les Miserables, Punk’d, Manic Panic, NASA, Virgin Airlines, Casablanca, Namenda, Donepezil, HTC, Xanax, Google, Amazon.com, Spiderwoman, Wikipedia, J.C. Penney, Swype, Bookscan, Star Wars, Firefly, Snuggie, Gmail, Thales, Airbus, Dassault, Jip’s Cafe, Samsung, Expedia, The Twilight Zone, Trapper Keeper, Day-Glo, LinkedIn, Skittles, Sharpie, Hello Kitty, Carmen Sandiego, Polo, Crown Royal, 7-Up, Invader Zim, Starbucks, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Up in the Air, Smirnoff Ice, Bratz, My Little Pony, Franklin-Covey, Pitch Perfect, Rihanna, Twitter, Peter Gabriel, Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Night of the Living Dead, Sanrio, The Walking Dead, George Romero, James Bond, Styrofoam, Dungeons and Dragons, The X-Files, The Phantom of the Opera.

  If you’re still out there, I wonder…

  Do you ever think of that night?

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Cole McCade

  CHAPTER ONE

  AS SHE LED HER FATHER through the busy concourse of New Orleans International Airport, Celeste thought today might be one of his good days.

  Such days were rare, lately. Sometimes he was himself, brown eyes alight with the sharp intellect that had made Alan Haverford a preeminent name in astrophysics. More often he was lost in the past, memories stolen by Alzheimer’s. Sometimes he didn’t recognize his own daughter. Didn’t remember that the woman at his side was the same girl who’d idolized him since she was old enough to call him Dada; the same girl who’d wanted to be just like him since he’d lifted her onto his shoulders and shown her Andromeda in the canopy of stars.

  But as he stood in the center of the concourse and scanned the signs—one hand on his hip, the other tangled in his shock of hair—the twist of his mouth said he was very much present.

  And in one hell of a mood.

  “Don’t make that face,” she said.

  His lips thinned. “No one’s proven it’ll stick that way.”

  “Maybe not, but you look like you swallowed a bug.” She hooked her arm in his and leaned into him. She’d gotten her willowy height from her father, but under his jacket his bicep was thinner than it should be. “I thought you’d be happy to be back.”

  “I don’t like it. This. You, uprooting your life for an old house.”

  “For our home.” She squeezed his arm. “And I’m not uprooting anything. Didn’t like Los Angeles anyway. Too much smog. Too much smug. Smug smog. Number one source of global warming.”

  “Pretty sure that’s bovine methane.”

  “Cow farts aren’t warming the atmosphere, Dad.”

  “You don’t know that,” he grumbled.

  “I know I’m not having a conversation about cow farts in the airport. Come on. If we get out in less than an hour, I’ll—”

  “—bribe me with food?” He patted the beginnings of an admirable paunch. “Because I need more of that.”

  “Beignets. Promise, these won’t turn out purple.” She grinned, adjusted the strap of her carry-on, and tugged on his arm. “I still don’t have your knack for Bunsen burner cooking.”

  “The secret is the tungsten.”

  “…tungsten’s poisonous.”

  “Technicalities.”

  Celeste chuckled and nudged him toward the baggage claim, following the signs through the airport. People surged past, rushing to their gates, bumping and pushing; she rested her hand protectively over the bulge inside her tatty imitation Vuitton carry-on bag. Through the faux leather, her telescope case was comfortingly solid. Safe. The rest of her lab equipment was currently boxed up and banging around a moving truck…if the movers weren’t playing hacky-sack with her glass beakers and petri dishes. Those could be replaced.

  Her Orion telescope—her first, a gift from her father—was one of a kind, and she couldn’t trust it to anyone else.

  She’d need it in the morning, anyway. This time tomorrow she’d be walking this same concourse and on her way to Paris, an annual international conference on astrophysics, and a week of delicious French food. Possibly even a new job.

  And with luck, a new life—for herself and for her father.

  They paused at the carousel. He shot her a hard look. “You had your apartment, your lab, and that…boy. What was his name? Murky? Mumpkin? Brainless mook? Memory’s not so good these days.”

  “Your memory was fine five minutes ago.” Celeste laughed. “It’s Mark.”

  “What happened with him?”

  She shrugged. “We broke up. Mutual thing. Keep an eye out for our luggage.”

  He scowled at the carousel, thick brows knotted. “Damned things make me dizzy. And I know you’re changing the subject.”

  Celeste snorted and leaned against a pillar, tugging her glasses off and chewing on the arm while she watched suitcases glide past. Coming home like this sat strangely with her. Her sister was the homebody, content to keep an eye on the family house—when she wasn’t off on one of her suicidal extreme sports trips. Ophelia would be gone a year this time, leaving not long after Celeste returned from Paris and taking off on a backpacking trip across the Eurasian continent. A year was too long to leave the house abandoned, so here she was, Cel to the rescue.

  It was for the best. She couldn’t afford the L.A. lifestyle anymore. Astrophysics was a limited field with few opportunities, and her consulting gigs had dried up. Between inflation and the cost of her father’s healthcare, moving home made practical sense.

  She hadn’t left much behind in L.A., anyway. Just the Brainless Mook; barely a fling. She’d never been the kind of girlfriend he’d needed, and couldn’t put him first. She was too distant. Too scattered. Too caught up in her work—and her fat
her was her top priority, above anyone else. He had no one but her and her sister. After he’d spent so long looking out for her, now she could finally pay him back. She’d apologized to Mook—to Mark—for being a crappy girlfriend, but she wouldn’t apologize for her father.

  My dad needs me, Mark, she’d said. I can’t help that.

  I understand. I do. But I need someone who needs me.

  It hadn’t mattered anyway. He’d run. They always ran, around the third date cancelled due to medical emergency. Or the second time she brought home perfectly safe canisters of radioactive isotopes when the lab was full. Yet somehow, she never saw it coming. She could predict a thousand ways for the world to end. Solar storms. Meteor strikes. Gamma rays. Interns.

  But she could never predict her own love life, until another relationship went spiraling into a black hole of doom.

  She glanced up and found her father watching her, gaze shrewd, but beneath that knowing scrutiny his eyes reflected warmth, concern. He pushed his hands into his pockets and looked away, rocking on his heels.

  “You’re brooding. You brood too much.”

  “Birds brood. I’m thinking.”

  “Mmhm. Bet I know what you’re thinking about.” He raised a brow. “Mutual, eh?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Too bad. Should’ve dumped him. I never liked him.” He clasped her shoulder. No matter the years, his hand remained strong, grip as reassuring as ever, carrying with it twenty-eight years of love. “He had the higher brain function of a camel, and he smelled like cheese. Now stop chewing on those damned things, you’ll ruin your teeth.”

  Celeste stared at him, then burst into laughter, pulled her glasses out of her mouth, and slid them back onto her face. “Jesus, Dad.” She spotted a green plaid suitcase coming round the carousel, and snagged its handle. “Here’s your bag.”

  “Now whose memory’s going?” He flipped up the tag: K. Hansen. “Mine was blue, starlet.”

  “Right,” she said with a watery smile, and told herself she wouldn’t cry. “Blue.”

  Picking out the right bags was like shooting bobbing ducks at a carnival, but she finally found theirs and piled them on a luggage cart. They made their way through the airport into the bright light of a New Orleans spring, the familiar scents of magnolias and cool lake brine sharpening the air. Brilliant crepe myrtles lit the streets, shedding petals in a rain of magenta snow. In the soft-edged sunlight, she could almost ignore how Hurricane Katrina had changed the landscape. Buildings she’d known by heart were gone. The skyline had changed, its silhouette nibbled along the edges.

  She wondered if Bayou’s End would be different, too, or if she’d return to a snapshot of the past—when home had been both sanctuary and torment. High school had been hell. She’d been Mary Celeste Haverford back then, before she’d taken her mother’s maiden name and become Dr. Celeste London, consulting astrophysicist to some of the top names in the aerospace sector. Mary Haverford had been Dr. Haverford’s baby girl. But Celeste London had been free to prove herself under her own name, without her father’s legacy paving the way to an easy career.

  She’d had enough of names following her when she’d been Hairy Mary, anyway: girl extraordinaire, she of the Coke-bottle glasses and frizzy blue hair and freckles dark as ink. One junior high incident with a Bic shaver had dogged her until college. She’d left that behind when she’d reinvented herself in university—when she’d discovered she could talk to boys, instead of mooning at them from afar and doodling P.N. or I.B. on her notebook in little hearts.

  I.B. Ion Blackwell. She hadn’t thought of him in ages, though she’d started to Google him once after overhearing his name at the tail end of the news—then stopped, afraid of being disappointed, afraid of tarnishing the magic she remembered with a Facebook wedding album or a collection of mug shots. Yet just the memory of the wild Gypsy boy he’d been, popular and perfect and darkly beautiful, made her heart flip, an echo of how her pulse had raced in thunderous rhythm with a single blue-eyed glance. She’d been desperately in love with him.

  He’d probably never even known her name.

  She wondered if Ion was still in Bayou’s End. Wondered if his boyish beauty had turned into a man’s handsomeness. Wondered if…

  If nothing. She wasn’t home for anything but the house, and her father. She couldn’t worry about—

  “Hello? Ground control to Major Cel?”

  Someone poked her in the stomach. She shook her head; her vision cleared, focusing on the pint-sized pink terror standing there with a hand on her hip, bright sundress turning her into just another floating shred of crepe myrtle: her older sister Ophelia, looking up at her with her vivid violet Elizabeth Taylor eyes bright with laughter.

  Celeste rubbed her temples. “Sorry, did I zone?”

  “Been calling you for five minutes.”

  She half-smiled. “Lot on my mind.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Another loser,” her father said, shoving the cart toward Ophelia’s obnoxiously magenta Mini Cooper. “Jackass wasn’t smart enough to know what he had.”

  Ophelia arched a brow. “Age hasn’t made him more subtle.”

  “Not one bit.”

  “How is he today?”

  “More Dr. Rush than Walter Bishop.”

  “Doctor…Walter who?” Ophelia frowned.

  “Watch more Fringe. Stargate Universe. Something.”

  “Watch less nerd TV.” She flicked Celeste’s hip. Despite being older, Ophelia barely came up to Celeste’s shoulder, and couldn’t reach much higher. “Come on, before he starts throwing suitcases.”

  “He’d better not.”

  Her sister froze. “They’re not explosive, are they?”

  “…not this time?”

  “Jesus. I don’t know how you’re not on the no-fly list. Or an FBI watchlist.” Ophelia shook her head and hurried across the lot, heels clicking. Celeste followed, longer legs easily keeping stride.

  They wrestled the luggage into the car and slid inside. Celeste let her father have the front seat; he’d taken enough blows to his pride. She wouldn’t shove him into the back like a child, but that left her folded up like a jackknife until her knees bunched around her ears and she barked her shins on the front seat.

  “Ow,” she muttered. “Why can’t you have a normal-sized car?”

  Ophelia grinned in the rearview mirror and jacked the car into reverse. “It is normal-sized. It’s me-sized. Tuck your legs, Jolly Green.”

  Her sister steered the car into traffic; the airport fell away. New Orleans flashed by, new renovations just toy models of the historic districts Celeste remembered. The traffic jams smoothed by the time they passed the toll gate onto the Causeway. The twenty-four mile stretch of the Causeway bridge disappeared into the horizon, an endless path floating over Lake Pontchartrain.

  Celeste smiled and watched the sun on the waves. Even in the brightest light, the water gleamed like glitter-strewn slate. It had fascinated her as a child. Her storybooks had said lakes were blue, but her lake was always the gray of an early morning…and when she saw it, she’d know she was going on an adventure. When she was little, she’d made weekend trips across the lake with her mother and sister—girls’ days at the Esplanade Mall, pretending to shop while looking for excuses to pick through the chocolates in the basement delicatessen.

  When their father had come along, he’d taken Celeste on side trips to the St. Charles Parish Planetarium. He’d shown her Delphinus and Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, all the planets—back when there’d been nine, before Pluto’s exile in disgrace. Then her mother was gone, and the trips to the Esplanade stopped…but her father had still made time to take her to the planetarium. She remembered sitting under an artificial sky of brilliant nebulae, picking out stars and swinging her feet—with her father at her side, waiting until she was ready to speak.

  Dad?

  Yeah, starlet?

  She’d laughed. He’d always ca
lled her that. But then her heart had swelled to fill her throat, choking off her laughter. I…I think I like a boy.

  I’ll get my shotgun.

  Dad!

  He’d grinned and draped an arm over her shoulders. Kidding. Maybe. I hope this boy knows how lucky he is, or I might be dead serious.

  I don’t think he even knows who I am.

  What’s his name?

  Ion Blackwell. He’s a Gypsy. At least I think he is. Everyone at school says he is. She’d looked down at her tattered Keds—covered in Magic Marker art—and toyed with the keychain her father had given her, two glittering silver stars dangling from asymmetric chains. I think I love him, Dad. But I don’t know how to talk to him.

  It’s a very serious thing, love is. Sometimes it makes your heart so big it gets in the way of your voice. He’d taken her hands and studied her gravely. He’d never treated her like a child, even when discussing advanced aeronautical physics—and he’d turned his words over with great solemnity then, as he’d squeezed her fingers. Are you afraid he won’t love you back?

  More than anything.

  But you’ll never know if you don’t talk to him, starlet. His thumbs had stroked her knuckles. I love you. Any boy would be stupid not to.

  She looked up, pulling from the memory. Her father watched her in the mirror, dark eyes pensive. Did he remember those weekends, she wondered? They shared a brief smile, before she turned her gaze back out the window.

  The bridge blended into the lakeshore, then highway. They sped past signs for Slidell, Covington, Mandeville, deeper into rural countryside, all scrub grass and pine trees and fields of scraggly cows. The turnoff for Bayou’s End passed over the brown ribbon of the Tchefuncte River, and into the swampy town that had been all she’d known for eighteen years.

  Nothing had changed. The town proper was a tight cluster of small shops, the farmer’s market, the gas station, and the single-story school that had swallowed her up at one end in kindergarten and spat her out at the other, at least marginally ready for college. More people lived outside the town than in it—but every rickety fishing shanty, houseboat, and countryside ranch claimed its home as Bayou’s End.