Baroness by Susan May Warren Read Free Book Online

her gaze skimming quickly off his, his words stinging. “I don’t suppose you saw a hint of God up there in the skies.”
    He stared at her, those brown eyes sifting through her words. “Maybe it’s not worth looking. Seems like heartbreak to put so much hope into something that might not even be there.”
    â€œYou don’t believe in God?”
    â€œOh, I believe in God. I just don’t think He cares. In fact, I think He’s abandoned us. Try flying over a battlefield and you’ll see I’m right.”
    She had no words for this, churning them over inside. She hadn’t given God much thought beyond the pews of her church on Sunday morning. If she looked around hard, however, she might agree with Rennie.
    What use was God if He didn’t show up for the important moments? Like saving her father? Or finding Jack? Maybe He had abandoned her. Maybe she had to figure out her life and where she fit into it on her own.
    Rennie’s hand slid into hers, warm and solid.
    â€œDo you mind?” he said quietly.
    â€œNo.”
    He smiled then and tugged her over the bridge, back to the Quai de la Tournelle .
    â€œI’m sorry I never got you back to Café a la Paix.”
    â€œI’ll have to alert a gendarme, see if he will rescue me.”
    â€œI would put up a fight. They would have to arrest me and throw me in the Bastille.”
    She heated down to her bones. The guilt of not meeting Rosie had slowly sloughed off her, leaving only the niggle of shame, and with his words, that too vanished. Frankly, Rosie would probably applaud today’s adventures.
    â€œI would bring you crepes and books from Sylvia,” Lilly said, laughing.
    True to his word, Rennie had introduced her to a bookstore—Shakespeare and Company, located under the eyes of the cathedral in the Latin Quarter, on what Rennie called the Left Bank. Books crammed every cranny, tucked spine in or out, on their sides, or on end, massive walls with ladders climbing into the rafters to retrieve Homer and Dante and Flaubert. There, he’d loaded her up with what he called “real books”—a novel by a new author named James Joyce, another by a T. S. Eliot. And poems by a woman named Gertrude Stein. “She lives right here in Paris and has readings at her salon.”
    He introduced Lilly to the proprietor, Sylvia Beach, and they drank tea, a spicy Indian mix that made her tongue sparkle in her mouth.
    Then they strolled along the crisp gravel paths of the Luxembourg gardens, and Lilly lost herself inside this pocket of grace, abundant with cherry trees and leaf-strewn canals and thirsty willows. She drank in the flower gardens around the Palace and let Rennie buy her a cup of café au lait and a brioche as they sat at a wrought iron table, watching little straw-hatted boys dip their sailboats into the mirrored surface of the lake. Rennie then toured her through the Musee du Luxembourg to view the Cézannes and Monets and finally out the other side, to the Parthenon with its grand columns. They sat again at the original model of the Statue of Liberty.
    â€œYou can see the Eiffel Tower from here,” he said, and she made out the frame of it against the setting sun.
    They ate dinner at a café off the Boulevard Montparnasse—Rennie called it Mount Parnassus—and finished off a plate of oysters, although she turned down the frothy beer for a lemonade.
    Then he had walked her back along the garden to the Seine.
    Now he stood on the curb to hail a cab. “The truth is, I don’t want to take you home.”
    She savored his words. “I really don’t have a home anymore.”
    â€œI thought New York was your home.”
    â€œIt’s my mother’s home. And my stepfather’s home. My home is in Montana, on a ranch as big as this city. We have a herd of protected buffalo and a stake in a copper mine. But my mother owns the Chronicle, and she came back