Broken French: A widowed, billionaire, single dad romance by Natasha Boyd (books like beach read txt) 📕

“Josie?” Madame’s voice called softly, and I tried not to feel disappointment it wasn’t Xavier. “Tu vas bien?”

I padded to the door and opened it. “Oui. I’m okay.”

She cocked her head to the side, assessing me. “Would you like to come downstairs? I know it is late, but we will hear the news of what happened. Oui?”

“Merci.” I nodded and followed her downstairs.

Evan, dressed in distressed jeans and a white polo, sat in the chair where I’d fallen asleep. He was leaning forward, resting his forearms on his elbows. Xavier was standing by the bookshelves, leaning his fists on a table. He looked exhausted and shell-shocked—not relieved as I’d imagined—as if everything he knew could no longer be counted on.

Madame and I perched on the sofa.

“Alors,” Madame began. “Qu'est-ce qui s’est passé?”

“We will talk in English for Josie and Evan,” Xavier said.

“Yes, of course.” Madame shook her head. “So what happened? How did they get to her?”

I could tell she was still blaming herself, and I squeezed her hand. My gesture didn’t escape Xavier’s notice.

“We won’t know all of it until the police have been through the surveillance tapes,” Evan said, “or Dauphine can tell us. But she isn’t saying much.”

Poor girl was probably in shock and exhausted.

“There isn’t much surveillance footage in that part of the marina due to the recent construction so whatever Dauphine shares will be critical in the case against Michello.”

“Maybe she will talk tomorrow,” Xavier said.

“Where did you find her?” I asked.

Evan explained that he’d known about a boat Michello had been sleeping on since getting out of prison because he’d been having him followed just to keep an eye on him. “He took Dauphine there with the promise of ice cream and pictures of Arriette—that’s how we think he got her to trust him. What we are piecing together is how Michello knew Dauphine was with her grandmother. Someone must have informed him of our movements.”

My stomach clenched tightly. And I looked to Xavier, who dropped his eyes from mine. So this was it. I was still the suspect? Grief almost felled me.

“We think it’s Rod,” Evan went on.

Wait.

What?

“Rodney?” Madame asked, shocked.

“What?” I asked. “Rod, as in the deck hand, oi-all-right-mate-Rod? No.” I shook my head in bewilderment. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” I swallowed. “Would he?” And here I should just be happy I wasn’t the suspect anymore … but Rod? Oh my God. Poor Xavier. We’d all trusted him. “How … why do you think that?”

Evan pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked exhausted too, and like he realized he shouldered much of the blame. “We don’t think he did it on purpose. But, when I offered him the job a few years ago, he was … let’s just say he was headed down the wrong path, with the wrong people, and his mom is a family friend. I knew he was a good kid, just needed direction and gainful employment. But I’ve always kept one eye open with him just in case—afraid for the right amount of money someone might get to him. I also detected a feed from the Wi-Fi on the boat a few days ago. Someone had obviously opened a bad link and well, some of Xavier’s business documents were compromised. Luckily, we think they only got a fraction before it was detected. When I asked each of the staff, Rod was acting all … off. Not much, but enough that I pressed him. He said he’d been approached a few weeks ago by a “total ten”—his words not mine—and spent the night with her. He almost missed the boat, showed up in the wee hours. Anyway the next day, she texted him and sent a link. Thinking it was a nude, he clicked.” Evan’s eyes rolled. “Not a nude of course. It was a wildlife picture. And yeah, bobs-your-uncle, we got ourselves some malware on the Wi-Fi.”

“What is this, bobs?” Madame asked.

“In this context it just means ‘of course.’ Bien sur,” Evan added the translation for her.

God, the trap could have happened to any one of us. “But what about Dauphine?” And how did Xavier get from malware to accusing me?

Xavier paced over to the other armchair and sank into it, weariness oozing out of every molecule. “Dauphine has an uncle, I mentioned him?”

I nodded.

“Michello,” Madame spat. “C’est une racaille.” I could surmise what that meant. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬Something distasteful.

Xavier went on. “We’ve been watching him, and he’s been down at the port keeping an eye on us. We think he even had someone at Les Caves the night you and Andrea were there. Were you approached?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Oh. Wait. There were these two guys. Young. Gorgeous. They were all over Andrea and me. Quite insistent, actually.”

Xavier tensed. “Insistent how?”

My irritation simmered. What, was he jealous now? “Persuasive. Handsy.”

His eyes narrowed.

“It was nothing over the line,” I added, relenting.

Evan’s eyes flicked between us. “Ahem. I think we get the point. I’d just found the discrepancy in the data feed and shut it down. That’s when I told Xavier I thought we had some malware.”

“I remember not being able to get online or send an email that day,” I said.

“We think they were trying to get another link in by approaching you and Andrea. Anyway, it took a few days to go through what was compromised. But Xavier’s calendar and our itinerary definitely were. We assumed corporate espionage. Especially when the day before yesterday, while you were sailing to Corsica, I had Xavier’s assistant at the office in Sofia Antipolis reach out to the older Monsieur Pascale and tell him not to invite another person to meetings with his son before clearing it with us first. That’s when he said he hadn’t known Morosto was coming, that the reservation had been changed to add Morosto at the last minute. He thought Xavier had done it. So Morosto had known where we were going and when. It was a hunch that Morosto had been using Michello to