All the Wrong Places (excerpt)

Chapter 2

Tu es ravissante...

J'adore...

Restez avec moi...

Julianne sat up from bed, waking up from a deep sleep. She looked at her bedside clock. It was only four in the morning.

She reached out for her ankle, to rub the tattoo that was permanently etched there.

Seven years ago, in a small studio apartment in Paris, she was sneaking out quietly, trying her best not to wake him up so he couldn't stop her from leaving... so she could let go of this fantasy life and face the nightmares that were waiting for her at home.

She thought she would forget him—the only man she's ever been in love with.

Jas Mathieu.

But even now, he still haunted her dreams. And oftentimes, in the middle of the night, she would lie in bed, thinking about him.

She wanted to fall in love. She did. And he was perfect. An aspiring painter waiting for his time to shine. He wasn't rich but he was ambitious. He had dreams and he had what it took to make them happen. That was one of the things she admired about him. She wished she could have been with him when his break finally came. But she knew from the beginning that their time was limited. She couldn't stay. She couldn't even give him her real name.

She remembered the day she decided to get a tattoo. She had always wanted to get one but she knew her parents would never agree.

"Well, how often do they look on your bum, your hip or the inside of your ankle?" Jas asked, his voice full of mischief. "You could get a tattoo—in a place where they wouldn't care to look, right?"

She decided that her father had already signed up her life to the McAllisters anyway. Getting this tattoo was something she would do for herself... something to remember her days of freedom in Paris.

"Okay, why don't you choose a design?" she asked him.

Jas drew a heart and butterfly wing tattoo design on a piece of paper. It was a bit of an abstract, but quite cute and elegant. She liked it very much.

"Are you sure you trust me to be the designer of probably the only tattoo you will get in your life?" he asked, his eyes twinkling with mischief.

"Well, I have faith in you," she replied, smiling back at him. "Something to remember Paris by. You and my tattoo."

He asked the tattoo artist to draw the design on her. When it was finished, she distinctly saw the line inside the heart that unwittingly looked like the letter J. Beside it was a line that formed what looked like one wing of a butterfly.

She narrowed his eyes at him. "You had your initial drawn on my ankle?"

He laughed. "Like you said, me and your tattoo."

He was right. She never forgot him. The tattoo always reminded her of their borrowed time together.

But who would have thought that he would change her life forever? That one night was all it took to bind him to her for the rest of her life.

Jared Adrien Sanders.

That was her son's name. His middle name was after his godmother, Adrienne, who had always been there for Julianne since she'd been banished by her parents.