The Rebel King

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He'd always been a little in love with Paris. She was the village eccentric, that mysterious lady reputed to possess a past both lurid and glorious. True, she was a bit blowsy now, not terribly clean and beginning to show her age, but beautiful still. And while she may have been mistrusted and reviled-and secretly envied-by her more conventional neighbors, one knew she was always ready to welcome a lad in need of refuge with open arms.

And there had never been a lad more in need of a refuge than Nikolas Donovan. His life had recently gone careening out of control with the dizzying speed of a sports car traveling down a steep and winding mountain road without brakes. It seemed to him a ride that could end only one way: with a calamitous plunge off a cliff.

Though at the moment, he had to admit, all the turmoil of the past several months seemed far away. It was an early September evening in Paris. Rain was expected later, but now the air was warm and soft with humidity. The trees were still green, with only a few leaves, harbingers of the autumn avalanche to come, tumbling and skittering like playful kittens under the flying feet of the children playing soccer among the chestnut trees in the Tuillerie Gardens. He felt pangs of envy as he watched them and listened to their grunts and scufflings of effort. He envied them this time, this age when a boy's only concern was whether he could kick the football between the makeshift goalposts before darkness and his mother's voice calling him to supper put an end to the game.

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