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Midnight Train to Paris

Prologue

December 24, 1937

Lausanne, Switzerland

Rosie Delaney stood on the empty platform, gripping the handle of her cherry-red suitcase with ice-cold fingers. She desperately wished that she’d remembered her gloves.

Thick, heavy snowflakes poured from the black winter sky, dusting the tracks in an eerie white glow. Save for the giant clock ticking overhead, the silence in the Swiss train station that night was deafening to Rosie’s ears, which had never been so alert.

Despite her nerves, Rosie was certain she’d covered her tracks well. She’d put on quite the show with Alexandre before slipping out of the annual Morel Holiday Gala unnoticed. She’d even resisted the overwhelming urge to say good-bye to the one person she would miss.

Her mother.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Rosie thought of the lovely sights of Paris and the even lovelier man who would be waiting for her there, in her favorite city, in only a few short hours.

Jacques Chambord.

She’d made the right choice.

Of course she had.

She’d left behind a closet full of shimmering evening gowns, fur coats, jewels, and high heels. Her meager suitcase contained only a few changes of her most practical, modest clothes and a box of letters.

Those letters meant more to her than any jewel-studded closet ever could.

Running her thumb over the newly bare skin on her ring finger, Rosie remembered how suffocating Alexandre’s elaborate diamond ring had felt on her left hand. And it wasn’t only the ring that had been suffocating.

The memory of him made her forget how to breathe.

If only the train would get here.

A nervous glance at the clock revealed that it was 11:37 p.m.

They would surely be wondering where she had gone by now. She could almost see Alexandre’s dark furrowed eyebrows, his beady brown eyes combing the party, searching for his fiancée, his trésor, his poupée.

Rosie was finished being Alexandre’s treasure, his doll.

She was finished keeping him and his elitist, power-hungry family happy.

A train whistle thundered through the night, and adrenaline shot through Rosie’s veins as she glimpsed the steam locomotive barreling down the snow-covered tracks.

Only one word soared through Rosie’s mind at the sight of the Orient Express on that snowy winter night in the Swiss Alps.

Freedom.