If only that purse-snatcher had been just one minute later, the cop could have opened the door for me. If only that customer had been a gentleman for, like, sixty seconds and helped me with the door instead of thinking only of his dumb coffee. If only that glass door hadn’t opened in the wrong direction. One minute. One single minute.
I guess it’s my fault for being in love with French pastries. And spending hard-earned babysitting money on high heels to impress my boyfriend with the Italian pedigree, even if he is from a hick town in Texas.
Whatever.
All I know is that everything has gone wrong.
I’ve missed my bus.
Eight Months Earlier
I was surreptitiously sneaking in a few paragraphs of a majorly romantic kissing scene from the latest Julia Quinn novel while Mrs. Olson drilled a few bad notes with the alto section when Mathew Perotti changed seats, sliding into the bass section behind the sopranos.
My heart went into overdrive. The new guy was suddenly right behind me, mere inches away, and the vibes coming off him were so strong I thought I’d faint. I stuck my finger in my novel, sat up straight, crossed my legs, and was dying to turn around and say something really smart or funny or provocative, but I held back because, naturally, I didn’t want to look too sappy and puppy-dog eager.
He leaned forward and began to sing real soft—just soft enough that only I could hear. My book slid to the floor. Out of his mouth came the voice of John Mayer, Elvis Presley, and Justin Bieber, all rolled into one. I froze in my seat listening to the words that made every girl swoon like an idiot. “We got the afternoon, One thing I've left to do, Discover me, discovering you.”
His warm breath fell against my neck and shivers raced up my spine.
When it comes to Texans, everybody in New York automatically thinks cowboys, horses, and an eye-rolling twangy accent, but Mathew’s drawl was subtle around the edges and absolutely fascinating.
Too bad the rest of the girls thought the same thing.
Mathew suddenly bent down and brushed his lips against my bare shoulder. I was wearing a pink sleeveless shirt and my arms were tanned from the visit to my grandfather in Florida. I’d spent every waking moment in the pool. When I felt Mathew’s warm touch, the unexpected flirty kiss, my stomach flipped at least seventeen times.
“Hey, new boy. What’s that for?” I turned around, attempting to flirt, which for me is a struggling art form.
His gaze drifted up to my eyes as he shrugged. “What can I say? You have nice shoulders.”
That was the day Mathew Perotti picked me for his girlfriend. Me, Chloe Dillard. The boring girl, the nice girl, the nobody girl.
The girl who wanted Mathew most of all.
“Where did you come from?” I ask the boy with the Hershey chocolate eyes when the room finally stops spinning.
“Back there—” he says, glancing behind him. “From the kitchens.”
Am I dreaming or is he speaking English with a French accent? Maybe the crack on my head jolted my brain into understanding perfect French.
Maybe not.
Lemon filling creates perfect little waves on both of my knees. Chocolate sauce drips all over my new Paris designer jacket, and whipped cream has streaked my hair like fresh bleached highlights.
My head pounds like someone’s hammering nails into my skull. I must have thunked it against the tile floor.
“Lie still, let me see if you’re hurt.” His voice even sounds like the warm chocolate spooned into beignets.
As I stare into the boy’s face, I wonder if the bus will come pick me up if I call them. Can I even give the tour guide directions to the shop? My head is whirling and I just want to lick the frosting off my fingers. I’m not sure I can survive eight hours on the bus and touring Château de Chenonceau—this crazy fabulous castle built in the middle of a river with bridges spanning both sides. France’s castles are simply spectacular, but they come in second place to the city of Paris, of course. Thinking of Paris reminds me of my new clothes—the ones that I’m currently wearing. I’ll have chocolate-stained clothing and eyelashes glued with pudding all day!
Sera and I had added our bags to the pile the bus driver had been loading, before we snuck off to La Patisserie. Now my bags are on their way to the Loire Valley and the fabulous Château de Chenonceau. Hopefully Sera will keep an eye on my luggage and make sure it comes with her to the hotel at the airport tomorrow night. We get up Monday morning at 5 a.m., get through security, show our passports, board—and sleep on the plane all the way home.
Show my passport.
I’m drawing a sudden blank. My passport is—where? Inside my backpack? In my luggage stowed away in the bus compartment? Robert nagged us every day about not losing our passports—and being careful to keep our money safe—and staying together—and making sure we had a buddy—and to inform our adult leader where we were going—and above all—to be on time at the designated meet-up location! If anybody could ruin a perfectly beautiful trip to Paris, it was a boring thirty-five year old Educational Tour guy named Robert.
So I took Robert’s advice and packed my passport in a very safe place. And now I can’t remember where. Wherever it is, the passport is miles from here. Plus my clean clothes and makeup for possibly the next forty-eight hours!
The boy with the sweet éclair eyes reaches out to touch my chin. He holds up his finger and shows me a blob of white cream. Then he licks his finger and smiles. I swear those straight white teeth could glow in the dark.
“I hate to see Maman’s White Whipped Delight go to waste,” he says in a deep, serious voice.
I can’t help it. He makes me laugh. “You’re crazy.”
He gives me a lopsided smile and his eyes crinkle at the corners. Can people’s eyes actually sparkle? “I have been accused of that before,” he says in a delicious French accent.
Several stabs of guilt pierce me—guilt with a capital G. I’m not positive, but it almost seems like this pastry guy and I are flirting. What am I doing? I have a boyfriend. And I suck at flirting.
I’ve always prided myself on being a loyal, honest, trustworthy girlfriend. Yes, those qualities make me sound like a Boy Scout, but I don’t flirt with other guys. In fact, a guy named Scotty from Geometry called every day during Spring Break asking me when I was going to break up with Mathew. His goal in life was to take me out on a date. Me—somebody’s personal goal. I mean, how flattering is that!
On the last day of break, Scotty showed up at my front door with a giant chocolate chip cookie with my name in swirling pink letters. Custom designed. It was so sweet! But I had to break his heart, gently.
Sera told me, “I think I would have given a guy who actually baked for me at least a chance.”
“You can’t go on a date with another person when you’ve got a boyfriend!”
“But how do you know Mathew’s so perfect unless you date other people? You hardly know anybody else. Mathew’s the only guy you’ve ever been with.”
I hate it when Sera says things like that. She can be so infuriatingly right.
My thoughts are pulled back to the present when a bell above the door jangles and a new customer hurries inside, stopping abruptly right before he crashes over me. “Pardon, pardon, mademoiselle!”
The French hottie guy—okay—I have to stop thinking about him as the “hottie,” but it’s hard not to because he earns the title so naturally. The boy speaks in rapid French and the older gentleman answers in even faster French. They lose me completely. This is going to take more translation than my little dictionary is capable of.
Then the man kneels at my side and begins looking at my foot!
Bakery boy explains, “This is Doctor LaCroix. He is one of our regular customers and wants to examine your foot. Do you think you broke your ankle?”
“Um, je ne sais pas,” I say, trying to sound sophisticated even though my ankle does hurt a little bit, but it’s the truth. I really don’t know if I’ve seriously injured myse
lf, but there’s no way I can walk to the bus now, let alone sprint.
The tour guide will have to send a taxi for me. Wait, Robert has no idea where I am. But Sera does. She’ll tell them. Or will she? She might assume I boarded through the rear door at the last second. We’d done that before and ended up in different seats for some of the daily excursions. Okay, no problem. I can telephone. Where’s my cell?
“My bag,” I say, groping around the floor.
“You should lie still,” the boy says to me, concern clouding those pools of steaming chocolate. My thoughts are running away with me. I blame it on the trauma of my fall and the pain, which is clouding my thought processes.
Doctor LaCroix tenderly touches the skin around my throbbing ankle. I sit up and wonder if it’s swelling. “Glaçon, s’il vous plait,” he says.
The bakery woman brings an ice pack and a damp towel so I can wipe the sticky cream off my hands and face.
“Merci,” I tell her, noticing that she has the same chocolate brown eyes as the French boy.
Doctor LaCroix speaks again, so fast my head is spinning and my stomach makes a strange twisting sensation.
“I’m feeling a bit sick,” I murmur, wanting to lie back somewhere, but the floor is really hard. And cold. Instantly, the boy pulls off his sweatshirt, rolls it up and tucks it under my head for a pillow. He and the doctor are still going at it a hundred miles an hour in their perfect, nasally French.
“He says you may have sprained it,” the boy finally informs me. “You need to go to hospital and get X-rays. We will pay for it of course.”
I shake my head weakly. “No problem. I have insurance.”
Those candy bar eyes smile and I’m dazzled all over again. Can a simple smile be making me faint? He’s just a bakery boy. A foreigner. How much can we possibly have in common? There weren’t any cute French boys that night on the Arc de Triomphe. Not one. So where’d he come from?
“You were injured in our store and we will take care of you.”
“But—”
“No more arguments.”
“Okay. D’accord,” I remember to add and feel a tiny moment of pleasure. The fall to the floor hasn’t knocked all the French from my brain.
The doctor nods, and looks pleased.
“You are—what do you say—a trooper?” the boy tells me and he actually looks impressed. My heart swells just like my foot.
Then he holds out his hand for me to shake. A French custom. They’re always shaking hands here. Friends meet at a café and they all shake hands when they arrive and then again when they depart. Except the ones who are really close friends. Best friends do a lot of cheek kissing.
“Moi, je m’appelle Jean-Paul.”
He has a name! Jean-Paul. Why does it sound so lovely to me?
I tell myself to knock it off. Mathew is lovely, too. I’ve always liked the name Mathew. Mathew belongs to me, and I belong to Mathew. Okay, my head is clear again, no more of this confusion. Amazing what a concussion can do to you.
“My bus,” I say, thinking about the tour again, and I grip Jean-Paul’s arm as if that will help him to understand my urgency. “I have to catch my bus.”
“There will be other busses,” he says soothingly. “They come every ten minutes.”
“You don’t understand. There is only one bus for my tour and it’s going a hundred miles away. And they won’t be back until tomorrow night.” My voice trails off. “I run cross-country. I can do it. The plane doesn’t leave for, like forty-eight hours.”
The pastry boy smiles at me with an air of amusement, but I’m dead serious. “Where are you going?”
“Home, of course.”
“Where is your home?”
“New York.”
“Ah, you are American,” he says. Only he pronounced it “A-mare-ee-can.”
Isn’t my U.S. accent totally obvious?
Then I notice his grin and that teasing sparkle in those chocolate eyes.
“My group—my French class—the bus.”
The doctor is icing my ankle and watching our little conversation with interest.
Now the bakery lady—I’m sure she’s Jean-Paul’s mother—comes over holding up a pink square covered in glitter. It’s the heel of my sandal. It appears that my shoe heel went flying off into the corner of the shop when it snapped, and rolled behind the refrigerated drink case.
“Très bien!” Jean-Paul exclaims.
“Très bien,” I repeat. Now if I could only glue it back on and sprint to the bus—like twenty minutes ago.
“No need to exert yourself,” he adds. “You must let us take care of you.”
“My cell phone.” I try to point, but I can’t see my purse from this position. “In my bag. I can telephone and maybe the bus can come here to get me. I can go to the doctor when I get home. I mean, I’m not bleeding.”
He gives a laugh and his eyes seem to dive into mine, although I don’t think he realizes what he’s doing to me. I drop my glance, squirming, and start chattering nervously.
“Sera, and Robert, the tour guide, and Madame Sauvant—that’s my French teacher—they’re going to be so worried about me. Nope, more like pissed. I’ll bet I make everyone so late we won’t get to go to the Loire Valley at all. And then nobody will speak to me for the rest of the trip.”
I glance up and Jean-Paul is still watching me so I keep talking like I can’t stop. “As much as I love Paris, I did hope to see a turreted castle with a dungeon and a haunted tower room. Especially a castle built on a river, no less. I was thinking about sitting in one of the window seats, looking out onto the lawns of the estate and pretending I was waiting for my sister to come downstairs as the carriage arrives with four sleek black horses. If I had a sister. I’ve always wanted one. Maybe there’s a later bus to the Loire Valley—with forty empty seats for the tour group?”
Lord, there is something seriously wrong with me.
Somehow Doctor LaCroix seems to understand what I’m saying. Gravely, he shakes his head from side to side. “No home. Hospital. Now. Maintenant.” He pats my hand, looking like my grandpa who whips all the old fogies playing gin rummy at the clubhouse in his retirement community.
I feel tears coming on. “No hospital. Home. Plane. Urgent.”
Suddenly we’re all speaking in one-word sentences.
Jean-Paul grins. “You are very funny.” His French accent makes my stomach feel fizzy. But maybe it’s just because I haven’t had any breakfast.
Out of the corner of my eye I spy my purse—it had fallen next to me when I performed my acrobatic tumble to the floor. I rifle through the lip gloss and pens and junk in my handbag and pull out my cell phone. I’m starting to wonder why nobody from the bus has called me and then I realize that I turned my phone off after my mother’s call when I was ordering my last hit of chocolate beignets. I press the power button and see that there are ten missed calls listed. Looks like just about everybody with a cell phone from the tour bus has tried phoning me.
The last attempt was fifteen minutes ago. Have they given up so quickly? Are they coming back for me? Even if somebody handed me a hundred-dollar bill, I couldn’t have said where our next hotel was going to be. I’m clueless. I just catch the buses, go where they take us, eat dinner at the restaurants where the tour has booked us each night, and hang out at night with Sera and the other girls.
I punch numbers and start listening, trying to squelch the waves of panic. The voice messages are a mixture of angry, worried, and frantic. The last one is from Sera, using a borrowed phone.
I’m still rambling nervously while I press the numbers. “My best friend Sera—her parents have refused to get her a cell phone until she goes away to college, which might be very funny to her father, but gets in the way of Sera’s personal life big time. Is there a teenager left in America without a cell phone?”
Jean-Paul smiles gently. “I don’t know. Is there?”
“Chloe, where are you?” Sera’s recorded voice screeches.
“Pick up your phone! I thought you were right behind me after I left the shop. When I got to the bus you were just gone. I told Robert and Madame Sauvant we’d made one last stop at La Patisserie, but the bus ended up at the wrong shop. Did you know that there are, like, dozens of La Patisserie shops in the city—and then I got confused and mixed up the street names and the turns. You are so much better at French than I am!”
Sera’s voice lowers. “Robert has been screaming at everyone. I think he needs to go to Anger Management classes, but whatever. Chloe, we’re headed to the Loire Valley right now because we have to meet up with some tour guide and our passes are only for today. If we miss the meet-up time, everybody will have to pay extra or we won’t see the castle at all. When there are this many people, well, you get what I’m saying. Robert’s making calls to the Educational Tour Office right now to sweep the city. That’s actually what he said. He’s even putting out a missing person’s report. I had to give the cops your description and everything.” Then Sera’s voice breaks, and she adds in a small, weepy whisper, “I’m just praying you’re okay, Chloe. Please be okay.”
The message suddenly stops and I hear my phone begin the shut down process. I stare at the screen, which has gone totally blank and shake it. The battery is dead. I must have forgotten to plug it in last night.
Three faces are gazing at me as I drop the phone into my lap. Tears fill my eyes. My French class left without me! Sera might be an organizer guru with her day planner iPad apps, but she’s terrible at directions. Why couldn’t she write down the address? She even gets lost at the mall. Then again, we never thought she’d need to know the address or write down the directions since we were leaving Paris to go to the castle, and only coming back to a hotel near the airport tomorrow night.
I’m stuck in a foreign country, without anybody I know. Alone. I hope Madame Sauvant hasn’t called my mother yet. She will go absolutely ballistic.
Breathe, I order myself. There has to be a solution. My dad used to tell me that whenever something bad happened I needed to look for the silver lining—the good thing that comes out of an awful situation—because there’s usually something unexpectedly nice. Like the time I didn’t get the lead in Annie during Summer Little Theatre even though I dyed my hair red and gave myself a home permanent. Nobody at the auditions was impressed by my sacrifice. Silver lining: a few weeks later, my dad got a bonus and we flew to Disney World instead.
Paris Cravings: A Paris & Pastry Novel Page 2
