Coco du Ciel

by Elise Noble

  “But you won’t. Having more people to talk to, having friends, it’s changed my life. Tell them, Remi.”

  “The cottage is yours for as long as you want it.”

  A free home? That was one hell of an offer. And the cottage was certainly a step up from whatever Rhys might stretch to on his income. Could he really leave England? He’d always assumed their time in France would be temporary, that a return home was just around the corner. Home. England had always felt like home, but when it came down to it, what was keeping him there? Nothing. He could still visit Uncle Albert from time to time—hell, he could even afford to fly to Wales with the money he’d save on rent.

  And he needed to do what was best for Coco. She was his future.

  “Are you sure?”

  “We’ve already spoken about it.”

  Then the decision was easy. Looked as if Rhys would have to brush up on his language skills and probably his etiquette too. But damn, he was going to live in the grounds of a bloody castle. If somebody had told him that a year ago, he’d have laughed his arse off.

  He squeezed Coco’s hand. “Villance?”

  But Coco was watching her sister, and Rhys realised there was one person who wasn’t happy with the way this was going. Rochelle looked positively stricken.

  “You’re leaving again? B-b-but you only just came back.”

  “Coco can’t stay in Lark’s River,” Rhys said as gently as he could. Remi had already magicked up a new passport for her to fly back to Europe. “Sooner or later, she’d be recognised, and then the Hatcher case would go up in smoke.”

  “What about somewhere else in the US? Sacramento? Stockton? A miracle brought my sister back, and I can’t bear to lose her again.”

  Visions of visas and work permits swam before Rhys’s eyes. Moving to the US was difficult—Jorge’s sister had managed it but only because she had a job with a big bank in New York. With Remi’s help, living in France would be feasible, but California…

  “Then why don’t you move to France?” Remi asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t want to speak ill of your living arrangements, but do you have a lot to leave behind? You don’t seem to like your boss much, you can’t afford your rent, and your social life seems…limited.”

  Tears trickled down Rochelle’s cheeks. Was a propensity to cry genetic? “I’m trying my best, okay?”

  Coco leapt up to hug her sister, scowling at Remi at the same time. “We know. Not everyone’s a billionaire.”

  “Remi isn’t trying to insult you,” Celine explained. “What he means is that we have plenty of space at the château and we’d love to have you stay with us. Isn’t that right, Remi?”

  Remi looked like a cornered deer, but he nodded anyway. “Of course. And the cottage also has a spare bedroom.”

  “And Marguerite—one of our staff—she mentioned that the lady who did her nails in Villance moved to Paris recently, so there’s a gap in the market there. You could fill it.” Celine beamed. “Oh, this is perfect.”

  Rhys couldn’t think of a better solution, but it was up to Rochelle. It would mean her leaving everything she’d ever known.

  “Uh, I’ll have to think on this.”

  Well, at least it wasn’t an outright “no.”

  EPILOGUE - COCO

  THREE MONTHS LATER…

  Coco gazed out the window at the beautiful gardens and then stood back to admire the living room of her new home. No, their new home. Small but perfect, it had everything she and Rhys needed. And what Rochelle needed too, of course. Now that she’d found her sister again, they couldn’t bear to be parted by an ocean, and after several late-night heart-to-hearts, Rochelle had decided to give France a try.

  Their French was still clunky, but with Remi and Celine living next door, they were getting plenty of practice at speaking the language. Some days, Celine refused to speak English for an added challenge.

  Coco was still getting used to the new, happier Celine. Now that she sported a choppier hairstyle and Rochelle’s clever make-up, Remi had agreed to her going out as long as they took a car to Limoges or Clermont-Ferrand, or borrowed his helicopter to go to Paris. Last weekend, they’d stayed in Nice for four days of sun and shopping. A five-star hotel and a billionaire’s borrowed credit card sure had a way of putting a smile on a girl’s face.

  Yes, they’d had to put up with constant phone calls from their men while they were away, but it was a small price to pay for freedom. Even Rochelle hadn’t escaped the stalking, not now that her little dalliance with Bones had come to light. Yes, Bones. Whose name was actually Bryn. Remi had been impressed with his performance in Lark’s River, both his technical abilities and his discretion, and had offered him a position on his security team. Coco had been wary at first, but as he’d thawed, she realised that his surliness hid a dry sense of humour and an unflinching loyalty towards her sister. She had a feeling Rochelle wouldn’t be needing the spare bedroom in the cottage for much longer.

  Which was something of a relief since they’d be needing it soon themselves. They’d tried to be careful, but it seemed that Coco had more in common with Jocelyn than she’d first thought. Thankfully, Rhys had nothing in common with Carl Hatcher. Yes, he’d been shocked when the pregnancy test came back positive, but now he was listing baby names and ordering tiny T-shirts on the internet. This time, her baby’s father would be everything she could hope for—kind, dependable, and calm.

  Calm… Not like Remi. When he’d found out a month ago that Celine was expecting too, he’d freaked. Even though she was still in the first trimester, he’d hired a Polish midwife and a nanny, and the stream of builders trooping in and out of the château gave Celine a constant headache.

  “All the baby needs is a crib,” she’d told Coco yesterday. “It doesn’t need its own version of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling, or a bed shaped like a perfect replica of the 1969 winner at Le Mans, or an actual freaking zoo.”

  “He’s just excited.”

  “I know this. But sometimes I wish he’d sit in front of the TV and drink beer like a normal man.”

  Not that Rhys did a lot of beer-drinking. Fit4Life had taken off, and he was already working on a sequel, for relaxation this time. Even Rhys seemed stunned at the success. Not only was the fitness coach a marketing demon, but the make-up vlogger had also told her friends about it, they told their friends, and it jumped to number one in its category in the app store. Hundreds of thousands of users subscribing at four pounds per month meant the baby was going to have a very lovely crib indeed. And when the baby was a little older, they could take the holiday of a lifetime—Australia, Asia, the Americas, they’d visit them all. Together.

  The back door burst open. Celine. During the daytime, she rarely knocked, but Coco didn’t mind. It was just nice to have the company.

  “Hey, hey! Remi wants to talk to everyone. Ooh, are those cakes from Chanté?”

  A groan escaped Coco’s lips. “If this is about paint swatches again…”

  “Oh, I found an article that said pregnant women shouldn’t go near wet paint, so now he’s picking out wallpaper. Can I steal a cake? Remi’s still on his crazy health kick, so we only have banana muffins.”

  “Sure.” Rhys picked up fresh cakes most days. Since Remi had hired Chanté to cater the VIP tent at Villance’s harvest festival, business at the café had improved, which was a relief because Coco craved fresh cream and nobody made better éclairs. And the cream, although fattening, was definitely an improvement on Jocelyn’s gummy bears and Marmite. “But what does Remi want to talk about? Wallpaper?”

  “No, no, not that. He said Joe Ellis emailed this morning.”

  Joe Ellis? The investigator in Las Vegas? With Hatcher in prison, the only mystery still to be resolved concerned Coco’s origins. The plant food. According to Bryn, who Remi had tasked with overseeing the process, Ellis had been working undercover for weeks.

  They’d had to let Bryn in on the secret. Since he was dat
ing Rochelle, there wasn’t an easy way to keep him in the dark. Was he shocked? Yes. Entirely surprised? No. He and Monica had assumed something weird was going on, and with Remi’s background in biotech, they’d bet on illegal cloning.

  “Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction,” he’d muttered. “Magic trees? I believe you, but anyone else would think you were as crazy as Hatcher.”

  Remi had chuckled at that. “True. And I’ve learned my lesson—you can mess with a person’s body, but not their soul.”

  So what had Ellis found? Coco prised Rhys away from his computer, and they all headed across to the château. In honour of the growing babies, Remi had switched out champagne for smoothies, and half a dozen glasses of green liquid were waiting for them on a tray in the living room.

  “Try this. It’s made from spinach, kale, apple, blueberry, almond milk, banana, and chia seeds.”

  Urgh. It was sweet that he’d gone teetotal in solidarity with Celine, but kale was meant for the compost heap, not for drinking.

  “Thanks, but I just ate breakfast.”

  “I’ll have yours,” Bryn offered.

  Rhys tentatively took a glass and sipped. “Not bad. You can hardly taste the kale.”

  Coco really didn’t care about the smoothies. “What happened in Las Vegas?”

  “We’re waiting for Rochelle. I don’t want to repeat myself.”

  A minute later, she showed up, and they all waited expectantly. This last loose thread had been bugging Coco for months, but she didn’t feel the same simmering anger at whoever had turned her into plant food that she’d felt towards Hatcher. After all, they’d helped to achieve justice in a roundabout way. But it was still wrong. The dead deserved to be treated with respect.

  “So, we know that Jocelyn’s body was prepared for burial by Peaceful Spirit Funeral Services, and yet her DNA ended up in plant food manufactured by Eastlake Horticultural. Eastlake is based in Las Vegas, while Peaceful Spirit is a chain headquartered in Reno. It took some digging, but Ellis found the link between the two.”

  “Which is?” Coco asked, impatient.

  “Two brothers. Rhett and David Englebert. Rhett founded Eastlake, and David is the CEO of Peaceful Spirit.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how I got made into plant food.”

  “I’m getting to that. Ellis found that both companies have suffered from operational issues in the last year. Eastlake has been struggling with its supply chain since a number of slaughterhouses it partners with have been closed—either temporarily or permanently—due to action by animal rights campaigners. The company hasn’t been able to obtain the by-products needed for several of its fertiliser lines, namely blood meal and bonemeal. Meanwhile, Peaceful Spirit managed to get into trouble with the environmental inspector. The company is… How should I put it…? It operates in the high-volume, low-margin sector. Cheap, no-frills services. The Costco of funeral care providers. They have several mortuaries, and each processes hundreds of bodies each month.”

  Rochelle wiped a tear away. “I wish I’d been able to afford better.”

  It wasn’t her fault. None of this was her fault. “You did the best you could under awful circumstances.”

  “If you’d held a fancy funeral, Coco wouldn’t be here today,” Remi reminded her. “Anyhow, the volume of waste products they were washing down their drains, specifically blood, caused a substantial load to the BOD at both the Chalk Bluff and Clark County sewage plants, and management was told to fix the problem.”

  “What’s BOD?”

  “Biological Oxygen Demand. According to Ellis, that’s the amount of oxygen required to break down the organic matter in the sewage. If sewage with a high BOD is discharged into a watercourse, it kills the fish because they can’t get enough oxygen to breathe.” Remi cocked his head. “We all learn new things every day.”

  “So let me guess,” Rhys said. “They decided to kill two birds with one stone and send the waste products from the funeral homes to the fertiliser factory?”

  “Exactly. A year ago, management issued a directive to collect the blood for ‘recycling.’ So that’s exactly what the staff have been doing. They drain the blood into twenty-five-litre jerrycans, and every other day, they load it into a truck. Ellis has been working as a mortuary assistant at the Las Vegas mortuary for the past month, and he has photos and documentation to prove this.”

  Coco felt nauseated, and she was fairly sure it wasn’t from morning sickness. She’d been fortunate with that so far. Celine, on the other hand, had been puking all over the place.

  “Is that illegal? It must be illegal.”

  “Yes, it is. If the blood goes through a sewage treatment plant, it’s properly degraded and disinfected. If it’s simply packaged into pots and sold in a garden centre, then it could contain any number of unknown pathogens.”

  “And any number of people’s DNA,” Rhys said. “Why did the trees bring Coco back and not somebody else?”

  Remi shrugged one shoulder. “One of life’s mysteries. I doubt the trees are sentient, so I expect they just latched onto the first fragment of DNA that reached their roots.”

  “You’re saying that Coco’s only here through pure dumb luck?”

  “That seems a reasonable assumption. But good luck, certainly.”

  A shudder ran through Coco. If Albert had stirred the pot before he mixed the fertiliser, or poured it differently, perhaps she wouldn’t be here at all. Joss would probably have agonised over that fact, but in Coco’s view, her time on this earth was too short. However she’d been gifted this new life, she intended to make the most of it.

  But she still wanted the people who’d stolen her blood and sold it for profit to pay.

  “So what can we do about Eastlake Horticultural and Peaceful Spirit?”

  “I need to fly to Las Vegas. Ellis has set up a meeting with an officer from the LVMPD in three days. With a…” Remi checked his notes. “A Detective Jack Callahan. Which means you need to look after Celine. She’s not to go near the horses alone, or sit for too long, or stand for too long, or use the hot tub… And I bought her more vitamins. You should take those too.”

  Coco rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mom.”

  “You should take the vitamins, sweetheart,” Rhys said.

  Remi put his hands on his hips. “I only do these things because I care.”

  Yes, he did. And Coco wasn’t really complaining. Better for Remi and Rhys to worry too much than not enough. And thanks to them and now Joe Ellis, she had closure on her past.

  The future stretched out in front of her like a sunrise over the ocean, and she intended to embrace it.

  Now she could start to live again.

  WHAT COMES NEXT?

  My next book will be Dirty Little Secrets, the first book in the Baldwin’s Shore series…

  Welcome to Baldwin’s Shore, the town where everybody has a secret…

  Brooke Bartlett is no exception. She’s been in love with her brother’s best friend for half her life, her dirty little secret. With Luca on the other side of the world, the temptation stayed out of reach, but now he’s back, and he’s not the only one. Brooke’s stalker is watching from the shadows, and he’s got his own ideas about her future…

  Baldwin’s Shore is set in the same world as Blackwood, and the series will link together.

  For more details: www.elise-noble.com/dirty-little-secrets

  And if you’d like to find out a little more about the origins of the Coco du Ciel trees, you can find that story in A Vampire in Vegas.

  When nightclub hostess Vee Pelletier stumbles across singer Serenity Strange’s body in a storeroom at Club Dead, the search begins to find her killer…but it won’t be easy. The list of suspects is longer than the line of beautiful people waiting to get in.

  Detective Jack Callahan has earned a reputation for solving the unsolvable, but this case may be beyond even his formidable skills. The deeper he digs, the darker the trail gets. And Serenity’s killer isn’t the
only person with secrets. Vee’s keeping a devilish one of her own…

  For more details: www.elise-noble.com/vampire

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  END-OF-BOOK STUFF

  Coco du Ciel started out life as a short story written for a contest—the prompt required some kind of mutant plant—and since I’d enjoyed writing it, I decided to expand it as a challenge to myself. Why a challenge? Because I wrote it all in third-person POV, something I find difficult and don’t particularly enjoy. The original draft was also written entirely from Rhys’s POV (who was then called Daniel—I’m forever changing names *rolls eyes*), although I decided to add Coco’s POV in a later draft because I thought we needed to hear from her. I also felt like writing a regular guy for a change, not a billionaire or a Navy SEAL, and for those reasons, Coco du Ciel ended up being a little different to my other books. But I need to vary the way I write every so often to keep from getting bored.