LITMIR.BIZ

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quiet and grateful. “I couldn’t have done it without you, Quentin.”

      His gaze softened. “We make a good team.”

      “Always.”

      Their glasses clinked musically and they drank, smiling at each other.

      After a few moments, Lexi sighed contentedly. “What an amazing day this has been. I almost wish we didn’t have to go back home on Monday.”

      “Me too,” Quentin murmured.

      “I’d love to have dinner tonight in one of those Michelin-rated French restaurants.”

      “Let’s do it, then.”

      “We can’t,” she reminded him with a rueful smile. “Asha’s chef is preparing a special New Year’s Day dinner. Besides, we don’t have reservations.”

      “Then we’ll come back tomorrow night.”

      “Mmm. Sounds like a plan.”

      “Good.” Quentin reached out, his fingertips brushing her cheek as he gently pushed her windswept hair off her face.

      Their gazes caught and held. A strange, intoxicating dizziness swept through Lexi.

      Altitude, she told herself. Or too much wine in one day.

      But she knew better.

      The winds of change were upon her and Quentin. That stolen kiss on the balcony had set something in motion between them. Something that had sent them hurtling into the unknown.

      Where they landed, only time would tell.

      Chapter 4

      “How was your trip?”

      Lexi jumped at the sound of her mother’s voice, which had snapped her out of her deep reverie. She’d been daydreaming about Burgundy.

      And Quentin.

      Turning from the kitchen sink, where she’d just finished washing dishes, she saw her mother standing in the doorway, puffing on a cigarette. Carlene Austin had been on the phone when Lexi had arrived at the house half an hour ago. She’d greeted her daughter with a distracted wave and returned to her conversation while Lexi headed into the kitchen. At the sight of dirty dishes piled into the sink, she’d sighed in resignation, then rolled up her sleeves and gotten right to work. Old habits died hard.

      Carlene shuffled into the small kitchen. “Thanks for taking care of that for me. The dishwasher’s acting up again.”

      “I figured. Have you called someone?”

      “No point. I can’t afford the repairs.” After thirty years in civil service, Carlene still complained of earning barely enough to make ends meet.

      “It’s just as well,” Lexi said, twisting off the water faucet. “The dishwasher’s old. No sense in sinking more money into it. We can go shopping to get you a new one this weekend.”

      “You buying?”

      “Of course.”

      “Thanks, baby.” Carlene sat down at the oak breakfast table, tapping her cigarette into an ashtray already bristling with butts. She’d once been beautiful, with a smooth caramel complexion and long, glossy black hair that she’d meticulously maintained. But time and bitterness, compounded with an unhealthy nicotine habit, had taken their toll. Now there was a hard edge to her features, dark circles rimmed her eyes, her hair and skin had lost their sheen, and the shapely figure she’d once flaunted had withered away to the gaunt frame now swallowed up in a chenille robe.

      Averting her troubled gaze, Lexi vigorously wiped down the countertops. She could see through the alcove into the living room that the heavy curtains were drawn closed, plunging the room into gloomy darkness. The worn, outdated furniture reeked of every cigarette Carlene had ever smoked. The whole house did.

      Shaking off the depressing thought, Lexi dropped the dishrag into the sink and joined her mother at the table.

      “When do you go back to work?” Carlene asked.

      “Tomorrow.” A chef instructor at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, Lexi couldn’t wait to tell her students all about her trip to Burgundy.

      Carlene drew on her cigarette and shot twin streams of smoke through her nostrils. “You gonna keep working after your cookbook comes out?”

      “Of course. You know I love teaching.”

      Her mother grunted noncommittally. The idea of enjoying one’s livelihood was a foreign concept to her. She’d never reaped personal fulfillment from her government job. It had been a means to an end, a way to feed and clothe her three young children after her philandering husband had walked out on them. His desertion, followed by a string of failed relationships over the years, had turned Carlene into a miserable, embittered woman.

      As Lexi stared at the glowing red tip of her mother’s cigarette, she had a flashback to the time when she was fourteen and Carlene had burst into her bedroom late one night, screaming at the top of her lungs because Lexi had forgotten to wash the dishes before going to bed. Trailing cigarette ashes, Carlene had stormed across the room and snatched the covers off her daughter’s body, cursing at her to get up. Shaken and disoriented, Lexi hadn’t moved fast enough. The next thing she knew, her mother was leaning over her and viciously stabbing the butt of her cigarette into Lexi’s thigh. The searing, excruciating pain had wrenched an agonized wail from her that brought her two younger siblings running from their bedroom.

      The sound of their confused, frightened sobs had penetrated Carlene’s black rage. Her horrified gaze had swept over Lexi, writhing in pain on the floor. As the enormity of what she’d done sank in, Carlene had backed out of the room and fled from the apartment, leaving Lexi behind to console her distraught siblings before she could tend to her own wound.

      The next morning, it was a humble, contrite Carlene who’d entered her daughter’s bedroom carrying a breakfast tray. Lexi had lain there, silent and unmoving, as her mother gently applied a salve to her burn and dressed it with gauze, assuring her that the scar would eventually fade. It had, but the memory of that harrowing night had lingered for years, as raw and painful as ever.

      As Lexi watched now, ashes crumbled off the butt of her mother’s cigarette and landed on the table. Carlene didn’t seem to notice or care.

      Frowning, Lexi got up to retrieve the dishrag. Returning to the table, she wiped away the ashes, wishing she could erase her memories just as easily.

      “I thought you were trying to quit,” she told her mother.

      “Don’t start with me,” Carlene warned. “I don’t need no damn lecture from you.”

      “I wasn’t going to lecture you.” Lexi silently counted to ten. “However, you really do need to take better care of yourself, Ma. Your doctor’s right. You’re playing Russian roulette with your life by smoking the way you do.”

      Carlene took a long, defiant drag on her cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke right into Lexi’s face. Though her eyes stung, she refused to flinch. She wouldn’t give her mother the satisfaction.

      The strategy worked.

      Scowling, Carlene stubbed out her cigarette with short, angry jabs punctuated with muttered expletives. “I’m getting sick and tired of you telling me what to do in my own goddamn house.”

      Technically, the house belonged as much to Lexi as it did to Carlene. She’d helped her mother purchase the property by cosigning the mortgage loan and supplying the closing funds. If her cookbook sold well—and by all early indications it would—she intended to buy her mother some badly needed new furniture, which she’d been unable to do at the time because she’d nearly depleted her savings account.

      “You never answered my question,” Carlene said sourly. “How was Paris?”

      “It was great,” Lexi replied.

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