“Mademoiselle?” asks Chrétien.
“It’s this stupid safety pin. What a ridiculous name. There’s nothing safe about a pointed metal stick.” I suck my wounded thumb. Which I am sure looks so … mature. Exhaling heavily, I try again. And jab my thumb again. At which point I might have uttered a strong expletive.
“Allow me,” says Chrétien, holding his hand out for the safety pin.
He gets down on one knee and takes both sides of my jeans in his long-fingered hands. The back of his knuckles brush beside my belly button. His hands are warm. His touch is electric. Like, actual electricity is pumping through his veins and it leaps across to me.
I have dated a lot of guys, but none with electricity instead of blood in their veins. Oh, boy. I am in deep.
I look down at Chrétien. The safety pin is giving him trouble, too, by the look of things.
“I beg pardon,” he murmurs. “I have nearly finished.”
The back of his hand brushes my belly again. More electricity.
“No worries,” I manage to say in this breath-y voice for which I would totally mock Sam if she ever used it. In fact, I think I have mocked her for something like that back before she and Will were an item.
“There we are,” he says, and he smoothes the waist of my jeans with both hands.
Oh. My. Gosh.
“Voila! Good as new,” he declares.
In spite of all the things I say to Sam about Chrétien, what I’m feeling at the moment can only be described as … bashfulness? Shyness? The consequence of electric shock? I’m not sure what the correct label is. I do, however, know this feeling is not an ordinary component of Gwynitude. Judging by the flash of heat along my neck, my jaw, my face, I am turning bright red. I mutter a quick thanks and push on the door. Outside, in the February air, my blushing won’t be as noticeable. I hope.
Chrétien makes this noise under his breath. It’s very French. It takes me a second to place it as his disapproving noise. I pause, trying to figure out what he doesn’t approve of.
Ah. The door. It probably caused him actual, physical pain to not hold the door open for me.
“Sorry,” I say, looking at the door as he pulls it shut.
“We are in la France now, Mademoiselle. You must allow me to behave according to the local customs.”
“Fine,” I say. “You can open every door for me until we get back to the château.” I don’t even know if he’s right about this being a local custom. It’s been a few centuries since he lived in France. But I guess I can survive having Chrétien open doors for me for an hour.
“Okay,” I say as we climb into Sir Walter’s car, “we shop for jeans first. Then shoes. Then lingerie.” I wonder for half a second if Chrétien knows that word. Then it hits me the word is French to begin with. Duh.
“Your state of preparation for a stay of this duration must have been poor,” says Chrétien.
“Yeah,” I say. Hans didn’t exactly let me pack. “You’d think Ma might have grabbed me a spare pair of … um … socks.” I was totally not going to say socks, by the way, but I chickened out actually saying “panties” out loud in front of Chrétien. Which will be interesting, seeing as I’m about to go panty shopping with him.
The universe has a strange sense of humor.
I shake my head as I shift into third gear. Then, just as we pull out from the château’s long drive, I notice a black car parked across the road. No one inside.
“Does that strike you as suspicious?” I ask Chrétien.
Chapter Two
EVERYONE WEARS JEANS
I downshift into second in order to pass the black car more slowly and get a good look at it. Expensive. Blacked-tinted windows in back. French license plates. Empty.
Suspicious.
But after giving the car a visual “once over,” Chrétien doesn’t appear concerned. In fact, he teases me. “Mademoiselle Samantha told me of your concerns regarding the delivery carriage.”
“Delivery carriage?” I frown. “Oh. The UPS truck. Yeah.” I sigh. “I guess I need to recover my chill.”
“You have endured a great distress,” says Chrétien, earnestly. “Only the passage of time will bring about the recovery of chill.”
“Recovery of chill?” And now I’m the one laughing.
I drive Chrétien to the closest town without running over anyone or anything, and my French home-stay last Christmas taught me how to find parking in France, so pretty soon we are walking through the charming village of Vieilles Dames looking for someone who will sell me jeans.
“Are you quite certain,” begins Chrétien, “that the females of France don the same manner of apparel as the females of your own land?”
“Everyone wears jeans, Chrétien. Everyone.”
He does this little head-shrug that makes him look like Sir Walter. If Sir Walter was fifty years younger and hot enough to deep fry wonton strips. (Not a very authentic Chinese food, by the way.)
“Ah,” he says, indicating a sign with an extended hand. Chrétien never points with his finger. “Le Petit Tailleur.”
I stand to one side of the front door, allowing him to hold it open.
Inside, Chrétien mutters to me that this doesn’t look like any tailor-shop he’s ever seen in France. What it looks like is total fantasticness with price tags in euros. It’s the colors that hit me first. Oranges! Plums! Magentas! Back in Las Abuelitas, I can guarantee you everything in La Perla Fashions, our one clothing store, is spring green, spring pink, or ivory. Ma colors.
Here, everything is Gwyn colors. I squeal just a little bit and dive into the first row of hangers I reach. The prices are a bit … depressing. As in, I am on a trip for jeans, shoes, and panties. I do not have money for a plum scarf to top a burnt orange sweater over a magenta micro skirt.
Sighing, I hit the jeans rack, find the cheapest pair there and ask, in imperfect French, where I can try them on.
The saleswoman, in perfect English, directs me to the side of the store where I cram myself into the world’s tiniest changing booth and somehow manage to undo the safety pin on my old jeans without drawing blood. The contenders for “Gwyn’s new hawt French jeans” have a crazy high waist. No way does anyone west of New York City dress in jeans like this. But when the saleswoman has me come out to check the fit, I see Chrétien do this little double-take followed by his cheeks turning pink, so I figure I must look okay.
“I’ll take them,” I tell the saleswoman. “S’il vous plaît.” Fifty-five euros later, I have a pair of jeans.
“Shoes, next,” I tell Chrétien.
“Your current footwear, I confess, has troubled me.”
“Oh, yeah? You don’t think flip flops are the way to go in the dead of winter?”
“The topless slippers are called ‘fleep-flops’?”
I laugh at his accent. ‘Cause it’s either laugh or, you know, swoon. But before we find a purveyor of footwear, we pass a lingerie shop.
“Ooh-la-la,” I say, passing a manikin wearing a bustier and the world’s tiniest panties.
Chrétien just stares, his eyes giving away nothing of whatever he’s thinking. But I’m guessing no one put stuff like this in window displays back in the day.
After nearly pushing the door open myself, I step to the side and allow Chrétien to hold it open for me.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle. Bonjour, Monsieur,” says the shopkeeper.
“Bonjour,” I say back.
“Ah, Américaine,” says the shopkeeper.
“Oui, Madame,” I say back.
“And your petit-ami, he is also visiting from … another land?” She takes him in, head to toe, and doesn’t peg him for American, apparently.
I would so love to say he’s visiting from another time.
“Oh, he’s not my petit-ami,” I say instead. Not my boyfriend. Tragically.
“Well, let’s just see what we can do to change that,” says the shopkeeper, conspiratorially. She pulls a measuring tape from where it drap
es around her neck, pushes my arms out to the side and starts measuring my boobs.
“Oh, no, no, no,” I say. “I just need some panties.”
“Mmm,” she intones in this completely French way which somehow conveys to you that you are wrong and that she knows better. She does this all with one letter of the alphabet. “Mmm.”
I totally need to learn how to do that.
Chrétien, meanwhile, has drifted close enough that I feel his breath on my shoulder.
“May I?” he says, extending a hand toward the measuring tape.
Omigod, there is no way I’m letting him measure anything on me.
“With the numbers marked already?” he asks, examining the measuring tape. “But, how clever!”
“They don’t have that when you came from?” I ask, surprised.
Chrétien shakes his head.
Neither of them notices my substitution of when for where.
Chrétien thanks the shopkeeper and returns the measuring tape, still gazing at it in utter fascination. Which, considering the variety of … undergarments surrounding the two of us, takes some powers of concentration.
I sidle up to the clerk so I don’t have to talk loudly.
“I’m a small,” I say. “In American sizes. What do you have that’s low-cut in front and won’t go up my butt cheeks in back?”
The clerk hands me half a dozen panties from these teensy drawers along one wall of the shop and directs me to the changing area. “Let’s see how we do with these, shall we?”
She turns to Chrétien. “You would like to accompany your little friend?”
I don’t blush easily (ask Sam), but my face is heating up like a super nova. “I think he’s good waiting out here,” I say. Chrétien himself seems to have been rendered speechless by the question.
I so did not see this shopping expedition in a clear light when Chrétien offered to come along.
I hold up one pair of panties in front of the mirror, check the price tag, and decide I can afford half a panty if I still want to buy shoes.
“Great,” I mutter.
“We are doing well, Mademoiselle?” asks the shopkeeper.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. But I must have said it too quietly, because she’s pulling back the curtain next thing I know.
“Hey!” I say. Kind of loudly. As in, loud enough to attract Chrétien’s attention away from the bustier he was examining a second earlier.
He sees me, standing there with my jeans around my ankles, and I am just so grateful I didn’t actually, you know, drop my drawers. Also, if I thought I couldn’t blush any worse a minute ago, I stand corrected by my full body blush right now. I tug the curtain shut, hard.
“Sorry, sorry,” says the shopkeeper. “Elle est charmante,” she says to Chrétien.
I can’t hear his answer. Thank goodness. I struggle back into my new jeans and grab two pair of panties that look least likely to bug me, and as I exit the fitting room, I keep my eyes anywhere—anywhere—but on Chrétien.
Who seems to be in a conversation with the shop owner about one of the bustiers, of all things. I so do not want to know how that topic arose between them. I pay and we leave and my cheeks begin to return to a nice neutral Asian color.
“I was to have been trained in the construction of ladies’ bodices,” says Chrétien. “Bustiers, you see? The pay was as good as for gentlemen’s coats, and my mother was ambitious for my future. I am told the bustier makes a surprisingly comfortable undergarment.”
“Ah,” I say. And for once in my life, I don’t come up with a provocative reply. At this point, all I want to do is gather the scattered shreds of my self-respect.
Chrétien maybe picks up on this, because he changes the topic. “The mètre à ruban, the measuring ribbon, I believe? It was remarkable, was it not?”
“Measuring tape,” I say. “Yup. Remarkable.”
Maybe he wasn’t changing the topic for my sake after all. I mean, seriously, of all the things Chrétien could have found remarkable just now: the measuring tape? Me-in-my-bikini-cuts didn’t even make the list? The last time I felt this disappointed was when I found out the guy in the red suit wasn’t the one putting toothbrushes and candy in my stocking.
“Let’s go home,” I say.
“We cannot return without your slippers,” says Chrétien.
Shoes. I’d forgotten. I dig in my jeans pocket. I have seventeen euro. Nope; there’s another ten.
“I don’t think I’ll find much for twenty-seven euros,” I say.
“You possess not the certainty of this.”
Dear God, I love how he talks. His voice is what chocolate would be like if chocolate were a voice instead of a food group.
“Here we are,” says Chrétien, opening another door.
I sigh heavily and walk inside.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle et Monsieur,” says the shoe salesman.
“Bonjour,” we reply at the same time.
“Américaine.” He chews the word like it tastes slightly off in his mouth.
“What do you have for twenty-seven euros?” I ask.
He sniffs, air rushing in through his nose, and the sound is so stereotypically snobby Frenchman that I almost giggle.
“Je vais chercher,” he says. He will look.
He asks my size, which I have learned in European sizing is thirty-five, and I reply, “Trente-cinq.” Which I so wish was my bust size instead, but that’s a whole other issue.
“Excusez-moi, Monsieur,” calls Chrétien, bristling with indignation. “Vous n’avez pas mesurer sa taille.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “He doesn’t need to measure me. I’m a thirty-five. I promise.”
The clerk stops in his tracks and turns. He glowers at Chrétien. Chrétien glowers back. For a minute, it looks like the two might punch each other, but then the salesman pulls out a foot measurer and plops it on the ground next to me. He takes my foot like it might bite him, and without so much as glancing at the numbers, he says, “Ah, oui. Trente-cinq.” He then breezes to the back of the store.
Chrétien mutters under his breath in French and the shoe salesman mutters under his breath in French, and I browse the haute-couture high heels section, wishing the universe had seen fit to gift me with the ability to walk in heels. There’s a pair that are seriously blinged out. I’d like to see Ma’s face if I came home with them. I reach out to hold one up: gold lamé, fake diamonds across the straps. They are gorgeous.
Monsieur returns a moment later. “Just as I feared. We ‘ave not your size.”
Chrétien takes the gold lame sandal I was drooling over a second ago and shoves it in the dude’s face. “We will purchase these. Size thirty-five.”
“Chrétien,” I murmur. They cost three hundred twenty euros. “I don’t have enough.”
“I do,” he says to me. To the clerk, he says, “A thirty-five. Rapidemente.” Quickly.
“Non, non,” says the man. “I regret we do not have that shoe in such a size.” He turns to me with a very fake smile that stops short of his eyes. “We do not, as a rule, cater to your … type.”
My type? The type with twenty-seven euros to spend?
Chrétien makes this noise in his throat that sounds like growling. “What do you mean, ‘her type’?”
The salesman flicks his fingers in the air as he speaks. “Her … type. Her couleur. Her … race. Small feet and … so on.”
Chrétien strides to the salesman, pausing to grab a pair of gloves that are displayed on the counter. And he freaking slaps the salesman with the gloves. Seriously. Glove-slap.
“Vous me donnerez satisfaction, Monsieur?” says Chrétien.
Which I think means, will the dude sell Chrétien the shoes or not.
But I don’t want them anymore. I don’t want anything from this horrible person or his horrible store.
“Let’s go,” I say.
Chapter Three
RED SHOES
Inside the shoe store, Chrétien stands his ground
, waiting for an answer.
I grab his hand and tug. “I want to leave. Now.”
Chrétien says over his shoulder, “J’habite Château Feu-Froid.”
“Why did you just tell him where we live?” I ask, shaking my head. I don’t want that creeper knowing where I live, even if I only live there a week.
“Should he decide to accept my challenge, he must know wherein I dwell, must he not?”
“Your … challenge?”
“Yes. I struck him and offered to fight for your honneur. How do you say it?”
“Honor,” I reply. “You seriously offered to fight a dude who was rude?”
“Of course. He insulted your good name and your national origin.”
I can’t help myself—I laugh. Like, full on giggle.
Chrétien raises one gorgeous eyebrow. “You are amused?”
“I’m honored. Truly.” I giggle again. “But no one duels over racism in this century. Well, they might fight wars, I guess, but no dueling.”
Chrétien looks puzzled. “That is most illogical. A duel is settled between two persons. A war involves thousands.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess it isn’t logical. But that’s how things are.”
Chrétien does the nose-sniff thing like the snobby shoe clerk. The French have so many ways to communicate that don’t involve words. Madame Evans should totally let me do a paper on that.
“Let’s go home,” I say.
We are halfway back to the parking lot when I notice an adorable slip-on shoe in a window display. In cherry red. I have such a thing for red shoes.
“Do you mind?” I ask Chrétien.
“Of course not,” he says, executing a mini-bow.
We enter through the world’s narrowest door, all carved in flowers and vegetables. Inside, the shop is a hodge-podge of shoes, bicycle tires, fishing rods, and things I can’t identify by name in French or in English.
“Excusez-moi,” I say to a white-haired lady in the back. “Est-ce-que vous avez cette chaussure en trente-cinq?” I point to the front window display, to the red shoe, hoping I’ve just asked if she has it in my size.
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