by Sandi Scott
Wait? Could it possibly be Ryan Brady? Although she had switched to a phone that would work in Europe, Ashley hadn’t figured out how to import her contacts yet. The Texas area code made her wonder though, could Ryan be trying to call?
Ashley had met Ryan at the computer software company, Smith Corp, where they both worked as programmers. He was a nice guy, and she’d considered dating him a couple of times, but he’d always ended up dating someone else – one of a series of super-tall, blonde leggy women from Dallas with long, straight hair and perfect makeup. Ashley was obviously not his type although they had fun just hanging out together.
Then Serge had come into her life on a motorcycle and wearing a black leather jacket, the first genuinely hunky geek that she’d ever met. Ashley was enchanted at first sight. The phone continued to ring. Maybe she should answer, then again, maybe she shouldn’t. She and Serge were serious about each other, far more serious than Ryan would ever be about any of his girlfriends.
Ryan was a classic geek that way, Ashley was sure his love for computers would forever outstrip his love of any woman. Conversely, Serge seemed like a bad boy, but he was really a softie. Ashley wanted nothing more than to settle down, get married, and live the rest of her life with Serge and she was sure he felt the same way, too. She knew they were on the same page, at least they had been, until this past week when he had started ignoring her in favor of work. Ashley sighed.
No, tonight was absolutely not the night to talk to Ryan, regardless of what he wanted. She’d be too tempted to pour her heart out to him instead of working through things with Serge, and if Serge found out, he might go haywire. Tonight, it was just her and the man with the magnificent mustache, that funny little Belgian, Hercules Poirot.
CHAPTER 2
The days flew by. Not only were the classes taking up most of Ashley’s time and energy throughout the day but she, Marie, and Patty were spending time together in the evenings. The restaurant was presided over in the evening by Chef Lemaire without fail—which left plenty of time for the three of them to start exploring Paris by night, which mostly meant restaurants, cabarets, and dance clubs. They even went to the Moulin Rouge, the famous cabaret where the entire interior of the main floor was red. Atop the front door, there was a neon-lit red windmill that turned all night. The dancers looked like Vegas showgirls—or maybe it was the other way around—Vegas showgirls all looked like Moulin Rouge dancers!
Serge continued to be AWOL. When he did stop back at the apartment after Ashley returned from the cooking class, he was cranky and irritable and snapped at her if she said two words to him. Her romantic interlude in Paris wasn’t very romantic anymore! But she didn’t let it get her down, at least not too much.
The cooking segment had gone very well. Ashley now believed she could handle any of the stations at the restaurant except, ironically, being a prep cook. She just couldn’t cut things fast enough. Patty promised her that more speed would come with time and that she just needed to think of herself as a ninja. Marie, of course, had the knife skills of a ninja assassin-swashbuckling pirate chef. Even Patty was impressed. Ashley wasn’t bothered, she had always maintained that her true chance to shine would be during the baking week. “I’m no ninja. Je suis une pâtissièr!”
“We shall see,” Patty said, chuckling wickedly. “Cooking is easy. Baking is hard.”
“You’re wrong,” Ashley couldn’t be swayed, “it’s the other way around.”
Patty snorted, but when it finally came to baking week, Patty had to admit that Ashley was correct. The first day Marie had broken down hopelessly in tears while trying to make croissants with Ashley humming happily to herself. Chef Lemaire himself had come in early to help ‘finish’ Ashley as a baker. “By rights, ma chère, you should have a world-class pastry chef teaching you tricks. Alas, only I, Chef Lemaire, is here to show you what I know of the secrets of the French flours and sugars and yeasts and leavenings, along with the secrets of le beurre. The butter.” He lowered his voice and looked at Ashley with a secretive smile as he finished speaking.
Chef Lemaire was a man who loved his butter. Not only did he take her around to several professional flour shops and introduce her proudly to the owners, but he also coached her on how to judge cream and make butter; sharing his secrets how to make European-style cultured butter. They worked on French buttercreams and pastry creams, macarons, petit pots, cream puffs, gateaux basque, Napoleons, and every sort of crepes imaginable! The only thing that everyone had difficulty with was the crêpes.
Customers seemed to think that the L’Oiseau Bleu crêpes were perfectly fine, because they were, but Ashley knew that the crêpes could be better. That week, a lot of crêpes were passed out to the customers, free of charge, to keep the results of her current obsession from going to waste.
The end of the week came too quickly and then it was time for Ashley and Marie to say goodbye. On the last day, they both received certificates saying that they had completed the L’Oiseau Bleu training for French cooks, which meant exactly zero as a professional certification but made them both glow with pride.
“I knew if I could last through baking week here, at L’Oiseau Bleu, I could survive anything,” Marie said with tears in her eyes.
“You have greatly improved your skills as a baker,” Chef Lemaire said generously.
“I have, but my real love is in cooking traditional French dishes.”
“And at that, mademoiselle, you are superb!”
“Thank you.” Marie embraced the chef around his enormous stomach in a fond. He patted her on the back, looking around to Patty with a panicky look on his face. He was not an expressive man.
“And you, ma chère, Ashley,” Chef Lemaire said once Patty had helped Marie to a chair and given her a glass of red wine to fortify her, “could bake anywhere you like in Paris.”
“Thank you.” She restrained herself from embarrassing the chef with another hug, but she still felt the emotional impact of the words.
Patty gave them both hugs and kissed them on both cheeks. “If ever either of you needs a job, come and see me. I’ll find you one. Either here, or with a good chef who speaks some English, non? And not bad pay for the wages either.” She named an amount that, when mentally translated from Euros to dollars, was less than what Ashley made as a programmer or doing white-hat hacking jobs but still was nothing to sneer at. She could live on that easily in Paris, and that was saying something.
Marie thanked her and said that she planned to get more training at the big Paris cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu.
“Wow!” Ashley said. She was truly impressed.
Patty and Chef Lemaire both smiled. “You will not only get the best training but also the instructors and the certification itself will open the highest doors in your favor,” the chef said.
Patty added, “You’ll do fine. They’re nothing compared to some of the things I put you through. They spend half the time trying to teach knife skills that you’re already better at than many of the staff.”
Ashley wasn’t quite ready to take that huge step even if it was for just the Diplôme de Pâtisserie and not cooking and baking. For one thing, what would Serge say? She sighed. She had no idea what Serge would say because he had barely been around at all in the last two weeks. “Are you all right?” Patty asked, as the three of them walked out of the restaurant, their elbows linked. They were on their way to an Algerian restaurant near the Varenne stop on the Metro.
“Boyfriend issues.”
Ashley had talked about Serge before. Every time she’d done so, Patty would always go very quiet as if biting her tongue. Finally, though, she said what was on her mind.
“Are we friends,” Patty asked, “or am I just the terrible sous chef who makes you do all the work while she steps outside for a smoke break?”
“Yes,” Ashley said without hesitation, “we’re friends.”
“Then, as a friend I have a few words of advice, Serge will never be good for you. If a man only acts
as though he loves you when you are at his beck and call, especially when you’re working for him, then it won’t last.” Ashley tensed up. She had a feeling that Patty would say something like that.
“We’ll see,” Ashley said.
Marie squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry about it tonight. We’re eating spicy food and drinking a lot of wine and going dancing. You can think about it tomorrow or the next day. No rush.”
“No rush,” Patty repeated. “To wine, tagine, and song!”
They all laughed. “To wine, tagine, and song!” Ashley chanted. “Wait! I need pictures of this.”
The three of them rushed back to the restaurant then stood together as Chef Lemaire took their photo, then Malik, the pastry chef, took their photo with Chef Lemaire, then finally Chef Lemaire took their photo with Malik.
AFTER A WONDERFUL NIGHT, Ashley did think about what Patty had said about Serge. She knew it was true but only since they had come to Paris. Once she had finished her job for the company Serge was working for and started going to cooking classes, he hadn’t wanted to have much to do with her. Still, she didn’t think it was fair to place all the blame for that on Serge. He was busy, but then again, he would have been a lot less busy if Ashley had been helping him with his projects.
On the other hand, he hadn’t really warned her that it would be like this when she had agreed to come with him to Paris. Serge had mostly talked about going on vacation together, saying that he would only have a little work to do for his company. Was it her fault that it had turned out to be the reverse? Did it mean that their romance wouldn’t last, though? Ashley was confused and didn’t want it to be true. She wanted to feel the same wonderful rush of emotion every day that she had felt when she was falling in love with Serge, or maybe just a notch down from that. What she had felt had been almost exhausting at first.
Serge had made her feel like a queen, even a goddess, and that got kind of overwhelming after a while, especially when she wanted to put on sweats, eat an insane amount of ice cream in front of the TV and veg out after a big programming job. All he wanted was for her to dress up so he could show her off to his friends.
Vegging out after a big job had always been one of Ashley’s traditions while working at Smith Corp. She and Ryan used to celebrate that way all the time, either watching movies or playing stupid video games together, the stupider the better. After one such celebration she had even been accused of having an affair with him by one of his girlfriends. Ryan and Ashley had looked at each other in shock and then burst out laughing. “I could never date someone who could kick my ass at Madden NFL,” Ryan said. “Come on. I’ve smelled her after a week of not showering. There’s no romance there.” Yet, the more she thought about it, there was nothing but romance with Serge. They’d gone out on dates. They’d sneaked off to secluded corners together. He’d driven her around on his Harley, without a helmet, her hair flying behind her while she laughed ecstatically.
Ashley couldn’t imagine Serge playing Madden with her. As for movies, he only liked the big action movies where everyone pretended to be ten times more serious than necessary. He couldn’t stand anything else, not even The Fast and the Furious. “Too silly.” He read business books, not novels. When she’d talked about getting a pet together, she had been ready to compromise and get a cat, bird, lizard or gerbil if he didn’t want a dog, but he’d looked at her like she was crazy.
“A pet?”
“A dog.” Ashley had said firmly.
“Why would we want a dog?” Serge wasn’t giving in.
“I want a dog. We could get a puppy and train it to find electronics like Ryan and I were doing with Dizzy at the office before I left.” Ashley knew right away that was the wrong thing to say. Ashley had convinced Smith Corp to adopt the rescue puppy from the pound that the Seagrass vet had asked her to foster. She loved having Dizzy underfoot, until Serge came into her life and made it clear pets were not part of his agenda. Any mention of Ryan and her work completely turned Serge off.
“But why does that mean we need to get a dog?” Serge had shaken his head. “No, I’m not ready for a pet yet, Ashley. I have too much to do, too many places to go.” Then, he’d brought up the possibility that his company might send him to Paris. They had a branch there, and a bunch of interesting projects had come up so she had put off getting a pet, telling herself that they’d talk about it when they came back home.
When are we going home to Texas? Ashley felt a wave of homesickness hit her. Paris wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t home. She wouldn’t mind staying here for a couple of years, especially if—forbidden thought—she could find a way to convince Serge that she needed to work at L’Oiseau Bleu instead of doing more projects for him, but Paris wasn’t, and would never be, home. Why? She wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like her part of Texas was famous for anything but its beaches and its barbecue. Still, it was home. Maybe her heart was just too stubborn for anything else.
ASHLEY WALKED DOWN to Rue Daguerre to pick up a pint of ice cream from a nearby market, hoping against hope that she could find some peanut butter, Parisians seemed to think she was crazy whenever she asked if they had any, then went back upstairs to put on her sweats and relax in front of her laptop screen.
About halfway through the pint, Serge came back to the apartment. He looked tired, with dark circles under his eyes, and he hadn’t showered for a couple of days.
Ashley covered him in kisses and got him in the shower. “Are you hungry?”
“No, I ate.” He was morose.
“How’s the project going?”
“I’m stuck on something.”
“Oh, no! Tell me about it.” Ashley was refreshed after her break from programming and she yearned to help him. He described the problem, sounding down and depressed about it. No solution immediately presented itself, but she promised herself that she would take a look at it later and see if she could surprise Serge with a solution.
Later came when Serge was asleep and snoring loudly. Restless, Ashley got out of bed and booted up her laptop to start going over the data that he’d sent her. It was another white-hat hacking job, this time for an online company named Cubiste Internationale that sold cheap imported manufactured goods from China and Indonesia.
The problem in this situation wasn’t that she couldn’t hack into the site and start messing up online transactions but that the company had been subjected to a very particular hack in the last month, and Serge couldn’t work out how it was done. Obviously, it was possible, it had already happened! But Serge just couldn’t seem to get a handle on how it was done.
Ashley sank into the deep, almost hypnotic mindset of working on a programming problem. Not that she didn’t like programming, she did, she just liked baking better. The keys flew under her fingers as she tried one solution after another, narrowing down the field of possible approaches until the number of solutions was exactly one – bypass the website itself and go through the credit card provider. Which, ouch Ashley winced mentally, would go way beyond the scope of a white-hat hacking project. Getting into a second site to get at the first one was a technique that an unethical hacker would use, and she didn’t have the authority from the credit card company to do it.
The next morning when she told Serge and showed him the details from her report, he laughed hysterically and mimed ripping his hair out. “I thought I was going crazy! I just couldn’t find a way, I thought I was losing it. Completely losing my touch.” Once again, she was covered in kisses and praised up to the moon, and he insisted on getting her paid through his company again for her freelancing hours, along with a huge bonus.
Then Serge was out the door, anxious to get back to work – completely ignoring her. His actions chilled Ashley, Patty’s observation was true. Serge only loved her when he needed her to do something for him. When he didn’t need her, she didn’t seem to exist.
CHAPTER 3
Days later, Ashley finally worked up the courage to confront Serge.
“Serge, we need t
o talk.”
“Uh-oh,” he said. “She’s using her serious voice.”
Ashley swallowed back a sarcastic response. If it had been Ryan saying that to her, not that he would have made a “joke” like that in the first place, she wouldn’t have thought twice about saying what was on her mind.
“You’re never here,” she said.
“That’s not true. I’m here now, aren’t I?”
“You’re never here unless you want me for something,” Ashley corrected herself. “When you want me for something, you’re all over the place. When you don’t, you sleep at the office.”
“Or with a girlfriend.”
“What?” she was shocked. That hadn’t even occurred to her.
He laughed at her. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You think I’m sleeping around.”
She felt rattled already. “No, that’s not it! I don’t think ...”
“I know that I’ve been busy at work, but I’m not sleeping around on you. I promise.” He caught her eye, his expression practically oozed sincerity.
“That’s not what this is about,” she said firmly. She had to keep him from changing the subject. “This is about you not being here except when you think I can do something for you. What about me?”
“What about you? What do you need?”
“This was supposed to be a vacation!”
“And you can do whatever you want,” he said, “but I have to work.”
“This was supposed to be our vacation.”
“I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, but that was never the case. You knew I would have to work while I was here.”
“I knew that,” she admitted, “but what I didn’t know was that you would disappear for days on end without even letting me know you’d be gone.”
“Are you upset about overcooked suppers or something?” he asked, sounding incredulous. “I told you not to cook for me.”