Page 66 of Enemies to French Kisses
“Bad news,” Laura says as I click the door closed behind me. “I’m going to live.” She laughs. “Don’t look so shocked! The French have all kinds of black humor.”
“Still, that’s not funny.”
“Oh, please.” She touches her cheek, her expression changing. “Wait a second. My face…” She runs her hand over her skin like in one of those commercials, but her expression moves from concern to horror. “A mirror!”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“A mirror, for heaven’s sake, I need a mirror!”
“I really don’t think—"
Ignoring my pleas, she’s up and out of the bed, trailing the IV behind her as she rushes in bare feet to the bathroom.
“NOOOOOOO!”
I run into the bathroom and spin her around. “It’s temporary.”
“I’m covered in welts!”
“It’s better than it was.”
“It is?” She runs to the bed and leans against it, the IV rolling to a stop beside her.
“The most important thing is that the anaphylactic shock has passed, thanks to some quick thinking and a lucky—um—cough.”
She turns her head from its resting place on her hands, but I can tell she isn’t going to let this slip by.
“A lucky cough?”
“It was mostly a cough.”
“What was the rest of it?”
Don’t tell her she threw up all over the carpet in the Ritz hotel while wearing the Raza Amiel dress, that the guests were a combination of aghast and deeply concerned. That won’t help one bit.
Still, the way the guests stepped around her so that the paparazzi couldn’t take pictures of the Raza creation on the floor was more humanity than I would have expected. “Fortunately the snail came back out before you could fully digest it,” she gasps and buries her face again, “whichmayhave saved your life. And that’s what matters here.”
She crawls back into the bed, face down, talking into her pillow. I have to get really close, though I don’t think she intends for me to hear her.
“I have made a fool of myself in front of a cast of Paris’ most elite. I had the opportunity of a lifetime, and I blew it.”
“More like the snail blew it,” I whisper but she doesn’t react.
“How will I ever recover from this? I can’t show my face in Paris again.”
“Hey, now.” I move beside her and rest my hand on her shoulder. “It’s not like that.”
“It’sexactlylike that. There were a hundred people there who saw me in that state—"
“Two hundred and fifty.”
“Not helping!”
“But they don’t matter! And they don’t make a stitch of difference to your success. You’ve reached this place so early in your career because of your merit, not because of what a bunch of stuffy silver spoon types think of you. It’s because of you that Innov’ Biotech has been able to expand, and because of you we’re going to take the Dutch proposal forward.”
“Hold up.” She rolls over and the hospital gown inches up her legs, just enough that I can see a lot more of them.
Deep breath.
