Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3) (2 page)

~ 1 ~

Carmen cracked open the door to Rosa’s room and saw a lump in the bed, under the white cotton comforter. Long strands of sable and burgundy hair coiled from the top and spread over the crisp, white cases on the pillows.

With a roll of her eyes, she quietly closed the door and went into the kitchen. She wrote a quick note (
Went out. Text if you need me. There’s food in the fridge. C—
), tented the paper and left it sitting on the countertop. Then she did as advertised and went out, locking the heavy door behind her.

Izzie and Laurent’s apartment was located in the swanky seventh
arrondissement
of Paris—only a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower. The neighborhood boasted tree-lined streets and sidewalks bursting with cafés, pâtisseries, chocolatiers, flower shops, and chichi boutiques. The apartment buildings were grandly aged and perfectly Parisian, with red geraniums abloom on black iron balconies onto which opened multi-paned French doors.

Elegant women and men in designer clothes strode with purpose down the walks and drove luxury cars, high-end scooters, and motorcycles, traveling the streets with the same blatant disregard for traffic law, self-preservation, or common decency of every other driver in Paris.

Izzie had left the keys to their Audi S8, but there was absolutely no way in all the nine hells that Carmen was going to drive that six-figure fucker in the city of Paris. When it was time to go out into the countryside, they’d take the Metro to the edge of the city, and she’d rent a car from there.

But they’d only been in Paris a week, and there was plenty to do right in the city to keep them occupied for a while. Once Rosa got herself out of bed, that was. Jetlag had laid the girl
out
, and she’d spent days doing virtually nothing but sleeping and occasionally coming out to the living room to sigh for a while. It had been all Carmen could do to get her to go out for an occasional meal. It was about time to kick that girl up the ass and get her moving. They were in Paris, for fuck’s sake.

When they’d arrived, Rosa had been giddy. While they’d been planning the trip, she’d been skeptical of the free accommodations, but when she’d seen with her own eyes that they’d be living among well-heeled Parisians, surrounded by shopping and food, she’d bounced up and down in the taxi.

Then she’d seen the apartment itself. It was a typical upscale flat, Carmen thought, in a stately building with an old cage elevator. The ceilings were high, the plasterwork was ornate, the doors were tall and carved. Izzie preferred a more muted palette than Carmen liked, but still, it was warm and classy. Four rooms and a bath—large living room with a fireplace, small kitchen, and two bedrooms, one large and one small. Carmen took the large bedroom, which shared access to the balcony with the living room. The small bedroom was quite small, but had a view of the Eiffel Tower.

When Rosa first walked in, she’d squealed. “Oh. My. Gawd! I feel like Audrey Hepburn!” She’d even done a little pirouette in the middle of the living room.

They’d walked to the Eiffel Tower that first afternoon, browsed through some of the shops on the way back, and had an early dinner at a cute little café. Rosa had been happy and chatty, and Carmen had felt more convinced than ever that she’d made the right choice, bringing her here.

Then Rosa had taken to her bed and slept for approximately ninety percent of her life.

Carmen had felt some jetlag, too, but she’d slept hard that first night and late into the next morning, and then her clock was reset. So she’d been doing Paris mostly on her own for this first week of their summer.

She needed to get her baby sister moving. But frankly, Carmen had enjoyed this week. She preferred her own company above all, and wandering alone through the streets of this magnificent city had been blissful, really. She’d done a lot of things Rosa would have balked at—the Catacombs, for instance. The Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Notre Dame. A day spent simply walking along the Seine until her feet gave out. Had she dragged Rosa along, those days would have been ruined by her endless complaints.

She’d also made it her mission to scout out the cafés, pâtisseries, and the like around their flat to figure out which had the best offerings and atmosphere. Usually, she’d been able to get Rosa out for a meal and a little bit of shopping, just an hour or two before she was back to yawning and sighing.

It really was time to get her in gear. The whole point of bringing Rosa to Europe was to get her out in the world and broaden her outlook a little.

Tomorrow. Carmen would let her sleep through this night, and then she’d shake her out of that comforter in the morning, and they would take on the Louvre and some gardens. At least.

For tonight, though, the thought of a nice meal, a good wine, and a good book at the little café she’d decided was her favorite so far sounded like a lovely end to a beautiful, solitary day in Paris.

~oOo~

Café Aphrodite sat on the corner across the street, at the end of Izzie’s block, but Carmen hadn’t tried it out until the third day. Since then, she’d eaten there four times. It was the perfect blend of good atmosphere and good food.

The side walls were lined with books and odd little knickknacks, many of which had the kitschy feel of knock-off antiquity. The ceiling was mirrored. The back wall was bottles of wine shelved from floor to ceiling.  A small bar took up space at about the middle of the room. A ten-foot tall marble fountain of Aphrodite herself, standing nude and glorious in her shell, dominated the center of the interior. There had been risk in this design of tending toward tacky. But the effect was instead cozy.

Though about fifteen small tables were perched within a low, wrought-iron railing on the sidewalk, and Carmen had enjoyed a couple of meals people-watching out there, on this night, she decided to sit indoors with her tablet. She had taken it as a challenge to finally get through David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest
during this trip. She’d been a fan of DFW since she’d come across a hilarious article of his in
The Atlantic
several years ago, and she thought she had read all of his published works but one.
Infinite Jest
was his most famous—and, in Carmen’s opinion, two hundred pages into his thousand-plus-page brick of a postmodern masterpiece, his most ponderous. The footnotes in this one were going to drive her insane.

Her reading tastes tended toward the literary, especially the contemporary literary stuff. But she liked the classics, too. Virginia Woolf was her favorite author. She’d enjoyed studying literature in school, and had danced around the idea of majoring in English for a while, but then she’d taken an upper-division course with a professor who’d insisted that texts had only one correct reading. Carmen didn’t like to have her own view of texts or the world wrangled so narrowly. So she’d majored in philosophy instead.

Not exactly a career-oriented choice, but one she’d enjoyed immensely. The world of the philosophy department had been delightfully open to ideas. She’d basically gotten a degree in arguing. It suited her well.

She’d knocked around for awhile after graduation, doing her own thing, serving at a diner near campus, still living with Izzie, who was finishing a Master’s program. They’d been planning to move to Europe together and see what happened.

Then Carmen’s mother had gotten sick, and Izzie had gone to Europe on her own.

And they’d seen what happened.

Marc, a server who’d had her table before, smiled when she came into the café. He sat her at a good table near the window and took her order for a bottle of pinot gris. They spoke English, which was good, because Carmen had discovered that she’d lost most of the French she’d learned after three years of study in high school and three more in college. Fifteen years was a long time away from a language.

While she waited for her wine, she perused the menu, which helpfully had English translations under every item. Marc brought her pinot, made the usual production of pouring and tasting and approving, and took her order of a chicken entrée in a mushroom sauce on a bed of wild rice—which was called
Suprêmes
something and made Carmen sing old Diana Ross songs in her head. Then Carmen settled comfortably, sipped her wine, and opened the bookshelf on her tablet to confront the goings-on at the Enfield Tennis Academy.

~oOo~

“
Pardon, mademoiselle
.”

Well, that French accent was worse than hers—and hers came with a touch of Rhody. Carmen looked up from her tablet and her half-eaten meal and found a man standing at her table. He was tall and good looking, in a blond, sunbaked, wind-blown, California way. Which, she supposed, was the traditional way to be good looking. He had blue eyes and a face a bit on the rugged side. Handsome, not pretty. Maybe forty or so.

He wore a crisp, cotton button-down shirt in emerald green, heavily faded jeans, and a brown leather jacket. His shirt was open at the throat, and she could see at least two stone pendants on leather cords around his neck. Yep. Definitely California.

He looked vaguely familiar, but Carmen chalked that up to the way that all Americans seemed to stand out to her in Paris. There was some kind of ‘home’ vibe to them, or something. Or maybe it was that Parisians all seemed to be so glamorous and put together, and Americans as a group looked like schlubs in comparison.

She didn’t answer, just lifted her eyebrows to signal that if he had something to say, he should get on with it.

“
Parlez-vous anglais?
”

“Wow. Your accent sucks. Do you speak English better than you speak French?”

He grinned then, showing perfect, white teeth and long, deep dimples, and for the first time, Carmen was a little interested. She had a thing for dimples. “Thank God. Yeah, I’m not good with French. But my facility with the English language is solid, I think.”

He was cute—okay, hot—but Carmen was ensconced in her private moment, maybe her last private moment of the summer, once she got Rosa up. She wasn’t in the mood for company. “Good for you. Is there something you wanted?”

Her terse rejoinder didn’t erase his grin. Instead, he cocked his head and lifted an eyebrow as if accepting a challenge. “Yes, actually. I was hoping you could help me. I made a promise that I wouldn’t go home until I’d spoken with a beautiful girl. It’s been days now, and I really want my bed. I don’t suppose you’d speak with me?”

Carmen rolled her eyes and set her tablet down. Immediate deduction of at least six hot points for starting off with a lame line like that. “Seriously? Is that line something you practiced in front of the mirror? Because I’m here to tell you, bud. Your mirror lies. You should never use that again. There. Now you’ve spoken to a beautiful woman. Home you go.” She picked up her tablet and her wine glass and tipped it to her mouth to empty it.

Instead, the stranger pulled out the empty seat at her little table and sat. He extended his hand. “I’m Theo.”

Ignoring the hand looming over her dinner, Carmen set her empty wine glass down and filled it from the bottle Marc had left. “No. This is not our Woody Allen meet-cute. You are not charming. And you are not invited. Go away.”

But he would not be dissuaded. “See, according to the terms of my promise, I have to have an actual conversation. I have to speak
with
a beautiful girl, not simply
to
her. And we both agree you’re beautiful.” He finally dropped his hand and sat back. “That’s refreshing, by the way. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a woman refer to herself as beautiful before.”

Carmen knew what she looked like. She wasn’t proud of her looks—genetics, being out of her control, were nothing to be proud of—but she knew her appearance made some things in her life easier. And other things harder. Enjoying a quiet meal alone, for instance.

She sighed and set her tablet down again. “Theo—is that right?”

He nodded, his widening Cheshire grin suggesting that he thought he’d won something here. It was a good smile, she’d give him that. Nice hands, too. She’d noticed while it had hovered over her table. Not too smooth. Good size. No rings. The sleeve of his jacket had pulled back to show a wide, brown leather cuff around his wrist and a hint of golden hair on his forearm.