One Summer in Paris(40)

There was no way someone who looked like him would choose to spend time in a bookshop, so Audrey assumed he was lost. Wherever he was going, she hoped he’d take her with him.

“Can I help you?” It was one of the few phrases she knew in French, but something about the way he was looking at her sent all words flying from her head.

“I’m Etienne.”

Audrey stared at him. “You’re kidding.” She already had a clear image of Etienne in her head and he looked nothing like this. It took her a moment to align expectation with reality.

This guy with the crooked, sexy smile was Etienne?

“I don’t generally joke about my own name.” His smile was wide and genuine. “You must be Audrey.” He spoke perfect English, with just enough of an accent to make Audrey’s knees wobble. He reminded her of a slightly edgy film star from one of those foreign movies you had to watch with subtitles. Audrey hated subtitles. She’d barely got to the end of the first word when they vanished from the screen.

“Yeah, I’m Audrey.” She stuck out her hand, conscious that it was probably filthy from handling ancient books. Still, if he worked here, then he had to be used to that. “You’re not what I was expecting.” She was desperate to text Meena. I met this super cute guy.

“What were you expecting?”

Bookish and boring.

“Someone different.” Great, Audrey. Knock him dead with your verbal repartee. He probably thought she was stupid, except he was still holding her hand and looking at her in a way that made her feel all melty, like ice cream on a hot day. She felt a jolt of electricity. A connection.

“I am early for my shift. I wanted to meet you. Most people who come to this place are decades older than us. That gives us something in common.”

“It does.” The idea of having something in common with him cheered Audrey.

He finally let go of her hand, swung his backpack from his shoulder and pulled out a laptop. “Working here is great because you have time to study.”

“Good to know.” Kill me now. If there was one thing worse than working in a bookshop, it had to be studying while working in a bookshop.

“I’m hoping to get this essay done this afternoon in the quiet moments.”

“You have an essay to do? In the summer holidays?”

“I’m taking extra classes.”

Of course he was. Someone who looked like him was bound to have flaws.

Etienne switched on his laptop. “How are you enjoying the bookshop?”

“Love it,” Audrey lied. “Working here is my dream.”

“Mine, too.” He gave her that smile again. “You love to read?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” The idea that they might have lots in common died a death. Still, with looks like that did it matter? As long as he didn’t want to talk about books, they should be okay. And if he did—well, some girls faked orgasms. She was going to have to fake book interest.

He entered his password and opened a document. “Who are your favorite authors?”

“Oh, you know—” Daunted by the dense lines of French on his screen, Audrey fumbled for an answer. “The usual.”

“The usual?”

Audrey had that same frozen feeling that came with exam pressure. Her brain stalled. She couldn’t think of a single author. Why hadn’t he asked her about movies? That was her idea of relaxation, not slogging through a book.

“Too many to name.” She stood up, hoping her tight jeans might distract him. Did that make her shallow? Probably, but Audrey was fine with shallow. She wanted a relationship to be fun. She didn’t want drama or intensity. Her life was already full of it.

She walked across the shop to shelve a book. Why, oh, why, did he have to be a book lover? The world obviously hated her. As she pushed it onto the shelf, Etienne frowned.

“It should be alphabetical, within the botany section.”

Audrey felt heat flood her cheeks. She didn’t know what botany was, and she couldn’t spell it. She always got her bs and ds mixed up.

“It will be fine here.” She thrust it into a gap on the shelves and caught his quizzical gaze. “What?”

“Nothing.” He brushed his hair away from his face and it immediately fell back in the same place. “So tell me about you. You live in London? With your parents?”

“Yes.” It occurred to her that here, in her new life, she was lying as much as she had in her old one. “You?”

“My parents have an apartment in Paris that I use in the summer. They go to their house in the C?te d’Azur.”

Audrey had no idea where that was, but she nodded knowledgably. He obviously had parents who didn’t reel around drunk most of the time. “Nice.”

An apartment in Paris could be good. Convenient. Better than her place, for sure. She couldn’t see herself having sex against that iron bed frame upstairs. And then there was the fact that the room was boiling hot.

“This is a summer job for you, or a gap year?”

“Just the summer at the moment, but I might stay on longer.” It depended what happened with her mum and Ron. She still hadn’t adjusted to not having to check up on her every moment. She checked her phone every hour for messages, but so far there had been nothing. Audrey wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.