Crown of Bitter Orange by Laura Florand

Author:Laura Florand [Florand, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: AOS Publishing
Published: 2016-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

“Interesting choice of a woman to bring to my birthday party,” Tristan’s grandfather said, with a level of dryness only he and Tante Colette could manage. Malorie and Damien both had a nice way with a dry voice, but Pépé’s dryness had been aged. Laid out under the sun and just desiccated for nine decades.

“I certainly thought so,” Tristan said cheerfully, grinning at his grandfather.

Pépé gave him one of his looks. Tristan just smiled. Pépé’s looks weren’t for the faint of heart, but somehow or other they always just made Tristan feel…loved. Like Pépé thought he could stand up to them.

“Pierre Monsard’s great-granddaughter.” Pépé shook his head. “Have you lost your mind? Her father was a piece of work, too. Not to mention her grandfather.”

“You knew her grandfather?” Tristan searched Pépé’s face quickly. Malorie didn’t know her own grandfather. Of course, Malorie wouldn’t have been born.

“Maybe.” Pépé’s face went its most unreadable, the man even Gestapo couldn’t get an indiscreet slip out of. And he had the scars to prove they’d tried. He glanced across the outdoor crowd to Tante Colette.

The two nonagenarians practiced so much acerbic stubbornness that they could never really manage to speak to each other, kind of like the same pole of two magnets couldn’t be forced together. The closer they got to each other, the stronger the repel force, but add family to the mix to keep them slightly apart, and it kept that repel force down to manageable levels.

Plus, it wasn’t as if they actually had to talk to each other anymore. They both had smart phones these days. They could text each other to coordinate strategical victories over their wayward descendants.

“Is he still alive?”

“No.” Pépé’s voice was clipped.

“Then why don’t you tell her who it was? It’s not like anyone could be hurt by it.”

Pépé said nothing.

Granite. You could climb it, but you couldn’t really tear it down.

Tristan frowned at him.

“I said maybe,” his grandfather said. “I’ve never found any good to come of spreading rumors.”

Yeah, when Pépé was a teenager, rumors got people killed. Rumors that some child recently moved here from Paris was really Jewish. Rumors that so-and-so had been out all night the night a German supply depot was blown up. And in the first year after the war, rumors that so-and-so had maybe managed to survive the Occupation by letting a German soldier in by the back door.

Pépé might absorb rumors, but if he released one back into the world, it was a verified fact, and you were in the need-to-know.

Tristan looked across the gathering at Malorie. She had about climbed out the passenger window of his car and thrown herself off the cliff they were edging when she realized where they were going. Then she’d muttered bitter comments the rest of the way about, “Fool me twice, shame on me,” as she slouched against the door. But once they’d arrived, she’d pulled herself together, of course—tall and cool and proud. So he’d put her with Layla and Allegra, who could make friends with cliff faces.

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