Stir Me Up
Cami Broussard has her future all figured out. She’ll finish her senior year of high school, then go to work full-time as an apprentice chef in her father’s French restaurant alongside her boyfriend, Luke.But then twenty-year-old former marine Julian Wyatt comes to live with Cami’s family while recovering from serious injuries. And suddenly Cami finds herself questioning everything she thought she wanted.Julian’s all attitude, challenges and intense green-brown eyes. But beneath that abrasive exterior is a man who just might be as lost as Cami’s starting to feel. And Cami can’t stop thinking about him. Talking to him. Wanting to kiss him. He’s got her seriously stirred up.Her senior year has just gotten a lot more complicated….
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Cami Broussard has her future all figured out. She’ll finish her senior year of high school, then go to work full-time as an apprentice chef in her father’s French restaurant alongside her boyfriend, Luke. But then twenty-year-old former marine Julian Wyatt comes to live with Cami’s family while recovering from serious injuries. And suddenly Cami finds herself questioning everything she thought she wanted.
Julian’s all attitude, challenges and intense green-brown eyes. But beneath that abrasive exterior is a man who just might be as lost as Cami’s starting to feel. And Cami can’t stop thinking about him. Talking to him. Wanting to kiss him. He’s got her seriously stirred up. Her senior year has just gotten a lot more complicated....
Contains mature content and some sexual situations. Suited for readers 16 and up.
Chapter One
I’m proud to say that after five years of virtual slavery, I am now allowed to make the soup on Wednesday nights for Étoile, my father’s restaurant. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Soup ranks fairly high in the kitchen pecking order, right up there with preparing the fish and working a stove.
I started at the bottom, peeling potatoes and apples when I was ten. I graduated to dicing onions and garlic. Then I was given the challenge of doing things like stripping and cleaning baby artichokes, which are actually worse than the onions because artichoke hairs can give you an infection if they get embedded under your fingernails—ask me how I know this.
Despite the onions, garlic and artichoke hairs, I managed to stick with cooking long enough to make it to salad prep—only to learn, the hard way, that bell pepper seeds on your cutting board make your knife slip.
Seeing as how knives were obviously too dangerous for me, I was then demoted to melon-balling and pitting cherries. After another year of this, the chef who usually does the soup, Georges, took pity on me and let me watch him. Not cook with him. Watch him. Then I was allowed to make garnishes for him. Then add ingredients for him. Then make soup with him. And now, at long last, I have my own night. The slowest night of the week. On Wednesdays, I get to be soup girl—and Georges gets to be sous-chef and babysitter to the soup girl—who, for her first solo soup ever, has decided to make a tricky-but-hopefully-stunning wild morel with vegetable confetti and a veal infusion.
Now, morels are rare wild mushrooms with caps like extremely delicate honeycombs that are almost impossible to clean. So, when Dad comes over and picks up a morel and taps on it, my already-pounding heart starts to sink. Sure enough, three miniscule grains of sand fall out. Dad’s face turns red.
“GEORGES!” he yells.
“Oui, chef.”
Dad starts yelling at Georges in French. I’m mostly fluent, so I can follow almost all of the bawling out my supervisor is getting. Georges gives me a sideways glare, then Dad turns his rage directly on me. “You expect me to feed my customers sand?”
“No.”
“You want to go out into the dining room and explain to my customers why they have grit in their mouths?”
“I’ll reclean them.”
“Yes, you will. Without water. And if you can’t get it right, you’ll be sweeping floors.”
“Oui, chef,” I say, though he’s my father. I call him this at work, just like everyone else.
Georges comes over and hands me a toothpick. I use this to clean each honeycomb hole, and I have to do it carefully because the stupid things are insanely fragile, and we can’t just wash the morels out—oh no—for that would wreck their flavor. No bugs. No dirt. No grit—and no water.
I set to work. It takes a tedious two hours, then Georges spot-checks about fifty mushrooms and gives me a nod. Dad sees the nod and comes over. He checks a mushroom—one single mushroom—and no sand comes out. None. Huzzah.
“Took you long enough,” he says.
I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m tired, but I still have to work seven more hours and then wait another extra hour or so for Dad to take me home. During the school year, I usually drive myself to and from work. But in the summertime, I tend to bum rides with my father. I have two reasons for this—one, to save the gas money. And two, because I like being with him on the drive home at night.
Our restaurant is in Northampton, which is about forty miles from the southeast corner of Vermont, where we live. Lately it’s the only time Dad and I have alone together. Usually on these rides, he lets go of the strict chef thing and just unwinds by talking about his day—how the new fish dish went, what other dishes he wants to try, and how much he wants to try to find certain ingredients, like tiny wild “mignonette” strawberries.
