CHAPTER
FORTY
The call they’d been waiting for came.
Of course, she missed it.
Madison clicked out of the message the moment she heard the man in the voicemail say he was from Michelin.
Staring at the phone, hands trembling, she could hear herself panting.
“Ça va?”Pierre crooned, flying to her shoulder.
The kitchen was empty. She was the last one in the house. Taking a moment of silence at the end of the night had become her new ritual in the lead-up to the Michelin announcement.
She’d told herself all week that she wasn’t going to let the announcement—whatever it was—distract her. So she’d only kept her phone on while they were prepping for dinner. Nothing was going to rule her entire focus. No guy ever had. Neither would the Michelin people.
They’d waited to call until three days before the official ceremony. Three days!
Rico had heard he’d won two stars yesterday—great news—but when the night had ended without any kind of notification, she’d feared Nanine’shadn’t won.
Now, here she was, alone in the kitchen with the message she’d been waiting for on her phone and no idea what the news was. She’d heard they called people to tell them they’d lost. But were those people who’d already been granted a star? She still wasn’t clear on that.
All she knew was, she had the message, and she needed to run home.
Fast.
Because there was no way she was listening to it without Kyle.
“Pierre, it’s going to be a rocky walk home,” she told him, gathering him up and readying them to go. “Mama’s going to run.”
And she did, pretty much the whole way, her brain telling her she’d totally lost her mind.
She’d just referred to herself as Pierre’sMama.
She might have just won her first star.
When she reached their exterior street door, she was struck with the enormity of how much her life had changed. She was living in amansionin Paris with the guy she loved more than anything and, again, she might have won her first Michelin star…
God, who would have believed it? Not her, but this was simply her Spicy New Reality, the one she’d finally started to believe was actually hers.
She burst into the house, panting, and heard Spike’s adorable barks greet her ears.
“Kyle!”
Sprinting toward the kitchen, past the flickering Romance Shrine, she yanked Pierre’s throw off and onto the floor. Because her little cooking buddy deserved to be out of his cage when they heard the news.
As a family.
God, she was totally a dope.
“You got the call!” Kyle was racing toward her pretty fastfor a man wearing Italian shoes, his gorgeous hair perfect with a totally joyous expression on his face. “How many?”
“I don’t know.” She lifted her shoulders before setting Pierre down on the floor, sucking oxygen into her straining lungs. “I waited until I got home. I couldn’t listen without you. It’s possible they didn’t grant us anything.”
“You didn’t listen?”He had his arms around her before she could open Pierre’s cage door, Spike jumping on her legs. “Oh, Mad, what were you thinking?”
“Funny you should ask. On the way home I was thinking I’d completely lost my mind.”
