French Roast by Ava Miles

would know. He sat down, exhaustion deflating him like an undercooked soufflé. “Look, no one here knows what happened.”
    “I won’t say anything if you don’t want me to.”
    The picture on the wall of Jill with her family made his stomach hitch. They’d been everything to him growing up, and it had hurt like hell to lose them. They wouldn’t understand. No one would. “For all its trendiness, Dare is a small town. What we did was wrong. I’ve grown up.”
    “So I see. It only makes you more attractive.”
    She approached him with a natural shimmy, and the notes of her specially blended Parisian perfume of hyacinth and frankincense consumed him. Few women could carry off a perfume so exotic. She was the embodiment of a sensual goddess, and she knew it.
    “Think about it. I’m staying at The Kenilworth Inn.”
    “Okay.” He walked to the door.
    Her hum lingered in the air like her fragrance. “ Á bientôt , Brian.”
    Her see you soon haunted him as he left the coffee shop to find Jill, his mind awash with new possibilities—and what they might cost him.

Chapter 10
    T he snow-covered cemetery looked like a sheet of paper from death’s typewriter, gravestone markers pounded into the ground by its destructive keys, dotting the land with painful stories of lives ended short, long, and somewhere in between.
    Jill walked carefully down the slippery sidewalk, needing her best friend—even if she wasn’t here anymore. The pine trees waved a forlorn greeting, whispering about nostalgia and grief. A fresh bouquet of yellow daisies and pink roses decorated Jemma’s grave. She tucked her arms around herself to ward off the chill. In her haste to get the hell out of Don’t Soy With Me, she’d forgotten her coat. Another smart move.
    Jill knelt and traced the angel on the tombstone, summoning Jemma in her mind. Short blunt hair. Wickedly narrow eyes. Petite frame. Animated hands. A laugh as light and airy as cotton candy.
    “Dammit, Jem. I need to talk to you like we always did.” The wind blew her hair away from her neck, causing her to shudder. “Brian lied to me, and just when everything seemed to be coming together so well. He had a lover in New York. An older French woman. She’s like something out of a Fellini movie—except she’s French, not Italian. God, it hurts.”
    She gripped the stone, her skin burning from cold. “How could he lie about something like that? Did he think I’d freak out about him being involved with some older chick?” She sniffed. “Of course I am. She’s even hotter than Kelly Kimple. I was going to sleep with him tonight, Jem. I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.”
    She sniffled and wished she had a Kleenex. “Did the French chick dump him? Was he too devastated to tell me? Maybe she changed her mind. It sounds like they’ve been talking. Doesn’t that mean he wants her back?”
    She thought of the familiarity of that woman’s heated kiss, and how Brian hadn’t exactly sprung away. He might as well have diced her heart with his chef’s knife. “What am I going to do?”
    Being here made her feel a bit better. It was almost as if she could see her friend staring at her with bright eyes, pushing her bangs out of her face like she always did when she listened. Jill’s knees protested the freezing cold, so she sat on nearby bench. Her body felt like peanut brittle ready to crack.
    She heard a car pull up. Pete Collins—Jemma’s betraying, scum-sucking ex—walked toward her. He held a bouquet of pink, orange, and yellow Gerbera daisies, the flowers he’d always given Jemma before he’d told her he wasn’t ready for marriage, dumping her a few scant months before she died. Jill brushed away her tears, turning her back to him.
    “I was just going to leave these,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.
    “Why the hell are you here?” She pointed to the bundle, which was identical to the other bouquets she’d seen at the gravesite over the past few