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....

Contains mature content and some sexual situations. Suited for readers 16 and up.

Stir Me Up

Sabrina Elkins

www.miraink.co.uk

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Apple Muffins with Cinnamon Swirl and Streusel Topping

Midnight Soup

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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.

Tonight though, when the time comes, I climb into the passenger seat and within five blocks my head’s already leaning on the car window.

“Something’s happened I have to talk to you about,” Dad says, waking me a little.

“What?” I ask, inwardly cringing. This must be about cleaning the morels.

“Julian has been wounded in an IED explosion.”

“Oh,” I say, thrown. So Dad’s not mad at me? Then his words sink in. “Sorry, I’m so tired I can’t think straight. Who is Julian again?”

Dad frowns at me. “Estella’s nephew. The one she raised since he was a boy. He’s a Marine in Afghanistan.”

That’s right. Dad’s new wife, Estella, raised her nephew alongside her son after her sister died. I’ve met her son, Brandon, but not the nephew yet. “How wounded is he?”

“His legs are in very bad shape. He’s in critical condition.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It is. They’re planning on airlifting him to a military hospital in Germany until he’s stable enough to be sent to Bethesda. When he is, I want you to go down there with Estella to be with her and lend a hand.”

I blink. “But I barely know Estella. And I don’t know Julian at all.”

Dad holds the wheel and peers down the dark road. “Estella can’t be with Julian all the time. She’ll need help and Brandon and I both have to work. Besides, it’ll be a good bonding experience for you two.”

“What about my work?”

“I’ll get your shift covered.”

Wonderful, I think to myself. “Fine,” I say with a sigh.

“Look, just as a warning, Estella is extremely upset about this.”

“Of course...”

“First they hit one roadside bomb, then apparently as Julian was trying to pull the three others in the vehicle to safety, there was a second explosion. None of the others survived.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes.” Dad looks far down the road, shakes his head and grows quiet. We both sit lost in thought and worry. When we reach the house, I see the light is still on in the kitchen. Estella is usually a very well-put-together lady—manicured and meticulously dressed, an elegant brunette with soft brown eyes and a figure Dad can’t stop staring at. Now, of course, she’s a complete mess, hunched at the kitchen table in one of Dad’s old bathrobes. Her shoulder-length hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Her eyes are red and bloodshot. The phone is next to the tissue box. I was thinking I might try to console her, but Dad makes a beeline for her and the two of them aren’t letting go of each other. So, I just tiptoe away.

I brush my teeth, wash my face and hands, strip down to my undershirt and panties and climb into bed. Shelby, my little red-and-white spaniel, is already there waiting for me. I scoot her over a little, close my eyes and think of Estella crying for her nephew at the kitchen table. I think of this guy, Julian, possibly fighting for his life in the belly of a plane somewhere. Then suddenly, I hear yelling.

Chapter Two

“NO!” Estella cries. “I DON’T NEED A BABYSITTER!”

Great...thanks, Dad.

He must be answering her because there’s a pause.

“THIS IS NOT A SIGHTSEEING TRIP,” Estella then yells. “I’M GOING TO BE LIVING IN THE HOSPITAL. I CAN’T BE LOOKING AFTER CAMI FOR YOU AT THE SAME TIME.”

Another pause.

“SO, WHAT WILL SHE DO, SIT THERE IN THE HOSPITAL WAITING TO SEE IF I DETONATE?”

The house is quiet. Okay, I guess Dad managed to calm her down. I text Luke, my boyfriend for the past eight months:

Dad’s asked me to fly out of town with Estella soon. Her nephew’s in the hospital.

His response comes almost at once:

If you’re leaving soon, I want to see you. Meet me on the road in ten minutes?

I smile, text him yes, and throw my clothes back on. Then I tiptoe down the hall to check on Dad and Estella. They’re upstairs in their room now. Fortunately, Estella and Dad never seem to come down before seven. I sneak back to my room, throw on my shoes, and stuff a bunch of pillows under my blanket and sheet, partly to fool them on the off chance one of them does come in, but also partly because if I am found out, at least this way they’ll know I’ve left on purpose and haven’t been kidnapped. Then I climb out the back bedroom window. I wouldn’t leave a window purposely unlocked, but the one on the far left has a broken latch, which makes getting back in much easier. For the past month or so of summer I’ve occasionally taken advantage of it. If Dad ever found out about this, he’d filet Luke and lock me in a tower. It’d be seriously terrible. But so far, we’ve gotten away with it.

Our house has a good amount of lawn. It’s a nice piece of land with forest all around it, a big old house set up on a steep little hill. The garage is a separate building at the bottom of the hill and has spare rooms for storage and Dad’s gym equipment. Just off the garage, there’s a small step-down garden with a footbridge that goes over a tiny stream. Apparently, Dad charmed some old widow out of the place back when I was a baby. I don’t blame him for wanting it.

Finally, I reach the road. Our road is like a long sloping dirt path up a mountainside. It winds past a cemetery and branches off in two different directions. I live down one branch of the road. Luke lives down the other branch. It’s late, pitch-dark as only a small back road can get, and Luke is nowhere to be found.

Fortunately, about two minutes later, I see headlights I hope are his approaching and climb into the brush alongside the curb. The road is narrow, and like I said it’s pitch-black out. The truck stops and Luke flips the light on inside. I run around the front and get in next to him.

“Hey,” he says. “Sorry I’m a few minutes late.”

Luke’s extremely handsome—tanned skin, black hair and dark brown bedroom eyes. He works in the restaurant with me, on the hot line—one of the three industrial stoves blazing away, and I do mean blazing. I helped him get the job with Dad about six months ago, which was no easy feat given his limited experience. Today was Luke’s day off. “No problem.”

“How’d your soup go?” he asks.

“Fine. Eventually.”

“Eventually?”

I tell him about the mushroom incident on the way back to his place.

The house Luke lives in isn’t much bigger than a trailer. He parks and takes me inside through the front door. His parents are asleep, but they have three grown sons, are used to girlfriends who sleep over, and don’t mind if their fourth and youngest, at eighteen, now does the same. We go to his closet of a room, mostly just a dresser and a bed. The bed is one of those cheap ones that feels like it might collapse if you move too much on it.

“So what’s going on with you leaving?”

I fill him in on how Estella’s nephew’s been wounded in Afghanistan, and how Dad’s asked me to fly out with her to see him in a few days. I also tell Luke how weird this will be for me—to be alone with Estella for so long, sharing a hotel room with her and visiting a close relative of hers I’ve never met.

“Can’t she just go alone?” he asks.

“You’d think so. But Dad’s convinced she needs help.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know, maybe a week? We’re playing it by ear.”

Luke looks warmly at me and touches my actual ear.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing. I’ll just miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too.”

He draws me in closer to him. “I wish I could’ve tried your first solo soup.”

“Oh, sorry—I was so busy, I didn’t think of bringing you any.”

“That’s all right.” He kisses me and pulls at my shirt.

“I was in morel hell making that soup.”

He smiles and kisses me again, sliding his arms around me. I love how it feels when he holds me like this; I just sink right into the comfort of being here. But then after awhile he surprises me by unbuttoning my jeans.

“Uhh...”

“Just a little,” he says.

“But if we start, we won’t want to stop.”

“We’ll stop.”

He comes over me, kissing and caressing me as his hand works its way around to the back of my jeans. Then he shifts me so he’ll have clearer access. I tense up slightly.

“It’s okay,” he whispers, and we start making out again. His fingers wind up moving closer and pressing against me.

“Ahhh,” I breathe, still highly uncertain—I mean, it feels great and I hate to disappoint him. But when it gets so hot and heavy, it makes it harder to put on the brakes. And sex is something I don’t think I’m ready for yet. “Stop, Luke. Please.”

He does. My eyes open. “See? I stopped.”

I smile. “Very good.”

“Very good as in you liked it?”

I cuddle against him, smiling still. “Maybe.”

“Maybe sounds promising.” He strokes my hair. “Beauty girl.”

He’s sweet. He holds me in his arms and explores his newly-claimed turf a few more times before morning. But at five-thirty his alarm goes off and we have to sneak me back home. The kiss goodbye takes longer than usual this time, because of the new development. He’s obviously extremely pleased about it. He can’t stop smiling.

“You’re a goofball,” I tell him.

“You’re fantastic.”

I kiss him one last time. He draws me in closer, and I climb over the console so I’m pressed into him. The steering wheel is pushing up against me, which actually works in his favor. “Mmm,” he says, hugging me tightly. Luke’s told me he likes having me around—in his bed, on his lap, next to him, near him, beside him. When we were in school together he’d meet me after almost every class and often cut class just to be with me at lunch. But he just graduated and I still have senior year to go.

He gives a small wave and watches me leave. Once I’m back in my room, I shuck my shoes, bra and jeans, thinking about him, how he touched me and how he wants me and what it might be like to let him go further. I don’t know why I’m hesitating with him, exactly. We’ve been dating long enough. Most couples probably would have by now. I just feel like once we do have sex everything will change, get so much more serious. The physical would be nice. But then Luke would want me over there all the time. He’d want me to move in with him as soon as I graduate.... I do love him, but a part of me is concerned it might also become kind of smothering. I don’t know. I guess I just like things the way they are.

I climb into the bed and decide to let myself sleep in. After all, I don’t have to be at work until two. Unfortunately, Shelby is used to waking up and being fed early. She sits next to me, staring at me with her stomach growling until I force myself up on my feet to go feed her.

Shelby’s a Cavalier King Charles spaniel—not the most athletic of dogs, but very sweet. She’s about twelve years old now. I’ve had her since I was a little kid. She was a birthday present to me and I love her. So, I wait for her to finish her food, give her new water and then let her out. She has a doggie door she can use on her own, but we’ve gotten into the habit of the full door-opening treatment in the morning. No doggie doors before coffee or something, I guess, I don’t know.

She goes through her freshly-opened door and then turns and waits for me to leave so she can do her business in privacy. It’s kind of cute, but I’m too tired to care. I leave her to do her thing and crawl back into bed to sleep for another hour. After I get up again later, I take a fast shower, change and make my way back into the kitchen, where I find Estella hovering over the stove.

“Morning,” she says. “Coffee?” She’s staring at the little espresso pot and clearly fighting back tears.

Poor Estella. She’s a wreck over this. “He’ll be fine,” I say, realizing this is probably zero comfort to her. “They have state-of-the-art care for our soldiers now.”

Suddenly I’m in a hug. I try to hug her back. But the truth is I was raised mostly by a man and I’m not used to being touched by anyone other than a boyfriend or maybe my aunts the few times I’ve met them. But Estella, I know, is very touchy-feely. Thankfully she pulls away from me pretty quickly. “Sorry, I’m a bit of a disaster.”

“I understand,” I tell her, and suddenly the coffee explodes, boiling over and leaking through the seal. Estella reaches for it with a bare hand.

“No, don’t!” I move her aside, shut off the stove and realize, looking at her, that Estella is barely hanging on. She’s a woman on the verge of a complete meltdown.

“I can’t do this,” she says mostly to herself.

My guess is she thinks her nephew is either dead or on the verge of death and they’re not telling her. Poor Estella. Poor Julian. I glance at the table and see an open photo album there, next to a water glass. She must have just been looking at it. “Are those pictures of him?”

“Yes.”

I go over and take a look. To be honest, I was expecting to see baby pictures, or pictures of him as a little kid, but these must have been taken only a few years ago. Julian looks about my age in the first picture. He’s lounging on the grass in a T-shirt and jeans, all straight nose, cheeks and angular jaw. His toast-brown hair is tinged with blond. There’s a devilish curve in his upper lip. His eyes seem amused—and annoyed. “Wow.”

Estella smiles, obviously pleased by this reaction. “My sister was a knockout. Julian looks just like her.” She turns the page. “See, here he is with his date for prom his senior year.”

The girl is blond, several shades lighter than my own light brown hair, and with eyes far bluer than my gray ones. Also, unlike me, she doesn’t have freckles. “She’s extremely pretty.”

“Yes, his girlfriends always are.”

I feel a stab of something, I’m not sure what. “Was she a cheerleader?”

“Actually, this one wasn’t,” says Estella.

We look through more pictures of Julian during his senior year, the year I’m about to begin. He was in varsity basketball. There are lots of shots with friends and with Estella’s son Brandon. Several are from Brandon and Claire’s wedding. Brandon has Estella’s dark features whereas his wife, Claire, is much lighter, with a round cherub face and short blond hair, so they’re like opposites and look very cute together. I want to ask Estella what happened to her sister, how she died, and how old Julian was when he came to live with her, but now’s not the time. I just keep complimenting how great everyone looks and then Estella puts the photo album away.

Chapter Three

The minute the album is out of sight, Estella’s stress level multiplies by a factor of about a hundred, particularly when Julian’s arrival date is moved up a day, and Estella’s non-changeable flight is therefore set for the morning after Julian will be there. Ultimately, we’re able to convince her that Julian will probably not be conscious or aware when he first arrives anyway—and no, she shouldn’t just pay for new flights or take the car and drive all the way down to Maryland to be there for him when he first arrives. The morning we have to leave, she’s still a mess about the delay, and about the trip in general. She can’t remember if she packed her socks or travel alarm. She can’t find her keys.

“Have a safe trip,” Dad says to her. “Call me when you get there.” He gives her an embarrassingly long hug and kiss goodbye and then turns to me and tells me—in French—to be as helpful as possible. Like this message is so important it requires his native language for added emphasis.

“I will.”

We finally make it into the shuttle van and to the airport and then there’s the stress over the tickets and whether to check or carry on the bags. This, of course, is really all about Julian and how worried she is for him, and nothing I do or say makes her feel any better. I only hope when she sees him, she’ll feel slightly more reassured.

Estella’s going to have a nervous breakdown before we even reach the hospital, I text Luke. But I have to power down my phone for takeoff before he can text me back.

Estella spends the whole flight memorizing maps of the area surrounding the hospital and then shredding her cocktail napkin into tiny little pieces and floating them in her ice water.

“We’ll be landing soon,” I say encouragingly to her. She blinks and nods but doesn’t really answer.

We carried on the bags, so without delay Estella hits the cab line and gets us from the airport to our hotel. There are a lot of hotels within a few miles of the hospital. Estella’s picked out one of the ones within walking distance.

“Let’s just check in, drop off the bags and head right over,” she says. She seems definitely on edge now, almost cranky.

The hospital is just under a mile away, so still a fair distance. The bags hit the room and I just have time to use the bathroom before she’s hurrying me back out again. When she wants to, Estella can really move. I’ve never been left in the dust so quickly outside of a running track before in my life. I have to pretty much jog to keep up with her, and the fact that I’m slowing her down seems to make her bad mood even worse.

“I wish you’d hurry!” she snaps.

Good grief. “Did you hear some news about Julian that has you more worried?” I ask.

Estella glares at me in response. All I meant was did a call come in I don’t know about that has her particularly in a rush. But I don’t bother to explain and she doesn’t care to stop to listen. Then all at once she turns to me when we reach an intersection and are forced to wait for the light.