Lucien(51)
“And what is that,” he asked on a laugh.
“You work too much.” She jerked his shirt out his pants. “And you wear too many clothes. Off with this.”
“I love a woman who knows what she wants.” Luc lay back holding his arms out to the sides. “Take what you want. All I ask is that you be gentle.”
“Gentle?” Elise straddled him and grinned down at him. “I’ll be gentle later. Much later. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”
“Do what?”
“This.” Elise gripped the fronts of his shirt then yanked them apart. Buttons flew through the air and she cackled with delight. “You can take it out of my wages.”
Luc groaned and reached for her, cupping her head and drawing her down to him. “That one was on me. And so is the next one and… the one after that and….”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Elise carried her bowl of ice cream into the living room and sat down on the couch. Luc moved his arm and she snuggled closer, using one hand to pull the throw blanket over her legs.
“What kind of ice cream is that?”
“French vanilla with strawberries. Wanna bite?” She held up a spoonful and he took it. Elise picked up the book she’d left resting on the back of the couch and set the bowl in her lap while she searched for her page.
Half way down the page, Luc took the bowl from her lap. “Open wide.” He touched an ice creamed berry to her lips.
“Mmm. Thank you.”
Elise turned the page and Luc sighed. Three sentences later, the spoon tapped thoughtfully against the bowl. “Luc?”
“Hmm?” Tap, tap, tap.
Elise closed the book, holding her place with her forefinger. “Is something wrong?”
“This.” He nodded at the papers in his lap. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What’s wrong with it?” She recognized the pages as the spreadsheets he’d been adding and re-adding all week long.
Luc picked up the calculator and showed her the number. “This doesn’t match that.”
Elise pursed her lips. “Fifty thousand and some change. Wow, that’s a lot. Is there a page missing?”
“Not that I can tell.” He pointed to the page numbers. “According to that, all of them are here.”
“I see. A missing column?”
He shook his head. “The last column has the line-item totals.”
“Hmm.” Elise frowned. “How many times have you added it up?”
“In the past hour? Four times.”
“Oh. And the numbers were the same every time?”
“Yes.”
Elise shrugged and opened up her book. “Then the page is wrong. You don’t make fifty thousand dollar mistakes.”
“I don’t,” he asked, amusement lacing his voice.
“No, you don’t.” Elise tilted her head back and was rewarded with a vanilla flavored kiss. “Have you cross referenced all of those figures?”
“Yes.”
“And…?”
“And the only entry which doesn’t match is the Supply column. Even after you went through and inventoried everything, I still couldn’t match it all up. It came nowhere near being close.”
Elise sucked in her bottom lip. “Um, Luc?” She knew she’d forgotten to mention something about the supply room.
“Hmm?”
“I sort of, um, didn’t put a couple of things on the inventory.”
Luc tensed beside her. “What things?”
“Well,” she began somewhat sheepishly. “There were these dresses.”
Luc slowly turned his head towards her. “What dresses?”
“Cocktail dresses.” Elise set aside the book. “You should have seen them. Absolutely beautiful, but big enough to hold three of me. One of them had a slit up to my neck.”
“You tried them on?”
She waved his comment aside. “Don’t be silly. I didn’t try it on. I just held it up.”
“In the supply room?” Luc appeared thoughtful for a moment. “What else was in there?”
“Not much. The biggest black leather couch I’ve ever seen.” Elise paused, remembering something else. “It was the most peculiar thing. Someone stored a case of erasers underneath the couch. Which didn’t make any sense since whoever did the purchasing only order two boxes of pencils.”
“A case of erasers,” Luc repeated in a daze. “Underneath a big, black leather couch.”
“Yep. One case of Olde English Rubbers.”