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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.
Stir Me Up
Sabrina Elkins
Contents
Apple Muffins with Cinnamon Swirl and Streusel Topping
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.