Read Online The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris by Jenny Colgan - Free Book Online Page A

say…I will say…welcome à Paris!”
    The second I stepped into the room, I could see there was absolutely no doubt that he had indeed forgotten. There was almost no hallway, just room for a hat stand with a collection of esoteric hats on it—I counted a fez, a trilby, and the head of a gorilla costume—then it opened out into a room. It wasn’t a large room, but it was incredibly stuffed. There were capes and material, feathers, scissors, fur stoles, pillowcases, ashtrays, empty champagne bottles, and an enormous red sofa with huge cushions strewn about it and over the floor. In the corner was a kitchenette that had blatantly never been used. The peculiar man straightened up, even though the ceilings were much lower than I’d expected and he could hardly stand up; he must have been six foot five.
    â€œ Non ,” he said sadly, looking around at the mess. “I did forget.”
    He turned to face me happily.
    â€œBut what if I said, yes, welcome, Anna Trent…”
    He pronounced it “a-NA Tron.”
    â€œâ€¦thees is always my house prepared at its best for visitor? You would not like that.”
    I shook my head to indicate that I wouldn’t.
    â€œYou are cross with me,” he said. “You are sad.”
    I shook my head. I was neither of those things; I was just a bit overwhelmed and tearful and exhausted with traveling and as far away from home as I’d been in my whole life really, and I kind of just wanted a table and a chair and a cup of tea, not some crazy bohemian workshop super mess, if that was all right with everyone. I had no idea who this guy was, except I knew I had to share with someone who didn’t work in the shop.
    â€œWhat is all this stuff?” I said, gesticulating.
    â€œOh, I bring my work home,” he said. “I work too hard, this is my problem.”
    This, I was to discover, was nothing like Sami’s worst problem, but I took him at his word.
    It turned out Sami worked at the Paris Opera in their costume department, earning next to nothing at all, with dozens of tiny seamstresses, making clothes for the opera productions. He’d really come to work in one of the big couture houses but had had no luck and was practicing his trade letting out stays for singers and complaining about fat tenors and sullen sopranos who insisted they needed space in their costumes to sing but were, he confided, just too greedy.
    But that all came later. Now it just all seemed a big mess.
    â€œI have a room for you!” he said. “It is nothing like this.”
    His face looked briefly panicked.
    â€œWait here,” he said and vanished through a door at the back. From a quick count of the doors, I ascertained, with some relief, that there must be another bedroom and a bathroom. For a hideous second, I’d thought that might be it and that I would be stuck in one hideously messy room with a distracted giant.
    Within a few moments, and looking rather as if he were concealing something about his person, Sami returned rather sheepishly.
    â€œIt is prêt , ready for you,” he said, bowing from the waist. Sami would have, quite frankly, gotten killed at our school. Probably literally. It would have been on the news.
    I followed with my clumpy bag, feeling very nondescript and plain, where he was pointing.
    My old bedroom in Kidinsborough was very small, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t expecting it. But there’s something about being thirty and walking into something tinier than a prison cell…it was absolutely minuscule. Tiny. The size of the single bed they’d squeezed in there—who knows how—and a tiny chest of drawers crammed up against it and nothing else at all; there just wasn’t the space. I blinked once, twice. I wasn’t going to start crying. For starters, there was nowhere private to do it. I must admit, I’d fantasized, maybe a tiny bit. About a little bitty en suite, maybe,