Black Ice - Anne Stuart [21]
Nothing much fun, she decided after she’d showered and dressed and arranged herself in a decent repetition of Sylvia’s borrowed chic. She eyed the fawn leather shoes with their pointed toes and high, thin heels, and moaned. Maybe she could tell them she had Japanese blood and needed to go without shoes.
No, that probably wouldn’t fly. Much as she would have liked to have an interesting bloodline, she was depressingly, blandly WASP, and no one was going to be fooled into thinking otherwise.
She made it downstairs without getting lost, just in time for a light breakfast of coffee and fruit before the work began. The participants were seated on either side of a long conference table, and a number of them were accompanied by assistants. Except for von Rutter, who was accompanied by his sleek and beautiful wife Monique.
Hakim was at the head of the table, and he gestured to one of the empty places to his right. Toussaint wasn’t in the room, she realized as she sat, setting her cup of coffee down on the burled walnut carefully. Maybe fate was going to be kind after all.
She should have known better. He appeared a moment later, with his own coffee, and took the remaining seat. Beside her.
She listened to the proceedings with only half an ear. A moment of silence for their late colleague, Auguste Remarque. She’d heard that name before, but she couldn’t remember where. It would drive her crazy until she found out—maybe she could simply ask someone. Or maybe she should just keep quiet and try to blend into the background.
There wasn’t much to keep her mind occupied over the next few hours. The organization of food importers were arguing about redistributing territory, and while Chloe had a great fondness for lamb and oranges and a well-cooked chicken, there was a limit to her fascination. The discussions she was asked to translate were dull to the point of madness, she’d always found numbers tedious, and units of chickens and piglets and barrels of corn couldn’t even excite the failed chef inside her. The others at the table seemed to find the discussion endlessly fascinating, and given some of the numbers she was translating she could imagine why. In euros, dollars or pounds they were talking a very great deal of money. She hadn’t realized grocery importers amassed that kind of wealth.
Because she was seated at the top corner of the table she had to turn to look at the speakers, and the man next to her was always just in her line of vision. Despite her hyperawareness, he seemed to have lost all interest in her, barely registering her existence. Since he spoke both French and English she wasn’t required to translate for him, and she could lean back in her chair and pretend to ignore him as well while she doodled on one of the pads of paper they’d set in front of them.
There was only one moment of trouble during the long, tedious morning. There was a word she didn’t know—no great surprise, though she was very fluent.
“What is ‘legolas’?” she asked, “apart from a character in The Lord of the Rings?”
Dead silence in the room, only the sound of a cup rattling in a saucer. They were all staring at her as if she’d asked them about their sex life or, even worse, their yearly income, and then, for the first time that day, Bastien addressed her.
“‘Legolas’ is a breed of sheep,” he said. “Of no particular concern to you.”
Someone in the room snickered, whether at his cool dismissal or something else.
“Don’t ask questions, Miss Underwood, simply translate,” Hakim said. “If you’re incapable we can find someone else. We don’t want our progress impeded by incompetence.”
Chloe had never responded well to public reprimands, and she’d already decided she didn’t like Hakim very much. At that point she would have liked nothing better than to be driven back to Paris in that luxurious limousine and never see any of these