Finding It by Leah Marie Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

my iPhone and scroll through my contacts until I come to Jean-Luc de Caumont. I select his name and his tanned, handsome face pops up on my screen above his contact info. I look at his thick eyelashes framing his smoldering brown eyes and suddenly feel weepy.
    What if I jeopardize my relationship with Luc for some silly insipid story about Bravalebrities, and Louanne still fires me?
    I select his mobile number and hold my breath. The phone rings five times before sending me to voicemail. A lump forms in my throat as I listen to Luc’s deep voice and smooth, sexy French greeting.
    “ Bonjour. C'est Jean-Luc. Veuillez me laisser un message et je vous téléphonerai aussitôt que possible. Merci .”
    “ Bonjour, Mon Cowboy. C’est moi …Vivia,” I say, my mood and tone falsely chipper. Spending the evening at some narcissism and martini-fueled soiree with a bunch of self-impressed Flat Stanleys suddenly seems pointless, shallow, and tragically selfish. “Something has come up here and I won’t be able to make it to Paris tonight. I’m catching the British Airways flight leaving Heathrow tomorrow morning at six fifty. Luc, I’m…really…sorry.”
    By the time I speak the last sentence, my voice is as painfully thin and shaky as Rachel Zoe. I wonder what Luc will think when he listens to my message. To borrow a Zoe-ism, I must have sounded bah-nan-ahs, starting off airy and ending up weepy. Torn between my career and romance, I feel like I am having a bipolar breakdown.
    Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Gordon Levitt! Did I really just quote Rachel Zoe, a woman I find about as annoying as woolly boogers on a cashmere sweater?
    I look in the mirror at my pale, gangly legs, bare beneath them hem of a black tent dress with white puritan collar and cuffs, and then up at my red-rimmed eyes.
    “How is that Alexander McQueen working for you, Vivia?”
    True to her word, Poppy is getting me “sorted out”—rather, she is having her devoted minions sort me out. She put me in a taxi and gave the driver directions to her favorite hair salon for an “emergency wash and blowout.” My ginger fro has been flat-ironed, glossed, and pulled into a sleek, chic high ponytail. Now I’m in Demimonde, her cousin’s ironically named chi-chi boutique.
    “Umm.” I blink away my tears, open the purple velvet curtains, and do a little spin. “What do you think?”
    Carolena tilts her head, and her chestnut curls spill over her Versace bustier. I only know the dress is a Versace because Fanny pinned a picture of it to her “Covet It” board on Pinterest.
    “It’s too…” She struggles to find the perfect word to describe the part hippie, part habit dress swathing my body.
    “Ecclesiastical?”
    “No.”
    “Voluminous?”
    “No.” Carolena studies me intensely. “Insolent,” she finally says. “The gown is simply too insolent. It does rude things for your figure.”
    How can you not love a woman who uses a word like insolent to describe a—I lift the price tag and gasp—two thousand three hundred and thirty five dollar dress?
    Who would pay two thousand three hundred and thirty five dollars for a dress that looks like a Project Runway unconventional challenge gone wrong? An image of Tim Gunn standing with his hands pressed together in a downward triangle pops into my head and his Snagglepuss voice plays in my ear, “For this challenge you will be sourcing your materials at a convent. Make it work, people, and if all else fails, pray!”
    I grapple for the side zipper, anxious to remove the ludicrously overpriced dress before I break out in a cold sweat and ruin it.
    Carolena reaches over and slides the zipper halfway down.
    “Thank you.”
    “Not at all.”
    She pronounces at all just as Poppy does, blending the two words together to form a single veddy British-sounding portmanteau.
    I step back into my fitting room, close the velvet curtains, and carefully remove the dress, hanging it on the padded silk hanger. Seriously, who