Page 16 of Bred By the Sheikh

Chrissy finally caught the sugar and inspected the napkin.

“There. Crisis averted.”

“My household is relieved.”

“I could tell. They were seconds away from assembling a response team.”

She picked up her coffee and glanced around the table again.

“Do you eat like this every morning?”

“I don’t eat all of it.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“No, but there are always choices.”

“That’s what you call choices?” She looked at enough food to feed twenty people. “At my apartment, having choices means deciding whether the yogurt is expired enough to be dangerous.”

Another laugh escaped me.

Chrissy added eggs, fruit, labneh, and flatbread to her plate. She thanked the waiter each time he offered something and asked another whether the pale green juice contained cucumber before accepting it.

She tasted the labneh with warm bread and made another quiet sound of pleasure.

My breathing deepened.

I reached for my coffee.

If she kept eating like that, the guest-experience workshop was going to become significantly more difficult.

“This is ridiculous,” she said.

“You mean the labneh?”

“I mean the whole table.”

“You disapprove?”

“Absolutely not. I’m trying to figure out how to smuggle that pastry chef back to Nebraska.”

“You’d have to negotiate with Farah.”

Chrissy glanced toward the household manager.

Farah’s expression remained perfectly composed.

“Never mind. I’m not brave enough.”

“I thought you were.”

“I criticized your advertising campaign in front of a room full of executives yesterday. That’s different.”

“How is that different?”

“I knew what I was talking about.”

I leaned back slightly.