The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles Read Online Free PDF Page B

car. She sat tall and straight, the way she’d been taught, pride making her rigid. After a moment, she felt her nose quiver, her mouth tremble, and two enormous tears form at the corners of her eyes. She brushed them away, sniffled, and started the car.

    Marcel Grobz reached across the bed to pull Josiane Lambert closer. But she had slipped out of reach and was ostentatiously turning her back to him.
    “Don’t pout, sweetie-pie. You know I can’t stand that.”
    “I’m telling you something super important and you’re not listening.”
    “Okay, okay, I’m listening. I promise.”
    Josiane relaxed and rolled back over till her purple and pink lace negligee was touching Marcel’s ample body. His fat stomach hung over his hips, and red hair covered his chest and formed a fuzzy halo around his bald head. Marcel was no prize, but he did have mischievous blue eyes that made him look far younger. “You have the eyes of a twenty-year-old,” Josiane would murmur to him after making love.
    “Move over, you’re taking up all the space,” she said now. “You’ve gotten fatter, Marcel. There’s fat everywhere.” She pinched his waist.
    “Too many business lunches. Go on. I’m listening.”
    “So here’s the thing . . .”
    She pulled the sheet up below her large breasts, and Marcel tried not to stare at the two mounds he’d been eagerly sucking minutes before.
    “You should promote Chaval. Give him responsibility and a sense of importance.”
    “Bruno Chaval?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why should I? You have the hots for him?”
    Josiane let out that deep, raucous laugh he found so sexy. He joined in the laughter, then tried to grab her again.
    “If you don’t stop I’m going on strike,” she said. “I won’t letyou touch me for forty days and forty nights! And this time I’ll keep my promise, I swear.”
    To break the last forty-day embargo he’d had to give her a necklace of cultured South Sea pearls, with a platinum clasp set with diamonds.
    And because Marcel was crazy for everything about Josiane—her body, her mind, and her earthy common sense—he listened.
    “Promote Chaval, or he’ll go to the competition.”
    “There’s almost no more competition left. I cut them all off at the knees.”
    “You may have hurt their business, but they could come back to bite you. Especially if Chaval helps them.”
    Josiane, who was as serious about business as she was about pleasure, sat up.
    “It’s simple. Chaval’s a great salesman, but he’s also an excellent accountant. I’d hate to see you have to compete against a guy with both people and money skills.”
    Marcel propped himself up on one elbow.
    Josiane went on: “Salesmen know how to sell, right? But they usually don’t get the finer points of a financial transaction. Payment schedules, due dates, shipping costs, discounts—you know, that stuff.”
    Now Marcel was also sitting up, his head against the copper bed frame. He took Josiane’s logic one step further:
    “So you mean that before Chaval can turn against me and become a threat—”
    “You promote him.”
    “What should I do with him?”
    “Put him in charge. And while he’s growing the business, we diversify, we start new product lines. We’ll let him wrestle with the day-to-day while we surf the wave of the future! Not a bad idea, eh?”
    This was the first time Josiane had said “we” when speaking about the business. Marcel moved away to get a good look at her: she was intent, flushed, focused, her thick blond eyebrows knitted in thought. He thought of how this woman, who never hesitated at any sexual act, also had all this ambition. What a combination! Generous and insatiable in bed, tough as nails at work.
    Marcel had hired Josiane as a secretary fifteen years earlier. Her only diploma was from some rinky-dink school that taught her stenography and very approximate spelling. She came from the slums, same as him, and life had kicked her around. Rough men had felt her up and