He thumped his fist against his sternum and tried to swallow, then gulped down some tea. Eyes twinkling, she continued to blithely eat her food. “You okay?” she asked, arching an innocent brow. He cleared his aching throat. “Yes,” he wheezed. “Just trying to make my lungs digest some food. Wonder of wonders, they’re not designed for that.” She chuckled. “Sorry. I should have let you swallow it first.” “Smurfette?” he all but croaked. “Your mother named you after a little blue cartoon character? Seriously?” “And my Aunt Marianne,” she reminded him. “That’s…interesting,” he said with a burst of air, because honestly he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He’d heard lots of interesting names over the years and the tales of how they’d come about—hell, he was named after a damned tree—but this one… This one certainly took top billing for ingenuity and definitely fell into the WTF category. “She had Down’s,” Mariette said, looking from beneath a sweep of dark lashes, evidently to gauge his reaction.
