A Wish Upon Jasmine (39 page)
“What was that all about?” Dom asked behind her. She turned, but she couldn’t quite get herself to leave the window. She couldn’t quite get herself to walk out of sight. “Célie, who is that guy and what did he do?”
She shook her head.
“Célie.”
She slashed a hand through the air, wishing she could shut things down like a
man
could, make her hand say,
This subject is closed
. When
Dom
slashed a subject closed with one move of his hand like that, no one messed with
him
. Well, except for her, of course. “Just someone I knew before. Years ago. Before I worked here.”
“When you lived in Tarterets?” Their old, bad
banlieue
. “And he was bad? Did he hit you? Was he dealing? What was it?”
She gazed at Dom uneasily. For all that he was so big and bad and dark, always seeming to have that threat of violence in him, it was the first time she had ever seen him about to commit violence.
“No,” she said quickly. “No. He didn’t.”
“Célie.”
“No, he really didn’t, damn it, Dom!
Merde.
Do you think I would
let
him?”
“You couldn’t have been over eighteen.”
“Yeah, well—he didn’t.”
Dom’s teeth showed, like a man who didn’t believe her and was about to reach out and rip the truth out of her. “Then
what
—”
“He left me! That’s all. He fucking left me there, so that he could go make himself into a better person. Yeah. So
fuck you
, Dom. Go marry your girlfriend instead of playing around with this
I-need-to-be-good-enough
shit and leave me alone!”
And she sank down on her butt, right there in the cooling room, between the trolleys full of chocolate and the marble island, in the slanting light from the casement window, and cried.
Just cried and cried and cried.
It sure as hell put a damper on chocolate production for a while, but for as long as she needed it, people did leave her alone.
Once again, a huge thank you goes to author Virginia Kantra for her insight into story here as well as to Mercy and Dale Anderson, Lisa Chinn, and Deborah Rines, who volunteered to read early drafts and give me invaluable feedback. This book would be far lesser without them.
And an enormous thanks to perfumer Lynne de R. in Grasse, who invited me into her perfume shop in Grasse one day and thus started me down the path of this story. It is also Lynne who introduced me to Joseph Mul, to whom I once again owe many, many thanks for allowing me to explore his fields outside of Grasse during the harvest and question him and everyone who works there relentlessly about all aspects of the rose and jasmine harvests. Of course any inaccuracies that have slipped into the story are all mine, but I owe much of the richness of texture in this story to their willingness to let me experience it myself.
And thank you once again to Sébastien and Mia for their patience and support when I am deep in story.
Laura Florand burst on the contemporary romance scene in 2012 with her award-winning Amour et Chocolat series. Since then, her international bestselling books have appeared in ten languages, been named among the Best Books of the Year by
Romantic Times
and Barnes & Noble, received the RT Seal of Excellence and numerous starred reviews from
Publishers Weekly
,
Library Journal,
and
Booklist,
and been recommended by NPR,
USA Today
, and
The Wall Street Journal
, among others.
After a Fulbright year in Tahiti and backpacking everywhere from New Zealand to Greece, and several years living in Madrid and Paris, Laura now teaches Romance Studies at Duke University. Contrary to what the “Romance Studies” may imply, this means she primarily teaches French language and culture and does a great deal of research on French gastronomy, particularly chocolate.
Copyright 2015, Laura Florand
Cover by Sébastien Florand
ISBN-13: 978-1-943168-02-6
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at [email protected].
The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
www.lauraflorand.com