Authors: Laura Florand
B00CACT6TM EBOK (28 page)
“I don’t think that’s what is defined as ‘sharing’,” Gabriel said, with cautious wryness. “It suggests I’m keeping a part for myself.”
“Léa did warn me about the importance of being a little selfish,” Jolie told him. “Of keeping something for yourself.”
“Can you be responsible for that part of the relationship?” Gabriel asked. “I just don’t know how to do it. I know how to grab for all of you I can get—I know how to be selfish
that
way. But I just don’t know how to hold back. And I—don’t want to learn. I think it would take something too terrible to even contemplate, for me to learn.”
She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around him to give him a strong hug, just a little pre-emptive strike against anything in life that might ever happen to him that would be too terrible to contemplate. Especially since she suspected that the terrible possibilities that grazed across his mind, the ones he couldn’t stand to contemplate, would have to do with
her.
His arms went around her immediately, too, and it was the most wonderful warmth against the chill of the walk-in. “Really?” he said after a moment, his voice with that odd strangled sound again. “Really beautiful?”
“Oh, Gabriel.” It made her want to smack pretty much anyone he had ever dated, that he had such a hard time believing her. But then, she had wanted to smack all those women anyway.
“You’re not dropping my ring, are you?” he asked, his voice sounding muffled, even though she could not possibly be squeezing him too hard for his big body to breathe.
She brought her left hand out from behind his body and showed it to him, her finger a little bent to keep the ring from falling off the tip.
“I don’t mean to rush you, Jolie, but could we at least slide it down one more knuckle? It’s going to fall off if you try to keep it like that for the next sixty or seventy years.”
“Gabriel,” she said suddenly. Because something had finally hit her—how terrible it must feel, the person ready to give all your heart, to always be faced with someone pulling back, not quite sure. “I don’t doubt you, you know. I know how incredible you are, how amazing, how beautiful.” Her mouth curve, and she tucked her head against his shoulder to whisper: “It’s more like foreplay. I can know how big and amazing you are and still need some more time to adjust.”
He gave a little crack of laughter. “Jolie. I just love how obsessed with sex you are. Here we are, in the middle of a proposal of marriage, in Luc Leroi’s walk-in, with a crowd of people and your own father out there, and you still can’t keep your mind off it.” He grinned. “Of course, I
am
big and amazing.”
She bit the side of his neck, very gently.
He made a little rumbling sound of approval and shifted her into his lap. Which felt good, too. No more space, but it had been darn awkward trying to reach across both her space and his to hug him.
“And beautiful,” she said. “Don’t forget that.”
“I should have made you that Rose before,” he decided definitely. “I had no idea it would have this effect on you.”
“Yes, you did. You just weren’t ready.” She smiled against his throat. “I didn’t want to rush you. Some things take time.”
He angled his body enough to make her own fall back against his arm, so that he could look down into her face. Whatever he saw there made his own face brilliant with happiness.
He picked up her left hand. “I’m just going to go ahead and slide this all the way on, okay? Just so it’s more comfortable.”
“I wish you would,” she murmured. “When it comes down to it, there’s no point doing something like this halfway. Never choose half of anything just to be safe, when you have a chance to have something whole and
perfect
.”
“
Bon sang,
you actually listen to me occasionally,” Gabriel said. As he worked the ring down to the base of her finger, everything inside her flowered into happiness to let herself go with this at last. To stop trying to hide behind boundaries that she had always wanted to open to him, from the very first.
“Besides, you know how I like the idea of a long-term binding contract,” Gabriel told her, closing her fingers into her palm and then his hand over hers, to keep that ring extra-securely on her.
She nestled her fist into his palm. “It does sound nice.”
* * * *
Thank you!
Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed stepping into the world of Provence and meeting some of the extended Rosier clan.
If you’re curious to know more about Daniel and Léa’s story, check out
Turning Up the Heat
.
And you’ll be able to meet more of Gabriel’s Rosier relatives in
A Rose in Winter
, coming later this year. Make sure to sign up for
Laura’s newsletter
to be notified when it’s released!
Meanwhile, you can always find Laura and other readers on
Facebook
for regular temptations of fantastic French chocolate and other kinds of fun.
For a list of Laura’s other Chocolate books and a sneak peek of the upcoming
Chocolate Touch
,
please keep reading.
Amour et Chocolat Series
All’s Fair in Love and Chocolate
, a novella in Kiss the Bride
The Chocolate Rose (also part of La Vie en Roses series)
La Vie en Roses Series
Turning Up the Heat
(a novella)
The Chocolate Rose (also part of the Amour et Chocolat series)
A Rose in Winter
, a novella in No Place Like Home
Memoir
“She’s back.”
Dom straightened from the enormous block of chocolate he was creating, gave his
maîtresse de salle,
Guillemette, a disgruntled look for having realized he would want to know that, and slipped around to the spot in the glass walls where he could get the best view of the
salle
below. He curled his fingers into his palms so he wouldn’t press his chocolaty hands to the glass and leave a stain like a kid outside a candy shop.
She sat alone as she always did, at one of the small tables. For a week now, she had come twice a day. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon. She was probably a tourist, soaking up as much French artisanal chocolate as she could in her short stay in Paris, as they liked to do. But even he admitted it was strange that her soaking up should be only of him. Most wandered: him in the morning, Philippe Lyonnais in the afternoon, Sylvain Marquis the next day. Tourists read guidebooks and visited the top ten; they didn’t have the informed taste to know that Sylvain Marquis was boring and Dominique Richard was the only man a woman’s tongue could get truly excited about.
This woman—looked hard to excite. She seemed so pulled in on herself, so utterly quiet and contained. She had a wide, soft poet’s mouth and long-lashed eyes whose color he couldn’t tell from that far away. Hair that was always hidden by a hood, or occasionally a fashionable hat and a loosely tied scarf, like Audrey Hepburn. High cheekbones that needed more flesh on them. A dust-powder of freckles covered her face, so many they blurred together.
The first day, she had looked all skin and bones. Like a model, but she was too small and too freckled, so maybe just another city anorexic. When she had ordered a cup of
chocolat chaud
and a chocolate éclair, he had expected to see her dashing to the
toilettes
soon after, to throw it up before the binge of calories could infect her, and it had pissed him off, because he loathed having his chocolate treated that way.
But she had just sat there, her eyes half closed, her hands curling around the hot cup of chocolate caressingly. She had sat there a long time, working her way through both éclair and
chocolat chaud
bit by little bit. And never once had she pulled out a journal or a phone or done anything except sit quite still, absorbing.
When she had left, he had been surprised to feel part of himself walk out with her. From the long casement windows, he had watched her disappear down the street, walking carefully, as if the sidewalk might rise up and bite her if she didn’t.
That afternoon, she was back, her hands curling once again around a cup of his
chocolat chaud
, and this time she tried a slice of his most famous
gâteau.
Taking slow, tiny mouthfuls, absorbing everything around her.
Absorbing him. Everything in this place was him. The rough, revealed stone of the archways and three of the walls. The heavy red velvet curtains that satisfied a hunger in him with their rich, passionate opulence. The rosebud-embossed white wall that formed a backdrop to her, although no one could understand what part of him it came from. The gleaming, severe, cutting-edge displays. The flats of minuscule square chocolates, dark and rich and printed with whimsical elusive designs, displayed in frames of metal; the select collection of pastries, his
gâteaux au chocolat
, his éclairs, his
tartes
; clear columns of his caramels. Even the people around her at other tables were his. While they were in his shop, he owned them, although they thought they were buying him.
The third afternoon, when the waiter came upstairs with her order, Dom shook his head suddenly. “Give her this.” He handed Thierry the lemon-thyme-chocolate éclair he had been inventing that morning.
He watched the waiter murmur to her when he brought it, watched her head lift as she looked around. But she didn’t know to look up for him and maybe didn’t know what he looked like, even if she did catch sight of him.
When she left, Thierry, the waiter, brought him the receipt she had left on the table. On the back she had written,
Merci beaucoup
, and signed it with a scrawled initial. L? J? S? It could be anything.
A sudden dread seized him that
Merci
meant
Adieu
and he wouldn’t see her again, her flight was leaving, she was packing her bags full of souvenirs. She had even left with a box of his chocolates. For the plane ride. It left a hole in him all night, the thought of how his
salon
would be without her.
But the next morning, she was back, sitting quietly, as if being there brought repose to her very soul.
He felt hard-edged just looking at her restfulness, the bones showing in her wrists. He felt if he got too close to her, he would bump into her and break her. What the hell business did he have to stand up there and look at her? She needed to be in Sylvain’s place, somewhere glossy and sweet, not in his, where his chocolate was so dark you felt the edge of it on your tongue.
She needed, almost certainly, a prince, not someone who had spent the first six years of his working life, from twelve to eighteen, in a ghastly abattoir, hacking great bloody hunks of meat off bones with hands that had grown massive and ugly from the work, his soul that had grown ugly from it, too. He had mastered the dark space in his life, but he most surely did not need to let her anywhere near it. He did not like to think what might happen if he ever let it slip its leash.
“She certainly has a thing for you, doesn’t she?” his short, spiky-haired chocolatier Célie said, squeezing her boss into the corner so she could get a better look. Dom sent a dark glance down at the tufted brown head. He didn’t know why his team persisted in treating him like their big brother or perhaps even their indulgent father, when he was only a few years older than they were and would be lousy at both roles. No other top chef in the whole city had a team that treated him that way. Maybe he had a knack for hiring idiots.
Maybe he needed to train them to be in abject terror of him or at least respect him, instead of just training them how to do a damn good job. He only liked his equals to be terrified of him, though. The thought of someone vulnerable to him being terrified made him sick to his stomach.
“She must be in a hotel nearby,” he said. That was all. Right?
“Well, she’s not eating much else in Paris, not as thin as she is.” Célie wasn’t fat by any means, but she was slightly more rounded than the Parisian ideal, and judgmental of women who starved themselves for fashion. “She’s stuck on you.”
Dom struggled manfully to subdue a flush. He couldn’t say why, but he liked, quite extraordinarily, the idea of Freckled Would-be Audrey Hepburn being stuck on him.
“You haven’t seen her run throw anything up?” Célie checked doubtfully.
“
No
, she doesn’t
—non.
She
likes
having me inside her.”
Célie made an odd gurgling sound and looked up at him with her eyes alight, and Dom replayed what he had just said. “Will you get out of my space? Don’t you have work to do?”
“Probably about as much as you.” Célie grinned smugly, not budging.
Hardly. Nobody worked as hard as the owner. What the hell did Sylvain Marquis and Philippe Lyonnais do with employees who persisted in walking all over them? How did this happen to him?
He
was the biggest, ugliest customer in the whole world of Parisian chocolate, and yet in his own
laboratoire
—this was what he had to put up with.
Célie waggled her eyebrows at him. “So what’s wrong with you? Are you sick? Why haven’t you gone up with your—” She braced her shoulders and swung them back and forth, apparently trying to look macho and aggressive. She looked ridiculous. “We could cover for you for a couple of hours.”
She tried to treat it like a joke, the way Dom could walk up to a woman, his aggression coming off him in hard edges all over the place, and have that woman get up and disappear with him for a couple of hours. But a profound disapproval lurked in her brown eyes.
Dom set his jaw. His sex life was really
nobody
’s business, even if it was infamous, and, well—“
No.
Go start on the
pralinés
before I make you come in at three a.m. tomorrow to do them
.
”