A Wish Upon Jasmine
Page 30
Oh, the beauties. There they were, the flat, perfect squares with their little prints, subtle but adamant, the way her boss liked them. Perfect. There were the ganaches and the pralinés setting up in their metal frames. Day three on the mint ganache. Time to slice it into squares with the guitare and send them to the enrober.
She called teasing hellos to everyone. “What, you here already, Amand? I didn’t expect you until noon.” Totally unfair to the hardworking caramellier, but he had slept in once, after a birthday bash, arriving to work so late and so horrified at himself that no one had ever let him forget it.
“Dom, when’s the wedding again?” Dominique Richard, their boss, was diligently trying to resist marrying his girlfriend until he had given her enough time to figure out what a bad bet he was, and the only way to handle that was tease him. Otherwise Célie’s heart might squeeze too much in this warm, fuzzy, mushy urge to give the man a big hug—and then a very hard shove into the arms of his happiness.
Guys who screwed over a woman’s chance at happiness because they were so convinced they weren’t good enough did not earn any points in her book.
“Can somebody work around here besides me?” Dom asked in complete exasperation, totally unmerited, just because the guy had no idea how to deal with all the teasing that came his way. It was why they couldn’t resist. He was so big, and he got all ruffled and grouchy and adorable.
“I want to have time to pick out my dress!” Célie protested, hauling down the guitare. “I know exactly what you two are going to do. You’ll put it off until all of a sudden you wander in some Monday with a stunned, scared look on your face, and we’ll find out you eloped over the weekend to some village in Papua New Guinea. And we’ll have missed the whole thing!”
Dom growled desperately, like a persecuted bear, and bent his head over his éclairs.
Célie grinned and started slicing her mint ganache into squares, the guitar wires cutting through it effortlessly. There you go. She tasted one. Soft, dissolving in her mouth, delicately infused with fresh mint. Mmm. Perfect. Time to get it all dressed up. Enrobing time.
She got to spend her days like this. In one of the top chocolate laboratoires in Paris. Okay, the top, but some people over in the Sixth like a certain Sylvain Marquis persisted in disputing that point. Whatever. He was such a classicist. Boring. And everyone knew that cinnamon did not marry well with dark chocolate, so that latest Cade Marquis bar of his was just ridiculous.
And she didn’t even want to think about Simon Casset with his stupid sculptures. So he could do fancy sculptures. Was that real chocolate? Did people eat that stuff? No. So. She did important chocolate. Chocolate that adventured. Chocolate people wanted to sink their teeth into. Chocolate that opened a whole world up in front of a person, right there in her mouth.
Chocolate that was so much beyond anything she had ever dreamed her life would be as a teenager. God, she loved her day. She stretched out her arms, nearly bopped their apprentice Zoe, who was carrying a bowl of chocolate to the scale, grinned at her in apology, and carried her mint ganaches over to the enrober.
She’d been loving her day for a little over three hours and was getting kind of ready to take a little break from doing so and let her back muscles relax for fifteen minutes when Guillemette showed up at the top of the stairs. Célie cocked her eyebrows at the other woman hopefully. Time for a little not-smoke break, perhaps? Were things quiet enough downstairs? Célie didn’t smoke anymore, not since some stupid guy she once knew made her quit and she found out how many flavors there were out there when they weren’t being hidden by tobacco. But sometimes she’d give just about anything to be able to hold a cigarette between her fingers and blow smoke out with a sexy purse of her lips and truly believe that was all it took to make her cool.
Because the double ear piercings and the spiky pixie hair were a lot less expensive over the long-term, but they could be misinterpreted as bravado, whereas—
A teenager slouching against a wall and blowing smoke from her mouth was always clearly genuine coolness, no bravado about it, of course. Célie rolled her eyes at herself, and Guillemette, instead of gesturing for her to come join her for the not-smoke break, instead came up to her counter where she was working and stole a little chocolate. “There’s a guy here to see you,” Guillemette said a little doubtfully. “And we’re getting low on the Arabica.”
Célie glanced at the trolley full of trays where the Arabica chocolates had finished and were ready to be transferred to metal flats. “I’ll bring some down with me. Who’s the guy?” Maybe that guy she had met Saturday, Danny and Tiare’s friend? She tried to figure out if she felt any excitement about that, but adrenaline ran pretty high in her on a normal day in the laboratoire, so it was hard to tell.
“He didn’t say.”
And Guillemette hadn’t asked? Maybe there had been several customers at once or something.
“I’ll be down in a second,” Célie said, and Guillemette headed back while Célie loaded up a couple of the metal flats they used in the display cases with the Arabica, with its subtle texture, no prints on this one. Dark and exotic and touched with coffee.
She ran down the spiral metal stairs with her usual happy energy, and halfway down, the face of the big man waiting with his hands in his pockets by the pastry display counter came into view, and she—
Tripped.
The trays flew out of her hands as her foot caught on one of the metal steps, and she grabbed after them even as they sailed away. Her knuckles knocked against one tray, and chocolates shot off it, raining down everywhere just as she started to realize she was falling, too.
Oh, fuck, that instant flashing realization of how much this was going to hurt and how much too late it was to save herself, even as she tried to grab the banister, and—
Hard hands caught her, and she oofed into them and right up against a big body, caught like a rugby ball, except it was raining chocolates during this game, and—
She gasped for breath, post impact, and pulled herself upright, staring up at the person who still held her in steadying hands.
Wary, hard, intense hazel green eyes stared back down at her. He looked caught, instead of her, his lips parted, as if maybe he had meant to say something. But, looking down at her, he didn’t say anything at all.
Strong eyebrows, strong stubborn forehead and cheekbones and chin—every single damn bone in his body stubborn—and skin so much more tanned and weathered than when she had last seen it. Brown hair cropped military-close to his head and sanded by sun.
Célie wrenched back out of his hands, her own flying to her face as she burst into tears.
Just—burst. Right there in public, with all her colleagues and their customers around her. She backed up a step and then another, tears flooding down her cheeks, chocolate crushing under her feet.
“Célie,” he said, and even his voice sounded rougher and tougher. And wary.
She turned and ran back up the staircase, dashing at her eyes to try to see the steps through the tears, and burst back up through the glass doors into the laboratoire. Dom looked up immediately, and then straightened. “Célie? What’s wrong?”
Big, bad Dom, yeah, right, with the heart of gold. He came forward while she shook her head, having nothing she could tell him, scrubbing at her eyes in vain.
The glass door behind her opened. “Célie,” that rough, half-familiar voice said. “I—”
She darted toward the other end of the laboratoire and her ganache cooling room.
“Get the fuck out of my kitchen,” Dom said behind her, flat, and she paused, half turning.
Dom Richard, big and dark, stood blocking the other man in the glass doorway. Joss locked eyes with him, these two big dangerous men, one who wanted in and one who wasn’t about to let him. Célie bit a finger, on sudden fear, and started back toward them.
Joss Castel looked past Dom to her. Their eyes held.
“Célie, go in the other room,” Dom said without t
urning around. And to Joss: “You. Get out.”
Joss thrust his hands in his pockets. Out of combat. Sheathing his weapons. He nodded once, a jerk of his head at Célie, and turned and made his way down the stairs.
Dom followed. Célie went to the casement window above the store’s entrance and watched as Joss left the store, crossed the street, and turned to look up at the window. She started crying again, just at that look, and when she lifted her hand to swipe her eyes, he must have caught the movement through the reflection off the glass, because his gaze focused on her.
“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.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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.
ABOUT LAURA FLORAND
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
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 laura@lauraflorand.com.
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
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Thank You!
Other Books by Laura Florand
ONCE UPON A ROSE, Excerpt
ALL FOR YOU, Excerpt
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT LAURA FLORAND
COPYRIGHT