Dom had flirted with her on principle when she was negotiating for his soul but remained fundamentally indifferent to her. That dark, mean part of him woke up often enough, with the beautiful privileged women who came into his shop, and he took advantage of their eagerness to be used by him. There was something intensely satisfying about being begged for more rough sex by a woman who would have thought him worthless scum ten years ago.
But Cade had never shown the least desire to be used by him, and beyond the satisfaction of sex with them, princesses didn’t do much for him. Their lives were too facile, too privileged. Plus, for God’s sake, Corey Chocolate. He wasn’t Sylvain; he had standards. How could Sylvain even hold up that arrogant head of his, marrying the heir to a multibillion-dollar corporation that produced such mass-market pap?
He frowned at Cade Corey, wondering what the hell Sylvain saw in her.
“What?” she asked dryly, and he gave her a look of surprised approval. The first time he had met her, she had wanted something from him, and thus had tried to be conciliating. He liked her better today, when she couldn’t care less what he thought of her.
Straight brown hair that was relentlessly silky, blue eyes, a steady I-own-the-world look. Odd, he kept feeling as if there was something different about her he should notice. “Nothing.” He shrugged and turned to Philippe. “So are you doing the Chocolatiers’ Expo? Cade, do you know who will be there?”
“Corey will have a strong representation.” She pointed a finger at herself, which, being Cade, might mean that she thought she, by herself, was the strong representation. “Devon Candy. Caillebaut, Kraft, Firenze . . .”
Dominique exchanged a look of mutual confusion with Philippe. “I meant the important people.”
Cade made a little growling noise of frustration.
“Me, you, Simon, Sylvain, I think those are the biggest names,” Philippe said. “Are you going yourself or sending some of your team?”
“Myself.” Simon Casset would probably do one of his exquisite, impossible flights of chocolate and jewel-toned sugar. Philippe favored displays that allowed him to showcase multiple gâteaux in some elegant effect. Sylvain . . . “What’s Sylvain doing?” he asked Cade, since, being new to the Paris chocolatier scene, she might be naive enough to tell him.
She smiled sweetly at him. “Working. Why aren’t you? Is business slow?”
Seriously, if Cade got any more annoying, he might actually end up liking her. Or at least respecting her. She handled herself all right for someone who had originally dropped into the ultra-competitive Parisian chocolate scene acting as if she thought she could buy it up and stuff it in her pocket.
Instead of responding, he studied Philippe’s current work-in-progress. All roses and pink and cream. A peek into some other, fairy-tale world. How did the man manage it? Was it that privileged Lyonnais past of his? Philippe was one of the few men as big as he was, but Dominique always felt bigger near him, oversized and clumsy. As if all his own edges were too hard and would break anything he ran into. His hands were far too big for his métier. Giant, hard laborer’s hands. They belonged to his first métier, the one his father had thought he deserved, that of a man who hacked meat off bones.
He compared notes about the upcoming event, but it started getting embarrassingly obvious that he was just restless and had no real purpose in being here, so he strode out, looking for other places to invade and be obnoxious.
He came out of the kitchens into Philippe’s Beauty and the Beast palace of a salon de thé, with its well-dressed crowd sitting among marble pillars under embossed lions’ heads and painted ceilings. And stopped.
There she was. The woman who had not come that morning. She was sitting in Philippe’s salon de thé, with one of those rosy, airy, fairy-tale concoctions in front of her.
He felt stabbed through the heart. Standing there, oversized for this froth of a place, in his black motorcycle leathers, with his shaggy hair and his stupidly shaved face. He, who shaved at best once every four days, had shaved every single damn morning for the past week. Why? For what stupid reason?
She put a spoon to her lips, enjoying Philippe on her tongue. She looked as if she belonged there, probably more than in the rough stone surroundings of his salon, despite his stupid embossed rosebuds and velvet curtains. She set the spoon down and gazed at her dessert a moment, her face a little sad, tired.
He shifted, accusingly, and she glanced up. Her gaze flicked over him, his size, his leathers, his hard stare. Her face closed entirely, and she looked back at him just as aggressively, until he half expected her to pull out Mace if he walked too close to her table.
Fuck her, he thought, so bitterly and insanely wounded, anyone would think he had just discovered his virgin bride in the arms of another man on their wedding night. He strode out of the salon, and did not bump into anything or break it, but probably mostly because people and even things just seemed to shrink out of his way.
It was a pure wonder he didn’t have an accident as he headed off into the Paris streets again. People kept shrinking out of his way there, too.
* * * *
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Acknowledgements
With my many, many thanks to Laurent Jeannin, head pastry chef at the Michelin three-star restaurant at Le Bristol in Paris, and Pastry Chef of the Year (2011). This book would not have been half so vivid without his patience and generosity in welcoming me into his kitchens, in answering all my questions, and in sharing so many stories of what it means to be a chef pâtissier.
About Laura Florand
Laura Florand was born in Georgia, but the travel bug bit her early. After a Fulbright year in Tahiti, a semester in Spain, and backpacking everywhere from New Zealand to Greece, she ended up living in Paris, where she met and married her own handsome Frenchman. She is now a lecturer at Duke University and very dedicated to her research into French chocolate. For some behind the scenes glimpses of that research, please visit her website and blog at http://lauraflorand.com. You can also join the conversation on Facebook or email Laura.
Copyright
Copyright 2013, Laura Florand
Cover by Sébastien Florand
ISBN-13: 978-0-9885065-1-0
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.
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