When Chocolate Is Not Enough...

by Nina Harrington

  A half-smile, brimming with condescension, creased his clean-shaven olive-skinned face, and he had just opened his mouth to speak when a firm hand gripped Daisy’s elbow and propelled her forward until she was within touching distance of Pascal—who, to his credit, appeared just as startled as she felt.

  ‘Mr Barone,’ Max said coolly, and he gave Pascal a handshake so firm that the Frenchman winced and flexed his fingers the moment they were released from Max’s vice-like grip. ‘Max Treveleyn of the Treveleyn Estate, St Lucia. Lovely to meet you.’ Max wrapped his arm around Daisy’s waist and smiled warmly at her. ‘Have you met my lovely chocolate master Daisy Flynn? I consider myself very lucky to have a star like Daisy on my team. She’s come up with some stunning ways to present my cocoa.’

  As he raised a champagne flute to his lips Pascal’s response was to tip the glass ever so slightly towards her in a silent salute and raise one eyebrow.

  ‘Mr Treveleyn. Miss Flynn and I have already met.’

  ‘Well …’ Daisy said, trying not to choke, and gave Pascal a short nod. ‘This is quite a surprise, Pascal. I didn’t think that you were interested in organic chocolate. How is life in Paris these days?’

  Pascal smirked, and one side of his mouth lifted dismissively. ‘Life in Paris is just fine, thank you. And how is life in …’ He lifted his eyebrows, looked upwards and pretended not to remember the name of the small town she came from. ‘I’m sorry. The name has completely slipped my mind.’

  ‘Oh, I’m based in London now.’ Daisy smiled back through gritted teeth, aware of other guests clustering around the patio doors and strolling out onto the terrace on each side of her. ‘Still working as hard as ever.’

  Pascal shuffled one step closer. ‘I hear you have been working on a range of moulded novelty chocolate body parts. The catering business must be such interesting work.’

  Daisy fought down a cutting response to his snide remark, and Max stepped in before she said something which would get them both thrown out of the contest.

  ‘Oh, wonderful work—and innovative. It took a while for me to persuade her to join my team, but the Treveleyn Estate could not wish for a better chocolatier. Daisy is going to knock the socks off those judges tomorrow. You wait and see.’

  Pascal nodded with a derisive snort. ‘It’s good to hear that you are so confident about your chances, Mr Treveleyn. My own team have been working full-time for months to find the most delectable recipes using the finest organic cocoa. I think the judges are going to be quite impressed with what Team Barone come up with.’

  Daisy could almost hear the cogs in her brain clanking over as the impact of what Pascal was saying hit home.

  ‘Why on earth would you want to take part in this contest, Pascal?’ she asked, her mind reeling. ‘I thought you were content with your chain of chocolate shops?’

  ‘You know I cannot resist a challenge, Daisy. I have plans to expand into the restaurant trade, and this is a useful opportunity to try out some of our new range of organic chocolate desserts. So, yes, this contest is turning out to be very interesting indeed.’ He raised his glass to his lips and glowered at her over the rim.

  ‘The very best of luck to you, Mr Barone. Now, if you will excuse us, I promised Daisy a glass of champagne to celebrate our new partnership. Have a great evening,’ Max said.

  ‘Oh, I will—I certainly will,’ Pascal replied with a nasty glint in his eye, and tipped his head to them before turning away to join another group who were probably more useful to his career.

  ‘I think the terrace is calling us. I’ll be right back,’ Max whispered into her ear, then slipped his arm away and headed out to the bar.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ON THE terrace, tables had been set with beautiful linens and stained glass lanterns which shed a warm glow in the fading sunlight. A wonderful sweet scent pervaded the patio from the white gardenia plants in full flower, which bloomed in stunning terracotta planters, but the setting was completely lost on Daisy as she tottered away from Pascal with as much dignity as she could on the borrowed heels that Tara had supplied to go with her borrowed dress.

  She collapsed down on one of the luxuriously appointed sofas and looked out over the stunning stone terrace, where elegantly dressed men and women were chatting.

  The jewels on the women glittered, and fairylights hung from the trees. Everything shone bright and sparkly and new and exciting, and laughter echoed out of the patio doors.

  While she felt like a tired old doormat someone had just wiped their feet on.

  The happiness and the excitement of being here had been trampled on and ruined by the blast from her past that was Pascal Barone—and she hated it. Hated the effect he still had on her. Hated that just seeing him again had brought back all of those old feelings of being so inadequate and unworthy and so totally, totally inept and useless.

  Here she was, surrounded by beautiful people in a beautiful place, about to eat beautiful food prepared by experts. And she had never felt more worthless.

  What had ever given her the idea that she could compete against pros like Pascal? She was a complete phoney. Just another wannabe country bumpkin with self delusions that she could pull this confidence trick off.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Max sat down on the sofa next to her and looked into her face as he presented her with a champagne flute. ‘I am so sorry. I had no idea that Barone had decided to enter the cooking contest. That was where you trained, wasn’t it? But you can relax. The worst part is over now.’

  ‘You have nothing to be sorry for, Max,’ Daisy answered, her eyes firmly fixed on the glass of champagne as though mesmerised by the bubbles. ‘This is my problem and I have to deal with it. Thanks for getting me out of there. Pascal was … is …’

  She swallowed down a long sip while Max joined the dots.

  ‘Pascal. Right. Tell me to get lost if you want, but the chocolatier who let you down in Paris … it was Pascal Barone. Wasn’t it?’

  Daisy took another long sip of champagne before pushing her chin out and trying with all her might to sound positive when she replied. The last thing she wanted was for Max to realise what an idiot he had chosen to work with.

  ‘Oh, that was years ago. Water under the bridge.’ She took another sip, but her hand was shaking so much that she almost dropped the flute and quickly lowered it to the table.

  ‘So I see. Do you want to tell me about it?’

  His long, strong and clever fingers were wrapped around hers now, and there was so much genuine sincerity in his voice that his few simple words broke through her barriers.

  ‘No. Yes. Maybe. Oh, this is so embarrassing.’

  ‘Embarrassing or not,’ Max replied, stroking the back of her hand with his thumb, ‘you are going to have to cook tomorrow knowing the Barone team is in the contest. I think you had better tell me everything. We have a lot riding on this.’

  Daisy sighed, low and slow. ‘I know. And you’re right. But I just never expected to see him again so it has thrown me a bit.’ She blinked. ‘Okay. I first met Pascal in Paris when we were students together at Barone Fine Chocolate. It was fantastic.’ She leant forward and rested her elbows on her knees. ‘The best eight months of my life. No doubt about that.’

  ‘So you worked with Pascal? That’s amazing.’ Then Max frowned and looked at her quite quizzically. ‘Wait a minute—why was Pascal training at Barone? I thought he was one of the Barone family?’

  ‘He is. Chef Barone is the fifth generation of Barone chocolatiers, but he was looking for someone to take over the business. Pascal is his nephew, but it turned out that he was way more interested in the business side than the cooking.’

  She turned slightly in her chair so that she was closer to Max.

  ‘But he got lucky. I was the other apprentice. He soon found out that I had always been happy to work in the background rather than seeking the limelight. I accepted that—after all, he was the nephew of my boss, and I was just the daughter of a baker from a small vi
llage in England. I was just Daisy Flynn. Wannabe chocolatier.’

  She looked up at Max, who was staring at her with rapt attention.

  ‘I’m quiet and shy and I always have been. Oh, I have worked hard to overcome it these past three years. But old habits are hard to break. Even now I feel a lot more comfortable in the kitchen than talking to customers.’ She shrugged and lifted her chin. ‘Pascal knew that from the start. The plan was that I would stay on and take over as master chocolatier in a couple of years. But we had bigger plans. Much bigger. Our idea was to develop a range of chocolates and petit-fours which would be sold to the local hotel trade and expand the shop. It sounded wonderful—so wonderful that I spent every night for weeks working and working on the perfect chocolates which were so unique and so delicious and bound to be a success. Pascal was thrilled, and was so was his uncle. We had everything going for us. And …’ Daisy faltered and gave a low sigh. ‘Pascal threw in an extra incentive for me to stay. A very personal one.’

  She looked down as Max made gentle circles on the back of her hand.

  ‘It will probably come as no surprise to you that after six months I had a crush on Pascal Barone the size of a small planet.’ She gave a slight snort. ‘You have to remember that I had arrived straight from catering college in one of the most romantic cities in the world, where I worked every day to produce chocolates and pastries for lovers to buy. Then one Saturday evening the shop was closed, the sun was shining, and Pascal asked me out for a drink. We had been working all day, it was April, and the trees were in blossom. So I said yes.’

  She allowed herself a wistful sigh.

  ‘A week later I was officially his doting girlfriend, and I finally had a chance to see Paris as it should be seen. With the person you are totally besotted with. It was a magical time. I was so in love with that man and the wonderful future we were going to have together, working side by side for Barone.’

  Max exhaled loudly. ‘Congratulations. At this point I have to tell you that I’m beginning to feel slightly nauseous at how sweet all this is. Paris in the spring? Okay. I get that. So what happened next?’ he asked. ‘Why are you not in Paris as the master chocolatier for Barone Fine Chocolate? You were working together as partners, and from what I’m hearing you made a great team.’

  ‘What happened was that life kicked me in the shins and reminded me not to have such delusions of grandeur. My dad was diagnosed with a brain tumour and was given six months to live. So of course I came home.’

  ‘Oh, no. I am so sorry. That must have been traumatic.’

  ‘It was. Dad came to Paris to spend a whole month with me, and we had the most wonderful time together. Pascal charmed him, Chef Barone took us all to the most amazing restaurants all over Paris, we worked in the shop together and we talked and talked. But at the end I knew I had to come home back to England and be with him for as long as I could.’

  ‘Why do I get the idea that your great plans didn’t work out quite the way you expected after all?’ Max said in a low voice.

  ‘Back in our small house, we both knew that every second we spent together was precious. And we had fun. Just lots and lots of ridiculous fun. The very best bit was cooking together. Really cooking. Whatever we wanted. It was a different world from Paris—but I loved it.’

  Her head dropped and her fingers gripped Max’s palm a little tighter.

  ‘It was so very hard to see him fade away in such a short time. I wanted every day to be longer and I felt so guilty for being ambitious. I tried to talk to him about it—he simply kept telling me that he loved me, that the last thing he wanted me to do was move back and take over the bakery and live his life. A life in which he had compromised his own ambitions to make a secure home for his family. I had been given the chance to make the most of my skills—but most of all he wanted me to be happy. I had a wonderful, exciting new life and a boyfriend we both adored back in Paris. I had everything he had ever wanted me to have.’

  Daisy slipped her hands away from Max and strolled over to the stone balustrade, gazing out over the gardens where the sun was now setting over the tall oak trees.

  It took a few seconds for Max to rise and stand alongside her, but her eyes faced forward as she whispered, ‘After he died, I found out that he had known about the diagnosis for months but had decided not to tell me. Because he knew that I would want to come back and be with him instead of living my dream life. His dream life. In Paris. He loved me so very much, you see. That’s why he sold the bakery to a doughnut chain before he came over to Paris to see me. He was cutting off my escape route back to the life he had known. I had nowhere else to go but forward. But you know what? It just made me so sad. To think that he knew that he had a terminal illness while I was sitting with Pascal in pavement cafés, drinking coffee in the sunshine.’

  Daisy felt Max wrap his arms around her waist so that she could lean back against his chest, confident that he could take her weight. The warmth of his body was so comforting that she almost cried with the delight of it.

  ‘I felt so guilty, Max. And so very, very selfish.’

  Max leant his chin on her shoulder and tightened his grip around her waist in an all-embracing girdle of support.

  ‘But that was his decision. He wanted his little girl to be happy. As a father I can understand that. I would probably do the same myself. He must have been a remarkable man.’

  ‘I know. He was. A very remarkable man. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how much he had sacrificed to make a home and a secure life for me—especially after my mother died and there were just the two of us. He could have moved to a restaurant job, but the wages are so low even then he believed it would be impossible. He gave up his dreams for me. And that crushed me, Max. It totally crushed me.’

  She shook her head and sucked in a few breaths of cooling air, trying to soothe her burning throat.

  ‘You needed time to grieve,’ Max replied, in a voice as soft as the gentle breeze that wafted onto the terrace. ‘How did you cope with your loss? Did you go back to Paris and become a demon in the Barone kitchen? Throw yourself back into your work?’

  ‘No. That was just the problem. I was paralysed. I didn’t know what to do! I lost interest in food. I lost my passion. My mojo. My zest for the crazy life I had been living, where I’d spent my whole day surrounded by chocolate in every possible form and heaven was working out the exact proportions of hazelnuts and cream and sugar for my praline mousse. All of that work and that life just didn’t seem relevant or important any more. My dad had shown me how futile it could be to tie yourself down to one place and let your dreams slip away through your fingers. But the very thing I’d thought I wanted held no attraction for me any longer.’

  She lifted both hands and dropped them down to curl around the edge of the cool stone.

  ‘The only thing I knew for sure was that Pascal was still in Paris, waiting for me. So one morning I just threw my bag into the car and headed off to France. All along the way I started building up this wonderful picture of my new life with Pascal, and all the plans we had made about opening up new shops and new markets for the wonderful chocolates I had come up with.’ She clenched her fist. ‘What an idiot I was.’

  ‘What happened? Had things changed while you were away?’

  Daisy nodded slowly. ‘Oh, yes, things had changed. I arrived late at night, after driving all day, and expected my loving boyfriend to be waiting for me with open arms. I hadn’t told him I was coming. It was meant to be a lovely surprise after he had begged me to come back soon because he was missing me so much. And it was a surprise, all right. I won’t bore you with the sordid details, but let’s just say that contrary to all his desperate telephone calls, telling me how much he missed me, he was not sleeping alone. The new student at his uncle’s shop was prettier and richer than me, and he had simply moved another besotted female into his apartment to take my place.’

  Daisy shook her head. ‘She was even wearing the same bracelet that h
e had given me for my birthday. I simply couldn’t believe it.’

  Max was silent as Daisy blinked away foolish tears for something she’d thought she had lost but in fact had never had in the first place.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Do? I did the one thing he had not expected me to do. I made a huge scene. I ranted, I raved, I cried and screamed, and then I flung all my things into my suitcase while he made excuses along the lines that it was all my fault for leaving him on his own for three months just when he needed me most to help build his new business empire.’

  She looked up and blinked hard.

  ‘I remember standing outside the apartment in the dark with a suitcase and a couple of plastic carrier bags, feeling as though the world had been whipped away under my feet. People were walking along the pavement and I couldn’t believe that they could go about their lives and still be happy when my life was falling apart around me.’

  ‘That must have been a low point.’

  She nodded. ‘I was too exhausted to drive anywhere, so I spent the night in a local hotel and went to see Chef Barone the next morning. After all, I still had a job and I owed it to my boss to keep my promises. But Pascal had taken with him every one of the new recipes I had come up with for our wonderful new joint venture, and all of his uncle’s most popular desserts. And claimed that they were his own work.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘His uncle was furious and felt totally betrayed. I was a mess. But what could I do? I was a student, and his uncle was an honourable man who was not going to destroy the family by suing his own nephew. This was exactly what Pascal had expected. The family knew, of course—but Pascal was their golden charmer, who could do no wrong in their eyes. It was simply business. Nothing personal.’

  She sniffed.

  ‘Nothing personal. If Pascal only knew how very angry he made me when he said that to my face.’

  ‘Angry because he had stolen your work and was passing it off as his own? Or angry that he had cheated on you?’ Max asked.