Sun-Kissed Page 19

  Besides, Kai was supposed to be strong enough for this now. She had worked so hard to heal, to grow strong. To still and chill those tears down to something—bearable.

  “Are you ready to be snowed in?” Kurt asked. “Do you want me to run to the store and pick up any supplies while there’s still a chance?”

  Her stomach tightened as if he had just pierced it with some long, strange, beautiful shard of ice. Kurt. Don’t take care of me. You always did that so, so—the ice shard slid slowly through her inner organs, slicing, hurting—well.

  “Why don’t you check your email so that you’ll know for sure whether they’ve cancelled?” he suggested. “Or find your charger so I can check my phone?” They had matching smartphones; their shared two-year contract still hadn’t expired.

  She didn’t check her email or find her charger mostly because she didn’t dare leave this powdered sugar snow. She had to keep her focus. She had to.

  She hadn’t yet managed to say a word to him. When she had opened the door, she had meant to. It shouldn’t have been so hard. Hello, Kurt. She could say that, right? After practicing it over and over in her head on the way to the door. But the instant their eyes met, his hazel gaze had struck her mute. As the moment drew out, his hand had clenched around his duffle until his knuckles showed white, and his whole body leaned just an inch forward, as it had so many, many times in their lives, when she greeted him after a long day or a trip, and he leaned in to kiss her.

  She had flinched back so hard that her elbows had rapped the foyer wall with a resounding smack, and he had looked away from her and walked quickly into the cabin without speaking, disappearing to find a room for his things. It had been at least twenty minutes before he reappeared, his hands in his pockets, to set himself at that post by the window and watch the road. Probably sending out a desperate mental call to his mother: Hurry up, God damn it. Where the hell are you?

  But the cars hadn’t come, and now he watched her. She could feel his gaze trying to penetrate her concentration on the snow. But she had to get that powdered sugar snow just right. She had to. Even if she had to play at snow for all eternity.

  “Kai,” he said and she shivered. Her name. Her name in his voice. “Can you still not even look at me?”

  Named one of the best books of 2013 by Dear Author and Romance Novels for Feminists, #1 in Amazon’s Short Fiction, and voted by readers as the AAR Tearjerker of the Year (you are warned). Available here.

  THE CHOCOLATE TOUCH

  “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.”

  For a wonder, Célie actually started to move. She got three steps away before she turned back. “You haven’t had sex with her already, have you? Finally broken someone’s heart, and now she’s lurking here like a ghost, snatching at your crumbs?”

  Dominique stared at her. “Broken her—ghost—crumbs—what the hell do you guys make up about me when I’m not in earshot?” He never had sex with women who had hearts. Not ones that beat for him, anyway.

  “Nothing. We contemplate possible outcomes of your actions, chef, but I think we’re pretty realistic about it.” Célie gave him her puckish grin and strolled a couple more paces away. Naturally, his breath of relief was premature, and she turned back for one last shot. “Now if we were creative, we might have come up with this scenario.” She waved a hand at Dom, wedged in a corner between glass and stone, gazing down into his salle below.

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  He blocked Célie’s face from the edge of his vision with a shift of one muscled shoulder and focused back on the freckled inconnue’s table.

  Merde, she had left.

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  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 at http://facebook.com/LauraFlorandAuthor or email Laura at laura@lauraflorand.com.

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright 2014, Laura Florand

  Cover by Sebastien Florand

  ISBN-10: 0-9885065-5-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9885065-5-8

  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. http://lauraflorand.com