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But I see it now … and if you’ll give me just one more chance, I’ll make it all up to you. …

“Annie-“

“Em, I know what you’re going to say,” she broke in, as breathless almost as if she’d run a mile to catch up with him, her heart banging against her rib cage. “Please, don’t say it. Not yet. We’ll talk later, when we get home … when all this is over.”

“It is over. This. Us. I’ve had enough.” She heard no anger in his voice, only sorrow and regret. “Look, I’m not blaming you. I knew what I was getting into, and like a dumb rodeo cowboy I figured the guy who stays on the bronco’s back longer than anyone is the one who wins. In life, though, I guess nothing’s that simple.”

She watched his lips move, and remembered when she had found his freckled lips fascinating and strange. But sexy, too. She wanted Emmett. She wanted him as eagerly and hungrily now as she had wanted Joe the night before.

“I love you,” she told him, and for the first time she knew that she meant it.

His blue eyes, flickering like neon, cut into her. “I was worried about you last night after I left you … you looked so damn beat. I didn’t want to wake you by calling, so this morning I stopped by to check up on you. Five o’clock, and you weren’t home … so I called the factory, I even called Louise at home, woke her up. She said you weren’t due to get there until six-thirty. And then I remembered about Joe. Is that where you went last night … to him?” His big hands, she saw, were clenching and unclenching at his sides. “No… don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. Or let’s just say I don’t want to hear it.” He brought a fist up in a swift, furious arc that stopped short of her. Tenderly, with his knotted white knuckles, he brushed her cheek.

Annie wanted to tell him he was wrong, that she loved him … but how could she explain?

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Emmett shook his head, spreading his big hands in a gesture of hopelessness. “I realized something last night. I always thought of love as something infinite, like the stars, or God. But it’s not, you know. You can run out of love just like a car running out of gas. Or a tire that just gets worn out after so many miles of bumpy roads. I’m tired, Annie. I’ve got nothing left.”

Annie felt stunned, as if she’d taken a dive into water that was too shallow. She hurt everywhere, her chest, her head, her stomach. Tears rose in her eyes, and began spilling down her cheeks. She had to make him understand. She had to make him know how much she wanted him … now … and tomorrow … and forever.

“Em …” Her voice cracked, and then faded on her lips. She wanted to beg him, but something held her back. She realized that if only she could, maybe her whole life would’ve turned out differently … but she was stuck with her stiff spine just as Emmett was with his crippled foot.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I wanted to let you know I’m not sticking around for the banquet. I really just came to say good-bye.”

“Dressed in a tux?” She managed a wobbly smile through her tears.

One corner of his wide, freckled mouth tipped up in a smile. “Couldn’t ride off into the sunset looking like a deadbeat, now could I?”

Ride off? “Are you going somewhere?”

He shrugged. “I’m pulling up stakes here. Moving out west.” He grinned, a flash of white against the freckled brown of his broad face. “Jesus, there I go sounding like Matt Dillon again.”

“Matt Dillon didn’t make a living selling real estate.” She sniffed hard, and pushed her tears away with the heel of her hand, angry at herself, angry at him. It was wrong. He had no right to go. It wasn’t fair, everyone she loved leaving her. “I don’t want you to go … you know that, don’t you?”

Emmett looked at her a long time, and for a momenta flicker of his eye, a shadow passing over his face-she thought he just might change his mind. Then

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he kissed her lightly and said, “There’s a difference between not wanting someone to go, and wanting them to stay.”

For a long moment, he lingered, and his gaze held hers-his blue, blue eyes squinting ever so slightly, as if he were looking toward some distant horizon. Or maybe trying hard not to cry. She felt a sudden longing to touch him, reassure him somehow … though, God knew, right now, she was the one who felt as if her whole life was falling apart. Tentatively, she reached up and felt the wetness at the corner of his eye, smoothing it away with her thumb. His mouth hooked up in a sardonic smile, and Annie felt a tearing pain inside her.

He touched her cheek, briefly, sadly, and turned away.

Annie watched him go, a big rusty-haired man with one crippled foot and one good one, and more heart than she’d ever deserved. She felt like crumpling onto the carpet, under the gilded ceiling of the Plaza Hotel, and crying until she had no more tears.

But, no, she couldn’t. Not now. Later, when she was alone.

Feeling cold and numb, Annie turned and started back toward the ballroom.

There was still Tout de Suite, she told herself. And though she yearned to chase after Emmett, she knew that if she didn’t stay here and win Felder over, she might lose not only Emmett, but her business as well.

She’d have nothing.

Annie, straightening her shoulders and blinking away her tears, swept in through the mirrored doors, holding her head up, like a queen proceeding to her coronation.

IVl erde!” Henri swore as the sheet of chocolate he was cutting with his knife broke in two.

He’d just removed this one from the refrigerator, and the cold had made it too brittle; he should have let it sit at room temperature a few minutes more. But here in the Plaza kitchen, where he stood hunched over a small

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corner table, the air felt warm enough to melt butter. And if the chocolate became too warm, he knew, his nearly finished three-dimensional model-made entirely from chocolate-would grow soft and begin to collapse where he had “glued” its pieces together.

His hands were shaky, but he forced himself to work slowly. No more mistakes. He placed a piece of heavy paper in the shape of a swan’s wing over the rectangle of couverture in front of him, and with several deft slashes cut through the half-inch-thick sheet. The thing had to be perfect, flawless … a way of showing her how much he still loved her.

Just a few more pieces to fit in, and it would be finished-the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, where all those years ago, on their first outing in Paris, he’d taken Dolly.

The lake itself he’d fashioned from a thin oval of chocolate brushed here and there with white chocolate to give it the look of a rippled surface. Around the edges of the lake, slender,.dagger-shaped wedges, set perpendicularly atop it, formed tall reeds, some dusted with cocoa to give them a textured look. There were lily pads made of milk chocolate, blooming with white-chocolate flowers, their curved petals thin as eggshells. And in the center, a rowboat molded from chocolate “plastic”-a pliable mixture of couverture and glucose-with two figurines in it, a man and a woman. Around the rowboat, swans and geese, and raised at one end, even a small waterfall fashioned from shavings of milk, white, and dark chocolate.

Would she recognize it? Would she remember? Even if she did, she might not want him anymore… .

So many years wasted.

Why had he been so pigheaded, insisting that she come to Paris?

Non. If she would have him, they would begin again. Here. Together. He had some money put aside, thank heaven, and there were his shares of Girod’s, for which Francine, if she wished to keep them in the family, would have no choice but to pay a good price.

Girod’s. The thought of never again stepping into his beautiful, beloved shop, tasting Pompeau’s latest ere-

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ation, joking with the apprentices and sales clerks, was almost unthinkable.

But he could do it. Those people would go on without him, and he without them. He had entered his father-inlaw’s small business, and through his hard work, his skill with chocolate, and his choice of the right people to help him, had built an enterprise of great prestige. And those abilities he could take with him anywhere. Even if he were to start again from nothing, at the absurd age of sixty-two.

So, yes, this replica of a lake, like Girod’s, was more than just pieces of chocolate cut out and glued together. It represented all he knew, the skill his hands possessed. And what better way of expressing his feelings to Dolly? With words, he would no doubt appear foolish. Let her see this … and know that his heart had gone into every lily, every reed.

Henri dipped the broadest end of the swan’s wing into a bowl of melted chocolate, kept warm in a bainmarie, and gently pressed the wing onto the body of the swan, holding it there until it had hardened.

But this was taking so long! Henri burned to go out and find Dolly, but he forced himself to move slowly. Everything had to be exactly right. Around him in the kitchen, chefs were barking orders, whipping saut้ skillets on and off hot flames. Doors endlessly swinging open and shut, waiters with trays hurrying in and out. Clouds of steam rising from a long hooded row of steam trays.

Mon Dieu, if he could only keep his hand steady! Not for years-not since his days as pastry chef at Fouquet’s-had he sculpted anything in chocolate. He did not seem to have lost his touch, but he had to go slowly where once he’d wielded his knife and brush with skilled abandon. He felt a queer tightness in his chest, and wondered if he might be having heart trouble. No, he was afraid, that was all. Afraid that he would find that he was too late.

After applying the last of the leaves, and spraying the entire model with confectioner’s glaze, Henri tore off his apron and stood back to admire his creation. Yes, she would recognize it, she would know it was the Bois-the

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waterfall, the swans, even that toy sailboat he remembered her exclaiming over.

Henri checked his watch. Mon Dieu, already half past eight! No time to go back and change. He had on the gray suit he’d worn on the plane coming over, but wrinkled or not, it would have to do.

Carefully, carefully, Henri lifted his masterpiece, which sat on an acrylic board like some magical, storybook island. Slowly, bearing his precious offering, Henri made his way toward the double doors.

Weaving to avoid a waiter bearing an enormous tray laden with steaming soup bowls, Henri felt panic rise in him.

Look, already the first course! If I don’t find Dolly now, now, before she is seated … before the interminable speeches begin … I will have to wait until after the entire dinner… .

Why hadn’t he thought to call someone about being seated at her table? At least then he could have been near her, breathing in her perfume, touching her.

Henri found himself remembering the first time he’d laid eyes on her, coming into his basement kitchen at Girod’s wearing a red dress with a bright, diamond-patterned scarf tied about her hair. She’d caught him at a bad moment-something about the ganache had put him in a foul temper-but she had merely laughed at his grumblings. “Oh, don’t mind me,” chirped this lovely woman he did not know, who nevertheless intrigued him with her boldness, and her easy familiarity. “You just go on ahead … I won’t take it personal.”

After all these years, would she still want him? After all, as Dolly would say, his foot-dragging?

Henri, his throat thick with longing, balanced his great gift to her with one hand while he pushed open the kitchen’s padded door.

R

JXudy sat in the Oak Bar on the main floor of the Plaza Hotel and sipped his tonic. No gin, not these days … doctor’s orders. Then why did he feel as if he’d socked

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away half a dozen martinis? The somber room with its dark oak walls and carved plaster ceiling seemed to be rocking to and fro, making his head spin and his stomach heave. There was a thick, nasty taste in his mouth like sour milk. From his table, set back against the wall, he watched the entrance, rolling his sweating glass back and forth between his palms while he forced himself to remain in his seat.

Eight-thirty, and still no Laurel. Jesus. She was supposed to have been here half an hour ago. Val had said so. He’d promised. But suppose Val had been bullshitting him? Or maybe Laurel had changed her mind. Suppose she’d thought it over, and realized she didn’t owe him a damn thing, not even a few minutes of her time?

But he had to see her. This might be his last chance.

Only yesterday, they’d nearly shanghaied him into the hospital. Exploratory surgery, yeah sure … but Rudy knew damn well what they’d find. He could feel it … almost taste it-his insides rotting. Cancer of the colon. Christ. No dignity to it. But then when had he ever been anything more to God-if there even was a God-than some kind of practical joke?

Okay, he’d go with it. But not just yet. Not until after this trip, after he’d seen Laurel. Not until he’d told her what had been eating away at him for years and years. Cancer? What a fucking joke. It wasn’t the cancer that was killing him … it was Laurel.

Absentmindedly, Rudy reached into the bowl in front of him and popped a peanut into his mouth. As he swallowed it, a bolt of acid shot through his stomach, causing him to double over, pain hammering at his gut. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the bartender shooting him a curious look, and willed himself to straighten.

Concentrate. Concentrate. Don’t let it show that you’re sick.

“Uncle Rudy?”

The pain in his gut was nothing compared to the blast that went shearing up Rudy’s spine at the sound of Laurel’s voice. He jerked upright, nearly knocking his drink over and then catching it just in time.

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She was only a few feet away, swaying toward him on high heels to which she was obviously unaccustomed, wearing a high-necked chiffon dress the pale ivory of Easter lilies, which floated about her ankles as if buoyed by some invisible updraft. Her hair was pulled up into a loose knot atop her head, leaving long wisps trailing about her neck. Pearl studs in her ears and an antique cameo brooch at her neck; she looked like a cameo herself.