Sun-Kissed (25 page)
“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.
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
[email protected]
.
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
[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.
http://lauraflorand.com