All For You, Excerpt
Paris, near République
Célie worked in heaven. Every day she ran up the stairs to it, into the light that reached down to her, shining through the great casement windows as she came into the laboratoire, gleaming in soft dark tones off the marble counters. She hung up her helmet and black leather jacket and pulled on her black chef’s jacket instead and ran her fingers through her hair to perk it back out into its current wild pixie cut. She washed her hands and stroked one palm all down the length of one long marble counter as she headed to check on her chocolates from the day before.
Oh, the beauties. There they were, the flat, perfect squares with their little prints, subtle but adamant, the way her boss liked them. Perfect. There were the ganaches and the pralinés setting up in their metal frames. Day three on the mint ganache. Time to slice it into squares with the guitare and send them to the enrober.
She called teasing hellos to everyone. “What, you here already, Amand? I didn’t expect you until noon.” Totally unfair to the hardworking caramellier, but he had slept in once, after a birthday bash, arriving to work so late and so horrified at himself that no one had ever let him forget it.
“Dom, when’s the wedding again?” Dominique Richard, their boss, was diligently trying to resist marrying his girlfriend until he had given her enough time to figure out what a bad bet he was, and the only way to handle that was tease him. Otherwise Célie’s heart might squeeze too much in this warm, fuzzy, mushy urge to give the man a big hug—and then a very hard shove into the arms of his happiness.
Guys who screwed over a woman’s chance at happiness because they were so convinced they weren’t good enough did not earn any points in her book.
“Can somebody work around here besides me?” Dom asked in complete exasperation, totally unmerited, just because the guy had no idea how to deal with all the teasing that came his way. It was why they couldn’t resist. He was so big, and he got all ruffled and grouchy and adorable.
“I want to have time to pick out my dress!” Célie protested, hauling down the guitare. “I know exactly what you two are going to do. You’ll put it off until all of a sudden you wander in some Monday with a stunned, scared look on your face, and we’ll find out you eloped over the weekend to some village in Papua New Guinea. And we’ll have missed the whole thing!”
Dom growled desperately, like a persecuted bear, and bent his head over his éclairs.
Célie grinned and started slicing her mint ganache into squares, the guitar wires cutting through it effortlessly. There you go. She tasted one. Soft, dissolving in her mouth, delicately infused with fresh mint. Mmm. Perfect. Time to get it all dressed up. Enrobing time.
She got to spend her days like this. In one of the top chocolate laboratoires in Paris. Okay, the top, but some people over in the Sixth like a certain Sylvain Marquis persisted in disputing that point. Whatever. He was such a classicist. Boring. And everyone knew that cinnamon did not marry well with dark chocolate, so that latest Cade Marquis bar of his was just ridiculous.
And she didn’t even want to think about Simon Casset with his stupid sculptures. So he could do fancy sculptures. Was that real chocolate? Did people eat that stuff? No. So. She did important chocolate. Chocolate that adventured. Chocolate people wanted to sink their teeth into. Chocolate that opened a whole world up in front of a person, right there in her mouth.
Chocolate that was so much beyond anything she had ever dreamed her life would be as a teenager. God, she loved her day. She stretched out her arms, nearly bopped their apprentice Zoe, who was carrying a bowl of chocolate to the scale, grinned at her in apology, and carried her mint ganaches over to the enrober.
She’d been loving her day for a little over three hours and was getting kind of ready to take a little break from doing so and let her back muscles relax for fifteen minutes when Guillemette showed up at the top of the stairs. Célie cocked her eyebrows at the other woman hopefully. Time for a little not-smoke break, perhaps? Were things quiet enough downstairs? Célie didn’t smoke anymore, not since some stupid guy she once knew made her quit and she found out how many flavors there were out there when they weren’t being hidden by tobacco. But sometimes she’d give just about anything to be able to hold a cigarette between her fingers and blow smoke out with a sexy purse of her lips and truly believe that was all it took to make her cool.