Read Online All for You by Laura Florand - Free Book Online Page A

if neither it nor her pressure on it weighed anything. “You can do that.”
    Oh, that bastard. It was now so easy to climb into his lap and bury herself there while she started crying again that her eyes prickled from it.
    She turned away in dramatic temper before she could let him see that and stomped back across the room and up the stairs.
    Dom and Jaime met her at the top of them, shifting from that spot in the glass walls where they must have watched the whole thing. Jaime shook her head with some bemusement. “It’s fascinating how little you guys care about what your customers think.”
    Oh, yeah, Célie had kind of forgotten about all the customers watching that scene.
    Dom gave that sharp, tear-someone’s-throat-out grin of his. “They’ll come back.” He pressed his hand to his chest and gave Célie a hopeful look. “My turn?”
    “Dom, I told you to leave him alone!” Célie stomped past him and grabbed a plated éclair off the counter in front of Thierry, whose job it was to both plate and descend the pastries and hot chocolate to the half dozen tables below. “Give me that.”
    “Hey!” Thierry protested. “That was for the woman at table three.”
    “Dom can make her another one.” Because it wasn’t as if she would have been able to talk him into making one for Joss. Célie stuck her tongue out at her boss and stamped her way into the ganache room with the plate. This room, on the opposite side of the laboratoire from the room with all the stoves and the variations in temperature and humidity that using them caused, also held the wire shelves scattered with metal trays of finished chocolates ready to be taken downstairs as the display cases needed replenishing.
    Stupid men. She pulled out some of those trays. Arabica again, yes. He’d liked the touch of coffee. And mint, because he used to have a weakness for chocolate mint patties, and boy would her mint chocolates knock his socks off in comparison. And honey-hibiscus, because she had come up with it all by herself, experimenting, and she liked to think it tasted like she would, if anyone ever knew how to properly taste her.
    Stupid, idiot men with their stupid, idiot excuses for making a woman cry her heart out for years. She slammed the little chocolates down on the plate around the éclair, a little circle of them, and then, remembering how fast he had eaten that box like a starving man, added a second one of each. Fine, a third.
    She stomped back out of the room. “Here.” She thrust the plate at Thierry. “For that idiot.”
    “Now you’re feeding him?” Dom demanded, outraged. “My chocolates?”
    She put her hands on her hips. “ My chocolates. And don’t you dare charge him. It’s on me.”
    Dom made a feral noise between his teeth and pivoted back to his lion sculpture. At the first tap, the entire ear came off.
    “Ha!” Célie said. “That will teach you to always want to use excessive force.”
    Dom gave her a dirty look.
    “You know, I think I’ll just do the rest of my work today from your office,” Jaime said. “It’s mostly calls and computer stuff, and God knows what trouble the two of you’d get into without me.”

Chapter 7
    Joss played with the chocolates on his plate. He’d eaten that little box she gave him too fast, and now he was almost afraid to eat these. They’d be all gone, once they were eaten, and he wouldn’t be able to see it anymore—this visible proof that she cared about him. Still.
    No matter how mad she was, she couldn’t let him sit here without food.
    No, it was more than food. These were her special accomplishments. The things she was so proud of, what she had made of her life when he left to make something of his. She was feeding him, but she was giving him something much more precious and intimate and proud than a croque-monsieur.
    He rubbed his thumb gently along the perfect smooth edge, circling the delicate design, a stylized red flower. He couldn’t shake the feeling that