Her eyebrows scrunched together. She stared at him as if he was speaking some language she didn’t know.
Dom couldn’t bring himself to hold her gaze. He let go of his damn rosebuds and walked over to the rough stone. The stone against which they had just made love. He put his palms flat on the warmth there, where the heat of her body pressed there by his had sunk into the stone.
“But you know that, don’t you?” he said low. “All this time I thought you thought I was perfect. You knew.”
“Perfect?” she said, startled.
“Yeah.” His mouth twisted. He hit the side of his fist against the stone. “I guess you never did think that.”
“I didn’t mean you were
flawless.
” She sounded taken aback. “I mean, Jesus, Dominique, you have a really dirty mouth. For example. And in some spots that thick hide of yours turns into such thin skin you can see your whole soul through it. What you are is
wonderful.
”
He pressed one hand over his chest, widening his fingers as much as he could to cover himself. “
Don’t
look at my soul.”
“I’ll look at whatever the hell I want. It’s
beautiful.
”
He looked at her helplessly. Any minute he was going to sink down and just sob into her lap like she was his missing mommy. And she didn’t resemble his mother at all . . . he didn’t want her for his mother, it was just . . . she loved him. Every time she looked at him as if he was the moon and the stars, it made every part of him okay. Except he had to remember he wasn’t. Okay. “Jaime. I spent six years in a
slaughterhouse.
My father beat the crap out of me and my mother both.”
She made a little low sound and flinched. Oh,
merde,
so maybe she hadn’t known that. Maybe he could have kept it hidden longer.
He forged on anyway. “My mother didn’t even try to take me with her when she left. I don’t know how to
do
any of these things, like be calm and reliable and love you; I just
try.
I’m a really, really, really bad bet.”
“It depends on what you’re betting on. If you want someone bigger than the whole damn world, I would say you’re the best bet out there.”
She washed over him, every time, like a balm for his soul. “Jaime. How did you ever walk into my life?”
“Let’s see.” She gestured around her. “Because it’s
beautiful.
And strong. And I could just soak all that beauty and strength up into me. I walked into your life because you made it a life anyone would want to be inside. And”—she smiled a little, her gaze drifting over his face, his mouth, his body—“it tastes delicious.”
Desire and delight ran through him the way they always did, beyond his control. She thought he was beautiful. She thought his life was beautiful. She thought his damn
soul
was beautiful. And,
putain,
but he could not get enough of her little mouth tasting him, all over. “Jaime. I
want
to believe in you. I want to believe in me. You have no idea how much I want to believe it. It’s just so hard.”
She shook her head. And walked up to him. Walked right up to him. He didn’t think she would ever understand what it did to him when she leaned against him like that, as if she was his. As if she could trust him. As if she needed him.
“I guess you’ll just have to try, Dominique,” she said softly. “I’ve seen everything else you’ve tried at, so if you promise me you’ll try, that’s good enough for me.”
C
HAPTER
31
S
he awoke with a crick in her neck, completely disoriented. Tables. Stone. Red velvet. Leather. Chocolate. The scent of chocolate. What the heck? She was sleeping on the little red Second Empire–style
canapé
that formed one of the voluptuous little seating areas in Dominique’s
salon.
A pastry chef jacket had been rolled up and tucked under her head, for a pillow. Because they weren’t known for luxury cushioning, in the Second Empire. Two leather jackets formed her blanket, the one she had given Dominique over her torso, his old one he had given her over her legs.
It was early morning, and light was just starting to spill through the great walls of windows, leaving the patterns of his chocolate sculptures and displays in shadows on the floor.
This was a really weird place for Dominique to leave her asleep. She blinked around, finding him nowhere on the ground floor, and finally took the spiral staircase.
The light seemed to grow richer as she climbed it, the sun rising higher somewhere beyond the city horizons, warming, turning the world golden. She stopped dead just inside the
laboratoire.
Dominique, almost completely covered in chocolate, stood on the counter by what had been the block for his sculpture. He was drawing a small carving tool very delicately over the edge of the careful feathers in a chocolate wing.
Tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t help it.
It was
La Victoire de Samothrace
. All in chocolate. Her wings spread behind her. Her body in motion, that one graceful leg leaving the ground behind her, the cloth of her robe fluttering with that caught-in-time instant of her launch into the air.
Jaime brought her hands up to cover her mouth, unable to breathe for the beauty of it. The joy of it.
Dominique’s head came up, as if her presence penetrated his concentration. He must be refining the finishing touches, because to her the statue looked complete. Glorious, courageous, ready to soar.
He straightened away from the wing and let his carving tool fall to his side, staring down at her mutely while she took the sculpture in.
But when one of her tears spilled over her lashes and tracked down her cheek, he leaped down and came up to her. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to ask her if she liked it. He just stroked the tear off her cheek.
And then gave a startled look at his fingers. He lifted his other hand toward her cheek and stopped midway, gazing at it ruefully. “
Pardon.
I just got chocolate all down your cheek. And I don’t think I’ll be able to wipe it off.”
“No.” She shook her head, a smile starting to sparkle through her tears until she felt like a rainbow. “No, you’re completely covered.” Shavings of chocolate must have fallen over him as he worked and had melted onto his body as he kept working. All night. To get from the half-formed sculpture it had been to this, he must have worked all night. Chocolate completely coated his hair, his face, his forearms, his hands, his chef’s jacket. “Oh, God. Don’t take a shower. Don’t even wash your hands.”
A slow grin grew on his face. “My team’s going to be here soon.”
“I’ll drive the motorcycle. It’s not that much harder than a moped, is it?”
“Umm. Maybe a littl—”
“Hush. You just sit behind me and try to stay intact. Or we can walk. My apartment is really close. You’re going to look a little silly on the street, but Dominique, you can do this for me. You’re like a woman’s wildest dream right now.”
His grin grew. “If you like me covered in chocolate, you should stick around a long time. It comes with the profession.”
“I’m trying to stick around. My marriage proposal still making you feel sick?”
He rubbed his belly, leaving still more chocolate on the front of his jacket. “I think it was the sugar shock. In my career, I’m not used to digesting something so sweet so suddenly.” He leaned in and kissed her, touching her with nothing but his mouth. She still tasted chocolate from a shaving that must have melted against his lips. “Jaime.” His mouth was so tender, those dark-water eyes of his so bright. “Do you
still
really mean that? That you want to marry me?”
“Surprisingly, one of the things my sister and I learned early in our lives as billionaire heiresses was not to go proposing marriage to anyone unless we meant it. And meant it for the long term.”
“Well.” He took her hands, forgetting again that his were coated in chocolate. “I have what might be a better proposition.”
There he went again. He had a woman ready to marry him, and what did he manage to do with that? Piss her off. Jaime stiffened and pulled at her hands. They slid a little in the chocolaty-ness of his grasp, and he tightened it. “Better than marriage?”
“Just hear me out.”
She set her jaw and waited.
La Victoire de Samothrace
soared beside them.
“Would you live with me?” he asked, low. “As much as you can. If you have to travel, I’ll come with you as much as I can. I really want to come with you. And you unpack your suitcase, and you live here. With me. For a long time. Three years. A long, long time, until we can see if I can . . . keep this going. If I can be trusted with you. Or four years, maybe four years would be better. Could you do that? If, after four years, I’m still . . . I haven’t . . . you think I’m worth marrying, could we do that?”
She stared at him. Her eyes glimmered with tears.
Merde,
he had said the wrong thing. “You want to spend four years proving to me every day you’re worth marrying?”
Four would be enough, wouldn’t it? If he could manage for four years to be a decent boyfriend, he wouldn’t suddenly become his father as soon as they got married, would he? He nodded, hesitantly. For someone who had just proposed marriage to a man she had been dating less than a month, she seemed to find this a weird idea.
She blinked, and one of the tears spilled onto her cheek, trailing down over the chocolate smear from his finger. “Did I ever tell you that being with you—it’s like someone just laid me down in the softest, thickest, silkiest comforter?”
Oh, boy, another one. He loved these analogies of hers. They made him feel—silky and thick and hot. Not very soft, though.
“It’s so . . . warm. It’s so—I feel precious. It’s like I could curl up there forever and never, never drag myself out into the cold morning.”
It shook his whole soul when she talked like that, opening up doors and windows he didn’t even know he had, and spilling parts of his soul out into odd tangles that gleamed like lost treasure. He looked at his big hands, opening and closing involuntarily on hers. He didn’t dare say anything, because he didn’t want to cry himself.
He glanced up sideways at his
Victoire de Samothrace,
which he didn’t know if he had carved more in her honor or in his—it was as if they had blurred together. The sight of it gave him the courage to smile a little, to try to tease. “Did you have a specialist check out that blow to your head?” he asked worriedly.
She burst out laughing. It ran over his skin like a waterfall, fresh and cleansing. “Oh, Dom, what am I going to do with you? The best specialists money could buy. What, did you think Cade went with the public health system?”
He pulled her in against his body, feeling a giddy secret kick of pleasure that he was covering her with his chocolate, that everyone would be able to see where he had held her, and picked up one of her hands, looking at it a moment in his. Chocolate from his hands smeared over her freckles. The same chocolate hid all of his scars, but if he had correctly understood her, she was promising to lick it all off and reveal them again. Not an offer a man could bring himself to refuse, even to protect those old wounds of his.
Merde,
protecting old wounds was what scar tissue was for.
“Yes, if you still want to marry me after four years, I’ll marry you,” Jaime said. “But I would probably feel more reassured if we got married tomorrow, because I’ll have to keep proving myself, too.”
“What? No, you won’t.”
She shrugged, clearly declining to argue with someone so blind.
He gazed down at her, so small in his arms, with that skin looking as if she were a beignet shaken in a bag of golden sugar. So small, but so steady and strong no matter what she thought, letting him hold her as if she could think of nothing better than to have his arms around her. “If you were only crumbs on a plate, I would pick every last one up with my finger,” he said quietly.
Her eyes started glimmering again.
“Could we get engaged?” he asked, rubbing her bare, thin ring finger. “I know you don’t like jewelry, and you don’t have to wear it when you’re visiting plantations, or I could get you something subtle, it doesn’t have to be gold, or—” He stopped himself from listing any and every way he would modify what he wanted to suit her, which would have taken days. “I would like that. A promise. Right here.” He rubbed the base of her ring finger.
“We could get
married,
” she said. “I’m not liking the way this negotiation is going.”
“We can’t get married, because I might faint.” But, surprisingly, he wasn’t feeling so light-headed now. The more she said it, the more she stayed in his arms, the more it seemed like something that could actually
happen.
Not like when he had kept trying to find his mother with his
relevé de notes,
his report card, on the off chance that learning he was first in his class would make her come back. And be his mother forever this time. This hope that Jaime had given him was one he was actually starting to
believe
in. “We have to build my strength.”
She turned his hand over, studying the base of his own ring finger. It was covered with chocolate. She rubbed a narrow band clear, and he wallowed as he always did in the pleasure of even such a small touch. “Four years.”
Maybe three. He wouldn’t entirely object if she kept bringing up the marriage proposal regularly until she convinced him. He would completely lavish her with chocolate—or jewelry, flowers, or anything else she might want, like, say, his body covered in chocolate—if she would keep proposing marriage to him.
His heart tightened so hard he was going to kill himself if tears showed in his eyes. “Do you know that if you married me, every time you said your name”—he swallowed, trying to make his voice sound less choked—“you would be saying you loved me?”
“Jaime Richard.”
She smiled up at him and pushed herself up on tiptoe to kiss him. “And it would be true.”
Oh, shit, he had to breathe a minute. His nostrils were stinging.
Maybe two, he thought. Maybe in two years he could say yes. He couldn’t wait four years to give her his last name. Or . . . or . . . maybe in one?
She wrapped her finger around the base of his ring finger, like . . . a ring. “I’ll make it very, very masculine, titanium or something, and you don’t have to wear it while you’re working dough or chocolate,” she said. “But you damn well better put it on when you go downstairs to talk to your female clients.”
She was going to put an engagement ring on him. Oh, that so completely worked for him. He wrapped her up and pulled her against him again, there at the base of his
Victoire de Samothrace,
squeezing her too hard because she held so much of his joy.