Free All for You by Laura Florand Page A

those foam sledgehammers so she could bonk him with it every day he walked in still a coward.
    She went back to her work while Jaime and Dom did the mushy-face stuff, and maybe she might have peeked out the window to see if any clouds had rolled in.
    Joss looked up at her movement in it, but he didn’t lift a hand and wave or anything. He just waited.
    She looked at the card she’d propped in the corner of the marble counter, tucked under the wall of frames in all different sizes. She had it propped face forward, so no one could see what was written on the back, and because she liked the way Dom’s eyebrow rose and the ironic, challenging glance he slanted at her when he saw his own name crossed out and replaced with hers. Ha! Take that. Because she didn’t want the responsibility of running a business like this in Paris, and she didn’t want the financial pressure, but she poured her life into these beautiful chocolates just like he did, and she did like getting some of the credit.
    She touched the card. And then she knew she really shouldn’t, but … she peeked at the back again. That stubborn, determined handwriting, and the little heart over the I in her name just like she always did for him, as if he’d noticed that, and, and … I would wait more than five years for you.
    Her eyes filled again.
    Blast it! She scrubbed at them, but not before two people spotted her and shook their heads. She knew she shouldn’t have risked looking at those words again.
    She glanced at the clock. It was nearly five. On normal days—not, obviously, the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s or the week before Easter or the whole month of December—she left at five, having started at eight. Of course, her afternoon had been about as unproductive as it was conceivable to be, and she wouldn’t normally leave without a heck of a lot more done, or else she’d have to come in at five in the morning tomorrow. And Dom got kind of grouchy when people came in too early unnecessarily—he liked having the kitchens to himself for a couple of hours. These days, he was torn, because he apparently also liked lingering in bed later than he ever had before he shared that bed with Jaime.
    It must be nice, Célie thought wistfully, to like sharing a bed with someone so much you didn’t want to leave it.
    “I need to go,” she told Dom abruptly, washing her hands. Dom came to fill the doorway of the ganache room and gave the quantity of work she had done that day an ironic look. “I’ll come in early tomorrow,” Célie said. That was a little meek. She stuck her chin up. “To make up for all those all-nighters I pull at Christmas.”
    Dom pretended to look grumpy, but his dark water eyes gleamed touché. “He still out there?” Dom checked the window. His hands closed automatically into fists. “Célie—”
    “It’s fine. Dom—I’m not worried. It’s Joss, okay?” He often used to show up just a few minutes before she was due to get off, to lounge against the wall of the building opposite her bakery. It had made her heart sing, every time, when she saw him out there waiting for her. “You guys just don’t understand because I overreacted.”
    “If you’re trying to protect Dom—an effort I deeply appreciate—can I just mention that I could put a Corey security detail on you if you need it,” Jaime said, coming into the room.
    Dom stared at his fiancée. “I think you must have me mistaken for someone else.”
    Jaime smiled at him and shook her head, laying her hand on his arm. Dom sighed, looking down at it, and then covered her smaller hand with his.
    “I need to go,” Célie said again. She went into the bathroom to change into her street clothes—jeans and a short-sleeved knit shirt, because it wasn’t as if she had been expecting to have to look hot on her way home from work—and grabbed her leather jacket and hibiscus-printed helmet. She hesitated, and then swooped back into the ganache room to fill a little metal