Bliss and the Art of Forever - Alison Kent Page 0,76
staying, and he’d regret persuading her. Her loyalty to her husband and the man’s family was admirable, and he couldn’t compete. He didn’t want to compete.
What he wanted was for her to choose him because he was the one she now wanted. At least he didn’t have to worry about physical attraction, though he’d been pretty sure all along that wouldn’t be an issue. The issue was a lot more complicated than that: his rival, though he hated thinking of a dead man that way, was a ghost, and Brooklyn still haunted.
The fruit bowl in his kitchen yielded but one lone banana. He and Addy had split the last orange this morning. He’d sent an apple for her lunch, and brought the remaining one to Bliss for her to have after school. Hmm. She must’ve left it there, too full after eating his mother’s cookies. Whatever else he did this weekend, Sunday he had to buy groceries.
The freezer contained frozen raspberries, blueberries, and cherries, the refrigerator two plump lemons. He’d already given Brooklyn the lemongrass candy, and he’d be making truffles with crème de framboise, crème de myrtille, and crème de griotte next week, so . . . Bananas, er, Banana Foster it was.
Digging a skillet from the cabinet, he set it on the stove, then grabbed a cutting board and a knife. Leaving those on the counter, he reached above the fridge for a bottle of dark rum and one of banana liqueur. From the pantry, he snagged the Vietnamese cinnamon he kept on hand for French toast and a box of brown sugar. The few molds he had were on the same shelf as his retired tempering machine. Retired from Bliss anyway.
The only cocoa butter he had turned out to be a jeweled ivory. Close enough to the yellow he usually used. More interested in the flavor than the color or the shape, he went with one that was a sort of trapezoidal prism. The edges and angles were great for showing off the shimmer of the shell.
He’d watched Brooklyn down the Queen Cayenne and witnessed her appreciation for the chocolate as much as the pepper’s bite. The Bananas Foster recipe yielded an equally taste-intensive experience: the caramelized brown sugar and banana, the tickle of the cinnamon, the headiness of the rum, and the extravagance of the butter and cream.
Unlike the last two candies he’d made her, this was one he kept in the shop during the summer. The ingredients brought to mind the tropics and clear skies and blue waters. He thought it appropriately symbolic of her trip to the Italian Riviera, and figured making it would show his support, when her going to Italy was the last thing he wanted.
Measuring out just enough chocolate for the half tray’s worth of filling he’d get out of his single banana, he tossed the discs into his tabletop tempering machine, then checked the bottle of cocoa butter warming in a bowl of hot water. The outer ring had melted, so shaking the seed of the solid center brought the liquid to a tempered state.
On the phone this afternoon, she’d called his daughter Addy, he mused, swirling the barest glaze of cocoa butter into the molds with his fingertip. Addy, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Obviously she’d heard him use the nickname, but she’d continued to call her Adrianne, putting up, he supposed, some sort of wall since Addy was in her class.
He wanted to change that, but didn’t want to make things hard on Brooklyn. As far as he knew, her stance on dating was her own, not a school regulation; she obviously had her reasons. He was going to have to find a way to get her to ditch them without causing her any grief.
After yesterday’s phone conversation with Callum, Brooklyn wasn’t sure what mood she’d find him in when she arrived with her boxes. In order to get to Artie’s books, she’d needed to move her keepers out of the way. Those would be staying with her, not traded in or donated, and she liked the idea of storing them at Callum’s. She was trusting him with something important, something valuable, even though he wouldn’t know.
She’d almost backed out. Almost called this morning to gauge his frame of mind; if she found him short-tempered again—Was that what he’d been yesterday? Had she caught him at a bad time? Had he not wanted to hear from her? Was he regretting the kiss