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Again and again, she had stifled the impulse to snap back that she was trying her best. But what if her best just

wasn’t good enough? There surely were other places where she could learn … but none of them could turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

No, she told herself, somehow she had to make this work.

Henri Baptiste, whom she hadn’t seen since she’d arrived in Paris two weeks ago, was finally due in today, returning from a month at the Girod factory in Marseilles, where the cacao beans from the family’s Antillean plantations were roasted, then ground and conched, and the finished blocks of couverture-except for what was needed here at Girod’s-shipped to a wholesaler in Holland. Henri had been down there overseeing the building of a new storehouse, she’d been told.

Annie was eager to see him. She remembered Henri from his visits to New York as warm and outgoing, always gesturing, and laughing that great booming laugh of his. But how would he treat her if he was told she’d turned out to be, well, not good enough? From stories she’d heard around Girod’s kitchen, she knew how exacting he could be. Dolly had told her once how Henri had tossed out an apprentice for having dirty fingernails-the boy, he’d declared, had no more chance of becoming a master chocolatier than did a coal miner of becoming a Cartier.

Oh God, what if he were to fire her as well?

Annie watched Pompeau’s tongue flick, catlike, to catch a drop of melted chocolate from the end of his spoon.

“No, no, c’est gat้el” he pronounced sadly. “The bouquet, he has gone away.”

She felt numb. A cold, humming emptiness in her head. And then she was flying back in time, standing in the kitchen of that greasy Greek diner being fired all over again by Mr. Dimitriou. As if all the years she’d worked for Dolly had never happened.

Looking around the large kitchen, she half expected to see that everyone was as frozen as she was-that the entire world had stopped turning. But no, all about her figures in starched whites were bustling about, their reflections rippling along the shiny, blue-tiled walls. The clatter of pots, the hum of the enrober as it conveyed nuggets

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of ganache along its conveyor belt to be drizzled in couverture, voices calling to one another in French. Light sparkled off the copper cauldrons, the marble counters, the stainless-steel refrigerator doors.

“You permitted it to make the vapor, you see that? And now, he has become like mud. Regardez ce/a!”

Annie had no choice but to peer into the oversized double boiler on the cooktop in front of her. Instantly, she saw he was right. Droplets of moisture were now dribbling down the inside, and the lake of silky darkbrown chocolate that began halfway from the rim had begun separating into grainy lumps.

“I’m sorry,” she said, struggling against the urge to cry. “I thought I was doing it the way you-“

Pompeau cut her off with a wave of his hand.

“No, no! The words I tell to you, the words in a book, they are only words. The chocolat, you must know when it is right, here.” He tapped his breast. “And here.” He touched a finger to his fluffy white temple. In his pink gibbon’s face, his blue eyes flashed.

“Let me start over. I’ll get it right this time. I-“

Again, he cut her off, this time with a flap of his white apron-already smeared with chocolate, she noticed, though it was still early in the morning. He was shooing her away as if she were a stray alley cat that had wandered in and was getting under his feet.

Annie felt a pulse jump in her temple. Her cheeks burned. At the other end of the long cooktop, Emmett caught her eye and gave her an encouraging thumbs-up. Thank God for Emmett. Always there with a wink or a smile. His coppery hair bright amid the cold steel and tile. Relaxed, confident, always rambling in his Texas drawl about the glories of Paris—the intoxicating Monet water lilies at the Orangerie; a street violinist at Les Halles, who’d played Mozart like an angel; a tiny shop on the passage des Princes that sold nothing but meerschaum pipes, carved into the faces of the world’s great men.

She watched him as he lifted a coffeepot from the counter and poured filtre into two thick white china cups. Coffee break. At nine-thirty, Pompeau allowed them a

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luxurious ten minutes. Now she caught Emmett signalling to her. But could it be that late, nine-thirty already? She’d started work at six A.M., and it seemed as if hardly an hour had passed. Suddenly, Annie felt weary, as if invisible sandbags were pulling down on her wrists and ankles. She glanced at the brass ship’s clock over the doorway leading upstairs. They’d have to move fast, before the nougat syrup bubbling on the stove peaked.

Annie followed Emmett into a small storage area to the right of the wall of stainless refrigerators. He walked with a jaunty stride, broken by a slight limp that hardly slowed him. A cup in each of his square brown hands, held aloft, a thick finger curled about each handle-a dainty touch that made her smile. He wore a red Henley jersey stretched across a chest as thick and solid as a hickory stump, faded jeans, and snub-nosed cowboy boots that clacked on the tile floor, like an impromptu tap dance. If he hadn’t told her about his crippled foot, she might never have guessed it was more than a slightly twisted ankle. Ask him about it, though, and he’d give her that big smile, wide as Texas, and drawl, “Only handicap I got is these here freckles. Damnedest thing. Must’ve stood in front of a screen door too long with the sun shining through.”

Annie liked Emmett’s freckles. She liked everything about Emmett, even the way he talked-his faint Texas twang, which he purposely exaggerated when he was kidding around, and all his homegrown expressions that reminded her of Dearie, and of Dolly too. Though for all his openness, he was in some ways a mystery.

When she’d first asked him where he was from, he’d told her, “A little bit of everywhere.” With time, she’d learned that he’d grown up mostly in Texas, where his mother had settled with her second husband after his father died, when Emmett was a little boy. But since leaving home he’d been all over, working on a beef ranch in El Paso, as an oil field roustabout in Oklahoma, and in Louisiana as a shrimper, a boat builder, a cook aboard a merchant ship. The way he talked, he seemed to have lived enough to be fifty, instead of only twenty-nine. But when she asked if he’d fought in ‘Nam, if that was how he’d hurt

; lived : when I dhurtl

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his foot, Emmett had just smiled and said, “Ever heard the rumor that alligators don’t bite, only crocodiles do? Well, don’t believe it.”

She never could be sure when he was or wasn’t giving her the runaround. They’d worked side by side since she got here, two weeks ago … and even with all the stories he’d told about himself, she couldn’t help feeling there was something he was holding back. Unlike Joe, who was a smooth deep river with an occasional raging current, Emmett was like a three-ring circus where you could keep your eyes on only one ring at a time, so you couldn’t know what was going on in the other two. Like how had he managed to snag this apprenticeship, which dozens of applicants—some with degrees from culinary institutes and experience working in three-star restaurants—had lost out on. He’d told her everything about lobstering, from building the trap, to baiting it, to tying up their claws, but he hadn’t told her that.

They settled into a pair of rickety folding chairs set near a narrow wooden table that looked as if it had been around since the storming of the Bastille. Modern, adjustable metal shelving lined the walls, the shelves stacked with ten-pound slabs of couverture-extra bitter, caraque, dark lact้e, cocoa pโt้, white, gianduja-next to cast-iron molds, sacks of unshelled nuts, vanilla beans, coffee, and gallon jugs of liqueur, orange-flower water, whole chestnuts in syrup.

Emmett hiked his bad leg onto one of the extra chairs and winced slightly. She could see it hurt him, though he’d never let on.

“You look like a mile of bad road,” he told her. “Take a load off, Cobb. Old Pompeau, believe me, he’s not so mean, … he just looks that way. I’ll bet he drinks hot milk before bed and sleeps with a night light. A regular old pussycat.”

“An old concentration-camp guard is more like it.”

Emmett laughed. “Pompeau, he’s not the problem. It’s you. My guess is, whatever’s eating you, he’s twice as tall as that old fart, and ten times better-looking. Boyfriend back home, right?” He pronounced it “raht.”

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“Are you always this nosy?”

“Fraid so.” He grinned.

“Well, then, I guess you won’t mind if I get a little nosy with you.”

“Fire away.”

“You never did tell me how you ended up here. I mean-chocolate?”

He shrugged. “Beats hauling shrimp nets.”

“You’re doing it again,” she sighed. “You’re purposely not telling me anything.”

Emmett cocked an eyebrow. “Me? Hell, some’ve said I could talk the other ear off Van Gogh.”

“I don’t mean that.” She smiled, and sipped her coffee, which was heavenly, better than any back home. “You talk, but you haven’t told me anything about yourself.”

“If you want to start at the beginning, I was born in North Carolina. Fort Bragg. Army brat. Moved to Osaka after the war, when I was still in diapers.”

“Seriously?”

“Colonel Cameron had the honor, I believe, of being the last American officer to die at Japanese hands. Stabbed to death in a brawl at a teahouse, more commonly known as a brothel.”

“Oh … I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. My mother, God bless her, has succeeded, over the years, in canonizing the poor bastard. If he came back now, she’d have him dipped in fluorescent paint and stuck to her dashboard. According to Rydell, he died a hero, defending truth, justice, and the American way.”

“Rydell?”

“Born in Atlanta, named after her great-greatgranddaddy, a big Confederate hero.”

“You still haven’t told me how you got here.”

“Oh … that.” He shrugged. “Not much to it. I was working as an assistant pastry chef at Commander’s Palace … you heard of it?”

“New Orleans. It’s famous, isn’t it?” She remembered Joe mentioning it.

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“You could say that. Anyway, turns out Prudhomme and Baptiste are old friends. A few months ago, Baptiste flies over for the ACF convention-that’s the American Culinary Federation-and old Paul puts in a word, and boom, next thing I know they got me singing the Marseillaise and munching on croissants.”

“Might be hard to manage both at the same time.”

He laughed. “A crip like me? I can chew gum, chug boilermakers, and walk a straight line. All at the same time. Like those commercials, we’re number two, we try harder.”

“Emmett, I … I didn’t mean …”

“Folks, when they say they don’t mean something, usually that’s exactly what they do mean.”

“Well, I wasn’t talking about your foot. But since you brought it up, how did it happen?”

“Ever heard that saying, Let sleeping dogs lie?”

“I wasn’t prying,” she explained. “I’m just interested … in you.” As soon as she heard herself, Annie felt heat crawl up her neck. She hadn’t meant it that way. God, why was she always saying the wrong thing?

Emmett’s eyelids drooped, his lips curled up in a sardonic little smile, one that seemed to say, I know what you meant, but I’m gonna give you a hard time anyway.

But then all he said was, “Let’s just say I tried teaching a lesson to someone who needed it.” His grin faded, and she watched his blue eyes grow dark. “Thick-headed son of a bitch. I’d have taught him, too … except he had something a lot tougher than me. Winchester pump-action. Blew a goodish chunk out of my foot.”

Annie looked at Emmett, and thought, Whatever it was, I’ll bet you’d go do it all over again.

Just a feeling. Emmett Cameron, for all his joking, was not a guy to be taken lightly.

“Your mother must have been pretty upset… after what happened to your father.”

His eyes slid away from her, again that odd dark look. She found herself staring at him. Somehow, she’d always thought of freckles as a flaw, like a weak chin or jug ears, but on Emmett they … well, they suited him.

Made him even more rugged-looking. Sort of a cross between Huck Finn and James Dean. With his blue-denim eyes and square features, she could imagine him leaning against a split-rail fence, squinting off into the distance, the mud-caked heel of one cowboy boot hooked over the bottom rail.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said, throwing his head back and gulping the rest of his coffee. His throat was tanned too, she saw, with freckles spilling down it. Adam’s apple the size of a child’s fist. The harsh overhead light burned on the top of his head, making the wiry ends of his rusty hair glow like electric filaments.

“Yeah … she was.” Again, that faraway look. “Upset I got it blown off ‘fore some Viet Cong could get to me. My kid brother, Dean, he went over in ‘69. Squeaky-clean-eighteen. Shades of the old man, ‘cept Dean died of dysentery. Way Rydell tells it, though, you’d think he’d bought it storming Hamburger Hill instead of the goddamn crapper ‘round back behind the barracks.” Emmett’s eyes grew bright, and he unashamedly dragged his knuckles across them. “Poor Dean.”

A tense silence filled the small room, and Annie became aware of all the sounds she’d learned to blot out—the gentle grinding of the electric enrober in the next room, the hum of the refrigerators, the rattling of a tiered metal cooling rack being wheeled across the tile floor.

“I still don’t quite get it,” she said.

“Get what?”

“Seems like you could have gone in any one of a dozen directions. Why this? Why here?”

Emmett shrugged, and smiled. “Like you, I was figuring on having my own business one of these days.”

“You sound like maybe you’re having second thoughts.”

“Could be. I know two weeks doesn’t sound like I’ve given it much of a chance, but I’m beginning to think this is gonna be just one more dead end for me.”

“Why don’t you leave, then?”