She bit her lower lip. “This will harden in about three to five minutes, so we must roll our balls and dip them in.”
“We?” he asked, but he washed his hands at the sink and let her put him to work.
Using the now firm chocolate fondant from the cold box, which had become like a creamy paste as she’d told him it would, they rolled it into balls with their palms. Next, they quickly dipped each ball directly into the tempered chocolate with their fingers and set them on trays lined with wax paper. He hadn’t been in such a mess since he was a small boy. Frankly, he loved it.
“I should have made the balls first ahead of tempering the chocolate,” Miss Rare-Foure said, working silently and quickly, making two or three balls for each one of his.
“Why didn’t you?”
She barely spared him a glance. “I was distracted,” she muttered, stirring the tempered chocolate to keep it fluid until they’d finished.
By him?He kept working until they’d used up all the soft chocolate but still had some of the tempered. He wanted to drink it before it hardened. He watched her give it another few vigorous stirs and reach for a tray of hardened treacle toffee. To his amazement, she poured the remaining chocolate on top and put the tray in the cold box.
“There,” she said with satisfaction. “Done and dusted, as they say, and nothing wasted. And now for theBrayson.” Retrieving a smaller bowl of chocolate fondant from the cold box, she it on the marble. “Let’s blend a few and see if you like any.”
When Miss Rare-Foure wasn’t silently concentrating as she dropped minute amounts of essence into small spoonfuls of chocolate or stirred in a ground spice, she was nibbling or handing a spoon over for him to try, waiting with a curious expression for his opinion.
“If I am doing a whole tray, as we just did, I add whatever I’m blending into the chocolate at an earlier stage, as I did before you came today. Here, try one of the balls you made.”
Henry picked one up, amazed at how hard the tempered chocolate had become, like a shell around the rich fondant middle. He took a bite.
“It’s like magic. When did you put in the nutmeg?”
She smiled at him, and he felt his insides do a jig. “Nutmeg was in the boiling cream I poured over the chocolate pieces when we first started. You have a good palate, my lord.”
Her words pleased him more than nearly any compliment he’d ever had. She tried chocolate with a little rosewater, wrapped some of the gooey chocolate fondant around a piece of chopped date, and even added turmeric and cardamom to another. He liked the way she occasionally puffed out her cheeks when she was thinking.
She seemed to find him amusing, too, which gave him a happy feeling, especially when they could laugh together. Miss Rare-Foure laughed abruptly and without shielding her mouth the way many did, as if they thought it a sin to show true merriment
“And to think,” she commented at one point, “for me, it all started with my reading that jolly children’s primer. You know the one, Mrs. Lovechild’s? ‘The Bees’ story sent me on a quest for honey in our kitchen, and our cook at the time kept it with the sugar and tins of cocoa. Naturally, I started experimenting. There was also the story about the boys working together. ‘The Hedge Hog,’ wasn’t it?” She smiled at the memory, and he easily recalled the stories she mentioned from the same book in his childhood nursery.
“I bullied my sisters — quite the opposite lesson of the primer,” she added, “into deciding to work in our mother’s shop, each of us doing something different to help out. Beatrice — she’s my next younger sister — hit me over the head with Mrs. Lovechild’s primer one afternoon when she was tired of preachy, moral lessons. I think that was the last time I saw that book.”
She was enchanting. Before he knew it, the time had come for him to leave as he had a late-afternoon appointment with his mother at their bank. He couldn’t let down the Dowager Duchess of Pelham, not since stepping into the role of duke and running their estates. For two years, he’d tried to make things as easy as possible for his grieving mother.
“I believe we’ve developed a few promising new chocolates, which I will try in the shop over the next few weeks, but I think you didn’t love any one of them enough for your lady friend.”
Miss Rare-Foure was his lady friend. That irrational thought whipped through his head. At least, he believed they had formed a friendship of sorts despite him being a customer. He didn’t foresee a time, even after he became engaged to Madeleine, when he wouldn’t want to drop by and visit with the chocolatier. It would be different, of course, when he remained in the front of the shop, coming in simply to buy a tin of chocolates.
“I am grateful you allowed me to come in the back and watch you work.”
“You were most helpful,” she said. She was leaning on the marble counter and rubbing her back. His fingers prickled, and he wanted to reach out and rub the sore muscles for her.
“Was I? Truthfully?” he asked, staring at how her hands kneaded just above the flair of her hips.
“Well,” she began as she straightened, turned to him, and made a wry face.
He couldn’t help laughing when she teased him, and it felt good to do so freely. Most people were entirely too proper around him, as if the moment he became a duke, he also became stuffy and would be offended by people acting too familiarly around him.
“The shop seems to do a steady business,” he said, “from the sound of the bell and all the noise.”
“It does. We are fortunate.”
“Skill,” he corrected, as he stood, making their bodies suddenly too close. She blushed either from his compliment or his proximity, he couldn’t tell, and then she walked toward the curtain.
Impulsively, he put his hand out to stop her pulling it aside.
“After we leave this space, we shall have to follow the rules again.” He said it lightly, like another jest.
