Unmasking Juliet (27 page)

God, it was mortifying.

No, not mortifying so much as completely devastating. She’d been ready to give him her heart.

Who was she kidding? He already held her heart and soul in his hands. She’d surrendered it to him, knowing full well what she was doing.

Yours.

The trouble was...now she didn’t know how to take it back.

Tears pricked behind her eyes, ready to spill over. She blinked furiously and stared at the remaining half of the truffle in her hand. The temptation to seek out Leo’s gaze was overwhelming to the point of pain. But she refused to succumb to it. And she certainly didn’t want to look at her family. Who knew what they were thinking after witnessing the intense exchange between her and Leo?

Concentrate.

She popped the remaining truffle in her mouth, closed her eyes and tried her best to let go of all her senses, save for taste. As with her first bite, lavender was the overwhelming flavor. Along with chocolate, that is. But she knew she was missing something. There had to be more to it than the obvious.

She let the creamy ganache sit in her mouth for a bit. It was sweet. Sweeter than most chocolate ganache. She’d assumed the sweetness came from the lavender. Unlike lavender that was grown for bath soaps and oils, which tended to be bitter and strong, culinary lavender was known for its delicate sweetness. It was perfect for cookies, tea cakes and flavored crème brûlées.

Not until she swallowed did she detect the barest hint of caramel. But when she did, she knew she’d hit the nail on the head.

Her eyes flew open. Caramel. Of course. Just a dash. Not so much to overpower the lavender or make the truffle sticky, but enough to add another layer of sweetness.

Chocolate. Lavender. Caramel. And probably a dash of sea salt. Because where there was caramel, there was usually sea salt. Not Leo’s fancy
fleur de sel
maybe, but garden variety sea salt.

She turned to face the proctor. “I’m ready.”

He checked his watch. “Are you quite sure, Miss Arabella? You still have approximately one minute left of your allotted time.”

“No, thank you. I’m ready.” She didn’t want to overthink things. She was pretty sure she was right. If she kept tasting it, she might invent new flavors to add into the mix. Flavors that would overcomplicate the recipe and send her veering off course.

“All right, then.” He nodded and called the name of the next contestant.

The name Agostoni was embroidered above the pocket of her chef’s coat. Juliet wondered if she was one of
the
Agostonis—an Italian family who’d created an empire out of their bean-to-bar chocolates and then subsequently sold it to a huge food company. Probably.

The Agostoni girl could win. So could any of the other handful of competitors. The odds were that neither she nor Leo would end up victorious. So, in essence, her proposed pact would have been a long shot even if he’d taken her up on it.

Somehow that still didn’t take the sting out of his rejection. She struggled to swallow. Her throat was bone dry. She felt sick to her stomach. She could feel Leo’s gaze on her, unwavering and as hot as his legendary
chocolat chaud.
She wished he would stop looking at her like that. She wished she could somehow forget he was there. She wished so many things.

How on earth was she going to get through the rest of this day?

The five-minute rounds for each contestant to taste the challenge item seemed to take an eternity. She watched the other chefs taste the truffles, smell them, roll them around between flattened palms and take them painstakingly apart. The head chocolatier from Jacques Torres even held one of the truffles aloft and let it fall to the ground with a splat. What exactly that was supposed to accomplish, Juliet hadn’t a clue. The crowd seemed to like it, though. Even Leo’s uncle Joe had a good laugh. Juliet was one hundred percent certain it was the first time she’d ever seen the man crack a smile. But then he caught her watching him, and his trademark scowl made a swift and immediate return.

When the theatrics were finally over, the contestants retreated to the kitchen. Happy to be away from prying eyes, Juliet gathered the supplies for her basic ganache and got to work. She’d go back and gather the special ingredients together when the crowd had thinned. The caramel especially. So far, not a single square of caramel had been brought back to anyone’s work station. Juliet tried not to get too excited about this fact. The others could be holding back just as she was.

She concentrated on breathing in and out and keeping her hands steady as she stirred her ganache. Not an easy task considering Leo was working at the gas burner right beside her.

“Juliet.” His voice hummed through her veins when he spoke.

How she hated that. Rather, she hated the way she so loved the sound of her name rolling off his tongue. “Not now, Leo. Please.”

He gave her a pained look.

She squared her shoulders and removed her saucepan from the stove. “I can’t do this. I just can’t. Not now.”

“Fine,” he said, in a way that made it clear that it wasn’t fine at all. Nothing was fine. Things couldn’t be further from fine. “But know this. We’re not finished.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant, and he didn’t elaborate. He could have been talking about their conversation or the tangled mess that was the two of them. Juliet wasn’t altogether sure which she preferred. But she couldn’t think about it now. She would figure that out later, once this godforsaken contest was over.

She dipped a tasting spoon in the ganache and brought it to her mouth. Mmm. Perfect. It was glossy, creamy and rich. Just as a ganache should be. Time to add the caramel while the mixture was still hot enough for everything to melt together in perfect harmony.

She gathered the caramel she needed from the ingredients table and dropped the tasting spoon in the large ceramic sink on the way back to her workstation. The sink was already littered with dozens of such spoons. All around her, the other chefs were sampling their work. A bite here. A nibble there. A lick of a spoon.

She allowed herself an exploratory glance in Leo’s direction. Like everyone else, he was busy. The whisk in his hand was going ninety miles an hour, the muscles in his glorious forearm straining with exertion. His workstation was littered with culinary debris—discarded blocks of bittersweet baking chocolate, upturned cartons of heavy cream, cold squares of butter. His pristine white chef coat had a drizzle of milk chocolate down the front. He was bent over his bowl with a look of fierce concentration on his beautiful face.

She forced herself to look away.

But then her footsteps slowed. Something was missing.

She glanced back at Leo. At his bowl, his whisk, his line of baking utensils—wooden spoon, pastry bag, measuring spoons, pastry brush, cutting wheel, knife spatulas in every size and variety imaginable. There were even a few items over there that were unfamiliar to Juliet. He was surrounded by all the trappings of a chef fully immersed in a taste test challenge, save for one very important item—a tasting spoon.

There wasn’t one within three feet of him.

It wasn’t just odd. It was patently unheard of. Surely she was mistaken. He had to have a pile of tiny spoons over there somewhere. She’d already used three or four in the course of the past half hour and had ten more ready and waiting in the wings.

She returned to her area with the caramel and went to work slicing it into paper-thin pieces to add to her ganache. And while it melted into her mixture, she sneaked furtive glances at the counter where Leo worked.

Her eyes hadn’t deceived her. He wasn’t in possession of a single tasting spoon. Not only that, he was already sealing his bowl with a layer of plastic wrap and heading toward the freezer.

He was letting his ganache chill without even tasting it?

Impossible.

She thought back to all the other times she’d seen Leo in action, starting with the time he’d lured her inside the lion’s den. She’d sat atop the kitchen counter of Mezzanotte Chocolates, feeling more wicked than she’d ever felt in her life just by virtue of being there, and watched him create. She’d memorized every moment. Every turn of his wrist, every lick of his finger. He’d sampled the
chocolat chaud.
Plenty of times. He’d done the same at her apartment the night he’d shown up with that big bag of groceries. He’d tasted every one of the batches she’d made throughout the day. Numerous times. And he’d sampled cup after cup of the concoctions they’d made together.

So if he normally tasted as he baked, why wasn’t he doing so now, when so much was at stake?

He’d eaten twice as many truffles as she had at the Napa Valley Chocolate Fair. Of course, that day had ended in disaster. He’d been carried away in an ambulance. And even though their tryst had been laid bare and they’d been outed to both their families, the thing she remembered most about that day was how awful Leo had looked. Pale, weak. A shadow of his normal self. Much like Cocoa had seemed when she’d consumed so much chocolate that she’d been poisoned.

Juliet’s hand stilled. She dropped her whisk, and it sank into her ganache. Or maybe it didn’t. She was barely cognizant of what was happening around her. The busy kitchen became a blur before her eyes, and the pounding of her heartbeat came so fast, so hard that she was forced to grip the edge of the counter to steady herself.

Leo had been poisoned. Just like Cocoa.

He must be allergic or something. It was the only explanation for why he wasn’t eating chocolate. Since the Napa Valley event, she hadn’t seen him eat a single bite.

All of a sudden, everything made perfect sense. No wonder he’d chosen to carve a sculpture for the artistic round of competition yesterday. It was gorgeous. And difficult. But most importantly, it required zero tasting on his part. No recipe to test, no delicate balance of flavors to worry about.

And now he was competing in the taste test without actually tasting anything. He didn’t have a chance.

But he could have. If he’d agreed to the deal.

Juliet gripped the edge of the counter so hard that her knuckles turned white. She’d interpreted his refusal as rejection when, in fact, it was anything but. He hadn’t been reluctant to share his victory with her. On the contrary, he was protecting her. He knew he wouldn’t win today.

How could she have been so wrong? She’d thought his refusal meant that she’d misunderstood what he’d written in her grandmother’s recipe book. Those words that had taken her by storm when she’d first read them could only mean one thing.

On this date, a Mezzanotte fell for an Arabella and tried to make things right.

Joy welled up in her soul. How many ways were there to interpret such words? Only one.

Leo Mezzanotte loved her.

And she loved him right back.

24

Leo clicked the door shut to the walk-in freezer only to turn and find Juliet standing behind him.

She gave him a most unexpected saucy smile and reopened the door. “You forgot something.”

A blast of frigid air enveloped him as she marched past him. She went straight for his bowl of ganache, plucked it off the shelf and tucked it under her arm. Then she headed for the door with it, as if it was hers to abscond with.

He stepped inside the freezer to block her exit. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Helping you.” She shrugged. The nonchalance of her gesture was betrayed by the fierce glittering in her eyes. She looked as if she either wanted to murder him or kiss him silly.

She was so damn beautiful, Leo was game for either.

“Helping me?” he repeated.

She lifted her chin. “Yes. You need caramel.”

Caramel. He’d had no idea.

He also had no idea why she wanted to help him all of a sudden. He couldn’t help but be intrigued. “And how do you know there’s no caramel in that bowl?”

She cleared her throat and shifted the bowl from one arm to the other. “There’s not. I know there’s not.”

He crossed his arms and did his best to stop the satisfied grin that threatened to spring to his lips. “You’re so sure of yourself. How interesting. One might even think you’d been watching me.”

Her cheeks glowed bright pink. Sure, the change in her complexion could have been a result of the frosty temperature of the freezer, but Leo preferred to think otherwise.

“There’s no need to make me sound like a stalker.” She rolled her eyes.

He shrugged. He enjoyed teasing her. It brought a modicum of pleasure to this otherwise dreadful experience. “If the shoe fits.”

“Says the man who climbed a trellis to get to my room two nights ago.” She gave back as good as she got. He had to give her that.

He aimed a smoldering grin at her. “I must remember it wrong. As I recall, we didn’t quite make it to your room.”

The air in the freezer heated up a notch.

She cleared her throat. “We’re wasting time in here.”

“Time with you is never wasted.” He wanted to kiss her. Right there in the freezer. But he still hadn’t figured out what she was up to. “Why are you suddenly so anxious to help me? I turned down your offer, remember?”

“Oh, I remember. What I can’t figure out is why you just didn’t tell me that you’re allergic to chocolate.”

Leo stiffened. He still wasn’t accustomed to thinking of himself as allergic to chocolate. Hearing it stated so matter-of-factly caught him off guard. He hadn’t told a soul about his diagnosis, and no one else had noticed anything amiss. Not his uncle, not his sister, not his brother-in-law. His family. People he saw day in and day out.

But somehow Juliet had.

He swallowed. “How did you figure it out?”

She glanced at the bowl in her arms, filled with chocolate he hadn’t tasted. “You reminded me of my chocolate-guzzling dog. The pieces just sort of fell into place after that.”

He narrowed his gaze at her. “I’m going to choose to not take being compared to a dog as a blow to my ego. Is this some kind of trick? Is there actually caramel in that truffle, or is this an attempt at sabotage?”

“Sabotage? Please. I think you know me better than that. Don’t you?” Her gaze softened. And the pendulum swung from the murderous end of the spectrum all the way to the side in favor of kissing him silly.

Leo had never been one to deny a woman who so clearly wanted to be kissed.

He kicked the freezer door closed, grabbed the bowl from her hands and tossed it on the closest shelf, then wrapped his arms around her waist. A gasp of surprise escaped her lips as he pulled her flush against him, but soon he was swallowing that gasp as his mouth found hers. His lips were hungry, wanting, demanding. The immediacy of his need took him by surprise. They were in the freezer, for God’s sake. But he didn’t really care. Not right now. Not when the gulf between them had mysteriously closed and she’d ended up in his arms. Right where she belonged.

Her lips were cold, icy from the freezer, but her tongue was hot. Molten. The combination of fire and ice was almost too much to take. He turned her slightly and pushed her backward until she was against the freezer door. A shiver of desire coursed through him at the familiarity of the posture. Memories of the hotel balcony, never far away, rose to the surface.

He removed his lips from hers before they ended up making a far greater mistake than forgetting the caramel. With his forehead resting against hers, he struggled for air. Their frigid breath danced together in a cloud of vapor and hovered between them.

“Juliet,” he breathed, brushing his fingertips against her face.

“Leo.” She smiled up at him. “You could have told me.”

He’d wanted to, but he’d been trying to avoid this exact scenario. “No one knows.”

“No one? Not even your family?”

“Especially not my family.” He cupped her face in his hands. “You don’t have to do this. I’ve got nothing to bring to the table. Why should you help me?”

Her lips curved into a bashful smile. “Because in spite of your last name, I’m madly in love with you.”

He hadn’t realized that he’d been waiting and hoping to hear those exact words until they fell off her tongue. And he most certainly hadn’t realized he had his own words, ready and waiting to spill forth. “Mad enough to marry me and make that last name yours?”

It was a preposterous idea.

Or was it?

He tipped her chin upward a fraction, pressed the gentlest of kisses to her petal-soft mouth and whispered, “My love for you is bigger than the moon and stars combined. We can make this work. I swear.”

Juliet’s lips parted, but before she could speak, Leo pressed the pad of his index finger against her mouth. He wasn’t about to give her the chance to say no. Not until she’d had a while to grow accustomed to the idea. He knew he’d caught her off guard. Hell, he’d caught himself unawares. But everything within him hinged on her answer. He no longer cared about the competition or what happened to Mezzanotte Chocolates. Everything he wanted was standing right in front of him. “Don’t answer yet. Think about it. Keep your name if you like. I don’t care what you call yourself, so long as you’re mine.”

She grinned against his fingertip and nodded.

Satisfied, for now, he removed his finger from her lips. “Shall we go make some chocolate, my love?”

Her smile was brighter than a golden Italian morning. “Yes.”

It wasn’t quite the yes he was after. Not yet. But it would do.

For now.

* * *

Chaos had come to rule the kitchen while they’d been tucked away inside the freezer. Or maybe it had been that way all along, and the change had been inside Juliet rather than the room. It was a definite possibility.

All around her, chefs were stirring, chopping and swearing. One of them—the biggest, burliest guy in the kitchen—was even crying. He was just sitting on a bar stool weeping quietly into his ganache. Juliet was barely cognizant of any of it. She floated through the rest of the afternoon. Her hands scooped ganache into balls, rolled those balls into perfect truffles, dusted those truffles with cocoa and confectioner’s sugar. But for all she cared, they could have been someone else’s hands. It was as if she’d gone to Rome as one person and was ending her time there a completely different one.

Juliet Mezzanotte.

There was a time when the very idea of marrying a Mezzanotte would have made her head spin. Now it was all she could think about. She wanted Leo. All of him. Last name included.

And suddenly, the contest was the least important thing in the world. She just wanted it to end so they could get on with more important things. When at last she and Leo stood with the other three contestants, back in front of the crowd in the courtyard, they did so hand in hand.

The contest proctor stood before them and praised the efforts of all the chefs. He thanked them for coming from all over the world to participate. At least Juliet thought that’s what he said. Her thoughts were elsewhere, dancing between worlds, through time.

Juliet Mezzanotte.

Leo squeezed her hand. “Ready?”

And she realized her answer was yes. Yes, she was ready.

The contest proctor cleared his throat one last time. “The winner of this year’s
Roma Festa del Cioccolato
is Leonardo Mezzanotte of Mezzanotte Chocolates.”

Juliet felt Leo’s hand clench around hers. She turned to look at him and couldn’t help but notice he didn’t appear at all happy to have been named the winner. She, on the other hand, was thrilled for him. He’d said himself he would never compete again. Even if he’d wanted to, he probably couldn’t. Not with a chocolate allergy. This was exactly the way his final competition should end—victoriously.

With tears brimming in her eyes, she clapped for him as he stepped forward to receive his prize. Then he was surrounded by a crowd of well-wishers, most notably the Mezzanottes, and she lost sight of him.

Her mother was at her side in an instant, with her father, Nico and Alegra following closely on her heels.

Her mom wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and, for a moment, Juliet felt wrapped in the sweetness of a maternal embrace.

Then her mother started talking. “Juliet, dear. Now don’t feel badly about the outcome. Leo shouldn’t have even been in this competition. I’m going to file a formal complaint. With any luck, we can get this decision overturned.”

Nico chimed in, staring daggers in Leo’s direction. “That’s right. He had no right to be here. You were the winner of the Napa Valley Chocolate Fair. He didn’t even qualify.”

Why did her brother even care? She doubted if he did, really. If it had been someone with a different name,
any
name, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

“Stop,” Juliet said quietly. “Please.”

Her dad moved in for a hug. “You’ll get him next time, sweetheart.”

“There won’t be a next time.”

At the sound of Leo’s voice, her father released her.

“Leo,” he said. “We’re having a family moment here. I think it’s best if you leave Juliet alone.”

“Dad, stop,” she said. But no one seemed to have heard her. As usual. They just kept aiming insults at Leo. And he was just standing there with a grim smile on his face, taking it all in. For her.

The other Mezzanottes joined the fray, and soon the lovely clay-colored kitchen was filled with a cacophony of angry voices. Leo’s uncle Joe talked over her father. Juliet’s mother and Gina Mezzanotte each stabbed angry index fingers at the air. One voice overlapped with another and another until she could no longer tell the ones that belonged to Mezzanottes from the ones that came from angry Arabella mouths.

She couldn’t take it anymore. She just couldn’t. How could they fail to see how absurd they were acting? They were an ocean away from Napa Valley, generations apart from whatever strife had started this whole mess, and they still couldn’t be in the same room without trying to tear each other apart limb from limb. Centuries of monks were probably rolling in their graves right now over the ridiculous behavior on display at their former place of worship.

“Everyone, would you just
please stop?
” she screamed, her voice echoing off the stuccoed walls.

A momentary hush fell over the crowd. Juliet found the sudden silence almost as jarring as all the yelling. She blinked, looked around and noticed that the judges, the other competitors and the rest of the spectators were beating a hasty path out of the kitchen, toward the garden and the gentle shade of the umbrella pines.

She couldn’t help but envy them.

“Juliet, really. There’s no need to raise your voice,” her mother said, somehow maintaining a straight face.

Could she genuinely not see the irony of that statement?

“Mrs. Arabella.” The deadly warning tone in Leo’s voice made Juliet want to grab him and kiss him on the lips right there in front of everyone.

But as tempting as that might be, she wanted her family to listen to her for once. Isn’t that what this trip to Rome was all about? Finally standing up for herself and what she wanted?

“Leo, I can handle this,” she said.

He nodded, but the angry knot in his jaw was working overtime.

“Leo just won the
Roma Festa del Cioccolato,
everyone. I think the decent thing to do would be to congratulate him.” She crossed her arms and aimed a glare at each of her family members, one by one.

She started with her mother, who just sighed and dropped her gaze to the floor. Her father glanced nervously back and forth between the two of them but remained mum. Nico rolled his eyes so hard that Juliet was surprised they didn’t fall right out of his head.

But finally, when her eyes met Alegra’s, something wholly unexpected and wonderful happened.

“Congratulations, Sparkle.” Her cousin’s voice was flat, but she winked at Leo. And the beginnings of what looked like a smile hovered on her lips.

Two words. Two simple words, spoken with nary a drop of emotion. And still, it was the most polite thing an Arabella had said to a Mezzanotte in over fifty years. With the exception of Leo and Juliet, of course.

Leo smiled. “Thank you, Alegra. But the victory isn’t mine to claim, no matter what the judges said. It belongs to Juliet.”

“Leo.” Joe Mezzanotte’s voice shook. That tiny hint of vulnerability made him seem less like an ogre to Juliet and more like a lonely old man. “Don’t do what I think you’re about to do.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Joe. I know this means the store will close, but I can’t keep this money. It belongs to Juliet. She told me what to put in the truffles. I couldn’t even taste them. I’m allergic to chocolate.”

Like a well-rehearsed chorus, everyone gasped in unison. Juliet’s mother crossed herself, as though her ears had just been assaulted by unfathomable evil.

“Allergic to chocolate? Nonsense.” Joe Mezzanotte’s face was whiter than Juliet’s grandmother’s white chocolate frosting.

“It’s not nonsense, Uncle Joe. It’s true. And it’s why this belongs to Juliet.” Leo handed her an envelope. Not just any envelope, but the one the judge had handed him when he’d been declared the winner of the contest.