Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(73)

Vi shook her head. “I’m imagining them all clustered together to one side of the table, more willing to sit in each other’s laps than not be able to see the rest of the room.”

Probably. The waiters started to put up the first slips. Vi turned away, grabbing them, calling out. “Don’t overdo it,” Lina told her futilely, and focused on work.

It was about sixty minutes before she could send the first dragon out, and she’d calculated exactly right. Jake’s table was the first one to finish the main course and order desserts. Americans. Seriously.

So he was the first to see it. The very first.

The dragon formed with such difficulty from red-gold blown sugar. The custard cream in its belly. The sparkle of gold dust over it, like freckles. The rosemary-scented smoke she pumped down into its throat just before the waiter carried it out—split second timing was crucial—so that it arrived at the table with plumes of smoke leaking out of its mouth.

Five dragons, one for each man at the table. But Jake’s was the only one with freckles.

She smiled, watching the dragons go out, her hands resting for one tiny second on her hips. In about two minutes, all the other tables were going to see what Jake’s table had received as their dessert, and her orders for more were going to explode past any ability to stop or do much but breathe and work for the next two hours.

And sure enough, they did, and she and her staff were deep into the rhythm when it penetrated Lina’s attention that one of the waiters was standing awkwardly in front of the pass, his expression akin to a man being sent out as a sacrificial lamb.

“What?” she said impatiently. There was no time at this hour of the night for anything but lightning-fast communication.

Thomas, the waiter, cleared his throat. His head bent. “He sent it back,” he whispered.

“What?” Lina rubbed an ear with the back of her wrist, to keep her hands clean. She couldn’t have heard right.

“One of the clients sent his dessert back.”

Every single member of her brigade stopped dead. Lina’s middle congealed in one sick lump. “What?”

“I’m sorry.” Thomas set the black plate on the pass and shoved it across.

Lina stared at it. The dragon was intact, but its smoke had all escaped. The guest hadn’t even tried it. Her dragon. The dragon that was the freaking symbol of this whole evening, of Paris, of Jake, of her. And what was this—wait—

“What’s that?” She touched the chocolate egg tucked up against the dragon’s belly, her face scrunching. It was one of those shells of milk chocolate that little kids loved for the toys inside. It looked as if it had been broken and put back together again, too.

“Is he saying he’d rather eat cheap candy?” Lina asked incredulously. Thomas looked as if he was about to dig a hole straight through the kitchen floor and pull the concrete back over his head to hide from her. The egg cracked back open under the pressure of her finger.

A strip of white paper inside, and—

A ring.

A ring?

Not…not a cheap trinket you might find in candy either. Red gold. It looked like real gold. Delicately etched, so that as she looked at it, she realized that its form was the body of a serpentine creature—no. A dragon. No, it had two heads, one from each side, forming the setting of a ruby ringed with smaller orange-gold stones—topaz?

A double-headed dragon, breathing one strong fire.

Her heart caught. She turned the slip of paper over.

Be my dragon?

She looked up, tears sparking instantly.

Jake stood just inside the door to the restaurant floor, watching her, his face intense, alert. He always did like to see what was coming to him from a long way off.

And he never had quite understood that when he didn’t eat one of her desserts she wanted to smack him.

“Jake.” Somehow she made it around the frozen members of her brigade, who were starting to break out into delighted grins.

Vi, ever alert to what happened in her kitchen, was turning at the unexpected shift in rhythms, a hand lifting the nearest pan, ready to throw. She paused and lowered it. Mikhail, shaving tuna, set down the very same knife he had once had to throw at a terrorist and came closer to look.

Lina reached Jake. His hazel eyes fixed on her every step of the way.

“Egg for rebirth,” he said. “Did you get that part? A dragon’s rebirth.”

She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face into his neck, because she was crying, and that was embarrassing even in these circumstances.

All around them, the kitchen brigades and the wait staff were starting to cheer and clap. The door beside Jake opened, and his buddies poked their heads in, grinning. They must have been peering in the little circular window all this time. Elias ducked past them and stepped entirely into the kitchen, apparently too refined for crowding in a door.

“What?” someone called anxiously from the restaurant. “What’s going on?”

“It’s a marriage proposal,” Chase told them cheerfully over his shoulder. “Shh.”

“Did she say yes?” someone else in the restaurant called.

“Or he?” a male voice called, a rumor of laughter and pleasure rising out there.

“Did she say yes?” Chase checked with Vi.

“Not sure.”

“Well, she didn’t try to kill him,” Chase said. “Which I just point out to you in case you want to learn from her example.”