The Queen of Sweets (4)

At first creating the Queen of Sweets was intended to be a joyful adventure and Victor only wanted to be the black hand behind the curtain and push Ashara Dayne to become an influential figure in the Known World.

He only had sweet fantasies regarding this great idea, but reality turned out to be completely different. Mentioning chocolate and how great it would taste in front of his sisters, without having a real chocolate bar to satisfy their greedy tongues turned out to be the greatest mistake Victor made in the last ten years, by far.

For the next few days, he only had a peaceful minute during his training routine in the morning. And after knowing how crazy his training against slave gladiators really was, one can imagine how insane his two little sisters behaved. They were either sleeping or crying for chocolate. He truly didn't understand what was going on, as his sisters always listened to him, but this time they were completely obsessed with the heavenly chocolate their brother described.

Maybe it was because Victor never really praised any food, because for his standards the food he could make was far from the food of famous chefs from his previous life. But this time even the hard to satisfy older brother truly described a food as incredibly tasty. 

Victor spent the next few days going through all the necessary steps to create his own chocolate. He had to spent hours over hours to create a chocolate that was close to the taste he promised in his description before.

Even though he was a chemist in his past life and knew what processes would happen with the cocoa beans, he never really made any chocolate from scratch in his previous life. The whole process was torturous for him, and the constant nagging of his sisters didn't help. If not for his mother constantly reminding and pacifying him, he would have probably just fled Canahs and went to Dorne in order to visit House Martell. Maybe he would have rather spent a few days in a lonely dessert, compared to this heavy task of creating tasty food.

Finally, after two weeks and a few failed tries, that nearly led to his sisters destroying his courtyard in anger, he managed to create a chocolate that was incredibly tasty for the people of Lys. When his sisters, Ashara and even his elders finally tasted a chocolate he was satisfied with, everybody instantly understood why Victor was praising this food so much and why he thought controlling the production of cocoa beans and chocolate would be very important for House Di Natale.

As his family was primarily involved in military affairs his father instantly recognized the military value of chocolate as a high calory food that was incredibly tasty and easy to carry around. During the age of cold weapons having chocolate as military food and rations could truthfully increase the battle strength of one side by a few percentage points.

The only person in Canahs and Lys who didn't want to hear the word chocolate nor wanted to have any taste of chocolate in his mouth was the poor Victor Di Natale. He was sitting alone in his courtyard, staring at the sea, and drinking the finest wine he could find in order to drain his sorrows of the last few days.

When he nearly finished two whole bottles and the sky was slowly darkening, he laid down on a chair and stared right into the sky.

Suddenly two warm hands closed his view to the sky, but Victor wasn't really scared at any point. There were not many people in this world that could get close to him without any warning signs of his guardians and none of them posed any threat to him. If an enemy could get this close to him without alarming any of his guardians, there was no point in struggling anyways.

When feeling the soft touch of the little hands and smelling the unique fragrance in the air he could identify the mysterious person quite quickly, even though he was somewhat drunk already.

Ashara Dayne didn't know how she felt in the last few weeks. At first, she thought she was very happy with her life in the Di Natale family, but in the last few weeks she felt how great the feeling of finding real passion truly was. She would have never imagined that an ordinary looking cocoa bean could hide so many secrets and with an insane number of complicated steps something so luxurious like chocolate could be created.

After going through the whole process and thinking about all the different variations she could create, obviously inspired by Victor himself, she found himself completely in love with this feeling. A career as the "Queen of Sweets" somehow seemed no longer like something she needed to think about, rather she was full of desire to achieve this cool and make her creations famous across the Known World.

Everything she gained and learned about herself was only due to the tremendous efforts the man in front of her put into this project. She really didn't know how to express her emotions to express how grateful she truly was. Everything funneled themself in two simple words.

"Thank you."

Victor didn't really react too much at first and the large amount of alcohol slowly caused problems with his still young body. When he saw the beautiful girl being right in front of him, with the sun slowly setting behind her silhouette and the glistening purple eyes looking at him full of an unspeakable emotion he somehow lost his reason.

He pulled the girl into his arms and kissed her straight on her small mouth. The young woman was completely shocked by this action and started struggling hard after a few seconds. The now completely drunk Victor released his hug and just saw the girl running away from his courtyard, seemingly very embarrassed.

Before he could decide on any reactions the large amount of alcohol got ahead of him and he fell into a deep sleep right where he was.

It took a whole night and most of the next morning before the exhausted body of Victor woke up again and a large headache greeted him as soon as he sat up on his bed.