Criminal Confections

by Colette London

  I couldn’t let such an unprofessional idea stand.

  “Bernard told me,” Eden informed me. “I assumed he’d know?”

  Whew. This was manageable. “Bernard is no longer in charge of Lemaître,” I said, thankful for that obfuscating truth. “You really can’t trust what he says about the business these days.”

  “Not even,” Eden persisted, “when he says Lemaître Chocolates was supposed to have merged with Melt?”

  That was a scenario I hadn’t anticipated. Rather than bringing Rex to Lemaître, maybe Bernard had been planning to bring Lemaître to Melt? Maybe Bernard had been selling company secrets to Rex, not Adrienne. I wanted to believe it was true.

  Except for the part where it vilified an adored chocolate patriarch, of course. I didn’t like that part at all.

  “You know the chocolate industry,” I told Eden with a wave. “Rumors are rampant. You can’t trust hearsay. Good luck with your story.” You’re going to need it. “Try the ice cream!”

  Then I headed toward the hotel, ready to call Travis.

  My day needed a dose of husky sexiness . . . and so did I.

  By the time I’d called Travis to ask him to check on Nina’s (potentially abusive) husband, gone online to look at news reports about Rex’s death, texted Danny to arrange a meet-up later, and arrived downstairs at Christian’s office, my outrage was a shadow of its former self. You could even say it had mostly disappeared altogether. Because as many ways as Danny and I were alike, we could be mind-bogglingly different in others, too.

  Unlike him, I, for example, do not hold a grudge or get revenge. I don’t even know how to do that. Most of the time, I’m moving on before any one person could get on my nerves.

  I’m a live-and-let-live type . . . unless someone is trying to bake me like a potato in a chocolate-fondue body wrap, I reminded myself. Then I had no problem taking the necessary actions to deal with things.

  Maybe I was formidable. And intimidating. I certainly felt that way as I burst into Christian Lemaître’s office and asked to see him immediately. Unfortunately, Christian’s bombshell of an admin didn’t pick up on my don’t mess with me mojo.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked, blond and bored.

  “He’ll see me,” I told her. “Hayden Mundy Moore.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Lemaître is not in right now.” Obviously unconvinced of my importance, she glanced up from her apathetic perusal of my shorts-plus-sweatshirt ensemble. “Sorry.”

  I listened. “I can hear sounds coming from his office.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine. He’s in, but he’s having his afternoon workout. He’s not to be disturbed. For anything.”

  This was taking way too long. “I’m disturbing him.”

  Where the admin’s ennui didn’t help my ego, it did help my plan of action. I strode across the office and stepped inside.

  Christian’s inner sanctum was dimly lit. It smelled (not surprisingly) almost overwhelmingly of chocolate. The noise I’d heard was a deluxe treadmill, raising a commotion in one corner.

  “You can’t be in there!” the admin yelled, much too late.

  I locked the door to prove that I could, then looked around. I identified Christian right away—mostly by the trail of candy bar wrappers that littered the floor. I followed them . . .

  . . . all the way to Christian’s desk, where the man himself sat in the spacious semidarkness, hands and face smeared unevenly with chocolate. In the background, the treadmill thumped away.

  Another glance confirmed the setup he’d rigged. A hexagonal dumbbell had been tied to the treadmill’s rigging with a length of stretchy exercise tubing. It was currently thumping along to simulate (I assumed) Christian’s footsteps as he “worked out.”

  I nodded at it. “That’s going to void your warranty.”

  He dropped his chocolate and gawked at me. “Get out!”

  “Nope.” I moved to his desk. “That’s not Lemaître chocolate.” Evidently, Christian had a hankering for cheap drugstore chocolate—the kind kids bought at the corner bodega.

  “It’s been a difficult day.” With a defiant expression, he stared at me. “The police, the questions, another person dying—” Christian broke off, his voice warbling. “I’m scared for my life! Aren’t you? For God’s sake, this place is a death trap!”

  Completely unexpectedly, I felt sorry for him.

  Christian Lemaître, one of the premier bullies of my industry, was petrified. With good reason, I had to admit. He’d holed up in here—probably after finishing talking with the police—to binge on comfort food.

  Yes, I know. You’re thinking I’m too soft, right?

  Well, that’s too bad. I didn’t get to be famous for my insight with chocolate without having some of those intuitive skills transfer to the real world of people. That’s how I am.

  “As soon as word gets out, I’m ruined!” Christian went on. “The press will crucify me. The public will turn their backs on me. I’ll be a laughingstock in the chocolate industry.”

  All right. Forget what I said earlier. Christian didn’t deserve that much sympathy. He was still 100 percent me, me, ME.

  “I can do something about that,” I told him, helping myself to a seat in one of his luxurious leather-bound executive chairs. (Mm, cushy.) “But you have to do something for me, too.”

  “Nobody can do anything!” Christian wailed before I could exact my part of the bargain—a check-and-repair mission of the spa’s malfunctioning wrap equipment. “My retreat is supposed to be my triumphal moment! Now it’s ruined.” He pouted. “First Adrienne offed herself, making me look like a bad boss in the process—and then she took my new product launch with her!”

  The Lemaître nutraceutical chocolates line, I surmised. I’d told Travis to keep the truffles. My report would (eventually) make clear my objections to them . . . and offer some alternatives.

  “Then my uncle gave everyone an earful when he went all nuclear winter on my banquet last night,” Christian went on, continuing his insensitive diatribe, “and now Rex is dead!”

  “Yeah. You must be really broken up about that.”

  “I am! Everything is falling apart!” Looking distraught, Christian wiped his chocolaty fingers on his shirt.

  That absentminded gesture of his niggled at me. Christian had also smeared chocolate on his shirt on the night that Adrienne had died, I remembered. Danny and I had both noticed that detail. But why had Christian been stressed on the night of the welcome reception? He’d been the boy wonder of the show.

  “Not everything is falling apart,” I told him. “As soon as my report is finished, you’ll see that you have options to—”

  He held up his chocolate-smudged hand. “Don’t even worry about your report. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  I was offended. “My report is not inconsequential.”

  I might have postponed writing it, but that was . . . temporary.

  “That’s not what I mean.” Christian gave an impatient wave. “I’ve been trying to catch up with you for days.” Suddenly, he seemed much more astute. Maybe the sugar buzz was wearing off?

  “I heard,” I said dryly. “Dunning me won’t work.”

  I don’t respond well to pressure. Funnily enough, it makes me . . . procrastinate. Badgering me about delays is a zero-sum game.

  Christian shook his head. “I want to offer you a job.”

  I couldn’t help perking up at that. At the same time . . .

  Did I really want to do more work for this soap opera of a chocolate company? Lemaître had not been the idyll I’d expected.

  “I don’t know, Christian,” I demurred, wanting to be professional. “You remember that stipulation in our agreement that limits my consultation to three months? That’s because—”

  My uncle Ross’s will demands that I keep moving, I was going to say, or go broke. But I never had a chance.

  “I need you, Hayden,” Christian begged. “Please do it!”


  I’ll admit it. Blatant pleading gets to me every time. I’m a sucker for anyone who really, really wants my expertise.

  “Well, I might be able to wrangle a consultation for your troubled toiletries line,” I compromised. “It’s a new area for me—being nonedible, that is—but I know I can do better than—”

  Tang-flavored Tootsie Roll soap, I meant to say, but . . .

  “What? There’s nothing wrong with our house toiletries! They’re fantastic!” Christian frowned. “I mean,” he said with the elaborate (and insulting) patience of someone conversing with a child, “that I want to offer you a job. A real job.” He paused. “I want you to take over Adrienne’s job. Immediately.”

  It took at least thirty seconds for that offer to sink in. Once it did, I reeled. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Christian might be proposing a full-time post. “I’m flattered, but”—at the moment, “San Francisco chocolatier” looks like a literal dead-end job—“I’m not looking for anything permanent.”

  “Don’t tell me your answer right now,” Christian urged.

  “I just did. My answer’s no.”

  But even as I said it, my mind started drifting toward my potential alternative future as Lemaître Chocolates’ head chocolatier. I could move into one of those cute Victorian houses in the Lower Haight, plant petunias in my Painted Lady’s window boxes, take the Muni to work (on a cable car, natch), get myself a little cocker spaniel or a French bulldog for company. . . .

  I was halfway to signing imaginary mortgage papers before I came to my senses, prompted by Christian’s agitated expression.

  “Take some time to think about it,” he insisted. “Really.”

  I didn’t plan to do any such thing. But while I was there . . .

  “I’ll confess, I thought Rex was a shoo-in for the job,” I remarked, blatantly fishing for more information from him. “With Adrienne gone, I figured Lemaître would need another expert—”

  “Rex?” Christian gave a moue of disgust, then ripped into another candy bar. Perfunctorily, he offered me half. I shook my head, rescuing my taste buds from an assault of cheap tropical oils, dubious chocolate, and stale peanuts. “Rex was my uncle’s protégé, not mine. The last thing I wanted was for Rex’s arty-farty ‘cacao essences’ and ‘artisanal aroma pods’ to infect Lemaître. You’d think the guy invented chocolate-based molecular gastronomy, the way the city press wet themselves over him.”

  Maybe that had been true a year or two ago. I’d seen the media clippings myself in Rex’s portfolio. But I couldn’t help thinking about Eden’s (almost guaranteed) unflattering profile.

  However brightly Rex’s star had shined, it had dimmed by the time I’d met him. Melt had definitely been on the skids.

  “But there’s a reason I ousted Bernard,” Christian went on after swallowing a huge bite of cheap candy, “and there’s a reason those rumors about Lemaître and Melt merging are bogus.”

  Then they weren’t true? That was interesting. Eden had seemed pretty sure she was onto something with that approach.

  Maybe I wasn’t the only one with a penchant for angling.

  “I guess if those rumors had been true,” I observed, “they would be history, now that Rex is out of the picture.”

  “Yep. Can’t merge with a dead man,” Christian pointed out prosaically. He took another bite, mindlessly chomping.

  He didn’t exactly seem racked with grief about Rex. Which only made me wonder . . . how dead set against the idea of a merger between Lemaître and Melt had Christian been? Enough to have taken desperate measures to make sure it would never happen?

  Maybe Christian was stressed because he’d followed his uncle’s hated protégé to the ridge and pushed him to his death. Even homicidal maniacs probably got ulcers and acid reflux.

  I wished I didn’t have to consider it. But given the several murderous looks I’d seen on Christian’s face during our acquaintance, he absolutely seemed capable of impulsive violence. Plus, he’d just confirmed Bernard’s status as Rex’s mentor. Until now, only Isabel had mentioned that—and she (along with being currently on the lam) was notoriously unreliable.

  Things were gradually starting to come together, though. Bit by bit, I was compiling a more complete picture of the Lemaître empire . . . and all its scheming, double-crossing denizens.

  “It must have been hard for you, having your uncle mentor Rex instead of you,” I said. It was odd that Bernard—the king of traditional chocolates—would have taken a shine to someone with avant-garde tastes like Rex. “How did you cope with that?”

  Eden would have been proud of my leading question. All I lacked was a recording device and a bloodthirsty demeanor.

  “By being better.” Christian wadded up a candy bar wrapper, unbothered by the persistent racket coming from his treadmill. “And by keeping an eye on Rex, just like I do everyone else.”

  I nodded. “Keep your friends close, and your enemies—”

  “Right under your nose. Exactly.” Christian eyed the wreckage of his chocolate binge, then shook his head. “Nobody else has the balls to invite their competitors to a retreat. Just me. It happens here, on my turf, where I control it.”

  I pointed out the obvious. “You can’t control everything.”

  “I can come damn close to it.” For a heartbeat, Christian’s expression filled with malice. Then, resignation. “At least I used to be able to. These days . . .” He sighed. “The excitement is all in the chase. You know what I mean? When I was taking over Lemaître, I loved coming to work. People used to run scared from me. They did everything I asked, right down to abandoning their offices and moving into dinky little cubicles. It was so—”

  “Tyrannical?” No wonder Nina was frazzled. Under Christian’s regime, Gandhi would have developed a few tics.

  “—gratifying.” He shook his head, looking me over with new and appreciative eyes. “You’re sassy. I like that about you.”

  He thought I was kidding. I hadn’t been. Christian wasn’t doing much to sell me on his nonmurderous side. Any man who relished putting people out of work and inspiring fear might be a man who was capable of murder, too. Especially of his rival.

  But of Adrienne? Yes, I decided, remembering the way he’d bullied her—the way he’d accused her of sabotaging him. The Christian I now sat across from would have unquestionably taken personally her selling secrets. He might have wanted revenge.

  Struck by the thought, I shivered. Hey, at least I wasn’t choco-roasted anymore. Maybe I wasn’t quite so pink, either.

  There was a bright side to everything—even confronting another human being’s fundamentally avaricious nature. Right?

  “I was wrong about you, Hayden.” Christian beamed at me. I felt as if I’d passed a creepy secret admission exam. “It wasn’t until you had the sense to withhold Adrienne’s notebook and use it for leverage that I realized we were on the same page.”

  Ugh. Viscerally, I wanted to turn the page. Christian and I weren’t at all the same. I hadn’t “withheld” Adrienne’s notebook as a bargaining chip. I’d done it—was still doing it, with the help of Danny’s street smarts—out of loyalty to my departed friend. I couldn’t see that changing anytime soon, either.

  “I’ll expect to have you and that notebook when you accept my offer, of course,” Christian went on blithely. “But the way you schooled me at ‘Name That Chocolate!’ was the cherry on top. That’s when you really sold me. Anybody else would have had the sense to let me win. You saw how everyone else buckled, right?”

  They’d “buckled,” I knew, because they’d been beaten—not because they’d thrown the charity contest on purpose. But since Christian was willing to gab, I was willing to listen. For now.

  “But you didn’t.” He smiled at me again. “I can’t say I wasn’t pissed you won. I was. I was going to fire your ass.”

  I gulped, belatedly realizing I’d almost “expertised” my way out of a lucrative consulting job. If my pride had cost me another gig (don�
��t ask), Danny would have been appalled.

  “Firing me would have been a mistake,” I told Christian evenly, “given everything I know about your company.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”

  I almost laughed. I’m about as menacing as a sleepy kitten. But I guess people tend to see themselves everywhere, don’t they? “I don’t know,” I said coolly, revising my opinion of Christian’s intelligence downward. “What do you think?”

  “I think maybe I underestimated you twice.” Christian leaned back, steepling his hands over his taut abdomen. How did he stay so buff while munching cut-rate candy? “I think maybe you were a little pissed yourself. You couldn’t troubleshoot my nutraceutical chocolate line, so you erased the evidence of it.”

  His smug expression baffled me. “Your nutraceutical line was doomed from the start,” I told him. “No one has ever devised a truly successful ‘healthy’ chocolate. We both know that.”

  There’d been numerous attempts to commercialize the cacao bean’s inherent heart-healthy properties. But no matter how tasty those “good-for-you” chocolates may (or may not) have been, the fact remained: Nobody wanted their indulgences to be endorsed by a buzzkill board of white-coated doctors. Chocolate was supposed to feel decadent, luscious, and oh-so-bad for you.

  “But I bet you thought you could do it, didn’t you?” Christian pressed. “Hayden Mundy Moore: the famous ‘chocolate whisperer.’ If anybody could achieve the impossible, it was you, right?” He paused. “Except in the end, you couldn’t do it.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was driving at. I’d thought I might be able to work miracles, given recent advances in culinary-based nanotechnology. I hadn’t, but I’d learned a few things in the attempt. In my book, that was progress. “My report is full of critical information that you didn’t have when you began, as well as solid procedures for moving Lemaître forward, so—”

  “Lemaître Chocolates was your only failed consultation, wasn’t it?” Christian interrupted. “Adrienne just . . . stymied you.”