The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  Looking at herself in the mirror, she felt . . . unprotected, and she reached for a scarf, clenched her fist and drew her hand away, reached for it again, pressed her hand to her thigh . . .

  And the buzzer sounded.

  Dom didn’t worry about what to wear because it never occurred to him. Even at award dinners and on cooking shows, clean jeans and an untucked pressed shirt were the height to which he aspired in terms of fashion. He would have felt a complete fool showing up in a suit, but since he had always seen his unknown in simple clothes, it never crossed his mind.

  His main goal for the evening in terms of her fashion was to get her damn hood off her head.

  So when she came downstairs with her hair naked, he was knocked off his feet from the start. He was waiting for her, tense and eager, trying not to stand too intimidatingly close to the door, and when he saw that reddish-caramel hair feathered around her face, he nearly muscled her right back through it, backward straight up the steps, and into her apartment. After which, a wall would probably do fine. All he wanted was a closed door between him and her and the rest of the world.

  No, a bed, he told himself severely. Don’t even think about anything else.

  So his mind did focus, obediently, on beds, but that might not have been the most helpful direction for it to head right at the moment.

  “You look beautiful,” he said involuntarily, and then cringed because he sounded like he had at sixteen, back when he had still thought he could get someone to love him despite everything.

  Her eyes shot to his, skeptical even while she flushed a little. He caught his hand just short of her hair, realizing he had been about to stroke the fine feathery cut. It was too short for her face, really. Maybe that’s why she hid it. Maybe it was a recent cut she was less than satisfied with. Maybe he could convince her to grow it out a little more, until it curved under her jaw.

  He had to stop losing his mind. It took time to grow hair, and she had made it clear she was a visitor here.

  Would it be a good time to ask for her name again? But if she said no, he might have a hard time not getting pissed off, so instead he took her hand firmly in his and headed them down the sidewalk.

  Her lips parted, and she looked up at him with eyes big enough to drown in. No, skydive in, the cloudless twilight sky of them, float and float and float until you forgot to open your parachute and slammed into the ground.

  He hadn’t held a woman’s hand since—well, ever. It hadn’t worked out at sixteen. He liked it, that slim cool feel of her fingers entrapped in his. God, he hoped his hand didn’t seem like some monster enclosing hers.

  “Is there anywhere you would like to go?” he asked. Merde, maybe he should have put on a suit after all. His name could get them in anywhere, even without reservations, and it would have been a great chance to impress her. But he didn’t really want to be in some elegant, hushed place with everyone watching them tonight.

  “Not fancy,” she said. She had not made one single effort to free her hand from his. “Just some place small, and warm, and . . . fun.”

  “Fun?” His eyebrows went up. Did she want him to take her someplace wild? If he got in a fight and got arrested, it would ruin the false impression he was trying to cultivate.

  She had to lift both hands to illustrate what she meant, but he just let her carry his hand with her, not about to let go. She pushed the free hand toward the one he held, apparently trying to gesture closeness. “Warm,” she said again. And then she did something that undid him to the last faint whisper of his soul: she gave his hand a squeeze with fingertips that could just barely reach around his, apparently using him to indicate what she wanted to say. He meant warmth. He meant this word she couldn’t find.

  He turned and kissed her. Wrapped her up in his arms, scooted her back into a green doorway with his body between hers and the brush of passersby, and kissed that full mouth of hers.

  He met closed lips, because she hadn’t been prepared for him at all. But he slanted his mouth over hers, too hungry to give up, and anyway, he had forced a hell of a lot of doors to open in his life. No force here, no force, just your mouth . . . please . . .

  Her muscles loosened to him, her weight sinking onto his arms, her lips parting. Her fingers came up to close around his shoulders through the leather, and he wished it was already off his shoulders, trampled on the ground, who cared, just so he could feel her hands.

  Her mouth, letting him in. After all those days eating everything he made, did she like the taste now of him? Please take me, too.

  He couldn’t say please, he couldn’t, but . . . he said it with his mouth. Coaxing hers. Taking hers. God, she didn’t need much coaxing.

  It went through him like fireworks, the way she opened for him, and his arms tightened and lifted her higher on his body, and—

  “Excellente technique, jeune homme,” a middle-aged woman said acerbically, walking past, and he brought his head slowly up and gave her straight back an annoyed but grateful look. You could always count on a fellow Parisian to let you know when you were making a complete fool of yourself.

  “Pardon,” he whispered to the woman whose name he still didn’t know, turning his head back to rest his forehead just gently against hers. “Pardon. I couldn’t help—” He stopped himself just in time, because he despised men who said they couldn’t help things.

  All her weight lay still yielded to him, her face flushed, her lips parted, her eyes clinging, her body his to hold. Oh, God. He looked back toward her apartment building, only a few doors away.

  He had promised her dinner, hadn’t he? Not fast-food sex.

  And just because she looked as if he could lower his mouth back to hers and nibble her lips and turn her body entirely limp and take her straight upstairs didn’t mean he . . . he shouldn’t . . . he—

  “We had better keep walking.” He straightened so roughly she stumbled, and he cursed himself. He never could wash those six years of brute hacking out of him, could he? He closed his hand around hers again, more tentatively.

  She didn’t say anything at all, but she curled her fingers around the edge of his palm—all she could reach from the inside of his hold.

  She wasn’t wearing a jacket, he realized when he shrugged off his own at the bistro. He grinned with heady anticipation. It was going to get cooler by the time they left the restaurant, and he would be able to give her his leather jacket, wrapping her up in his warmth for all the walk back to her apartment.

  “Do you like it?” He smiled down at her, enjoying deeply the fact that he could now use tu with her, as they waited at the bottom of the steps for the waiter to arrange a space for two in the crowded little place, its room set just a few steps down from the street. He had brought her to one of his favorite bistros, on the edge between the Marais and the République area. The kind of place where you could get a good steak, fresh cut frites, and lather it with sauce Roquefort, all of which he was planning on talking her into ordering. Were the bones on her wrists just starting to soften a little, after ten days of his salon?

  Her smile warmed him all through. “C’est parfait,” she said shyly. She had grown very shy since that kiss.

  That shyness put him in power, and he felt corrupted by that power already, inclined to lure her into his clutches and keep her there forever. Surely it wasn’t a very smart thing for her to do, to let him have the power here.

  Any woman who let a man have power over her was a complete fool, but when he was the man in question . . .

  Well. She wasn’t here for very long, he reminded himself. He could surely manage to be a decent person for as long as she was in the city.

  “What are you doing in Paris?” he asked, holding her hands across the table because he didn’t want to lose the privilege in case she recovered some shred of sense, and sliding his fingers under the close knit of the cuff of her sleeves to stroke against the inside of her wrists. He wasn’t really trying to manipulate her, he just couldn’t stop himself. He loved the
feel of her skin, he loved that access, he loved the way her eyes grew dazed and dreamy.

  But his question made her pull her focus back in, her eyes clearing and growing distant. “I have family here.”

  It hit him like a slap that there was some lie there. Here he was, her melted marshmallow, and she could keep herself together enough to lie to him. He had thought he had the power? “But you’re not staying with them?”

  Like, whose apartment did he need to direct them back to, in order to have her all to himself?

  She shook her head. “I like to have my own space.”

  Great. That unshared, private space of hers was not very far from this restaurant at all.

  “What family do you have here?”

  “My—sister,” she said reluctantly, watching him, for what he didn’t know. “My father and grandfather, sometimes. My family has always liked Paris. My mother used to get us all to come here sometimes when we were little. It’s where she and my father had their honeymoon.”

  He smiled. He didn’t have many privileges of birth, but he did at least have that one: he was born in a city that made women’s hearts mushy and romantic just by whispering its name.

  Well, he hadn’t been born quite in it. Even with that privilege, he was on the outskirts, the muddy hem of the elegant gown. But he had claimed Paris fully now. “Is that why you speak French?”

  “Mmm. Partly. My mother died when I was ten, and my father didn’t want to come back here after that. But I guess my sister and I always had a—tie to Paris, because of her. We both studied French in school, and my sister just recently moved here. But most of my practice is from development work in French-speaking countries. That’s what I”—she seemed to hesitate a long time over her verb tenses—“I’ve been doing.”

  Bon Dieu. An infinitely better person than he was, then. “How long have you been doing that?”

  “Since college.”

  College. So she had about ten years more education than he did, too.

  “But I did summer internships even during college, so I guess you could say longer.”

  He massaged the back of his neck and didn’t say anything. It was as he suspected. He didn’t have much to offer her but great chocolate and great sex. Why she kept sitting in his salon acting as if she could absorb something more from him was a mystery.

  Well, no, it wasn’t a mystery. It was a testament to his own ability to construct illusions. She had never suggested she wanted anything else.

  The best he could do was delay her realizing her mistake as long as he could. Or was that how his father had gotten his mother? By hiding his real self just long enough? “Odd,” he said without meaning to. “I lost my mother when I was ten, too.”

  Her fingers squeezed over the hand that still held hers. He instantly dropped his hand from his neck to recoup her other hand. If there was squeezing going on, both his hands wanted some. “It’s tough,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry. Was it an accident or did she get sick?”

  He shouldn’t have brought this up. “A boyfriend,” he said dryly. Dryness was about the best tone he could manage about this event, and that had taken a lot of practice.

  Her eyes widened, shocked. “A boyfriend killed her?”

  He flinched. “No.” Well, God, now that she suggested it, he realized he couldn’t know. They said women repeated cycles, so she might very well have run off with someone who treated her the same way his father had. “She ran off with him. Would you like a red wine, do you think? This Médoc is supposed to be good.”

  Was his mother all right? He had bitterly hated her for so long, and now suddenly he felt a desperate urge to track her down and make sure she was hale and happy. Something she had never made sure of about him.

  His Still Nameless Date was staring at him with her lips parted, her eyes uncomprehending. See, and her parents had loved her, too. The knowledge squeezed his heart with anguish. He didn’t deserve her. He shouldn’t be sitting here, luring her into his clutches.

  “Whatever you want,” she said absently of the wine, blinking, trying without success to stop staring.

  He flicked a hand at Axel, the waiter, and ordered her a glass. She raised her eyebrows when she realized hers was the only one being poured. “I said whatever you want.”

  Here it came. “I don’t drink.”

  She blinked a couple of times, and then burst out laughing.

  Well, that hadn’t hurt as much as he’d thought. He raised one eyebrow, waiting, while her laugh twisted and tumbled in his middle, doing all kinds of unethical things to him.

  “You really don’t? But—you’re French!” she burbled. “Oh, I love it. You must love saying that to people.”

  He hadn’t, actually, ever loved saying it before. People looked at him as if he had grown two heads, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to explain the reason. But—he found himself smiling, his thumbs gently stroking the back of her hands.

  “Is chocolate your only vice?” she suggested cheerfully.

  “Well—not my only,” he had to admit.

  She looked down at their joined hands, and her mouth curved in a way that made that tsunami of warmth and arousal beat through him. She could have been looking right through the table, straight at his currently most pressing vice, which was surging at the imagined attention.

  Her lashes lifted suddenly, and from under them, she gave him a long look. His hands squeezed slowly tighter.

  “So, did your father raise you on his own or did he remarry?” she asked randomly. Probably grabbing at topics to make the sexual tension halfway bearable.

  “Mmm.” This was what he got for taking a woman out to dinner. Conversation, for God’s sake. He did much, much better just going straight to sex, before, during, and after which no woman ever looked at him with the slightest hint of pity. “He didn’t remarry. This is really good.” He pointed to the healthiest first course on the menu, trying to make up for all that sugar he was pouring into her body. “The chef sautés the chèvre very quickly over high heat, and then lays it over a bed of mâche, with balsamic caramelized figs—”

  He stopped, because her eyes had flicked from his finger on the menu back to his face, and they were narrowed, a little annoyed.

  What had he said? Damn it, the whole sex-and-that’s-it policy had been working so well for him. What had inspired him to change it?

  Her hands shifted in his as if she might be wanting to free them, and he couldn’t help it that his fingers tightened a little. It was instinct. He looked down at her hands caught in his as the twitch stilled and she changed her mind, then up to the freckles over her cheekbones, her wide mouth, her blue gaze back on their hands, the blush that had never entirely faded from her cheeks that evening. That warmth washed through him, beating his helpless body. Oh, that. That had inspired him to change his policy.

  “You want me to be quiet so you can concentrate on the menu?” he hazarded.

  She shook her head, gazing at their hands. “No. No, whatever you said sounds good.”

  It wasn’t until the first course arrived that he realized one of the worst aspects of this dinner idea, that he had to let go of her hands, too. He angled his legs under the small table so that they kept brushing against hers instead. And she looked up at him with those skydiving eyes of hers and that sunset blush and let him do it. And she ate all of her salad and only a third of the steak, but then she kept soaking up that Roquefort sauce with fries and nibbling one more from time to time while he ate his steak, until her whole rich concoction of pure cream and Roquefort was gone, so he felt he had accomplished something. Plus, he had the brilliant idea to talk about the best places to visit in Paris instead of family history, so his own enjoyment of the conversation improved radically. Her eyes sparkled as she talked about what she had seen, asked him about what he liked. He was a little embarrassed to realize she had visited more of the cultural monuments of his city than he had.

  He draped his jacket around her shoulders as they left th
e restaurant, entirely smug about his forethought in wearing one and her lack of forethought in not. They didn’t say a word as they walked through the streets. He knew he should keep up conversation, not let her start having second thoughts, but his heart was beating so hard, he didn’t dare open his mouth. He knew his words would come out choppy; she would hear his struggle to breathe.

  What was the matter with him? How could he be nervous about sex?

  At the door to her building, she turned and looked up at him, her hands burying in the pockets of his jacket, her eyes very wide.

  He leaned into her, bracing his arms on either side of her head.

  “Tell me your name.” He tried to keep his voice coaxing, but he was pretty sure he didn’t succeed. Damn it, he was not going to be her wild one-time nameless fuck, her little visit to a porn shop. His whole being rose up in rebellion against that role he had embraced for so long.

  Bordel de cul, she wasn’t going to tell him. She looked away, her face growing thoughtful and distant. Braced over her, his body surged with ways he could wring it out of her, and she shot a glance up at him, a wistful, hungry smile.

  “J’aime,” she said, with that choppy English J of hers, and his whole body jerked.

  And then went still, more still than in that last second before they got to the Rs when the Meilleur Ouvrier de France award was announced and even his peers finally agreed that, yes, he was one of the best of the best chocolatiers in the world. He forgot all about her name. “What do you love?” he whispered. His—chocolate? His body? Being with him?

  Her eyes widened, and she stared at him as if trapped, which she was: he had his arms braced on either side of her and his body looming over her, and there was no way he was going to let her go. Her face turned so crimson he could tell even in the silver-gold night lights of the city. “That’s my name.” Her voice came out a strangled whisper.

  He blinked a moment, while his insides scrambled and congealed and tried to be reasonable and didn’t know what to do. “Your name is Jaime?” He couldn’t say the hard J; his English training consisted of the swear words he had picked up from films and all the marketing vocabulary for his chocolates, practical things like oats and black heart of the ganache with its virile notes of olive oil. He silked it out, her name, and her head tilted back as if he had just petted her with it.