The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  Two pairs of blue eyes locked, an old battle of strong wills.

  “I’m on board for the Round Table, by the way,” Cade said. “As you should know. Just say the word, and I’ll start leveraging every other person in the chocolate industry I can into it. But that will be a lot more people if it’s in Paris.”

  A Round Table like the one she had in mind could take six months or more to set in motion. At it, she could develop long-term, three- and five-year projects. Work with Cade, their father, their grandfather, to muscle and persuade all the great chocolate companies to get on board.

  Was that even—fair? To do all this without leaving Paris? Was it a cop-out?

  “Or in Washington or New York or London,” Cade added. “If it would facilitate a break-up. God knows, when I said I would love for you to date a Parisian, I didn’t have an arrogant, womanizing brute in mind.”

  Dom stood in the tiny waiting room, the only person there and that was probably a good thing because he dwarfed the small space. He glanced at the magazines on a table. What do you think you are, a magazine in an airport? He pulled a book out of his jacket pocket and leaned back against a wall, because he wasn’t good at sitting and waiting. Then he stroked his new jacket, despite his best intentions. He couldn’t stop himself. The soft leather, the elegant, edgy style of it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford something like this, but he didn’t pay much attention to clothes, and so this was the nicest thing he had ever worn.

  He couldn’t stop petting it. Ever since Jaime had shown up with it in its designer shopping bag, tilting her head down as she handed it to him, blushing a little as he pulled it out, until he had to lay his hand over the nape of her neck, so deliciously exposed and vulnerable to him. She had stilled under his hand on her nape, a profound intense quiet, and then looked up at him under the weight of it.

  It melted him into helpless nothing when she looked at him like that. As if she couldn’t believe how wonderful he was. But at the same time, he had to fight himself to keep from tightening his hand on her nape, from nudging her: Go ahead and believe. Believe in me.

  Selfish bastard that he was. But if he could make himself into someone she really could believe in, that didn’t count as luring her under false pretenses, did it?

  He couldn’t stop wearing the jacket, even though Célie chortled things like, “It’s so sweet. Isn’t he adorable?” whenever she could pretend she thought he was out of earshot. In fact, he was going to have a really hard time in July when he was sweating like a pig but couldn’t bear to take it off.

  She could have given him back his own jacket.

  But she had kept it for herself.

  Rubbing the edge of its replacement between his fingers, he tried to concentrate on his book. He had only read a few verses when Pierre Paulin came out.

  “I like the beard.” Dom sat across from him in his office.

  The older man touched the neat gray beard at his chin and grinned. “Isn’t it perfect? You can always trust a man with a gray beard to know the answer to your life. I might have had to start dying it, if it hadn’t come in naturally. So. It’s been a long time—five years?”

  He knew better than Dom did, since he had his records right there in front of him, but that was about right. When Dom was twenty-three he’d worried about how he could run his own business the way a normal man did; he’d needed help figuring out what a good person did with frustrations and anger and impulses to punch something. The gym was already a lifeline by then, but it turned out Pierre had a few other tips, too.

  “Still like Prévert?” Pierre nodded to the book in his hand.

  Dom slipped it back into his pocket. “I do. Still hate poetry?”

  “Sorry,” Pierre said apologetically. “I’m an uncivilized barbarian, I know.”

  Dominique, who had seen his last school at twelve, grinned wryly at the man with multiple degrees sitting across from him. Maybe Pierre had gotten too much of education and Dom had never gotten enough. His apartment was walled with books. “So you remember how you wanted to work with me on my inability to handle a deeper, significant relationship?”

  Pierre glanced at his notes from that last meeting five years ago. “And you told me your lack of deeper relationships was working for you just fine.”

  Dom nodded and settled back into his chair, pressing into it to make sure it formed a firm wall at his back. This hour was going to be a really long one, and he might as well be braced. Plus, when you were in a terrifying freefall, it was nice to have something hard to hold onto. “I think I’m ready for the lessons.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Dom turned a small oval fève of couverture chocolate in his fingers against the marble counter. It started so hard, but never as hard or cold as the marble. His fingers had already started to melt it. Near his hand lay a small pile of them. Smooth, dense, dark perfection. How could he put that in the center of a ganache? How could he make a chocolate whose last bite denied all the ease of the first, refusing to melt on the tongue?

  He could call it J’aime, and only a tiny few in the world would ever understand the reference. But they would be the people who mattered.

  If he made her the perfect chocolate, would she trust him? Would she let him strip her naked in the daylight? Would she press her face into his chest and confide some detail of that life she could not return to? And what are you thinking of doing with that knowledge, you bastard? Feeding the fear, so you can keep her safe in your arms?

  Speaking of trust. He rubbed the nape of his neck.

  “Monsieur,” Guillemette said from the top of the stairs. “There’s a James Corey below to see you.”

  He blinked, disoriented. Between James and Jaime, pronounced correctly the way Guillemette could manage, there was not that much difference, and the Corey name after it threw him completely off.

  “Oh.” He figured it out. “Are the Coreys still trying to buy my name to put on their chocolates? Why, did Cade ditch Sylvain?” he asked hopefully.

  No, wait, did he hope for that? He liked seeing the other man suffer, but if Sylvain turned his attentions back to Jaime—

  “He didn’t say, Monsieur.”

  Dom rolled his eyes. “Well, send him up.” Might as well get it over with. Besides, he liked being sought after so much he could pick and choose and turn people down. It was so different from the way he had started his life.

  “He isn’t very young,” Guillemette hinted.

  What? Oh, the stairs. Dom sighed and touched his hard little ovals of chocolate. “I’ll come down.”

  The white-haired man inspecting his displays had to be in his late seventies, but he seemed spry, with no cane or limp. Although considerably shorter than Dom, he carried himself as if he could buy and sell Dom with the snap of his fingers. The resemblance to Cade Corey was striking.

  He could hardly come onto the old man so aggressively that he would drive him off, as he had with Cade, so he extended his hand courteously instead. “Je peux vous aider, monsieur?”

  Blue eyes met his, and a ripple ran through Dom, almost of recognition. Something about the eyes. Their energy? Their age, surrounded by heavy wrinkles? “Je ne sais pas.” The old Corey’s French was rusty, wielded with a heavy accent, each word pulled out carefully. “I wanted to get a look at you.”

  Dom raised his eyebrows, not sure why he should let this man or anyone else inspect him. Except, damn it, the man was close to three times his age.

  “See what you were made of.” The older man got a crafty look in his eye. “I don’t suppose you would let me look around your kitchens, would you?”

  “I’ll even let you buy a sample of everything in the store to take home and run tests on,” Dom said cordially. “Every other chocolatier-pâtissier in Paris does it all the time.”

  “Don’t have anything of value to hide, is that it?” the old man said.

  Dom showed him the sharp edge of his teeth. “It’s all in here.” He tapped himself on the chest.

  J
ames Corey gave a snort of laughter. “Good place to keep it.” He went to the base of the stairs and placed an age-freckled hand on the banister. “ ’Course, it could be a danger; hearts get stolen, too.” He gave Dominique a sharp look.

  Dom laughed. “I don’t keep mine on me anymore.”

  The old man studied Dominique with a long, steady, oddly familiar look. “Feel pretty secure about where you got it stored, do you?”

  Dom stopped smiling.

  “You’re positive the person who’s got it isn’t going to run off with it to some foreign clime?”

  That bastard. Anxiety closed around his lungs and squeezed. Dom fought it with all the arrogance in him, forcing himself to sound unassailable: “Well, I doubt she’ll try to steal my name and savoir-faire with it.” His name. Jaime Richard passed through his mind with sudden cruel beauty, a ray of light lined with shards of glass.

  He drew a breath, riding it out. He had ridden out crueler pains than a pipe dream, that was for sure.

  The old man’s eyebrows went up. He started slowly up the stairs. It was a lousy view, compared to Jaime’s butt, but Dom should probably walk behind an old man up the stairs, too. And keep a hand ready.

  He didn’t have to grab the old billionaire’s butt, thank God. James Corey mounted the stairs with no sign of faltering.

  And smiled with pure delight when he walked into the wide, luminous space, its great windows open to the spring and its marble counters gleaming. “Beau,” he said with that intense drawling accent of his. “Très, très beau. You can’t make any real money off of it, but I can see how you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I get by,” Dominique said with some asperity. Not billions, and not even millions, not in his personal income, but he was doing just fine, thank you. And he had barely gotten started. He got e-mails every single day begging him to open a shop in Tokyo or New York.

  “Are you going to show me around?” the billionaire asked, proving that just like his granddaughter Cade, he was completely gonflé. If the man had been thirty years younger, Dom could have refused that presumption. But given his age, what could he say?

  “Si vous voulez. Do you know anything about making chocolate?”

  The retired head of the largest chocolate-making company on the planet gave him a narrow look. “You Parisian chocolatiers can be a little hard to stand sometimes.”

  “I mean real chocolate,” Dom corrected apologetically, not having intended the insult.

  The blue eyes got narrower.

  Dom coughed. “Chocolate that tastes good?”

  The old man huffed and muttered something about his granddaughter’s lack of sense.

  Dom grinned. “You can’t really blame Cade for choosing Sylvain. She asked me, and I wouldn’t stoop.”

  The old man’s gaze sharpened. A spark of unholy glee lit his eyes. “Wouldn’t stoop to a Corey?”

  “Have a taste,” Dom said kindly, proffering him a chocolate. “Then you’ll understand.”

  The old man gave the chocolate—his Paris Brûlée—an annoyed look. But he bit into it, and his annoyance faded, his gaze softening, growing hungry. “Smoke,” he murmured. “Smoke in chocolate. You know, I might like you, kid.”

  Dom pulled the tray of chocolates back, annoyed. Might like him? “There’s an épicerie down the street that sells bonbons, if you’re desperate for crap.”

  “And then again, I might not,” the old Corey said, giving Dom a nice jolt of satisfaction. He did love to piss people off, especially people who thought they got to make some kind of assessment of his worth. The old man ate the second half of his Paris Brûlée and licked the trace of chocolate off his thumb.

  So Dominique might be able to tolerate him, after all.

  “What’s this?” James Corey stopped before the great half-carved block of chocolate. “You give up?” That sharp glance again.

  Dom bared his teeth just a little. “I don’t give up. But the expo isn’t for another week, and I do have other things to do with my time, besides carving sculptures.” Plus, that block of chocolate kept scaring him to death with the statement it was trying to make. Every time he tried to work on it, he became convinced he was jinxing himself and had to go do something less terrifying.

  The old man scanned the rough-hewn folds of the block of chocolate, trying to see what it would become. “We’ve got a lot of money, we Coreys,” he mentioned.

  “Yes, and you know what would be wonderful? If you spent some of it putting Sylvain Marquis’s name all over some crappy bar you sell in supermarkets all over the world.” Joy shot through him just at the thought. “That would be beautiful.”

  James Corey was starting to look both thoughtful and amused. “You don’t want any of the money yourself?”

  Seriously, what was it with people trying to buy him recently? First Cade Corey, then Jaime, now this guy. Did he look affordable? “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what you want to buy from me, and I’ll let you know if I want your money.”

  The old man’s penetrating straight look was so oddly familiar, with, underlying it, a deep amusement. That was all he needed, some billionaire too old for him to sock hanging around his laboratoire acting as if Dom was the butt of some private joke. “I hear you like to play with very wild flavors,” James Corey said, so extremely casually that Dom braced himself. Here came the pitch. A few million for his name on something that probably had peanuts in it. Dom had gone pretty far, but even he would never put peanuts in chocolate.

  “Have you ever thought about spinach?”

  “Spinach?” At least the peanuts would have been a challenge. “You want to pay me to put spinach in chocolate? That’s boring! Go pay some chemist to do it.”

  “Boring?” James Corey looked offended. “You mean you can’t do it.”

  “I mean why would I want to do it? It’s the blandest flavor out there. I don’t use chocolate to hide flavors, I use other flavors to bring the chocolate out.”

  “I have paid chemists to do it.” James Corey folded his arms. “And they can’t.” His growing annoyance made Dom feel better already. “I don’t think much of people who claim they could do something impossible if only they wanted to bother.”

  Dom gave him an incredulous look. “Trust me, on the list of impossible things I’m working on right now, spinach doesn’t even make the first page. For one thing, it’s not impossible, and even if it were, I don’t see why I have to go do every impossible thing that crosses your mind.”

  “So what are the other impossible things?” the old man asked craftily.

  “None of your business.” Be someone’s sun. Be perfect for her.

  “Are they worth more than twenty million dollars?” The blue eyes gleamed.

  “Hell, yes. But if you want to pay me twenty million dollars to blend spinach and chocolate for you, I’ll squeeze it in.” It would probably only take him an hour or two and would be les doigts dans le nez compared to the other tasks, a piece of cake. Jaime might even get a kick out of watching him. “But don’t you ever put my name on it.”

  James Corey’s eyebrows rose. “Twenty million and not even the right to use your name. You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

  He tried to. “You’re the one who started the bidding.” What was Dom supposed to do, bargain him down to what it was really worth? People who had too much money were very strange.

  “What if I wanted something else for the twenty million?” The old man had the oddest glint in his eye, like Satan in a desert. “What if I asked you to seduce my granddaughter away from Sylvain Marquis?”

  Dominique stared and then grinned. Someone else who hated Sylvain. Nice to know the man was marrying into the family from hell. “Well, I’m sorry I can’t help you, but it’s a nice idea. Good luck with it.” He was going to need it, if he was going to try to get something out of Cade’s steel grasp.

  “Why can’t you help me?” A snide look. “Impossible?”

  This old man was starting to seriously piss him
off. “I think maybe you have me mistaken for someone else. I’m Dominique Richard, not your prostitute. I work with chocolate. I’ve got a girlfriend.” He started to hyperventilate, just claiming it. A girlfriend suggested something permanent, solid. Not someone who could disappear on him if he blinked too hard. “And your twenty million isn’t worth either one of those things.”

  James Corey rested a hand on one of Dom’s marble counters as if he owned it, and studied him a long moment.

  Dominique showed him his teeth. “Must be hell, not having anything worth more than money.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a couple of things worth more than money,” the old man said. “Two or three. But I always like to make sure. It’s really lousy when my treasure gets treated by someone else like trash.”

  “You ever thought about settling down?” Grandpa Jack asked.

  Jaime nearly jumped out of her skin. Which was saying a lot, since she had just finished her weekly physical therapy session, and even her skin was exhausted. They were sitting in the ultra-luxury Hôtel de Leucé off the Elysées, eating something from the Leucé’s Michelin three-star pastry chef Luc Leroi that melted like snow over her hot, tired tongue. She would have liked to be sitting in Dominique’s salon instead, but didn’t dare meet her grandfather there. So they were on the opposite side of Paris, eating desserts in which ice kissed fire and birthed spring. And that cost over fifty euros each, which would not even be a decimal point in her grandfather’s budget, but which made him roll his eyes anyway.

  “Settling—down?”

  “Yes! You know, get married, have kids, stop running around the world.”

  Jaime gaped at him. Both her father and her grandfather treated all men who approached Jaime and Cade as if they needed to be tested for rabies.

  “Your sister’s doing it,” Grandpa Jack said, as if Jaime had ever imitated a damn thing Cade did in her entire life.

  “I thought you wanted me to run Corey,” Jaime said dryly.

  “I do want you to run Corey. But given how stubborn you are, it’s good to have other options.”