The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  “Dad’s coming back in this weekend,” Cade said suddenly. Their father had installed himself in Paris for the first month of Jaime’s hospitalization, but then, when it was clear she was stable and mending, had had to start flying back and forth to Corey headquarters. “What do you think about having Dominique join us for dinner?”

  “Isn’t that a bit like dragging a gladiator into the emperor’s arena? None of you have the right to give him your thumb up or down.”

  Cade raised her eyebrows and exchanged an incredulous look with Sylvain. “See, this is what I have to put up with. She honestly thinks that,” Cade told her fiancé.

  “My thumb’s down,” Sylvain said. “I have absolutely no need to see him again to make up my mind.”

  “Then you don’t have to,” Jaime said sharply. “Trust me, he won’t be the first man I’ve dated whom I never introduced to the family.”

  “And he won’t be the last?” Cade suggested.

  “Oh, are you just using him as a healing process?” Sylvain brightened. “That would be fine.”

  Jaime pressed her lips so tight together, it was a wonder her rage didn’t implode them. “You know what? Why don’t we talk about you two instead of me? Like all Sylvain’s defects. I never really got a chance to not welcome him to the family.”

  Sylvain grinned at her, entirely unfazed. “Go ahead, figure out a way to blame me for the fact that your sister broke into my laboratoire and stole from me.”

  Damn it, it was hard to insult a man when her first memory of him was the anxious, carved lines of his sculpted face softening into a smile as he offered her one of the best chocolates in the world to tempt her appetite awake after weeks of IVs. All while telling her stories in that low, elegant, melted chocolate voice of his: who he was, what he was doing there, how he had met her sister.

  It had been one hell of a story, too, how he had met her sister. Jaime hadn’t known Cade had it in her. “So how is it working out for you?” she asked him maliciously. “Having Cade as an ‘apprentice.’ ”

  Cade, who, like Jeanne d’Arc, could go boss around the King, the Pope, and probably multiple presidents while she was at it, and consider it all in a day’s work.

  Sylvain laughed. “It’s not so much that she can’t take direction, it’s that she keeps trying to take charge of the business. And it’s my business.”

  Cade pressed her lips together and shifted restlessly, and Jaime felt a tiny twinge of guilt for stirring up trouble. She did want her sister to be happy.

  “Plus”—Sylvain slid a sidelong glance at his fiancée—“I think she’s bored.” Something he clearly didn’t take as a compliment.

  Jaime raised her eyebrows. Cade got to spend her days having a hottie like Sylvain Marquis lean over her and show her how to temper chocolate. It sounded like most women’s idea of Happy Ever After.

  “I’m not bored. I love it.” A smile softened Cade’s mouth. “It’s like a dream come true.”

  Well, good. Her sister wasn’t insane, then.

  “But,” Cade admitted, and Jaime felt a strong desire to strangle her. Cade had spent her entire life focused on running a major business. Couldn’t she just enjoy her freedom?

  Her brain hiccupped, trying to draw attention to an inconsistency in her thinking. Something about enjoying things without a guilt trip about what one wasn’t doing instead . . .

  “. . . I love being around fine chocolate, I love being—immersed in someone who’s immersed in it.”

  Jaime blushed at that window into her sister’s heart. But Sylvain tilted his head toward Cade, sitting beside him on the couch, and squeezed her shoulders. Cade wasn’t really talking to Jaime, was she?

  “I love doing it. But maybe . . . doing it as a hobby. It’s true what Sylvain says that I keep trying to take over every business I even notice and make it run ten times better. I think the fromager is going to stop letting me buy cheese there.”

  “You’re giving him a permanent migraine. He doesn’t want to have a website and export his products to the world,” Sylvain said.

  “At the same time, it’s not as if I can be a Corey vice president part-time. I don’t know. I’m not sure what I should be sinking my teeth into.”

  If she added, Besides Sylvain, of course, Jaime was going to have to leave. But Cade spared her, being far too elegant to actually say such a thing, even if a tiny grin flitted across her face that was worth a thousand words.

  “I really like the idea of helping you get this Round Table going, to be honest,” Cade told her.

  “I’m trying to walk without crutches, Cade.”

  A frustrated press of Cade’s lips. “I worry about whether I’m giving enough back to the world, too, Jamie. Especially now, when I’m living purely for my own pleasure.”

  Sylvain smirked at that purely for my own pleasure.

  “I’ve been interested in this ever since you raised our awareness of the issues, and I do think it’s time to take this beyond Corey Chocolate, to bring in a large consortium of chocolate producers and really stamp out the problem for once and for all.”

  Sylvain tried not to frown. “In Abidjan?”

  “My vote’s for Paris, but I believe Jaime thinks that a reluctance to put herself into an unstable political situation in a country where she just nearly got killed indicates weakness.”

  Sylvain drew supple, gorgeous eyebrows together. “You know, Jamie, just because you feel weak doesn’t mean that every action you take is weak.”

  Cade smiled approvingly and snuggled a little closer to him on the couch.

  Sylvain had the lousiest taste in armchairs, Jaime thought glumly. She might as well have been trying to snuggle up to a rock on Mars. Her sister and Sylvain looked so sure of each other. Cade might be restless and Sylvain might be balking at some of her efforts to take charge, but neither of these things threatened their relationship. Their love seemed to be a given, and everything else was just adjustments to make around that happy, immutable center.

  Leaving the apartment, she struggled against need and loneliness. Cade had called her a taxi, but she paid off the driver at the edge of the Seine and got out, slowly crossing the bridge. Notre-Dame gleamed to her right, the Louvre down the river to her left, and far away the Eiffel Tower, glowing pristinely, emitted no sparkles at the moment. A group of men heckled her, trying to get her to sit with them, and her skin tightened in uncontrollable overreaction, her pace quick as they called after her, laughing and contemptuous both: Miss, miss.

  Once she reached the Marais, people left her alone, same-sex couples mixed generously with the heterosexual ones on the sidewalks, beautifully or daringly dressed people strolling between bars and cafés along the seventeenth-century streets.

  If she had had his number, she might have called him. If she had known where he lived, she might have shown up at his door, unable to spend a night apart. Hoping he didn’t have someone else there, that he was glad to see her.

  But she didn’t know any of those things.

  She recalled his brush-off of that brunette: She’s not going to call me later. She doesn’t even have my number.

  She stopped at a bar and got hit on by a pretty blonde with curly hair, which she found infinitely easier to tolerate than being hit on by men in the street. She laughed and shook her head, and regretfully informed the blonde that she was traitorously dating a man, and was told with a wink that one night could change her mind. Finally, she couldn’t draw out her single drink any longer or field the advances with any more deftness, and she had to go back to her dark, empty apartment.

  She tried a couple of things, to be strong. She took a shower. She answered a voicemail from her father, talking for a while. She tried to open a book. And still, she found herself pulling her comforter over her head and sobbing into its darkness. Just sobbing and sobbing, because she was so lonely and so cold and for all those other reasons that cruelly struck her like a rain of fists.

  CHAPTER 23

  On Wednesdays
, Dom usually had lunch with the wine-seller down the street, a friendly relationship that had developed despite Dom’s lack of interest in the other man’s products. Dom enjoyed it. He didn’t have many people approximating friends, and the others were all kitchen friendships, people he had gotten to know working his way up, busy, ambitious workaholics like himself, with few windows for socializing.

  This Wednesday, he was bad company, falling out of the conversation over and over without realizing it, his face growing grim. A whole day and night without seeing her except for that moment in the street made for a too-long stretch that uncurled fear in him, from that tight, hard knot where he always carried it.

  When he walked into his shop after lunch and saw her sitting there, relief hit him so hard it left him shaky, and he had to practice breathing calmly as he walked over to her table.

  After one quick glance up, she didn’t look at him. Her hands closed tightly around her cup of chocolate, and she focused on it as if she was trying desperately not to do something. Her sweater sleeves had fallen back to expose the goose bumps on the lower part of her forearms.

  He flipped a chair around to sit beside her and forced himself not to pull her straight into his lap and wrap her up. Damn public places. Even his own. He laid his big hand over that goose bump–ridden forearm—one good thing about the size of his hand, he could wrap it around the whole exposed area of skin and have plenty left over to slide his fingers up under the sleeve and cover more. His fingertips brushed against the scar she liked to hide high on her forearm. Probably from a broken bone jutting through the skin. Oh, God, try not to think about it. He curled his hand around her head and kissed her. Too long, too intimately for the middle of his own salon.

  All the tension drained off him. When her lips parted, the fear slunk back into its huddle in his middle.

  The hand not caught under his hold slipped to clutch a fistful of his shirt. Again, he felt her fighting not to do something.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered, pulling back enough to study her face. She looked like she was coming down with something: circles under her eyes, a hint of red around the rims. “Go ahead and do it.”

  Her hand flexed in his shirt. “Do what?”

  “Whatever it is you’re trying not to do. You can do it to me.”

  He had survived everything else, after all.

  She shook her head, her mouth a bitter twist as she forced her gaze back to her chocolate. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me?”

  Blue eyes locked with his in one moment of naked honesty. “If I could, I would crawl into you and never come out.”

  It shook his whole body, like the crash of a demolished building. He had to wait until the shock waves settled down. Then he stood, pulling her up with him.

  “Guillemette.” He managed to keep his blush down to the barest hint of heat on his cheekbones. “Could you tell them upstairs I’ll be out for a while?”

  He took her to his apartment because it was closer. In the end, that decided him, and if it hadn’t been what decided him with quite a few other women in the past, he would have felt much less like the merde he was when he brought her there, too. He saw her eyes flicker and her face close when she realized they had been standing just beneath it the other day and he had never told her.

  She closed back into that steel center of hers where he could never reach.

  But he could lure her out of it, into his hands.

  He could.

  “Crawl into me.” He pushed his apartment door closed behind him, pulling her in against his body. “It’s all right.” He yanked his half-buttoned shirt and T-shirt over his head in one gesture, and wrapped her up, lifting her, his bare back against the door. “Go ahead.”

  “I love you,” she said into his chest, and pure terror washed over him.

  “Oh, God, don’t say that.” He carried her into his bedroom, pulling off her clothes as he went. “Don’t—are you going to leave me?” He buried them under his comforter, wrenched her clothes off, pressed his mouth into the join of her shoulder, his hands too hard on her hips. “Please don’t say that,” he begged almost inaudibly against her skin.

  She froze against him.

  “No, don’t. Don’t freeze. I’ll do anything, Jaime.” He dragged his hands over her roughly, everywhere over her, trying to mark her as his so they could both remember it. Even if she was gone. “Tell me what’s wrong. I can fix it.”

  He sounded so much like himself as a child, the first few times his mother had thought about leaving, it was horrible. Damn it, he had put that all behind him.

  “I know,” she said into his skin. “I know. You fix everything. Everything about me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to say it. I didn’t mean to. I just—” She shivered all over and tried to bury herself deeper into him, as if he was the only heat source in a blizzard. He could feel her lips press together against his skin, the way she folded them in, trying so hard not to say something; she couldn’t even kiss him. “I can’t get enough of you. I’m like some vampire, I’ll suck you dry.”

  “No.” He stroked her body urgently. “You said I was the sun, and you can’t suck that dry. I promise I won’t run out. I promise. You make me feel—” like I can give out heat and love forever. And never, ever falter.

  He rolled onto his back, pulling her on top of him, so that his hands could move more freely, so that she could feel all the hard, big strength of his body, how her entire weight could lie on it and he could hold it easily. He knew the value of strength, that was one thing he knew very well.

  It was to make himself unassailable. And now to make her unassailable, too. At last somebody needed his strength.

  He had suddenly the clearest understanding he had ever had of the way his father had gone so wrong. A man’s strength was supposed to be against the outside world: to fight it back from himself and those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it inward, against the very people you had been given that strength to protect, because you couldn’t deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness.

  I love you, she mouthed against his skin. Even he knew that much English. His body flicked as if at the impact of a fist. His hands tightened on her, but he said nothing. He didn’t try to stop her again. He had told her he could take anything she wanted to do to him; he had to take this, too. I love you. Her lips brushed across him, telling his body a secret his mind wasn’t supposed to know. This time it hurt less like a fist and more like the pressure of a massage, his muscles slowly relaxing to it, no longer flinching but soaking it up.

  He raked a hand through that short hair of hers, nuzzling along her scar through the veil of her hair. She shook her head, trying to knock his mouth away. He kissed it anyway, firm, one last time, then let himself be shooed down over her face, her throat. He tricked her. Tracing over her shoulder and down her arm, kissing every centimeter of her scar there before she realized what he was doing.

  “Stop it,” she said in English, pushing at his chest. But he had tricked her there, too. She couldn’t push him away, because he was the one underneath, pressed against the bed. She could get away herself, but she couldn’t force him back no matter what she did. Let her push him. He liked the pressure of her hands against his muscles.

  “Mmm.” He let her know it. Caught her other hand and pressed it against his chest, too, let her know how much pushing he could take. “I like that. Even harder, if you want. I’m a little sore.”

  The heels of her palms ground in instantly, a sweet, intense ache in his overworked muscles, with the force of someone who had been on the receiving end of physical therapy. “Why?” she whispered.

  He shrugged, and her hands rode over the muscles that rippled with the movement. “I work out too much when I . . . need to deal with things.”

  He had gone back to the gym, the night before, when he left her in the street
because she had “other plans.”

  “What things?”

  It would probably not be reassuring to her to know that she couldn’t do something else for an evening without driving him to extremes. His hands found a scar he hadn’t seen the day before. Neat and surgical, on her belly. They must have had to operate. Which could only have been because she had received so many blows to the belly that . . . “Mon coeur.” He squeezed her too tightly to him again, fighting the need to interrupt his lovemaking to go throw up. Sexy.

  He rolled them over, putting himself between her and the rest of the world. “Jaime,” he whispered, combing her hair back, kissing her again. “I love you,” he whispered in the shadow of the comforter.

  Her body jerked under his. Her eyes went very wide, staring up at him. He shrugged the comforter off them enough so that he could see their color. Fall forever blue. “You can’t possibly,” she protested. Why was her voice so afraid and so hungry, as if he was holding out something delicious to taunt a starving woman but was planning to snatch it away?

  He shrugged. “That’s what people once thought about me becoming Meilleur Ouvrier de France. That I couldn’t possibly. But I did it, just the same.”

  A little spark of annoyance in her eyes. Jaime did humble the way a convalescing wounded fighter might take occasional naps. “Meaning that it’s hard to love me?”

  “It’s horribly hard,” he said, betrayed into honesty. “It’s the most gut-wrenching thing I have ever done in my life, and that’s saying a lot. But I’m going to do it, nevertheless.” He kissed her, delving into her mouth, taking his time about it, proving to her that there was at least one aspect of loving her he knew exactly how to do.

  When he lifted his head at last, she stared up at him, her lips parted but her eyebrows flexed, caught between softness and perplexity. “You can’t mean it,” she said finally. “How could you? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Oh, he knew that. For him to crumble so completely and utterly at her feet, just from her sitting so quietly at his table, eating him bite by little bite? He, who had spent his entire adult life keeping women as far away from his heart as he possibly could? No, it probably didn’t count as anyone’s idea of normal.