The Chocolate Touch (13 page)

He lifted his head. Her eyes were closed, her hands flexing helplessly into what she could manage of his biceps. She seemed to like prickly. He ran a little test with his jaw over the upper slope of her breast.

She made a little sound, and her hands slid up over his shoulders, soft hands, so soft. Oh, God, he thought he could detect against the smoothness of his shoulders just the faintest hint of a little callus or blister from her newly acquired sport of weightlifting, and it made him return to her mouth and kiss her for such a long time.

He wanted to wrap his arms around her and squeeze her the way a man dying of thirst might squeeze every last drop of water from a sponge. But he didn’t. He didn’t.

He just kissed her. Taking his time. Licking up her response. Diving for more.

He liked this. Oh, how he liked this. He pulled her wrists above her head and rolled over onto her, trapping her, watching her eyes widen, her breath catch, then rolled again and let her trap him. He lifted her because he could, because he could manipulate her body so easily, and he
loved
that.

He tangled and rolled and took charge and yielded, kaleidoscope glimpses of the different ways they might make love if they had a lifetime to try every mood.

He liked this so much, too much. “Can I keep you?” he whispered against her skin. But he was down at the small of her back at that point, and he didn’t think she heard.

She certainly didn’t say yes.

He trailed his jaw and his lips back up the line of her spine, thinking of ways he could get her to say yes. And he licked the nape of her neck until she was all one shivering moan, completely his. For this moment, completely his.

“Can I?” he whispered again into her ear, although he didn’t know if she had heard the first question, so when she shivered and nodded, all she was really saying yes to was his touch. Still—on her head be it, right? You should never agree to something unless you had read every line of the contract. His mind flashed ideas of ways to keep her: a golden cage, a treasure in a box and him with the key, the pure brute force of his arms. None of them worked. He kissed over her shoulders, down the length of her arms. None of them worked in real life.

Addiction.

Maybe he could just get her so addicted to him she wouldn’t be able to tear herself away.

He laughed a little, a harsh puff of air against her skin, mocking himself for the pipe dream. But . . . like the time he had asked for a job from one of the top chefs in Paris, after being just freed from arrest and with only an abattoir as his past experience, or the four years’ merciless training and then the brutal trials for
Meilleur Ouvrier de France
. . . it was worth a shot.

He shouldn’t, of course. He shouldn’t try to make her completely his, because he was a bad bet. But when a man had his teeth sinking oh-so-gently into a woman’s naked butt while she made a little moaning sound was probably not the best time to ask him to think of anything except his own wild wants.

So he laid her out in that city light she thought was like moonlight and went to work on being addicting.

W
hen Jaime woke, there was a note on the pillow beside hers:
Come by
.

No signature. She picked it up and rubbed it between her fingers. She looked around for a moment, then dug into the bottom of her suitcase, coming out with a small round box that had been given to her by the grandmother of a child in Côte d’Ivoire. She folded the note and placed it carefully in the tiny box, then slipped it back down into the bottom of her suitcase.

She didn’t try to turn on her computer at all that morning. She was terrified she would find more e-mails asking her to leave.

 

When Dom came in to his
laboratoire
later than usual, Célie and Amand were already there, in the
cuisine,
the hot room where things were cooked. Célie was talking to Amand: “. . . I think it’s adorable. He’s fallen so hard. Would you ever have believed it? Mr. Take It and Leave It. And I got a look at her. She’s not a movie star or anything. She looks just—normal.”

Dom barely forewent growling. Like an . . . adorable teddy bear. It was enough to make a man break something, but . . . he sighed. He did kind of like it. Being adorable.

“I just hope she doesn’t crush him. Didn’t Guillaume say she sounded like a tourist?”

“Well,” Amand said reticently. “You can’t say he doesn’t deserve to have his heart crushed.”

Thanks, Amand. People always thought that about him. Even when he was six years old, the people who loved him thought he deserved what he got. He shoved a mold that clattered against the tile backdrop.

“Or to be loved and left,” Amand said, not catching the hint.

Dom filled the doorway, so that Amand looked up from slicing off great pats of Isigny butter and Célie from weighing chocolate. “Please,” Dom said, “don’t let me interrupt.”

Célie stuck her chin out at him. “Then I won’t.
I
think it would be extremely salutary for you, if somebody loved you and didn’t leave you. It’s a lot harder work.”

Dom stared at his chocolatier for a long moment and then turned abruptly and went to the far opposite end of the main room, carving bits of long Grecian skirt from his sculpture. Just until the shakiness inside him calmed down.

 

When Jaime got there a few hours later, Dominique was growling into his phone. He gave her one delighted look, a kind of surreal syncopation with his immediate return to growling, and offered her the nearest fresh pastry to eat.

While she bit into flakiness and a chocolate cream so dark and intense she wasn’t sure how he got it to fluff, she circled around the great block of chocolate, intrigued. The bottom seemed to be turning into rough-hewn folds. A person maybe, the folds of a long dress? Was that what he saw coming out of the chocolate?

He shoved his phone into his pocket. “If he really can’t get us enough of our vanilla because of the cyclone, we’re just going to have to find another supplier. But first, I’m going to see him in person and make sure he’s not letting someone else talk him into giving them what he’s got.”

“Vanilla?” Jaime raised an eyebrow, licking cream off her lips. His dark eyes immediately went to her mouth, and he smiled, just a little smile, as if he was kissing her there. “You?”

“It goes in as a base flavor in all kinds of things. And I’m not about to start using some inferior product from Papua New Guinea.”

“The vanilla there is quite good!” Jaime said rather indignantly. She saw a lot of friendly faces when he said “Papua New Guinea.”

He dismissed those friendly faces with a wave of his hand, as not at all relevant in the quest for the best vanilla, and reached for his motorcycle jacket. Then he gave Jaime a slow grin. “You want to come?” From the expression on his face, he had known some women before her who liked riding on his motorcycle with their legs wrapped around him. “I’ll drive carefully.”

She sighed, because there wasn’t a lot she could do about the fact that she wasn’t the first woman he had met, and that he had learned a lot from the other ones. “Yes. I want to come.”

He even had an extra helmet for her, with a hibiscus on the front, female size. A jasmine scent lingered in it. “If I get lice from one of your women,” she muttered.

“What?” he asked blankly.

She just glared at him, refusing to expand.

He looked from her to the helmet. “That’s Célie’s. She comes in on a moped.” He slipped his leather jacket around her and zipped it up. “Lice.” He was grinning.
“Salope,”
he whispered to her respectfully.

Jaime had ridden on a moped behind a proud teenager in Papua New Guinea only six months or so ago. And she had driven herself around on mopeds quite a bit. It seemed so much more appropriate than arriving in a phalanx of expensive cars to pretend you cared about the little people who couldn’t afford bicycles. But she hadn’t ridden on an actual motorcycle behind someone since she was seventeen years old and still throwing her panties on the stage at concerts.

And her eighteen-year-old driver back then hadn’t been as big, hadn’t been as hard, hadn’t been as much to wrap her arms around. Compared to the other bikes that passed them, Dominique drove with extreme care: slowly, no weaving in and out of traffic. She tightened her arms around him, trying to help offset the wind that must be cutting through his clothes, since he had given his jacket—which was also his protection against any fall—to her.

As they left the heart of the city, they entered a different world of bigger, uglier buildings, big supermarkets, warehouses, square-cornered practicality, the cheaper world where the large things of this city were exiled. He pulled in near the door of a small warehouse with several vans parked in front of it.

“Do you drive that carefully when I’m not on the bike?” Jaime asked, taking off her helmet and automatically running her hand over the left side of her head, making sure her hair was still in place.

Dominique grinned and didn’t answer.

“Would you?” she asked because she couldn’t help herself.

He stilled, his helmet just off his head. Probably taken aback by the nerve of a woman he had slept with two times trying to take over his driving. He lowered the helmet enough to gaze at her for a long moment. “Drive more carefully? Did you just ask me to drive more carefully?”

“Yes,” she said sternly.

He stared down at her with those almost-black eyes of his and didn’t say anything at all. Not yes, not no, not “that’s none of your business.” He looked oddly shaken. When he turned toward the warehouse, with his helmet tucked under his far arm, his mouth curved a little.

That smile disappeared under a sudden flare of outrage. “
Putain!
I knew someone was stealing the supply.”

 

Sylvain Marquis was just leaving the building, and he nearly ran straight into them. He started to raise one of those haughty eyebrows of his at Dom, and then spotted his companion.

Dom jerked and closed his hand too fast, too hard around Jaime’s nearest shoulder, as if Sylvain had reached out and tried to grab her away. The woman who had just told him to
drive carefully.
As if he
mattered.
“You know
Sylvain
?”

What had
he
done to get her name? Maybe that explained what she was doing with Dominique. Maybe she was some kind of chocolatier groupie, concentrating all her attention on each of them, one at a time, until . . .

“Jamie, qu’est-ce que tu fous avec lui
?
”
Sylvain demanded.
What the hell are you doing with him?
Sylvain liked to pretend he had risen above the
banlieue,
that he belonged among the aristos and bourgeois over there in his Sixth Arrondissement, so the sight of Jaime with Dominique had definitely hit him hard for him to swear. Or maybe it was the influence of their environment, out here on the margins of Paris, a degree closer to where they’d both grown up, bringing out the worst in him.

“Your
banlieue
is showing, Marquis.” Dom’s teeth showed, slashing, sharp, as he shifted his body a step in front of Jaime. “Careful, or I’ll let you see mine.”

Sylvain gave him a scathing look. “You still haven’t learned how to solve problems with anything other than your fists?”

Dom sneered at him. The supercilious bastard who thought he had managed so much better. “If you think I’m going to fight you for her with a delicate game of chocolate, think again.”

Jaime grabbed
Sylvain
’s arm. Not Dominique’s. Dom flinched as if he’d been whipped.

“You. Come here,” she told Sylvain. With
tu.
She was on
tu
terms with that bastard.

She dragged Sylvain off, out of earshot, while Dom spun on his heel and snarled, not sure if he should lunge after them and beat the crap out of Sylvain right then or if that was one of the destructive urges that would ruin his whole life if he revealed it in front of Jaime.

He knew far too well how easy it could be to ruin things by letting your fists fly. He had seen it from the point of view of the things ruined.

Jaime was keeping her voice low, but her whole body language was a yell. As she whispered, her fist clenched, and she poked Sylvain in the chest with it. Dom snarled harder, hoping she would haul off and hit him for real, and then Dom could leap, let off any leash of civility.

Sylvain was trying to keep his voice down, too, but words escaped: “Dominique
Richard
?” And “. . . womanizer . . .
un vrai salaud
. . .”

Jaime poked Sylvain harder. It was close to a punch this time. Her face was flaming with temper; he was surprised that short hair of hers didn’t stand up around her head like a fire. If he could get control of his own wounded, panicked rage, it would be kind of fascinating to watch. He hadn’t known she had a temper. He had suspected, from those little glimpses of cool steel from time to time, but hadn’t known for sure, that she could stand up to a man.

He
loved
women who could stand up to men.

And . . . and . . . he settled back on his heels a little, less ready to lunge. He even folded his arms, to show how calm he was. She was standing up for
him.
She was fighting Sylvain Marquis over
him.
The anger in him unflexed, stretched, started to show a little hint of a hard-edged grin. So how do you like that, Sylvain “Dieudonné”?

But why hadn’t she grabbed
Dominique
’s arm to stop a fight? Hadn’t she believed she could stop him?

He stiffened as Sylvain closed his hand over Jaime’s fist, holding it back from his chest. Jaime could poke the man as much as she wanted, but that didn’t give
him
the right to touch
her. What
made him think he could close his hand around her fist so familiarly?

Sylvain said something more, got a response he didn’t like, turned and strode away a few steps, turned back to Jaime and flung out his hands. She just glared and spoke quickly.

Sylvain folded his arms, stared at the ground, and shook his head a few times.

Jaime put her hands on her hips and said something more.

“Fine,” he saw Sylvain’s lips shape. “Fine.”

Just how long was he supposed to allow them for this lovers’ quarrel? Dom strode back up to them and got an immediate glare from Jaime. Apparently longer.

Sylvain turned his head and gazed at him, with a set jaw. Sylvain was tall enough to meet him eye to eye, but he was leaner. He got to look like a gorgeous passionate poet, while Dom was the rough butcher boy. “You really are a bastard, Richard.”

“Fuck you, Marquis.”

Sylvain narrowed his eyes and looked back at Jaime. “After all the chocolates I made for you. Please don’t tell me you actually prefer his.”

Sylvain . . . making chocolates for Jaime . . .
Dom’s fists strained against his will. If only he could teleport Jaime somewhere else, so she wouldn’t see this, and then
kill that bastard.

“Is this all just about chocolate egos?” Jaime demanded furiously.

Sylvain barely bothered to indicate Dom with his aristocratic jaw. “With him—probably. But I meant what I said, Jamie.”

Dom growled.

“Don’t even think about it, Richard,” Sylvain said, his tone so sharp and severe it startled its way through Dom’s anger. “There’s no way I’m indulging you in a fight right in front of her.
No way.”

Dom’s eyebrows drew together as he stared back at his most despised rival. What was the meaning there?

Sylvain shook his head, looked once more at Jaime, then turned on his heel and walked away—to his van, which was currently being loaded with big boxes of the vanilla beans Dom had come for.

Dom refused to give him the honor of glaring after him and turned away. And to be even clearer, he laid his arm proprietarily and extremely gently
—no anger, don’t let her feel any of the anger—
across Jaime’s shoulders, still in his jacket, and led her toward the farther corner of the building.

At the corner, he dropped her shoulders and leaned back against the building, pressing his butt into it, trying to glue himself and any violent urges to the concrete. He folded his arms across his chest for extra measure.

“Is your name Ja-mie or Jaime?” He was so mad he almost managed to say that hard J in her name, the way that-bastard-Sylvain, with six more years of school and therefore of English classes, could.

“Jamie is a nickname.” Jaime spoke not so much as if she was mad at him but as if she was just globally hostile, anger spreading out from her like a radius of self-protection.