The Chocolate Touch (14 page)

A nickname. Sylvain not only knew her name but her
nickname.
“How do you know Sylvain?” he growled.

Jaime shot him a glare. “That’s none of your damned business.”

It was probably fortunate that he found it vastly reassuring when she talked to him that way, as if she wouldn’t put up with shit from him. It calmed part of him down, even while part of him still strained to do murder. “Have you slept with him?”

She gaped at him. Then her eyes flamed with rage. “What do you guys do, practice internecine sexual warfare? And I would like to know what business it is of
yours,
when you seem to sleep with anyone who looks at you, whom I may or may not have slept with.”

That was, unfortunately, very fair. He folded his arms as tight as he could over his chest, regretting the fact that he had let Sylvain get away without at least smashing his fist into that beautiful, arrogant nose of his.

He glanced across the parking lot to the Marquis van, where the men from the warehouse had finished loading
Dominique’s supplies,
but Sylvain hadn’t yet climbed in to drive away. He stood leaning against the driver door, his arms folded and one ankle crossed over the other, as if he had all the time in the world to watch this play unfold.

What the hell was he standing there for? In case Jaime needed rescue? It wasn’t too late for Dom to cross the parking lot and smash that nose.

“Does Sylvain sleep around, too?” Jaime asked suddenly, cautiously, like someone with a vested interest in knowing.

“I have no idea,” Dom said sullenly. He would do just about anything to be able to rebuke that “too.” God damn it, that part of his past was his own screwed-up fault. “I think he’s engaged now,
en fait,
” he added stiffly.
So . . . off limits. Stay away from him.

That information didn’t seem to hit her any great, rocking blow. She nodded slightly, satisfied.

“To some billionaire,” he added for good measure. “Who produces this mass-market
merde
they call chocolate. I don’t know how Sylvain can still manage to act as if he’s the lord of the earth, but of course if anyone were to sell out, it would be him.”

Her face grew quite still. She looked at the ground, not at him, her profile a pure, lovely thing, like marble with freckles, and distant, as if it was roped off in a museum.

“Jaime.” His fists flexed and unflexed, in hiding behind his biceps. “Are you interested in Sylvain?”
Do you lap him up like the last bit of sauce on your plate, too?

Jaime gave him an incredulous look. “Are all the women you know nymphomaniacs?”

Probably not all of them. He wouldn’t be surprised if there were more than a few certifiable ones in his past, though. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t really know them,” he said after a moment, low.

On her face, puzzlement and shock. Why did he have to go and admit the worst details about himself? Did some part of him want her to discover who he really was, so she would flee to safety?

All the anger seemed to drain out of her, leaving her bleak and exhausted. His heart congealed.
Don’t look that way because of me. Please don’t.
She glanced toward Sylvain across the lot, and pain froze him. If she chose to ride back with him . . .

She rubbed her eyebrows with weary fingers, but she couldn’t get them to smooth out. “It isn’t clear where my interest lies?” she asked, low. “What we’ve done, that’s”—her voice broke, and she swallowed and forced it out stronger—“just normal, for you?”

He said nothing, breathing hard, staring at her. It was, in fact, normal for women to act like sex addicts with him. But just sex, addicted to sex and nothing else. So for the rest—he didn’t know. It was all new territory to him. No, she wasn’t the same. She didn’t feel the same. But could she really want
him
?

All of him?

Well, the parts of him he was willing to let her know about?

“You think I might be doing the same thing with Sylvain tomorrow night or maybe I might have been, a few nights ago?”

He dug his fingers into his biceps, wanting to rend things at the images that flashed through him. See, this was what he had been afraid of. That all those years of trying to turn himself into someone worthwhile would fail at the first real test. And they had only been in a relationship two days.

A castle-in-the-sky daydream of a relationship. He hadn’t even known her name forty-eight hours ago. “Have you ever been to the beach?” he asked. He had been once. Ridden his bike out to Brittany, which was only a few hours away. He had been too old to build a sandcastle, which was what he really wanted to do. He had felt lonely and lousy and ridden back the same day.

“Many times,” Jaime said stiffly. “Why?”

“I was just thinking about sandcastles.” How it must feel to build one. The texture of the sand, the water, the sun, the joy of building, and then in the end the way it all flowed away, nothing to keep, but no harm done. It was not so different from sculpting things out of chocolate, really.

Jaime looked back toward Sylvain, patiently waiting.
Don’t leave with him. Don’t. But you would be smarter if you did.
“All right, I get it,” she said flatly. “They’re fun, and they don’t last. Don’t you need to go check on your vanilla beans or something?”

And give her a chance to slip off with Sylvain? “He can have them,” Dom said harshly, shorting his own chocolates in the brutal competition for Paris’s best without a second thought. He pushed her helmet onto her head. “I want you.”

A
motorcycle was a terrible flashback to the era of women’s economic and legal dependence, Dom decided. No matter how much a woman might be angry or might want her distance, she had to hold onto you while you took her where you wanted.

As such he was deeply, terribly glad of it and probably needed to buy a car as soon as possible. Where he was going to park a car near his apartment, he had no idea.

It was the height of annoyance that Sylvain followed them all the way back to the city, no matter how painstakingly slowly Dom drove to try to make the other man so frustrated he would give up and pass them. Especially since Dom, had it not been for his priceless passenger with her thighs wrapped around his, could have lost the bastard at any time, given the motorcycle’s greater speed and maneuverability. And
that
would have been a hell of a lot more fun.

Sylvain waited until the frequent stoplights and the people filling the sidewalks in the heart of the city gave Jaime the possibility to slip away any time she wanted to, before he headed off in his own direction.

Fool,
Dom thought. But he did manage not to make any vulgar gestures at him. Mostly because he didn’t want to look worse than he already did.

He stopped the bike in front of Jaime’s apartment, before he could yield to the impulse to kidnap her. She slipped out of Célie’s helmet and his jacket, her face grave as she glanced from her apartment door back to him. Without a word, she handed both helmet and jacket back to him.

His heart started beating too hard, that panicky desperate feeling. “Keep it.” Even if she never let him back in again, she would have that piece of him in her apartment with her. When she packed, she would have to look at its big bulk and figure out what to do with it.

Her brows knit. She pulled the jacket back slowly against her chest, her fingers stroking over the leather.

His panicked heart eased under the stroke of those fingers, as if he was still wearing the jacket, as if those fingers were gliding right there on his back, under his shoulder blade, where that spot of the jacket would fall. Sylvain’s voice sounded in his head:
After all the chocolates I made for you. After all the chocolates . . . for you, I made for you.
He strapped her borrowed helmet on to the back of the bike and looked at her again. “Jaime. Are you just using me?”

Like every other woman. To get over Sylvain, maybe, if he was having an affair with her even while engaged to his billionaire?

Her face—all the light left it. His jacket drooped in her hands until it dragged on the ground. “Yes,” she said, her face empty. “Yes, I am.”

He pressed both open palms on the seat of his bike and stared down at them. Even against that black leather, they looked too big, too hard.

“All right,” he said finally. “I’d better get back to work.”

He left his bike there and walked. He didn’t trust himself to drive.

 

“I don’t know what influence Sylvain expects me to have on your sex life, but I suppose I should tell you that he really doesn’t like Dominique,” Cade said. They were at a café at the end of the Île Saint-Louis, with a view of Notre-Dame and the river. It was a little too cool still to sit outside, really, but they weren’t the only ones who had found the April day too tempting to stay inside. Most of the outdoor tables were full. A blond woman with a ponytail was playing the violin on a wooden block right at the middle of the bridge that arched between them and the cathedral, the notes soaring over the world and through them, like some great gift.

“I believe it’s mutual,” Jaime said dryly.

“Also, I should tell you, he really did hit on me. Actually, it was a little too arrogant for ‘hit on.’ I think it was more like he made it clear he would be happy to scratch my itch if I happened to have one.”

“Thank you, Cade.”
Jaime’s voice was ground out of her. “Can you stop now?”

“Do you think he knows who you are? That it’s some kind of pissing contest with Sylvain?”

Jaime’s jaw clenched. Her eyes and nostrils both stung, but she would be damned if she would let Cade see. “I have no idea. I mean, it would explain some things. Clearly, he couldn’t be interested in me.” She turned her head away, jaw very hard, staring out over the river.

There was a moment’s silence. “Jaime. That’s bullshit. Why do you think that?”

Jaime shot her a dry, burning look. “The same reason you and Sylvain do, I assume, but for God’s sake, let’s not compare notes and make sure.”

Cade was silenced. Well, there was an accomplishment. Her boardroom-managing sister, who could handle all kinds of discord, opened her mouth and closed it a couple of times, finding nothing she dared say.

“Besides—” Jaime focused as hard as she could on the violinist, who, standing on her bucket, notes flying so beautifully into the air, reminded her of
La Victoire de Samothrace
. “I told him the truth about me, so I don’t think you need to worry about him anymore.”

“You
told
him? And he still nearly picked a fight right in front of you?”

Jaime’s right hand closed into a slow, hard fist.
“That’s not the truth of me, Cade.”

Cade started to speak and paused, then pulled control around her like a cloak, the way she must exude calm when boardroom tempers flew off the handle. “What truth, exactly, did you tell him?”

Jaime looked back at the violinist. The girl looked so happy. So . . . victorious. “That I was just using him. What else could I possibly be doing?”

T
he knock on the door that evening made her jump; it was the first time anyone had knocked on it. Her sister called her to come down. Dominique had rung the buzzer from below. Her grandfather made her come to him. Her father was in the States right now. No one else even knew where she lived yet. It was a very soft knock, very gentle.

She looked through the peephole and jumped again, her heart pumping madly. She opened it too fast. Dominique leaned with his forearm against the jamb, gazing down at her. His black hair was damp, and the heat and strength of him hit her with an almost physical force. He had come from the gym. She could see it in the extra bulge to his muscles, in his heat. His eyes in the shadow of the hall were all black.

“What for?” he asked.

She looked up at him, uncomprehending. The way his body leaned, she had only to step forward to be in a cave of Dominique.

“What are you using me for?”

Her brows knit harder.

“For sex?” He closed his hands around her waist, and a burn started instantly, spreading through her everywhere from his palms.

“For a distraction? To cure a broken heart?”

“For
you,
” she said impatiently. A distraction. “What do you think you are, a magazine in an airport?”

From the flicker of his eyes, it had occurred to him. He walked her back into her apartment, his hands on her waist. Arousal instantly began to seep in and melt her, just from his taking control of her body, just from the door swinging shut behind him. “Why don’t you explain that a little bit?”

“The difference between you and a magazine?”

“How you’re using me.”

“For
you,
” she said again, frustrated and helpless. Did he think she wanted to go into her weaknesses? She hated her weaknesses.

His hands flexed on her waist. “What about
me
?”

She didn’t even know any other way to tell him that didn’t go into the nitty-gritty of how pathetic she was. She put her hand on his chest. “You.”

His chest rose and fell in a long, hard breath under her hand. “Maybe you should explain what you mean by ‘using. ’ ”

“Maybe you should explain what
you
mean by using. You asked the question.”

He was silent for a long time, his hands flexing uneasily into her ribs, in a way that sent little ripples of pleasure through her. “That you’re in it for something that’s
not
me. That anyone else would do.”

“Oh, no,” she said involuntarily. “No, I really don’t think so.” Surely she wasn’t that bad? That she would have turned to any other strong man who paid her attention with that same desire to press herself against him and never let herself be pulled away?
I love you,
she thought again, on a great tidal wave, that might wash over her body and spill out of her mouth. She clamped her lips together. Talk about a using thing to say.

His hands tightened on her waist. “Think what?”

“That anyone else would do.”

He stared down at her for a long moment. “I don’t care,” he said abruptly.

She closed her eyes. “Yes. That’s what I thought. But you confused me there for a little while.”

He looked at her. He spoke the next three words as if he was ripping them out of himself along with a big slice of skin: “I do care. What I mean is—if you’re just using me—I’ll take that, Jaime. You can use me all you want to.”

He turned her against the wall, blocked her in with his arms and his body. “Here. Here’s something else to use.”

 

So she did use him. He had said she could. He pushed her up against that wall and lowered his mouth toward hers, and she put both hands on his shoulders and pushed him back. And he went. Falling back before the pressure of her hands as if it was some kind of superior military force, letting her push him into her room, down onto her bed.

He lay back as if she could have made him, yielding her those powerful muscles as an athlete might bend before a princess. The eroticism of that jolted through her. He wore only a fitted, deep gray T-shirt, a soft, fine knit, too little for the cool spring evening. She pushed it off him.

His muscles were still engorged from his workout and tightening ever harder as she looked. He made a little sound when she placed her palm in the center of his chest, like a starving man at the first bite of food.

She stroked him everywhere, the ridged muscles of his abdomen, the soft curling hairs over hard muscle on his chest, across broad shoulders and over tense biceps. He tried to close his hands around her hips, but she pushed them down. “You told me I could use you.”

A couple of long breaths that swelled his chest against her hands. It was still early evening, the sun not yet set, and for the first time while they made love, she could see the true color of his eyes: the brown that lurked, that made them not quite black, like dark, dark water. “All right.”

It was a million times better than sitting in his
salon,
soaking up his flavors. She got to soak up him, all over everywhere him, hands running along his body, mouth kissing those gorgeous impossible muscles, all the way down, down, down his arm, over every hard curve and line of tendon and muscle, down to his wrist, to the inside of his wrist, to press a kiss into the center of his palm, to curve her face into that big hand, stroking it back and forth against the calluses, wallowing in him.

“Jaime.” His voice sounded broken, all rough and harsh, with none of that veil of gentleness she was used to.

She rubbed her face the same way over his stomach, his chest, like an animal seeking comfort, and the hand in which she had nestled followed her, riding on her skull, the nape of her neck, gripping her shoulder in a sudden spasm. She didn’t like having her nape exposed, but it didn’t feel breakable or fragile with his big hand curved over it. It felt utterly enveloped and protected.

God, the warmth of him, the strength of him, she could bury herself in it and never come out. “You’re so beautiful,” she whispered against his stomach, in English, all her French having left her.

And, “So beautiful,” against the bone and muscle of his hip as she pressed his jeans down.

And, “So beautiful,” as she slid back up him, dragging her body against his the way one might drag a finger down a plate to lick that last little bit of deliciousness, to get every taste she could.

His hands scraped up and down her back, trying not to hold her, but occasionally the stroke tightened into a grip, despite himself. He shuddered under her. “Jaime.”

Her name in his mouth was always such a shock. It made her dream all kinds of things.

She laid her body the length of him, all her weight on him, framed his face in her hands, and kissed his mouth. Taking her time. Feeling the flex and yield of his lips to her, the strength of his response, the taste of him, the way her hands could sink into his overlong hair, all silk, while the heel of her palms rubbed against the roughness of his jaw. She sank deeper and deeper into his mouth, unable to pull herself away now that she had started, kissing him over and over, angling her mouth, first one way, then another, exploring every fit.

With her every touch, more power seemed to gather in his body, more and more and more until it seemed close to breaking out of him, uncontainable, like lightning from a storm cloud. He dragged one hand over the headboard but found no purchase on its flat surface. She ran her hand up that stretched arm, over the bulge of biceps, and he fisted his hand over the pillow, squeezing one great corner of it into a small ball.

He wrenched his mouth away. “Jaime. Let me.” His other hand curled over her bottom, pressing her against his arousal.

She buried her face in his neck and let him push her jeans down, let him part her thighs, let him slide her down on him. She loved the shivering flick that ran through his body when he pulled her onto him, as if he had been touched with a whip. She loved the sound he made. “
Ma chérie
. Let me. Let me.”

His hands began to move her in a slow, steady, deep rhythm, while she kissed his shoulders. Her thigh-length sweater fell over his hands, tugged between their bodies. He slid his hands up once to push it off, but she would have none of it, pressing down again, catching it between their skin.

He did not try too hard. His focus now was elsewhere. Condensing into his sex, into the rhythm of their hips. He rolled them over suddenly, and she liked that, liked losing power, liked finding herself in the cave of his body. Caught in a cage formed by his strength. “Jaime.” He slipped a hand down the length of her, between their bodies. “Do you like that,
minette
? Do you like it?” He was breathing very hard, the rough words almost soundless. “Ma
chérie,
” he breathed as her body fell back into the mattress, all weakness, while her hips arched up. “Mine. Use me.
Oui, minou
. Use me just—like—that.”

She convulsed into him. It felt like skydiving into the sun, right into its brilliant heat. The sun surged back at her, his heat driving into her deeply, his hands hardening in one last bruising second as they both came together.

 

Later, Dom lay on his back, with one arm behind his head and the other around her, curling her into his side. She felt damp, lax, entirely his. “It’s funny,” he said softly. “I don’t feel used.”

She must have thought he was making fun, for she pinched his ribs. He caught her hand and closed it in his so she couldn’t repeat the gesture.

He turned his head to look down at her, not joking at all. “I don’t know if you’re very good at it, using people.”