The Chocolate Touch (15 page)

“G
uillemette,” Dom said to his
maîtresse de salle,
whose skill in English had been one of the reasons he’d hired her. They were alone downstairs, making sure the displays were all perfect to start the day. “What does
boo-fool
mean?” Something like that. The funny way English hit some syllables hard and swallowed the others made it difficult for him to pick them all out. Especially when they were mouthed against his skin.

Guillemette concentrated a moment. “Byoo-ti-fool?” she said finally. She flipped open one of their English-language brochures and pointed to its description of his
salon
. Oh, he knew that word. English had the strangest pronunciation.

“Beau,”
Guillemette said, and tilted her head. “More really than
beau
.
Beautiful
is a much stronger word in English.”

He felt hands run all over his skin, a soft silken stroke.

Unlike his above-stairs team, Guillemette was far too elegant and well-mannered to make fun of him, but she busied herself quite briskly with organizing sacks and displays for the day, sneaking glances at him. On her subtly made-up cheekbones, a little blush showed. Suggesting she was guessing fairly accurately at contexts in which he might have heard that word recently.

Blushing himself, he ran up the stairs.

“Are you using me for a romantic fling with a Frenchman that you can write about in your travel journal?” Dom asked that evening, as they walked. She had come late in the afternoon, when he was ready to leave the
salon
in the capable hands of his evening
responsable,
and he had sat with her while she ate his newest
tarte,
taking great and erotic delight in every morsel he watched her lips close over. Then he had walked with her past the Place République up to the Canal St. Martin. He liked this neighborhood, on the border between upscale tranquility and energetic protest and diversity. He liked the iron footbridges and the dark water and how the bars spilled directly onto its banks, the life of the street so much closer to the water here than by the Seine. Nineteenth-century buildings lined the canal, built for laborers and occupied now by people like him, who had snagged an apartment just before prices went out of the stratosphere. He liked to think he and the area had something in common, built for labor and now revealing their beauty to everyone who had underestimated them.

A romantic fling was the height he had been aiming for, at first, and he should be satisfied with having qualified. But, as with most of his ambitions, a part of him was already reaching for bigger and better things. And a part of him was trying to slap his hand for reaching for them, but given his past history, he was particularly impervious to being kept down by slaps. Even his own.

Jaime gave him an annoyed look. “You’re rather aggressively persistent, aren’t you?”

Dom tried not to look smug. If she was only just now figuring that out, he had been disguising himself pretty well.

She rolled her eyes at whatever she saw in his face, but her mouth curved. She looked at the brown-black water of the canal again. They were leaning on the rail of one of the lower footbridges, in the rustling shelter of the spring-green trees to either side of the canal. “I’ve been here three months already, Dominique. I’m not souvenir hunting.”

Three months? She had only shown up in his life two weeks ago. “So whose chocolates were you eating before?” he asked jealously.
After all those chocolates I made for you,
Sylvain had said. Sylvain didn’t even have a
salon.
If he was feeding her his chocolates, it was somewhere private.

“I like La Maison des Sorcières,” she volunteered.

The place Philippe’s fiancée Magalie and her aunts had. Where they made
chocolat chaud
and dark chocolate witches and pretended to themselves they could ensorcel anyone who walked by. Which felt disturbingly like it might be true, sometimes; he could never understand why Magalie’s hot chocolate tempted him so much when he was the person who made the best damn hot chocolate in Paris.

Yes, he could see Jaime there, soaking up that witch-house atmosphere with the same concentration with which she had sat soaking up his. Drinking their chocolate. Nibbling on their witches. Damn it, now he was jealous of a lesbian couple in their sixties and their niece. He slanted Jaime a glance. “You’re not attracted to women, are you?”

“I was just checking!”

“Good lord.” She sounded resigned, a little wary or tired. “Have most of the women you’ve dated been ambi-sexual gymnasts, or what?”

Kind of, yes. He considered the length of the canal for a moment, the little bridges marching away under the glow of the old lamps, such a tighter and more intimate chain of bridges than those over the glorious sweep of the Seine. “I haven’t actually dated them.” He kept his tone as neutral as he could.

She curled her hands around the metal rail. She didn’t give him a shocked, uncomprehending look again. She didn’t look at him at all. She just stood there, staring into almost-black water, digesting the information. “It’s almost the same color as your eyes,” she said finally, her tone a little dry, self-mocking.

He looked down at the still, deep water. Over on the far bridge from them, someone imitating the film
Amélie
tried to ricochet a stone, and the water trembled a little. Just like him.

“I don’t understand what you’re getting out of this,” she said suddenly, and he looked up to find her watching him sideways.

“Getting out of this?” Maybe something was being lost in translation.

She made a bleak gesture between herself and him.

“You,” he said, uncomprehending. And realized he sounded exactly like her the night before.

Her eyebrows flexed deeply. Her head stayed tucked down and away from him, but her eyes tracked up his body. She opened her mouth, closed it hard, and finally opened it again. “That makes no sense.”

His hands itched to close around slim shoulders, to trace her with his palms, even here in public, claiming every shape of her body with his touch. “How can’t it make sense?”

There was something she was not telling him, her face severe and frustrated. Something she could not stand to say. He, of all people, could recognize that. “Why not the brunette?” she finally said, brusquely, an obvious red herring. She pressed those full lips of hers together hard. “Because you already had her?”

He stiffened. It was true, he had. And it had been good sex, too. Rough and wild, the kind of sex that seemed to require a mutual tip shoved into each other’s pockets before they parted. The thought of Jaime imagining him that way—imagining herself used in that way—made him feel sick.
Putain,
was there nothing of him beneath the surface he presented to her, and the chocolates and pastries he fed her, that was good enough to deserve her?

He wished he could make himself
table rase,
erase everything of him up until the point he had met her, the way he swept an eraser across the whiteboard in his office at the start of a new week.

He was trying so hard to be different for her, to not be the man he had been before. And she couldn’t even tell. To her, he was still—a sordid, rough user of a man. He looked down at his hands, closing around the railing, half expecting to see them chapped from cold, bloody work.

No. Cocoa butter softened everything. The morning he had woken up, after a week working chocolate in the pastry kitchens, to discover how soft his hands were had been the morning that decided his future career path. But no matter how much he drowned them in chocolate, the scars and the size weren’t something he could ever change. And he kept the calluses on the palms on purpose. In case he needed them.

“I just want you,” he said, low. “I’m sorry.” That pissed him off, to hear himself apologizing for wanting her. Couldn’t it be just a little bit a compliment to her?

She looked as taken aback as if he had thrown cold water into her face. “Did you just
apologize
?”

He shook his head. Wishing desperately that he hadn’t.

“Why?” She searched his face, and he struggled to get his gentlemanly mask back in place. He had slipped up, there. She had spotted something. She was trying hard to see behind it.

“Why would you be sorry?” she persisted, probingly, a dog after a bone.

Putain d’imbécile,
he apostrophized himself. What was the point of trying to convince her she should put herself in his hands if he was going to confess the truth at the first most casual interrogation?

His damn better half had seen a chance to warn her. Better
half
? Who was he kidding? A feeble ten percent, at best.

He threw himself back into the refuge of his more dominant selfish ninety percent as hard as he could. “For not having better words for it. You asked what I’m getting out of this. You. That’s all I want.”

All.
And maybe a serving of moon and stars while he was at it. What a stupid thing to say.

“Why?”
she asked incredulously.

He gave a funny little shrug, trying to slide this moment toward safer territory. “You still haven’t let me count all your freckles.”

She had an uncomfortably penetrating look when she wasn’t lost in a romantic daze. It boded ill for a long-term relationship. “So once you have, you’ll be ready to move on?”

His heart pounded too hard, that sick feeling resurging. He turned back to the canal abruptly, gripping the rail, staring down at the brown water. “Do you
want
me to move on?” Shit, why had he asked her that? She might say yes.

“I would understand it, if you did,” she said slowly, reluctantly.

His hands gripped harder. “Why? Because you want to, yourself?”

She gave him one of those incredulous looks. “No. Because I’m the one getting everything out of this.”

His lips parted in shock. Maybe his disguise as a nice guy was too good. He snuck a glance at her. If he told her what an idiotic thing that was to say, might her illusions shatter too quickly?

“You only get me, as you said.” There was a grim downward set to her mouth, her gaze internal. “What there is of me.”

She sounded like his own internal voice. As if herself wasn’t that much to offer. But
his
internal voice was justified. He tried a smile. “I like that. You.”

She studied him in puzzled frustration. “Not that this is the most important thing in the world,
obviously,
but that brunette was nearly as gorgeous as you.”

She thought he was gorgeous? A silly, pleased grin grew over his face, even as he flushed. No wonder his team couldn’t stop making fun of him. This was pathetic.

Gorgeous. He tucked his hands into his back jeans pockets, just to make sure they didn’t spoil the picture. “I like you,” he repeated. That had to be obvious by now. Surely he didn’t have to dig his entire dirty soul up and spread it at her feet right this second to prove it to her?

“Why?”
she said again.

He looked at her, all freckles and bones that should be softer, and that tsunami of arousal and warmth flooded through him yet again. He was almost getting used to how very helpless he felt in its waves. “Every time I look at you, I want to lick you all over,” he breathed.

She blushed over every visible centimeter of skin, and he glanced involuntarily up the street to his apartment. She didn’t know how close it was, and he couldn’t decide if he should tell her. What if he let her more deeply into him and she didn’t like what she saw? But if he could get her up there before the sun finished setting, even she couldn’t make him turn off the sun so she could hide. He would be able to see how far she blushed.

He slipped one hand out of his jeans pocket and curled it over hers on the bridge railing, almost forgetting the scars. “So how are you using me?”

“Not again.” He liked her exasperation. He had never been at a point in a relationship where the woman could roll her eyes and let him hold her hand at the same time. He wondered if she could roll her eyes and still let him make love to her, too.

“You’re married. Is that it?” Oh, God, that would be the most horrible thing anyone had ever done to him.

“
No,
I’m not married. Have you
ever
dated anyone with any morals or sense?”

He slanted her a dark, rueful glance and decided not to point out the obvious about his sexual history to her again. “I am right now, I take it?” he asked hopefully.

Her smile burst up like the sun coming up on a planet that had never felt a sunrise.

What?

Whatever he had said, it made her slip closer to him, tucking herself up in the arm he immediately, obligingly curved around her.