The Chocolate Touch (19 page)

“Y
ou’re dating someone who survived a traumatic beating recently?” Pierre asked, disturbed. “It makes sense that you would end up with someone like that, but . . .”

Dominique pressed his heels against the floor, driving himself harder against the back of his seat. “I’m not repeating any
putain de cycle
.”

“It would only be natural if you were attracted to someone like your mother,” Pierre said gently.

Pierre hesitated.

“She was attacked while doing development work by people who were hired to do it, which is hardly the same thing as someone who remains in an abusive relationship,” he said between his teeth. What kind of development work?
Putain,
what was her last name? Was he some kind of animal, that he didn’t know those things about her already?

Pierre maintained a neutral expression. “How do you feel about it?”

“She’s strong.” Dom met the psychologist’s eyes for a moment. “She’s strong enough to kick me out.” To zip that suitcase up and leave him. The day before, his day off, which should have been a day of pure bliss, strolling through Paris with her, had been awkward, delicate, and rather horrible. He had felt as if everything he did, from taking her hand too carefully to letting it go when her jaw set and she snapped something about not being fragile, was breaking something between them.

He glanced uneasily at his phone. Jaime hadn’t shown up today. She knew he left around four, didn’t she? And Guillemette was smart enough to text him if she did show up?

Pierre looked thoughtful, which was one of his tricks of the trade, and glanced down at his notes. “Is eighteen still the last time you hit someone?”

“Yes,” Dom said wistfully. There had been three of them and one of him, and all four of them had wound up bloody and bruised. There had been something gloriously satisfying about it, and if one of his opponents hadn’t pulled a knife and gotten Dom a night’s stay in the emergency room and all four of them arrested—he might right this minute be his own father, instead of the man he had decided to become.

Pierre glanced at his birth date and did the math. “Ten years. That’s a pretty long run, Dominique.”

He had always respected this about Pierre: the man didn’t try to make you sit on a couch. He let you have a nice, hard chair to push yourself back into. “I’ve never been in a relationship with anyone who was vulnerable to me. And you have no idea how much I would like to beat the fuck out of someone right now.”

“But you’re not,” Pierre said approvingly. “That’s the important part.”

“They’re in prison on another continent, Pierre. And I hope their prison is one of those horrendous hellholes you hear about, too. What, did you think it was my
self-control
that was stopping me?”

“Ah.” Pierre, the intellectual who believed in using his words to resolve things, let one corner of his mouth kick up wryly. “Well. We’re going to hold you excused on that one. But when you say you’ve never been in a relationship with anyone vulnerable to you, I’m not sure I agree. When you first came to see me, it was for your employees . . . ? Who, I believe, have in several cases come from very problematic backgrounds and would therefore be considered a vulnerable and dependent group . . .”

“You don’t
hit
your employees. You might yell at them or in some psychological way be a bastard—”

“But you don’t,” Pierre said. “You don’t yell at them or psychologically abuse them.”

“No, they walk all over me,” Dom said, aggrieved. Sylvain and Philippe probably got to yell at their team once in a while to keep them in line, without suffering mountains of angst over it.

“They don’t abuse
you
?”

Dom’s eyebrows went up. It had been sixteen years since anyone had been able to get away with abusing him. “No, I think it’s a pretty happy place to work for everyone, to tell the truth.” He could feel light coming out of his
salon
and kitchens from blocks away. It was a heaven to hell contrast with the abattoir where he had started his working life. He loved it, the contrast. Every single day he walked into his
salon,
he loved it.

“That’s an amazing accomplishment in and of itself, Dominique. All your work is amazing.” A diehard fan, Pierre came in at least once a week.

Dom couldn’t stop a pleased smile. But he said, “Those are employees. The relationship is different. There’s been no real test of me, ever. I’ve never allowed one.” How the hell could he be so selfish as to make Jaime his guinea pig? He needed to let her go.

But she said he was her sun. If he let her go . . . she might be cold and empty. And who would destroy anyone who tried to hurt her?

“Hmm.”

Dom had forgotten how annoying Pierre’s
hmms
were.

“You said once a long time ago that you had never hit anyone smaller than you.”

“No.”

“Not ever. Not even young on the playground.”

“I got in a lot of fights, but I think they were with boys pretty much my size.” He had been a big child, but it wasn’t until his teenage growth spurt that he had turned into such a bruiser. He hadn’t really had anything against any of the younger, smaller kids, anyway. It had been the bigger ones, the ones who tried to bully him or others, who drove him into a rage.

“You know, Dominique, I tried to tell you once before, and you left and never came back, but I’m going to say it again. I think you might be selling yourself short in relationships. I don’t think you’ll let yourself ever do what your father did.”

His
hmms
were annoying, but fundamentally, Pierre was such a damned good guy. “How can you be so sure?”

“I can’t be
sure
.”

Dom’s heart sank. He wanted sure.

“But I have much greater hope in you than you seem to in yourself, Dominique. You’re not so good at hope, but I’ve never seen anyone to match you in determination. You just go and do what you decide you want yourself to do. If you don’t know how, you find out how. Like now.” Pierre nodded at him.

Dominique stared at his big taut hands, trying not to admit something. That maybe, he was focusing on the question of whether he should let her go because it was easier than the real fear: when and how she would leave him. He took a deep breath, concentrated on it, let it slowly out. “So . . . how? How do I do this deeper relationship thing?”

“Have you considered that both of you could come see me together?”

Dominique shook his head, repelled. “
She
doesn’t need it.”

Pierre’s eyebrows rose a little bit. “Someone who was traumatically beaten just a few months ago? Are you sure?”

“She’s very strong,” Dominique said stubbornly. He saw her sitting in his
salon,
the still, absorbed focus of her. She had him. He was her healing. Thinking about it that way made him a little uneasy. He could feed her senses and her body, he could warm her, he could let her soak up everything she wanted from him. But . . . he wasn’t a doctor.

“It might help you two to understand each other. Given her past experience and yours—you’re going to have some issues you need to communicate about.”

Dominique gave him an appalled look. “No. I mean, she can communicate about whatever she needs to, but she doesn’t need to know
anything
about my past.” Drag her into that ugly period of worthlessness? She thought he was her
sun.
Not some dirty mongrel that had heaved itself out of the mud.

If Pierre raised his eyebrows one more time, he might glue the things in place. “Do I take it that this woman doesn’t, in fact, know anything?”

Dominique shook his head vehemently.

“All she knows about you is that you’re one of the world’s top chocolatiers, and she has no idea what you climbed up from to get there?”

Dominique knew he was looking unbearably smug. But, come on, it was quite a disguise to pull off.

“Well. You asked how to work on having a deeper relationship. Honesty might be a good place to start.”

Was his psychologist
crazy
? “Pierre. She
trusts
me. You want me to be honest with her and ruin that?”

Pierre gave him a very wry look and waited.

“Fuck that.” She let his hands curve around her skull. She let him lock her body under all his size and muscle, and she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him while he did. He was never, never, never going to let her find out that no woman in her right mind would trust him with herself. “Pierre—you’re a good man, and I respect your advice. But I would lie
comme un arracheur de dents
for this woman.” Lie like the lowest worm there was.

 

No
texto
from Guillemette. He swung back by his
salon,
but Jaime hadn’t come by.

She hated his knowledge of the attack. He could tell.

Pierre would probably say he should let her see one of his wounds, let her know that he knew what it was like, to have someone hurt you, to keep on doing it after you were on the ground and not fighting anymore and not even conscious to receive it, to do it when all you had done was want to love them.

But everybody knew that boys raised violently became violent men.
He
knew it. He rode that violence inside him like a wild beast all the time, trying not to let it buck him off. He couldn’t tell her that she should leave him.

She thought he was her sun. She thought she wanted to soak him into her soul, that he was that beautiful. When they used the chocolate in the enrobing machines to coat something with nuts or fruit in it, they had to purify it afterward: pour it all through stretched women’s pantyhose, let the sieve catch even the finest bits that corrupted the chocolate’s purity, then return the chocolate to the cleaned
enrobeuse,
maybe temper it again, as if all its past use and abuse had never been. He wished he could do that to himself for her.

He didn’t want her to realize he wasn’t a sun.

He hated it when she didn’t come. He got that cold, desperate feeling in his stomach, the fear trying to push out of the shell he locked it into. But she hadn’t come once before, right? When she was feeling exposed and vulnerable.

So he went to the gym, and she wasn’t there, and he cut his workout short and went to her apartment. She wasn’t there, either, and he kept trying to tell himself not to be an idiot, not to squeeze all the breath out of her by grabbing onto her too tight. She didn’t have to be glued to him.

He had stepped back out onto the street—lecturing himself that he couldn’t hang out there waiting for her to show up, that was too
louche,
too creepy, something his father would probably have done—when he saw her. Coming up the street with her hands empty, no shopping, a tiny backpack of a purse. Her steps fractured when she saw him, and the man striding briskly behind her flowed off to the street around her and back to the sidewalk without even breaking pace, still talking on his phone.

Dom let him pass and looked back at her. Her eyes were wide, somber.
Merde.

He left her door and met her halfway. Three quarters of the way. It took her a while to start moving toward him.

“I missed you.” He smiled down at her, while his heart pounded sickeningly.

Her face softened into a shy smile. His heart eased a little. “You must get tired of me sitting in your
salon
all day.”

“Ah, non,”
he said involuntarily.
“Non. Non.”
It bathed his whole body in warmth to know she was sitting there. Soaking him up. Sometimes he still stood in the little corner of glass and stone, smearing chocolate prints against the glass as he watched her, the poor child outside the candy shop he couldn’t quite believe he had the right to enter. The size of his chocolate prints, compared to the little foggy ones they often had to wipe off the front of his
own
windows, was . . . humiliating. Like his insides should really have grown at the same rate as his outsides.

He reached out and stroked the tips of his fingers along the line between her hair and cheek, to prove to himself that he could. That she would like it. “I like feeding you.”

Her smile bloomed.

“Come for a walk?” he coaxed. “I know a restaurant you will love.” Thank God for his city. He had a thousand restaurants she would love. That was three years of nightly temptation.

But her smile faded. She bit her lip. “I can’t.”

His heart clutched with panic again.
Normal,
he tried to tell himself.
Normal that she would sometimes have other plans. Don’t, don’t do something stupid or clingy or creepy. Don’t you dare ask her what they are.
“All right,” he said easily. Easily. God. He trailed his fingers over her shoulder, down her arm, lifting the tips of her fingers in the tips of his. For all the world as if he was confident and normal. “Come by tomorrow and I’ll make you something special.”

Her smile kicked back up. Her eyes clung to his. “All right.”

He looped his arm around her, turned them both into the nearest doorway, and kissed her. She pressed herself instantly against him, as if she liked the feel of him along the length of her body. He smiled down at her, deeply relieved. “I’ll miss you tonight.”

Her hands flexed into his shirt, grabbing fistfuls. “Me, too.”

So . . . he tried to feel like a completely normal person when he left her, and not like he wanted to throw his arms around her legs so that she had to drag him with her every step.

“J
amie. I’m just trying to tell you. He’s a total bastard.” Sylvain stood at his granite kitchen counter, running a knife through shallots with blurred speed as if they were Dominique’s fingers. Sylvain in a kitchen, the murderous poet.

Cade toasted Jaime silently with her wine and wandered out into the living room area as if this subject had nothing to do with her. Lying traitor. She had invited Jaime to facilitate this lecture.

“You know, I had other offers for this evening,” Jaime said coldly. Strolling around Paris hand in hand with Dominique. She
hated
proving she was strong again and not a clinging vine. It made those hours of brutal physical therapy look like a piece of cake.

Next time you’re trying not to cling, go take in a show. They’re dancing
Firebird
and
The Rite of Spring
at the Opéra Garnier. You might find it motivating. You can decide whether you want to be the sacrificial virgin or the bird that rises from the ashes.
Instead of defending her sex life to her family.

Someday she had to tell Dominique her last name, so she could make him join her for these cozy dinners. But for now, it was nice to be anonymous. He couldn’t Google her and find the five pages of results that suggested she had done nothing with her life but get beat up.

Although seeing Sylvain’s face if she arrived with Dominique Richard in tow as his dinner guest would have been priceless. Not worth adding one more possible blow to her relationship with Dominique, but otherwise hilarious.

Dominique’s face, though, when she had said she was busy that evening. That hard, guarded look. Her whole right side felt empty, as if it should be pressed against something. That broad swath of skin over her shoulders and down over her biceps, where his arm would have draped, was cold . . .

“I’m just—I’m worried about you.” Sylvain studied her, a man whose very first acquaintance with her had been when she was a battered pulp being hauled around on a hospital bed, and who was never going to get over it. “You’re vulnerable right now.
Et il s’en fout.”
He doesn’t give a damn.

Jaime remembered the shower, being held like a teddy bear. “That’s not true, Sylvain.”

He gave her a frustrated look. “He’s a very good flirt. You wouldn’t necessarily know
qu’il s’en fout
.”

“He’s not, really.” Cade drifted back from the living room. “A good flirt. I mean, he is in a direct way, but the long, elaborate, sensual seduction—not his thing.” Her gaze lingered a subtle moment on Sylvain, giving Jaime far more insight into her sister’s sex life than she was at all comfortable with.

Why the hell did Cade feel so comfortable barging into hers? “Cade, can you call up a picture on your phone of the man you think is Dominique Richard? Because I’m really not sure we know the same person.”

Cade’s eyebrows went up, and then
she
looked uncomfortable. Oh, great, Jaime had given her a visual. This was ghastly.

“I don’t mean to be any ruder than the two of you are, but my personal life is none of your business.”

And God knew, comparing the way Dominique Richard had flirted with each sister was
not
her idea of fun.

Sylvain gave her a blankly uncomprehending look. “We’re your family. How in the world could you say that?”

Cade grinned at her smugly. “He’s got a little sister of his own.”

It pissed her off beyond belief, the way Cade always thought of her as the little sister who needed guidance. “Is she all grown up, too?”

“Oh, no, she’s only twenty-one.” Sylvain sounded appalled.

“Sylvain, didn’t you start your own business at twenty-one?”

He dumped all the shallots in a pan and gave her a long, steady, disgruntled look.

“Look, I am in exactly the situation I want to be in, and if you would give me the respect of believing I wouldn’t let myself be in any other type of situation, I would appreciate that.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you,” Cade informed her fiancé ironically. “She’s using
him.
”

“Oh, pour l’amour de Dieu.”
Sylvain attacked some mushrooms far more viciously than the weak little fungi merited. He stopped after a moment to give Jaime a hard look. “He’s not violent, is he?”

“You can just feel it simmering in him all the time, violence.”

“You’re just saying that because he’s so big and he looks so . . . rough.” Rough-edged, hard, bad-boy, leathers . . . trying to hide that soft ganache center of his. He was so
gentle
with her.

“No,” Sylvain said impatiently. “
Putain,
Jamie, I grew up in the
banlieue,
too. Not as bad a one as his, but I know the difference between bravado violence and the real thing. He’s got it in him.”

“Maybe with
you
! You’re not exactly his friend and ally.”

“How many times did you say he got arrested?” Sylvain asked Cade.

“Sylvain!”
Cade hissed. She gave Jaime an awkward look.

Jaime’s blood boiled. “Did you have him investigated
more
after you heard I was going out with him? What the hell, Cade? Did I do that to you with Sylvain?”

“You didn’t even know about Sylvain or care,” Cade said impatiently and with an old anger. “You were off in Papua New Guinea at the time. And, to answer the question, once. He got arrested once, when he was eighteen. A knife fight, but he didn’t have the knife. The times before that were calls to
la D. D. A. S. S.
when he was a lot younger.”

Jaime absolutely refused to take advantage of Cade’s continued prying into other people’s private lives, but . . . “What’s
la D. D. A. S. S.
?”

Cade raised her eyebrows at Sylvain.

“They check on family issues,” he said reluctantly. “And some other things.”

Jaime’s eyebrows plummeted. She walked away through the living room to stand at Sylvain’s great balcony windows, open to the spring night.

“Don’t start getting
le coeur tendre
!” Sylvain called after her, frustrated. “Have some sense!”

“Jamie? Sense?” Cade asked incredulously, and Jaime’s head almost exploded. How could her family honestly believe that she had reformed cacao farm labor practices in difficult parts of the world without at least some sense being involved? Did they think it was all wild-eyed activism and pure luck?

Yeah, they did, didn’t they?

“What were the calls for?” Jaime asked stiffly, looking back.

Cade shook her head. “You know those kinds of records are sealed. I don’t know how my team managed to find out they even happened. His mother left when he was pretty young. It could have been teachers trying to make sure he was being cared for properly.”

If his teachers were trying to make sure he was all right, then he must have been showing some pretty obvious signs of not being all right. No mother and—what kind of father sent his son to work in a slaughterhouse? She flinched at the possibilities, her heart curling in her in pity for a little boy, in awe of a grown man. Was there nothing he couldn’t rise above, to become that big, rough, gentle man proffering her wild chocolates with a coaxing smile?

Damn it, how could she ask him to stick himself with a woman who couldn’t rise above
anything
?

“I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” Jaime said abruptly, harshly. “We can talk about something else, or I’m leaving.”

Cade sighed. Sylvain looked frustrated, biting his tongue.

But they talked about something else.

 

After dinner, Cade nestled against Sylvain on the couch, while Jaime curled against the lonely edge of an armchair, trying not to feel miserable. They didn’t mean to rub her isolation in her face. But at that moment, she wanted nothing so much as to spend the rest of her life exactly like them: in Paris, in some simple, quiet apartment, curled up against . . .

She looked down at her hands. Feeling a wash of need that terrified her. Couldn’t she stand on her own anymore?

The irony. She had spent so much of her life wanting
not
to be like Cade or their family. She had been the independent one, the one who was wild and free. And now she was just begging for a nice, safe cage.

Begging for it from a man who had never had a cage in his life, who had broken through every bar that held him.

“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.”