The Chocolate Touch (23 page)

D
om saw the old man waiting for him in the dark, silent street, a huge bag in one hand, before he even got to the door. “Not you again,” he said in exasperation. He very definitely needed some time on his own right now, just him, his
salon,
and his chocolate. The things he could count on. This tendency of his heart to start believing that Jaime might actually not leave him was scaring the hell out of him. God, her body tucked so trustingly against his on the quay . . .

“Missed you the other day.” James Corey sounded very put out about it, too. “You get to take off work often that way? To spend the afternoon carousing?”

Dom raised his eyebrows at the old man’s ire. “Been a while since you spent the afternoon carousing?”

The old billionaire muttered something angrily under his breath.

Dom just glared back at him. “It’s five thirty in the morning. Do you think I got up early so I could enjoy someone else’s company?” He wanted to work on his sculpture. He could almost believe in it, this morning. Almost not flinch in fear as its form revealed itself under his hands. The Chocolatiers’ Expo was that weekend; he couldn’t keep putting it off forever, until he could actually believe in himself. He never would have gotten anywhere, if he did that.

“If you already get up this early at your age, just see how much you can sleep when you’re mine,” James Corey told him. “And this way, I don’t run into anyone I don’t want to.”

“
I
do,” Dom said indignantly.

“Yes, well, I have a feeling one of your customers might be even ruder to me than you are.”

He had some snobby customers, all right, but he was pretty sure the old man was more than a match for them. Rolling his eyes, he let James Corey follow him inside, primarily because he felt uncomfortable leaving an old man on a dark, empty street to be mugged. He locked the door behind them and flicked on the staircase light, because he loved that, coming into work with the shop all dark, only that spiral staircase gleaming like Joseph’s Ladder into heaven.

“I have to say, you have a really nice spot here,” the old man allowed.

Dom sighed. He loved being the first person to walk up that glowing staircase in the morning, no one else in the world but him. But . . . old man . . . all that. He sighed a second time, extra heavily to make sure it was audible, and gestured for James Corey to precede him. “But don’t come back in the morning again.
Putain,
for this, I should have stayed in bed.” His arm over Jaime, her fingers curling sleep-loose to hold that arm to her. Promising not to leave him, until he wanted just for a while to forget his fear, to sink into her and believe her.

“We’re still negotiating that spinach deal,” James Corey said.

“Oh, am I supposed to be bargaining you up from the twenty million?”

The old man snorted. “I admit, I had some ulterior motives with the twenty-million offer. But seriously, for you to create me a chocolate spinach bar, what would it cost?”

“I think you misunderstood. It’s
Sylvain
’s name I want to see plastered all over some cheap bar in the supermarket.”

“Listen, our bars are good enough for
my
name to be on them,” the old man said dangerously.

Dom shrugged. “Everyone has his standards.”

“You’re just so convinced you’re too good for the Coreys, aren’t you?”

Dom laughed involuntarily. “Just my chocolate.”

James Corey gave him one of those sharp glances of his. “Oh, really? Don’t have too high an opinion of
yourself
?”

“Why don’t we say twenty-five million? Is that a high enough opinion of myself for you?”

“Selling yourself?”

Dom groaned. “Can I call you a taxi or something? I was really looking forward to coming to work today.” Well, he had been at first. Striding through the pre-dawn empty streets, the scent of Jaime still on him, ready to turn that block of chocolate into something so beautiful, so perfect. The closer he got to facing that statue, the more fear had stolen into him, the way it did when he caught himself believing Jaime might not leave him. It was like facing a very big gorge and trying to walk across it on a bridge made out of one very thin piece of paper.

“I brought you some spinach.” The old man set the huge bag down on the counter, right at the base of that half-formed chocolate sculpture, as if the damn green leaves were naturally more important.

Dom grinned wryly. He had to like someone who was that annoying. And, well, it was easier than facing his fears. He yanked up the bag of spinach with a great show of impatience and stomped back to his
cuisine.
“Did you bring a contract that spells out the payment schedule and that you can’t use my name?”

“Why don’t we talk more about the payment later?”

“Ouais,”
he said dryly. “That’s what I thought would happen to that twenty-five million.” He poured some cream into a pot and picked through the spinach leaves, tossing in only the freshest. Then he went back into the other room and considered his range of Valrhona for a moment and finally selected a blend of Trinitarios and Criollo, a 72 percent with a powerfully bitter base. “This ought to do it.”

He slammed the bag a few good hard knocks against the edge of a counter, breaking the block inside into smaller chunks, then emptied it into a great metal bowl, while the cream infused. He hadn’t bothered to turn on a light in the
cuisine,
so that the illumination came only from the stairwell end of the main room of the
laboratoire
. As the old man hovered over him in the dark, they could have been two alchemists concocting the elixir of life. “There.” Feeling that the cream had infused with about as much of the bland green flavor as he could take, he sieved the leaves out, pouring the not-quite-boiling now-green cream over the chocolate.

James Corey gaped at him as he dropped the dirty sieve full of leaves into the nearest sink and started stirring the chocolate-cream. “Wh—you threw out the spinach! That’s not nutritious!”

Dom stopped stirring.
“Nutritious?”

“Yes! You know, something moms can feel proud to feed to their kids.”

“American moms can feel proud to feed spinach-chocolate bars to their kids? Are you sure that even your country is that crazy?”

The old man folded his arms, outraged. “D-day mean anything to you?”

What? “Were you there?” he asked, his tone shifting into respect despite himself.

“Two years too young,” James Corey said reluctantly. “And my dad had had polio, so he couldn’t join up, either. But we
did
make the ration bars. Chocolate base, but as packed full of nutrition as we could get them.”

Dom gaped at him, for a moment too outraged even to speak. “You are trying to get me to imitate
World War Two ration bars
?”

“Better,” the old man said stubbornly. “I want something gourmet.”

“Oh, go away,” Dom said in complete disgust. Waste of a whole pack of chocolate, some good cream, and his nice, quiet morning by himself working with his sculpture in the dark. Which was the only way he could really work on her anymore. He was afraid if he stood up there carving on her with the lights on, somebody—the block of chocolate maybe—might see too much of his soul. “You know, I could have slept in with my girlfriend this morning, if I had known you were going to be stalking me.”

There. He had said the word again. And he was going to keep saying it,
girlfriend,
until he stopped feeling as if he had accidentally thrown himself off a cliff.

James Corey pressed his lips together tightly. “I really don’t think you need to describe your sleeping arrangements to me. That’s rude, even for you.”

“Thanks. She’s really cute, too, have I mentioned?”

James Corey gritted his teeth and muttered something under his breath about “granddaughters” and “these damned Parisians.”

A flicker of a memory went through Dom’s brain. His team gossiping about the delay in Cade and Sylvain’s wedding. “How’s your other granddaughter, by the way?”

James Corey stiffened, gazing at him with oddly bright eyes.

“I heard she was in the hosp—” Dom stopped. And stared into those familiar blue eyes.

For a moment, no one said anything, Dominique growing whiter and whiter and James Corey smugger and smugger, as if he had been caught red-handed and that was exactly his favorite way to be caught.

Without a word, feeling as if he was walking through solid ice, Dom turned and strode into his office. It took him a second to boot up his computer. But the image results for
Jaime Corey
came back instantly. There she was with an Ivorian man in a T-shirt, standing in front of a blackboard nailed to two posts stuck in the ground, a thatched roof offering it shelter from the sun. The man had one arm slung around her much smaller shoulders and was grinning for the camera. Her hair was long, caught up in a ponytail from which red-caramel wisps were escaping around her fuller, younger face, her nose shiny from the heat and humidity. She wore a huge hat and a tunic of thin, long-sleeved brightly patterned cotton, to protect that fair freckled skin. She looked so confident, so sure of herself, as if nothing in the world could touch her.

There she was—
putain,
a body on a stretcher surrounded by emergency professionals, being shifted into a helicopter. Then another with a forced smile for the camera, her face so very thin and two-months-in-the-hospital pale, her hair barely an inch long. That must have been just before she started showing up in his
salon.

There was no chronological order to the search results. There was one of a very young boy carrying on his head a huge burlap bag that looked as if it must weigh far more than he did. Beside him was another figure, fallen to one knee under a similar huge sack, her head twisted under it awkwardly, a tangled ponytail forced across her face by the burlap.
Putain,
he had even seen that one before, it had been all over the media at the time.

There was another one, the same boy a few years older. It was hard to tell who was prouder, him or Jaime, as he stood beside her with a diploma in his hands. He was looking very serious; Jaime looked as if she had been caught crying.

Jaime Corey.

She had told him she was wealthy.

She had told him she worked with labor practices and against exploitation of children.

And now it was suddenly—all true. He could
see
it.

See that when she made a choice between leaving him or not, who he was asking her to abandon. The child in him uncurled sulkily from its fetal position, wanting to tell that boy in the photo to buzz off. That he needed her, too.

As if he needed any more proof of what a bastard he was.

As if she had ever had any real intention of giving herself to him.

Corey. That was no minor last name to not mention. He didn’t know it because she hadn’t wanted him to know it. She had wanted to keep part of herself separate. Safe.

He supposed he was lucky she had told him her real first name.

“She never liked to be a parasite, our Jamie,” her
fucking namesake
said from the door behind him. “She always had a thing about it, even when she was very young. Stupid school. Some left wing professor got hold of her, and we never got her back.”

“Get out.” Dom spoke flat, low. “Get out of my place.”

The billionaire shrugged at the order. “Has she told you about the dinner invitation yet?”

“Get the hell out.”

“Tonight. Her dad’s flying in, too. That would be Mack Corey, current president of Corey Chocolate.”

“He can go fuck himself, too.”

“I’ll pass on the message. Meanwhile, it’s a real family get-together. And we would like you as our guest of honor.”

S
omething was wrong with Dominique, Jaime thought. He had barely spoken to her when she came in after her gym workout that morning, his lips a flat, hard, non-responsive line when she kissed him. A bitter fury seemed to simmer in him, like that first time she had seen him, staring at her across Philippe Lyonnais’s
salon
. Like, and yet far, far worse. He was riding it hard, that fury. He was not letting it buck him off. But he wasn’t letting it go, either. She couldn’t get near him.

She stood beneath the great chocolate sculpture. Carving tools lay all around the counter at its base, as well as chocolate shavings, some of which had melted in Dominique’s hair. Her lips curled. He was so big, so hard, he made her feel so safe, and yet sometimes, there were those little moments, when she wanted to squeeze him to her like a little boy. Her hand had started to lift toward him, still out of sight behind the counter he kept between them as he worked on the sculpture’s hem, when he lifted his gaze and speared her with it across the folds of chocolate, black and hard.

Her hand dropped. She rocked back a step, taking a careful breath. “Is this—that question about leaving you again?” It was the closest thing they had had to a fight in the past two days.

His mouth hardened still further. “I guess so.” “Would it—” She drew a breath. It was kind of hard to ask a man if he would be willing to marry you when he was acting so hostile. The idea had come to her while she was struggling to lift far too much weight in the gym. It was a strange idea, maybe. They had known each other so short a time, and yet she felt she knew everything she needed to know about him. Maybe she had known all she needed to know before she even met him, from his rosebuds and rough stone and the taste of his wild, dark, passionate soul on her tongue. But certainly she knew now, his strength and his hunger, and the way he held her hand as if he would lose an arm before he would lose his grip on it.

She had spent so much time basking in his warmth and strength, not realizing he was getting so much he needed back from her. She’d been turned in on herself, healing, taking. Not
thinking,
because he seemed so willing to be used by her. He was so hungry to keep giving more.

She still didn’t quite understand what he was getting from her. But he was getting
something.
Something he was desperate not to lose.

She thought of that ten-year-old boy realizing his mother was gone. That it was just him, and the father who would send him to work in a slaughterhouse two years later.

And thought that no matter how premature it was, maybe the ability to count on long-term was the very thing they needed. And that maybe
her
asking
him
would heal about five thousand wounds in his soul. And him saying yes would wipe her fresh and new and whole again, a slate ready for a brand-new day.

Maybe she would only work at the organizational level, work from Paris. Cade claimed she could end up doing even more good that way. Maybe Jaime couldn’t get herself back in the field again. She didn’t know yet. She had assumed that growing strong meant leaving Dominique. But . . . there, in the gym, she had kept seeing Sylvain and Cade cuddled together on the couch, an image that seemed to flash across her retina with every single press up from that bench, Atlas lifting the world. When the two got engaged, they had thought they had it figured out—Cade would give up her life and choose Sylvain’s. Now they weren’t sure that would always work. But they were sure
they
would work, whatever they did about their professional lives.

She watched Dominique chisel with grim care, as if, no matter how badly he wanted to hack the hell out of something, he was going to
force
this statue to be beautiful.

Maybe if she could get him to
smile
at her again, she could do something. Dominique
always
smiled at her. From the very first time he had introduced himself, when he saw her, his eyes warmed like sunlight on that deep, dark water.

She stroked an uneasy finger across the counter, picking up chiseled fragments of chocolate on it, and nibbled them.

His eyes flickered to that movement. Maybe for a second his mouth almost thought about softening.

Suddenly he set his chisel down and leaned all the way across the counter, his hands gripping the edge closest to her. He leaned in close, his eyes glittering bleakly, his private whisper cutting like glass: “You had no right.”

She flinched, not even knowing what she had no right to do.

“To sit there and eat my chocolate like you couldn’t get enough of me,” he whispered fiercely. “I
love
you. And you
always
meant to leave.” His hands gripped the edge of the counter so tightly, if it hadn’t been marble, it would have broken.
That was why he was gripping it, and not her,
she realized.

She slipped her arms between his, sliding them forward through his chocolate shavings until their faces were only inches apart. “I never thought you would want me to stay. Not at first. You’re so much bigger than I am. In every way.”

He shook his head, their faces so close his lips almost brushed hers with the movement. Except he looked feral enough to bite her, if they did. “I’ve never understood it when you say that. I’ve told you already, you idealize me more than you should, Jaime.”

“No. I don’t idealize you at all,” she repeated.

He released the edge of the marble, with a hard glance around. But any possible audience had already crowded into the other rooms, stretching indefinitely their “need” to find something elsewhere. The enrobing machines, abandoned, let chocolate cascade over nothing, an endless empty fall. “Come into my office,” he said abruptly.

Dominique’s office was—minute. It was impossible to get the door closed without brushing against each other, and even once it was closed, with him leaning back against his desk, it was only possible to keep about a foot between them.
“He would have been happy to have sex with me in his office,”
Jaime remembered Cade saying, with a sudden, white rage. “
How
many women have you made love to in here?” she asked.

Dominique winced, closed his hands around the edge of his desk, and tilted his head back. For a second he looked—shamed, defeated. Then his face hardened with determination again.

She put her hand on his arm. She could never resist laying claim to that strength. And she wanted him to know he didn’t feel dirty to her touch.

He gave her hand a bitter, wary look, as if she had pulled out a whip and he was braced for the beating.

Jaime frowned, searching his face. She stroked her hand slowly down his arm, over the tough texture of the chef’s jacket until she came to his skin and could curl her fingers partway around his thick wrist and slide over the back of his hand.

Her mat of freckles against all those tiny scars over his knuckles. Her eyebrows crinkled together. She had worked with teenagers who had been abandoned by their parents or sold into slavery by someone they trusted, who had been beaten and exploited, who had grown into manhood doing brutal, hard work. But she had worked with them—more distantly, in group situations. Solving the problem, not trying to live with them one on one. Still, if she could
quit being so weak and self-absorbed
. . . she might realize that Dominique Richard—rough, gentle, wild, beautiful, overachieving Dominique Richard—had issues.

A lot of issues.

One of the reasons he loved her might be . . . how much she loved him. One of the reasons he might be terrified of her was . . . he was afraid to count on that love.

She studied his tense face again. His hand lay taut under hers as if he both wanted to yank it away and couldn’t bear to.

“I don’t suppose you would be interested in indulging me in a little fantasy, would you?” she asked.

His face hardened even further. “I’m not having sex with you in this office. Not ever.”

Damn it, how many women
had
he screwed in this office?

“That’s not the fantasy I had in mind. This one would be after dark, when everyone is gone.”

His hand jerked under hers. “No. I’m not your fantasy.”

Her eyebrows rose a little. “I think most men
like
being a woman’s fantasy.”

“Well,
I don’t.
”

She frowned at him and tried to think of another approach. “So I’m not your groupie?”

His eyebrows flexed. “What the hell are you even talking about?”

“Why don’t you ever stay the night with me? Only
one
time, since we started dating, have you stayed until I woke up. It’s confusing, the way you’re always gone in the morning.”

“I’ve always stayed the whole night,” he said, startled. “I leave for work.” Still pressed back against his desk, he stared at her. “You didn’t know that?”

She shook her head.

“So when you wake up and I’m not there, you’ve been thinking—what?”

“That it’s understandable you would need space. That I need to let you breathe.”

There was a silence. “No,” was all he said, the word packed tight with meaning. “No. I—breathe better when you’re right here.”

With a little sigh, she stepped forward and sank into him, letting all her tension leave her. Her face rubbed against the chef’s jacket, wishing it gone.

One of his hands unlocked from the edge of the desk, flexing to restore circulation. He brought it warily to press between her shoulder blades. “And you? Do you need space to breathe?”

He smelled of rich deep chocolate and something green underneath it, some experiment perhaps. “I breathe better here, too,” she said quite honestly. She drew a breath. “I have an unusual question for you.”

“Me, too.”

She hesitated. Maybe he was going to ask the same thing? Did she want him to? Her heart squeezed quite tightly at the possibility that he might be thinking along the same lines. “Go ahead,” she whispered.

“What’s your last name?”