The Chocolate Touch (11 page)

J
aime dreamed dappled sunlight. It fell through the thick shade of banana leaves, through the second tier of cacao leaves, and it speckled the brown leaves that crunched softly under her feet. Her hand stroked over the ribbed, dimpled outside of a cacao pod, curled over its football tip. Delicate blossoms peeked at her from the trunk. A man smiled at her and offered her a pod, splitting it open for her with one deft hack of his machete, holding the pod he was splitting in one hand. The fruit tasted like nothing else: white and pulpy, it had its own flavor, not a peach, not a mango, not a kiwi—cacao fruit, nothing like the chocolate it would eventually become.

“This is amazing,” she told him. She was proud of him, proud of herself. It was so recent and yet so elusive, like something lost in a bad dream, that pride in herself. He had been determined to make a success of his own farm without resorting to the slavery he himself had known, kidnapped as he had been at age eleven. She had brought Corey funding in. She had helped set up a program on his farm, which kept children completely in school until fourteen, and then allowed them to work up to three paid hours a day in conjunction with schooling, until age sixteen. Many parents were convinced that schooling itself was impractical, training children for opportunities they could never have, so this combination had been the most palatable to the area. No slavery here, no beatings, no insane loads for kids to carry. The program had spread to other farms; everyone around him had wanted in on it. And she had brought them in on it. Changed a whole region. She could change the whole damn world, if she kept at it.

The man grinned at her, pleased. She kept walking, sinking deeper and deeper into the plantation, until, in a dream’s transition, she was along the banks of the Amazon River, an ocean away, the cacao growing in its natural state, the forest dark and thick around her. She smiled, because she was safe here, and happy. And then the riverbank caved in under her and hard hands yanked her from the water, and . . .

She woke up with a gasp, pain shooting all through her. No. No. Damn it, this dream had started out so promisingly. When was she going to manage to escape its ending?

She rubbed her face and peeked around. In case she had screamed in her sleep and . . . maybe attracted someone to her rescue.

He was gone. It was barely dawn, but he was gone.

She sighed. She hadn’t really expected him to be there. It would have been nice, but . . . she wasn’t given to delusions, and she hadn’t indulged in any here.

She tucked her hands behind her head, images of the night pushing that final second of her dream far away. She smiled in a kiss-bruised, sleepy way, thinking about him. They had made love for
hours.
Or he had made love to her for hours. He had worn her out. She remembered growing more and more malleable, saturated with him, and still willing for more, just as long as his hands and his mouth kept sliding over her.

It was the first time in months that she had woken up conscious of aches in her body that didn’t make her mad, or determined, or cast a darkness over her just from their existence. Instead, they felt—good. Well-earned. Alive.

What an extraordinary night. She never, ever would have pegged herself for the panty-throwing girl the rock star
actually picked up
. Maybe the fates had wanted to give her one dream come true, after everything.

It made her smile, all through her determinedly healthy breakfast and her shower. When she was dressed, she opened the floor-to-ceiling casement windows to the spring morning and turned on her computer for the first time since her last try a week ago.

She was going to do it. Going to be strong again. She could feel it, as if she had drained all Dominique Richard’s strength from him and filled herself with it.

Dear Jaime,
read the message from Antoine Soum-bounou, head of one of the largest farming cooperatives under the Corey umbrella.
Thank you for the e-mail from your secretary, letting us know you are well.
Cade was the one who had put an assistant on all those well-wishing e-mails. Jaime hadn’t been able to face it.
When do you think you will come back to Abidjan? I am hoping we will still one day soon be able to do this Round Table on Sustainable Cocoa Economy you have talked about. Between the fight for power and the sanctions, things are bad here. Farmers are having trouble surviving, and you know what that means . . .

It meant that labor practices got nastier and more desperate. Exploitation and trafficking grew.

First she pressed her forehead into the table, hugging her belly. Then she wrapped her hands over the back of her head and the nape of her neck, spreading the fingers wide to cover as much as she could.

Then, just when it was about to take hold of her, the sickness, the sweating, huddled dread, she leaped up so fast that the chair fell behind her and she bruised her knee against the table. Slinging her purse over her shoulder, she headed out of the apartment.

Out there, on the streets, away from what she couldn’t bear to do and knew she couldn’t abandon, she felt better already. Paris welcomed her, with its green doors, and red-eaved cafés, and elegant people brushing by her, and its utter distance from the rest of her life.

She glanced up the street, in the direction that would lead to Dominique Richard’s
salon,
with a little smile.

But she knew better than to go that way. It was one thing to be a groupie and another a clinging leech. She just wished she had stocked up on more of his chocolate before sexing herself out of the right to linger there.

Cuddling to herself the memory of the evening and night with him until the warmth and pleasure of it filled her and everything else faded away, leaving a big happy smile, she turned southward toward the Seine.

 

“Whoa!” Cade stopped on her heels in the Tuileries, where she and Jaime had promised to meet up. “What happened to you?” She stared at her sister. “You look—you look—” Her eyes rested on Jaime’s throat and narrowed. “Have you met someone?”

“Can I have a little bit of a private life?” Jaime said stiffly, pulling her scarf around her throat. Dominique did have a prickly jaw.

“No,” Cade said. “No one needs as extreme a sense of privacy as you. You get on my nerves. Who is he?” Her face brightened up like sunrise. “Is it a
Parisian
?”

Jaime stared at her sister for a moment. “Why does that make you so happy?”

Cade turned the sunrise off on purpose, with that boardroom control of hers. “Oh, I don’t know.” Cade shrugged indifferently. “Just, you know—” She looked around at the kids pushing the little colorful sailboats on the pond. “It could be kind of
nice
if you decided to live in Paris, too. The opposite end of Paris, of course.” She frowned deeply at Jaime.

“Who’s going to run Corey?” Jaime asked dryly.

“Dad. He’s fifty-three and not ready to release power anytime soon, no matter what he says. I’m not ready to pull my fingers completely out of the pie, either, but I think long-term, when Dad wants to quit, we might hire a CEO. It’s fifteen or more years down the road. Good Lord, you didn’t think any of us were assuming
you
would want to do it?”

Well, she wouldn’t. But still. Jaime folded her arms. She didn’t know why it was so annoying, when you spent most of your life trying to convince people of your unsuitability for a certain role, that they
accepted
that unsuitability, but right now, pretty much every suggestion that she couldn’t do whatever she determined to do rubbed raw nerves. “Grandpa Jack wants me to do it.”

“Would you?” Cade asked, astonished. “I thought you liked doing the farm-level work. It’s”—she hesitated over the praise but said softly—“it’s amazing what you’ve done. You know that, right, Jaime?”

Right now Jaime didn’t want to do much beyond sit in Dominique Richard’s
salon
eating chocolates and
mille-feuilles
.

He would get sick of her eventually. You couldn’t just glue yourself to a man’s life like some kind of leech, sucking everything that was beautiful about him into you. She had spent all her life trying not to be a parasite.

Right now, she was afraid to go back there, anyway. Last night . . . his hands on her everywhere, her complete openness . . . she felt herself blushing right in front of her sister.

“I absolutely do not want to run Corey, no,” she said. Although if she wasn’t doing anything else, maybe she should make her father and grandfather happy? It would be a first.

Last night . . . that
was
one-night-stand sex, wasn’t it? Get it all out of your system, saturate yourself, never see the person again. Sex with a groupie.

She could go back to his
salon
and see if he still smiled at her today. She longed to go back. But what if he looked at her the way he had looked at that brunette? What if his lifted eyebrows said,
Haven’t we finished this already?
After she had been so . . . naked to him.

Mostly guys didn’t slip out while you were asleep if they wanted to see more of you. She had accepted, going into it, that it was a toss-your-panties-on-the-stage-and-have-the-rock-star-pick-them-up kind of fluke. She shouldn’t try to force it into anything else now.

“Are you okay?” Cade asked, as they took a seat at one of the outdoor cafés. The food at the Tuileries cafés wasn’t particularly good, but it was certainly a nice place to relax with one’s sister on a spring day in Paris. Jaime had spent the morning next door in the Louvre gazing at
La Victoire de Samothrace
. That great statue of Victory, headless, armless, her wings outspread, looked as if, marble or not, she could leap into the sky and rise above everything.

Sometimes it was a huge help to her,
La Victoire de Samothrace
. And sometimes it made her feel like a total loser, unable to rise to the standards of that soaring marble.

“I wish everyone would quit asking me that,” Jaime said, annoyed. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“You look fine, for once. I’d be interested in meeting this Parisian who makes you look so fine.”

“Will you stop?” She requested an apricot juice from the waiter and scanned the crêpe menu. The crêpes here were terrible, but the ambience was everything. They ordered, and she snuck a glance at her sister as she handed back the menu. “So who else did you research when you were trying to buy Sylvain?”

“I did not buy him,” Cade snapped touchily. Apparently the accusation kept coming up.

“I didn’t say you did, I said you tried to. The whole world knows you actually stole him.” The blogs had made for some hilarious reading while Jaime was stuck in a hospital bed, avoiding her own e-mails. Once the swelling went down around her eyes enough that she could read. “Who else did you look at?”

This was Cade. She might have thrown her hat after a windmill, but she had most certainly researched the top twenty windmills before she did.

“Well . . . I visited Philippe, but chocolate really isn’t his primary concentration. Still, his name has the cachet I wanted for the line, so he could have worked.” Cade brooded darkly. “If a single one of these chocolatiers-pâtissiers in Paris had the sense to appreciate their own economic benefit instead of acting like an offer from a major American corporation was a coarse insult.”

Jaime grinned. “Who else? Dominique Richard?” “Oh, him.” Cade rolled her eyes. “I believe he would have been quite happy to sell me some sex in his office, but not his chocolate, oh, no.”

The knife went right into her gut, out of the blue, like the other time, the other time her guts had been bludgeoned. Jaime sat there with her legs stretched to the side of the café table, looking as relaxed and happy as Paris in the springtime and feeling like she needed to curl in the dust and gravel and vomit. “A flirt, hmm?” she managed through numb lips.

“If you like that kind of thing.” Cade shrugged. “He’s very aggressive and not very romantic.”

Jaime’s eyes crinkled a little, doubtful. Were her standards and her sister’s that different? What did Sylvain do for romance, scatter rose petals everywhere she walked? And what did she call “aggressive”? A smile? An excruciating thought occurred to her: Dominique might have been more instantly interested in Cade and therefore come on to her much more strongly. Cade was pretty. Very elegant and classy, with a charismatic, own-the-world confidence.

Jaime stared into the gravel and dust of the Tuileries at her feet, trying intensely to visualize
La Victoire de Samothrace
soaring armless but wings spread above that staircase in the Louvre, trying to see that and absolutely nothing else.

“I mean, he came out of an abattoir, which is impressive, but sometimes you can really tell.”

“He came out of an
abattoir
?” That dusty ground jerked out from under her feet. “A slaughterhouse? Like—where the carcasses pass by and the people who work there have to hack the meat off bones with great big machetes?” There had been a whole series of Pulitzer Prize–winning articles about work in such plants in the United States that had come out when she was in college; she remembered studying them in one of her classes on local economic development. She had wanted to visit one as part of a project for the class, but none would allow visitors, and when she tried to sneak in by getting herself hired, she hadn’t even been able to pass herself off as a potential employee. Too small, too educated, too accustomed to privilege so that it must leak out of her every pore; she had not looked rough, or tough, or needy enough. “And it’s
cold,
isn’t it? And . . . and . . . brutal.”

“I think so. I’ve never seen how one operates in France, but how different can it be?”