The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  The truth flashed out of him in a sudden desperate rage, lightning from what had seemed an innocent white cloud: “At least you would be safe.”

  Jaime drew back into herself, hair rising all up and down her arms in spite of herself. “What happened didn’t make me helpless, Grandpa.”

  Just incapable of doing any damn thing.

  Maybe if she took over the reins as Corey heir apparent, she would at least be capable of something. Even if it was only running half the world.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Bonjour.” The low, rough, gentled voice stroked over her, and Jaime looked up at Dominique Richard helplessly. This crush was overwhelming her, too sudden and intense. Her defenses were all down: physical weakness; her sense of purpose hiding in a fetal ball; and now her heart was going to cop out, leaving her a pushover for a gorgeous bad-boy.

  Thank God for her heart. The only part of her that still knew how to seize life.

  She smiled up at him, just to thank him for existing and letting her sit there all squooshy about him. Men like him were wonderful. They made themselves larger than life, superstars, someone you could sit in a corner and fuzzily swoon over.

  Well-mannered toward his guests, he could have no idea of the effect his courtesy had on her. Superstars didn’t. It might cross their minds that women came to them easily, but they had no idea how hard the woman was fighting to keep her head on straight. They never understood how much power they had without even trying.

  Not that Jaime was trying to keep her head on straight. She was using all of what she had once thought a considerable willpower for other things. Besides, why resist? Thank God she was able to enjoy the fun and infinite security of having a crush on a man out of her reach.

  His near-black eyes brightened at her smile. He definitely liked female attention, no matter whom it came from. She gave him a little more of it, the way she used to throw her panties onstage with all the others lying at a rock star’s feet. You’re amazing. Here’s my tribute.

  He came closer to her table, and this time she relaxed into the sense of being loomed over. There was no harm in him. He meant no threat to her.

  “Did you like the chocolates?” he asked with a smile that made a woman feel at the center of his world.

  She blushed. After her workout at the gym the evening before, she had lain in her bed, nibbling on his chocolates instead of falling asleep, lured deeper and deeper into fantasies about him with every bite. Some of those fantasies sparkled back through her mind as she looked up at him, and the blush was uncontrollable. “Of course. I like everything you make.”

  His smile widened into a grin. Oh, he liked to be praised, didn’t he? He looked like a boy who had just won the marbles off everyone else in the schoolyard when he grinned like that. It melted her middle.

  He pulled out the chair opposite her, and she started. How much time did one of France’s most famous chocolatiers-pâtissiers have to spend with her? Talk about courtesy to his clients. And what did you do with a crush when he actually sat down and talked to you?

  “Which was your favorite?” he asked hungrily.

  It amused her to realize that he just wanted his vanity stroked. Now that, she could do, especially if it kept him near her longer. “All of them.”

  He radiated pleasure. It reached right into her erogenous zones and radiated there, too. “Allez,” he coaxed, lapping up her praise and begging for more. “There must have been one or two you liked a little more, a little less.”

  She shook her head. “I liked all of them.” Flavor after astonishing flavor, always a surprise, always delicious, combinations of exotic flowers and herbs and vinegars with a darkness that came inside and shook her mouth and through it her whole body. She had loved his chocolates. Tonight she was going to go right back out on another trip around the world, escorted by their dark and delicious creator, curled up in her bed. Imagining him pulling her in against that hard body and feeding them to her . . .

  “You ate them all?” Was that a visible swell to his chest?

  Yep, vanity. She gave him another starstruck smile, enjoying how easy it was to feed his ego and make him happy, and nodded.

  He was pretty much openly gloating at this point. She half expected him to get up and do one of those soccer victory dances. “Do you like caramels, too? Would you like to try some?”

  “I liked yours.” She had never had any other caramels besides the chewy mass-market ones a Corey subsidiary produced, and she hadn’t especially liked those. But three of his had curved like a gift around the plate under her hot chocolate the other day, a very nice little client-relations gesture. Warm and buttery and just delicately chewy, like condensed sunshine.

  He sprang up as if he couldn’t sit still any longer—the man was probably always in motion—and went to the tall columned displays of his current caramel flavors, grabbing several. The fast, hard, graceful enthusiasm of his movements made her whole soul weep a little with thwarted longing. Like being at a party with one of her favorite movie idols, watching him flirt and play and dance in real life.

  She looked at his big hand as he offered the caramels to her and had to lick the inside of her lips. The little things gleamed bright and warm, light shining off the plastic that wrapped their golden colors, held in that hard, large palm. She took one, delicately, and her fingertips brushed his skin.

  Oh, boy.

  This was better even than that time she had run into a favorite sexy movie star and convinced him to autograph her arm in permanent ink, but it might be more than her heart could take. It was beating like mad already.

  The caramel yielded to her teeth, soft, smooth, creamy, while the flavor of it slapped her palate awake. “What is it?” It reminded her of her travels in the tropics, both the good and the bad.

  “Passion fruit mango.” He watched her eagerly, maybe even a little anxiously, which charmed her. Anyone would think if she hadn’t liked it, it would have crushed him. Dominique Richard. Who, according to her sister, was so outrageously arrogant he made Sylvain Marquis and Philippe Lyonnais look mild-mannered and humble. How dearly he must love to have his ego stroked.

  “It’s delicious.” She bit into the other half. Such an intense flavor, such a luscious texture. Tonight she was going to lie awake fantasizing that he was there stretched out beside her, feeding these to her, too.

  Her skin prickled all over, in protest at this torture, in longing. What she wouldn’t give to have those big, rough hands stroke her in real life.

  Uh-oh. With the movie stars and the rock stars, she had never drifted past fantasy into any kind of real life longing.

  “What about this one?” He unwrapped it. Big fingers on that tiny, delicate twist of plastic, opening the sun for her . . .

  Dulcet texture and stinging flavor. She looked up at him helplessly. Maybe if she gave him her rented apartment number, he would be interested in a one-night stand, despite her ordinary looks. She could be his groupie. It might break her heart, but she thought she had proved she could survive being broken.

  “You’re going to kill me, Monsieur.” She laughed. “An overdose of deliciousness.”

  Displeasure flashed across his eyes. “You can call me Dominique,” he said brusquely. “I’m not very formal.”

  His eyebrows lifted a touch as he looked at her. Waiting either for her to say his name or to give him hers. But it would be so safe and warm to keep him on his stage. “I wouldn’t presume.”

  He frowned. The light in his face faded radically.

  He hesitated a long moment, and then finally nodded and moved away from her. Back to work. Clouds crowded over her moment in the sun, and it was her own fault. He spoke to the elegant young woman who seemed to run the room, glanced back at Jaime, hesitated again, then ran lightly up that gorgeous spiral of stairs, disappearing into the heavens from which he had descended.

  Which was funny, given that he looked much more like a devil than an angel. Maybe, post-fall, Lucifer had discovered he could br
ibe his way back into heaven with sufficiently good chocolate. It would work with her if she were God. She watched him go, part of her relieved, part of her wistful. As she cradled the cup in her hands near her face, the heat rising off his chocolate seemed to warm her whole body.

  When she was leaving, the elegant young woman gave her a small, very elegantly ribboned bag, inside which a dozen caramels gleamed like captured suns. “From Monsieur Richard. He wanted you to have them.”

  Jaime reached for her wallet again, confused.

  “Non, non. Il vous les offre.” It’s a gift. He offers them to you.

  How incredibly sweet. He must just love his open admirers. She slipped it into her worn, woven purse, wishing it was the kind of memento she could keep forever instead of one that had to be eaten within days or lose its quality.

  She heard the music as she stepped out of the shop. Her heart already lifted, it was easy to turn toward the sound, to head toward the Place de la République and its crowd of dancing people.

  Dominique always liked that first moment when he stepped into the street, carrying the scent of cacao with him so strongly that people turned to look at him, trying to catch his flavor. It was so vividly better than stepping into the street smelling of blood and death. Better, even, than stepping out smelling of the cacophony of scents he would pick up cooking, anything from onions to pumpkin, when he had been apprenticed to a chef; or that butter and flour scent when he had been shifted over to pastries.

  He heard the music from the Place de la République and smiled. He kind of liked forging his way through protests on his way home from work. And he loved the way people would come into his salon to relax over sumptuous desserts after an hour or so of energetic protesting. Paris. Nobody did life better.

  It was a pro-immigration or anti-discrimination protest—he could tell before he even got close enough to see the signs, from the diversity of the crowd, every ethnicity from the nearly pure black of Senegalese to the bronze of Moroccans to the white skin and bright blond hair from Poland. With a liberal dose of nos-ancêtres-les-Gaulois French who sympathized with the cause. A punk rock group was playing on a stage under the proud statue of Marianne, symbol of the French Republic; he could only make out half the words, but the group was known for its anti-discrimination themes.

  All the streets were blocked to car traffic, and the white vans of riot police formed stern lines up the edges of those streets, reminding the protesters what would happen if things got out of hand. But the police themselves lounged tranquilly in the vans as the crowd danced with bobbing signs for the television cameras but continued to play nice.

  He spotted his inconnue dancing happily near the fringe as he came closer and felt a little jolt to his heart. She had a big grin on her face, as if she didn’t want to think of anything in the world but dancing.

  He stopped unnoticed a few meters away from her at the edge of the crowd and was just thinking about joining her when she stopped grinning and moved out of the crowd.

  Two men followed her, closing in even as he moved forward to meet her. He had just time to glimpse the stark, ferocious expression on her face, out of all proportion to the situation, when he reached them. The two men were grinning, moving far too close to her and looming over her; he caught the words “my dick.”

  He grabbed her arm and yanked her from between the two of them so that she fell against his chest. “Fuck off,” he told the two men, showing the edge of his teeth.

  He had an instant to realize he had scared the hell out of her when she jerked wildly, and then all the tension drained out of her and she looked up.

  She relaxed to—an incredible degree. He couldn’t possibly be that reassuring.

  The two men bristled, and instantly the berserker urge swept him, the violent pleasure at the idea of taking them on and anyone else in the mob they pulled with them. What did he care if he ended up bloodied and beaten? He had survived it before. He grabbed her shoulder, ready to fling her out and straight toward the protection of the riot police.

  But the older con flicked a glance over Dom’s hard body and carnivorous expression. “Connard. Je t’emmerde.” The asshole turned sullenly back into the crowd, the younger one growling but following suit. If it took two of them to go after one small woman, one by himself was never going to face off against Dominique.

  Dom watched them a second, to make sure they didn’t return with reinforcements, then took his inconnue out of the crowd, still with a hand on her shoulder, guiding her far enough down one of the boulevards to be out of the mob. “Pardon,” he said to her, when they were far enough away from the noise to hear each other. “Ça va?”

  She had recovered from that instant of relief and now looked—and felt, her shoulder in his hand—tense and brooding.

  “I’m fine,” she said roughly. “Perfectly fine.” She hesitated and then looked up at him. That brooding anger got confused, distracted; fascinatingly, she blushed.

  That—had to be promising. All the hardness in him melted like chocolate too close to a flame, and he smiled down at her, helplessly enthralled.

  “That was very nice of you, though,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Nice. He could have let her save herself, walking toward the riot police or into the nearest bar; it was not as if the men could have done anything but harass her with a few crude words in this spot. He could have walked up, smiled at her, and put his arm around her shoulders, ignoring the men altogether, which would have made them instantly turn their attention elsewhere, with no chance of violence. Instead, he had just nearly started a fight, in circumstances that could have turned a peaceful protest into a tear-gassed mob scene. If that was her idea of nice, they might actually suit each other.

  “My pleasure,” he said, which was unfortunately all too true. Violence must be like nicotine; you never quite got over the addiction. He still felt the powerful desire to go back into the crowd, haul both those men out of it, and drive his fists into their faces. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

  She shook her head minutely. “Startled me, for a second.” Which was a lie if he ever heard one; for a split second, her reaction had been pure terror. But that terror had been so instantly, so oddly, so completely allayed. An odd, faraway look came over her. “You smelled like chocolate,” she murmured. He remembered that instant when she had relaxed against his chest, before she had even looked up and seen his face.

  Desire surged and fisted around him. He wanted nothing in life but to strip them both naked, to wrap her in his scent. It made his breath ragged with the effort not to say it, not to lean into her, aggressive and guttural, and say, Come smell me all over.

  His scalp prickled with the struggle not to be as crude and direct as the two strangers he had just driven away. He cleared his throat and forced himself a couple of steps back out of her personal space, before he violated every centimeter of it. “It’s better in the middle than at the edges,” he said, trying to focus on practical advice because he didn’t want her getting in trouble on her own some day while he was up in his laboratoire and had no idea. “The troublemakers always hang out on the edges.”

  She made a little face. “I hate being in the middle of a crowd, though. I used to enjoy it, but these days, it feels as if I can’t get out.”

  Hunh. It must be odd to be so small. He could shove his way through most masses of people. Crowds didn’t trap him. They just made him want to hit people. “I don’t like being in the middle, either.” He was adamantly against hitting people who didn’t deserve it. “You could just avoid protests. Tear gas is no fun.”

  She grimaced. “I know.”

  “You do?” She was American, right? He had gotten the vague idea that Americans were too passive for protests, but maybe that was just one of those media stereotypes.

  She shrugged oddly. After a second, she held up three fingers.

  “That’s exactly how many times I’ve gotten tear-gassed,” he said, considerably startled.

  “Most o
f mine were as a student.” She sounded so stiffly defensive, she must be talking to someone else in her head. He wasn’t going to start judging anyone for getting into trouble.

  Most? “All of mine were as a teenager,” he admitted, feeling a tad out-gunned. Like a reformed addict, ever since he was eighteen he had avoided situations that might lead him back to his addiction, if that was the best way to describe his rapport with violence.

  “Two G-8 summits,” she said, for some reason embarrassed. “I was a spoiled brat.”

  “Banlieue issues. I was mostly just a troublemaker. But not like them,” he added hastily. Not one who harassed women half his size. “What was the one not as a student?” curiosity compelled him to ask, even though she clearly didn’t want to volunteer the information.

  Her eyebrows crinkled, her expression shifting to something very sober. “That one—I was in Africa,” she said with what had to be deliberate vagueness. If she had actually traveled in Africa, she was surely capable of distinguishing countries within the continent. “And—very naive to join in a protest. There were—there were actually military sharpshooters on the rooftops, shooting people in the crowd in the head. Peaceful protesters in the crowd.”

  Putain. She must be incredibly strong, was the first thing he thought. In fact, he wanted to close his hands around her shoulders and hold her still for him while he took a good long look into the depths and strength of her. The fleeting thought crossed his mind that his heart might have protected itself for so long and then thrown itself so ridiculously after her because it had incredible survival instincts.

  But no, then, surely he wouldn’t feel so helplessly kamikaze.

  “Don’t do that,” he said involuntarily.

  She looked questioning.

  Don’t put yourself in positions where people might shoot you in the head, he wanted to say, lamely. “Don’t join in protests in strange countries where you don’t know how the government might react.” Starting with G8 summits.