The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  He wanted to throw that suitcase out the window when he almost tripped over it. Probably throwing her things through windows would ruin his disguise as a nice guy. Maybe he could unpack all her clothes while she was sleeping in the morning, drag the suitcase away with him, and leave it out on the street to help the first homeless person who came by. An act of charity, almost.

  You selfish bastard. That’s her escape, when you revert to form.

  He kissed her again, managing just barely not to give the suitcase at least one hard kick.

  He didn’t like it that she wouldn’t let him have the light on again. His hand fisted around the lamp base, and he had to force himself to turn it back off, like a petulant boy.

  But the sight of her lying on her side beside him on the bed, the city lights gentle over her, was still beautiful.

  “It’s like moonlight,” she said softly, once, her hand tracing slowly from his shoulder down over his ribs to his hips in a way that squeezed him with anguished, frantic longing and fear, as if he could be precious.

  “Moonlight?” Him? he thought, with a jolt of confused, wary pleasure. It sounded beautiful, but . . . intangible. Transient.

  “The city light.”

  Dominique, you’re pathetic. You thought you could be moonlight? “I’ve never been anywhere outside of Paris. I’ve never seen moonlight without all the city lights to compete with it, or spent a night without some kind of light.”

  Her eyes widened with wonder. “I’ve been in places where there were no lights, no man-made lights, for so far, if you stood on tiptoe, the stars would get caught in your hair. And when there was a moon, it just filled the whole world up.” Her fingers flexed into his shoulders. “Oh, you should come see sometime! You would love i—”

  And just when his heart was leaping like a praised puppy, she broke off, her face closing, her body stiffening.

  One thing was for sure, the accidental inclusion of him in her future plans turned her off like a light. He had to work hard, ignoring with his usual impatience his own hurt heart, to relax her again. To turn her muscles all malleable to him. To hear her breath catch. To make her body twist, rubbing her skin against the sheets and against him.

  “Jaime.” He said her name over and over again. J’aime. I love this, I love this, I love the way you let my hands shape your head as if you trust me with it. I love pressing a kiss right there on the curve of your hipbone. I love—“I wish you would let me see you. I like the colors of you.”

  A flicker of hesitation, and then she said dryly, “You mean, you like to see me blush. No.”

  “I do,” he admitted unabashedly. “I want to see where it goes. Do you blush down to here?” His mouth brushed over one breast, just above the aureole of her nipple. “What color are these, anyway?” He breathed over the little raspberry, watched it tighten still further. “Are they pink, like your blush? Or brown, like your freckles? Are there freckles here?” He curved his hands around her breasts. His hands looked so big, so brutish against her small breasts, with the nipples peeking out like some last desperate cry for help before being hauled under by the mauling monster.

  But she liked it. He looked up at her face and slowly, gently brought one of those rough thumbs to rub a circle over her nipple. Oh, she liked it very much. Her eyes closing, and her breath coming fast, and her hands sliding over his biceps, gripping, not finding much purchase. His biceps were too big for her small hands. But he would hold still for them. Whatever purchase she found, he would let her hold him.

  He lowered his head to nestle his face against her breasts, and she shivered all over. He twisted his chin enough to rub it against the back of one hand, still cupping her breasts. He had shaved between the gym and meeting her again, which meant twice that day, and five hours later it was already faintly prickly. Now that was just unfair. How the hell did other men get smooth jaws? He wished he had started practicing this gentlemanly stuff years ago, before he met her, so he would have a clue how to carry it off.

  He lifted his head. Her eyes were closed, her hands flexing helplessly into what she could manage of his biceps. She seemed to like prickly. He ran a little test with his jaw over the upper slope of her breast.

  She made a little sound, and her hands slid up over his shoulders, soft hands, so soft. Oh, God, he thought he could detect against the smoothness of his shoulders just the faintest hint of a little callus or blister from her newly acquired sport of weightlifting, and it made him return to her mouth and kiss her for such a long time.

  He wanted to wrap his arms around her and squeeze her the way a man dying of thirst might squeeze every last drop of water from a sponge. But he didn’t. He didn’t.

  He just kissed her. Taking his time. Licking up her response. Diving for more.

  He liked this. Oh, how he liked this. He pulled her wrists above her head and rolled over onto her, trapping her, watching her eyes widen, her breath catch, then rolled again and let her trap him. He lifted her because he could, because he could manipulate her body so easily, and he loved that.

  He tangled and rolled and took charge and yielded, kaleidoscope glimpses of the different ways they might make love if they had a lifetime to try every mood.

  He liked this so much, too much. “Can I keep you?” he whispered against her skin. But he was down at the small of her back at that point, and he didn’t think she heard.

  She certainly didn’t say yes.

  He trailed his jaw and his lips back up the line of her spine, thinking of ways he could get her to say yes. And he licked the nape of her neck until she was all one shivering moan, completely his. For this moment, completely his.

  “Can I?” he whispered again into her ear, although he didn’t know if she had heard the first question, so when she shivered and nodded, all she was really saying yes to was his touch. Still—on her head be it, right? You should never agree to something unless you had read every line of the contract. His mind flashed ideas of ways to keep her: a golden cage, a treasure in a box and him with the key, the pure brute force of his arms. None of them worked. He kissed over her shoulders, down the length of her arms. None of them worked in real life.

  Addiction.

  Maybe he could just get her so addicted to him she wouldn’t be able to tear herself away.

  He laughed a little, a harsh puff of air against her skin, mocking himself for the pipe dream. But . . . like the time he had asked for a job from one of the top chefs in Paris, after being just freed from arrest and with only an abattoir as his past experience, or the four years’ merciless training and then the brutal trials for Meilleur Ouvrier de France . . . it was worth a shot.

  He shouldn’t, of course. He shouldn’t try to make her completely his, because he was a bad bet. But when a man had his teeth sinking oh-so-gently into a woman’s naked butt while she made a little moaning sound was probably not the best time to ask him to think of anything except his own wild wants.

  So he laid her out in that city light she thought was like moonlight and went to work on being addicting.

  CHAPTER 13

  When Jaime woke, there was a note on the pillow beside hers: Come by.

  No signature. She picked it up and rubbed it between her fingers. She looked around for a moment, then dug into the bottom of her suitcase, coming out with a small round box that had been given to her by the grandmother of a child in Côte d’Ivoire. She folded the note and placed it carefully in the tiny box, then slipped it back down into the bottom of her suitcase.

  She didn’t try to turn on her computer at all that morning. She was terrified she would find more e-mails asking her to leave.

  When Dom came in to his laboratoire later than usual, Célie and Amand were already there, in the cuisine, the hot room where things were cooked. Célie was talking to Amand: “. . . I think it’s adorable. He’s fallen so hard. Would you ever have believed it? Mr. Take It and Leave It. And I got a look at her. She’s not a movie star or anything. She looks just—normal.”

&n
bsp; Dom barely forewent growling. Like an . . . adorable teddy bear. It was enough to make a man break something, but . . . he sighed. He did kind of like it. Being adorable.

  “I just hope she doesn’t crush him. Didn’t Guillaume say she sounded like a tourist?”

  “Well,” Amand said reticently. “You can’t say he doesn’t deserve to have his heart crushed.”

  Thanks, Amand. People always thought that about him. Even when he was six years old, the people who loved him thought he deserved what he got. He shoved a mold that clattered against the tile backdrop.

  “Or to be loved and left,” Amand said, not catching the hint.

  Oh, you fucking bastard, Amand. You’re welcome for hiring you when you were a clueless teenager who didn’t dare go back home.

  Dom filled the doorway, so that Amand looked up from slicing off great pats of Isigny butter and Célie from weighing chocolate. “Please,” Dom said, “don’t let me interrupt.”

  Célie stuck her chin out at him. “Then I won’t. I think it would be extremely salutary for you, if somebody loved you and didn’t leave you. It’s a lot harder work.”

  Dom stared at his chocolatier for a long moment and then turned abruptly and went to the far opposite end of the main room, carving bits of long Grecian skirt from his sculpture. Just until the shakiness inside him calmed down.

  When Jaime got there a few hours later, Dominique was growling into his phone. He gave her one delighted look, a kind of surreal syncopation with his immediate return to growling, and offered her the nearest fresh pastry to eat.

  While she bit into flakiness and a chocolate cream so dark and intense she wasn’t sure how he got it to fluff, she circled around the great block of chocolate, intrigued. The bottom seemed to be turning into rough-hewn folds. A person maybe, the folds of a long dress? Was that what he saw coming out of the chocolate?

  He shoved his phone into his pocket. “If he really can’t get us enough of our vanilla because of the cyclone, we’re just going to have to find another supplier. But first, I’m going to see him in person and make sure he’s not letting someone else talk him into giving them what he’s got.”

  “Vanilla?” Jaime raised an eyebrow, licking cream off her lips. His dark eyes immediately went to her mouth, and he smiled, just a little smile, as if he was kissing her there. “You?”

  “It goes in as a base flavor in all kinds of things. And I’m not about to start using some inferior product from Papua New Guinea.”

  “The vanilla there is quite good!” Jaime said rather indignantly. She saw a lot of friendly faces when he said “Papua New Guinea.”

  He dismissed those friendly faces with a wave of his hand, as not at all relevant in the quest for the best vanilla, and reached for his motorcycle jacket. Then he gave Jaime a slow grin. “You want to come?” From the expression on his face, he had known some women before her who liked riding on his motorcycle with their legs wrapped around him. “I’ll drive carefully.”

  She sighed, because there wasn’t a lot she could do about the fact that she wasn’t the first woman he had met, and that he had learned a lot from the other ones. “Yes. I want to come.”

  He even had an extra helmet for her, with a hibiscus on the front, female size. A jasmine scent lingered in it. “If I get lice from one of your women,” she muttered.

  “What?” he asked blankly.

  She just glared at him, refusing to expand.

  He looked from her to the helmet. “That’s Célie’s. She comes in on a moped.” He slipped his leather jacket around her and zipped it up. “Lice.” He was grinning. “Salope,” he whispered to her respectfully.

  Jaime had ridden on a moped behind a proud teenager in Papua New Guinea only six months or so ago. And she had driven herself around on mopeds quite a bit. It seemed so much more appropriate than arriving in a phalanx of expensive cars to pretend you cared about the little people who couldn’t afford bicycles. But she hadn’t ridden on an actual motorcycle behind someone since she was seventeen years old and still throwing her panties on the stage at concerts.

  And her eighteen-year-old driver back then hadn’t been as big, hadn’t been as hard, hadn’t been as much to wrap her arms around. Compared to the other bikes that passed them, Dominique drove with extreme care: slowly, no weaving in and out of traffic. She tightened her arms around him, trying to help offset the wind that must be cutting through his clothes, since he had given his jacket—which was also his protection against any fall—to her.

  As they left the heart of the city, they entered a different world of bigger, uglier buildings, big supermarkets, warehouses, square-cornered practicality, the cheaper world where the large things of this city were exiled. He pulled in near the door of a small warehouse with several vans parked in front of it.

  “Do you drive that carefully when I’m not on the bike?” Jaime asked, taking off her helmet and automatically running her hand over the left side of her head, making sure her hair was still in place.

  Dominique grinned and didn’t answer.

  “Would you?” she asked because she couldn’t help herself.

  He stilled, his helmet just off his head. Probably taken aback by the nerve of a woman he had slept with two times trying to take over his driving. He lowered the helmet enough to gaze at her for a long moment. “Drive more carefully? Did you just ask me to drive more carefully?”

  “Yes,” she said sternly.

  He stared down at her with those almost-black eyes of his and didn’t say anything at all. Not yes, not no, not “that’s none of your business.” He looked oddly shaken. When he turned toward the warehouse, with his helmet tucked under his far arm, his mouth curved a little.

  That smile disappeared under a sudden flare of outrage. “Putain! I knew someone was stealing the supply.”

  Sylvain Marquis was just leaving the building, and he nearly ran straight into them. He started to raise one of those haughty eyebrows of his at Dom, and then spotted his companion.

  “Jamie?”

  Dom jerked and closed his hand too fast, too hard around Jaime’s nearest shoulder, as if Sylvain had reached out and tried to grab her away. The woman who had just told him to drive carefully. As if he mattered. “You know Sylvain?”

  What had he done to get her name? Maybe that explained what she was doing with Dominique. Maybe she was some kind of chocolatier groupie, concentrating all her attention on each of them, one at a time, until . . .

  “Jamie, qu’est-ce que tu fous avec lui?” Sylvain demanded. What the hell are you doing with him? Sylvain liked to pretend he had risen above the banlieue, that he belonged among the aristos and bourgeois over there in his Sixth Arrondissement, so the sight of Jaime with Dominique had definitely hit him hard for him to swear. Or maybe it was the influence of their environment, out here on the margins of Paris, a degree closer to where they’d both grown up, bringing out the worst in him.

  “Your banlieue is showing, Marquis.” Dom’s teeth showed, slashing, sharp, as he shifted his body a step in front of Jaime. “Careful, or I’ll let you see mine.”

  Sylvain gave him a scathing look. “You still haven’t learned how to solve problems with anything other than your fists?”

  Dom sneered at him. The supercilious bastard who thought he had managed so much better. “If you think I’m going to fight you for her with a delicate game of chocolate, think again.”

  Jaime grabbed Sylvain’s arm. Not Dominique’s. Dom flinched as if he’d been whipped.

  “You. Come here,” she told Sylvain. With tu. She was on tu terms with that bastard.

  She dragged Sylvain off, out of earshot, while Dom spun on his heel and snarled, not sure if he should lunge after them and beat the crap out of Sylvain right then or if that was one of the destructive urges that would ruin his whole life if he revealed it in front of Jaime.

  He knew far too well how easy it could be to ruin things by letting your fists fly. He had seen it from the point of view of the things ruined.r />
  Jaime was keeping her voice low, but her whole body language was a yell. As she whispered, her fist clenched, and she poked Sylvain in the chest with it. Dom snarled harder, hoping she would haul off and hit him for real, and then Dom could leap, let off any leash of civility.

  Sylvain was trying to keep his voice down, too, but words escaped: “Dominique Richard?” And “. . . womanizer . . . un vrai salaud . . .”

  Thank you, Sylvain. I’ll kill you.

  Jaime poked Sylvain harder. It was close to a punch this time. Her face was flaming with temper; he was surprised that short hair of hers didn’t stand up around her head like a fire. If he could get control of his own wounded, panicked rage, it would be kind of fascinating to watch. He hadn’t known she had a temper. He had suspected, from those little glimpses of cool steel from time to time, but hadn’t known for sure, that she could stand up to a man.

  He loved women who could stand up to men.

  And . . . and . . . he settled back on his heels a little, less ready to lunge. He even folded his arms, to show how calm he was. She was standing up for him. She was fighting Sylvain Marquis over him. The anger in him unflexed, stretched, started to show a little hint of a hard-edged grin. So how do you like that, Sylvain “Dieudonné”?

  But why hadn’t she grabbed Dominique’s arm to stop a fight? Hadn’t she believed she could stop him?

  He stiffened as Sylvain closed his hand over Jaime’s fist, holding it back from his chest. Jaime could poke the man as much as she wanted, but that didn’t give him the right to touch her. What made him think he could close his hand around her fist so familiarly?

  Sylvain said something more, got a response he didn’t like, turned and strode away a few steps, turned back to Jaime and flung out his hands. She just glared and spoke quickly.