The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  Jaime knocked her head against the nearest immovable object, his chest. Clearly talking her into something wasn’t his best skill. He shoved consideration of his heart away into a dark, abandoned space, the way he always had to, and leaned his body into hers a little, angling her back against the railing of the bridge. She looked up as she felt his weight press, hint, hover just short of actually making her carry it. Her lips softened right away. Oh, yes, how he loved the way her lips now softened the instant he looked at her a certain way. He dipped his head and kissed those lips, taking his time, consigning that suitcase of hers to perdition, giving them all the time in the world.

  She made a little sound and slipped her hands in under his jacket, climbing up his back.

  He teased her lips, kept his voice so low you could almost think he wasn’t aggressively persistent. “Tell me, Jaime. How are you using me?”

  She yanked her head away, pulling back so far to glare at him that he had to catch her, alarmed at her angle over the railing and the water. “Like—like a plant uses the sun, all right? Or . . . or a sponge uses water. Satisfied now? Don’t you ever let anything go?”

  He let people go all the time. But his hands flexed into her bottom, in a strong message. Not her. No, I won’t let her go, and you can’t make me, his hungry, childish devil told his better half. His better ten percent.

  “The sun.” As the words sank in, they seemed to replace oxygen. He forgot to breathe normal air. The sun? She used him like the sun? He was the sun. Him.

  Her mouth twisted. “The sun and the water don’t get much out of it.”

  He could only stare. She had just told him he was the sun to her, and she thought he didn’t get anything out of it?

  What the hell was he doing wrong? Hadn’t she even noticed the gooey melted marshmallow of him all over her hands? Did he need to be bringing her flowers or something? Presents? Should he be getting jewelry?

  He couldn’t imagine jewelry on her. She didn’t even wear a watch. It was as if the pure, clean lines of her needed to stay uncluttered of anything but the fairy dust freckles. But, whatever, it was his day off Monday, maybe he should take her down the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and see if anything in the glitzy windows made her eyes sparkle.

  “I think the sun analogy only goes so far,” he said very dryly. Not that he wanted to refuse it. It bathed through him, healing all kinds of old bruises, to be her sun. “How could you possibly think I’m not getting anything out of it?” Every time he touched her, he had to restrain himself from squeezing her like she was a sponge in the desert from which he could suck the last drop of water.

  Now she pulled away from him. He wanted to fight that, to overpower her, because always there was a part of him that knew he could, but once again he managed to remind his instincts what decent men did and let her go.

  She put a body width between them, slipping her hands into the opposite wide sleeves of her light loose sweater. She turned her back to the water she said looked like his eyes, but she didn’t quite face him, either. She pressed her butt back into the rail and gazed across the bridge up the canal the other way, to the group spilled out from the bar around the next bridge, their plastic cups of beer in the slow-gathering dusk gleaming like fireflies caught on the edge of the street lamps.

  “I don’t have anything to offer anyone right now,” she said.

  He gave an incredulous laugh. Nothing to offer? When she made him feel so happy, what was that to her? Nothing? “What are you talking about?”

  “My worth—the things I’ve been good at—I can’t do right now. I don’t want to. I might never do them again. And that’s—that’s what is good about me. Without it . . . there’s only me.”

  His eyebrows drew together. “That sounds like a good place to start over. With only you. Putain, I would love to have a base like that.”

  Her eyes widened. Her mouth softened. She looked at him as if she thought about easing back toward him, but she bent her head and thought worse of it. “I do have money,” she said harshly, as if it was forced out of her. “If . . . it’s needed. I do have that.”

  He stared at her, as betrayed as if she had knifed him in the back after thirty other senators. She had money? She thought he cared? She thought he might care? She thought . . . what? That he was going to scrounge after her money, like some boy crawling out of a scrapheap? Not the boy who had beaten his bloody way to the top of the hill and could claim its kingship?

  She had money. She was some kind of privileged princess. Fuck. Doing what? Crawling in the muck? Playing Lady Chatterley? Was that how she was using him?

  You didn’t think the sun could be bought with money.

  His hand closed slowly into a fist over the rail, bruising his hard palm. “What the fuck do you think I care about that?” he asked, low and far more harshly than she knew how to say anything.

  Her eyes flared and she flinched, like someone who had known she was making a mistake before she ever made it.

  “Why the hell did you just flinch from me? Do you think I’ll hurt you if I’m angry?”

  Now she blinked, confused. “Wh—?”

  “Fuck you,” he said, unbearably hurt. He had bared his all for her. He had tried to lay cloaks over mud puddles. Any day now, he would have let her know that he read poetry . He would have been sprawling on his stomach on the bed beside her, reading her the pieces that reminded him of her. “Va te faire foutre.”

  He turned and strode away.

  CHAPTER 17

  He got as far as the next bridge before his frantic heart managed to beat so fast that he could barely walk anymore and he had to clutch at the post at the corner. He looked back.

  She was standing still where he had left her, looking at the water. Not at him.

  He turned and ran. Ran back to her as fast as he could. “I’m sorry,” he said before he even reached her. “I’m sorry.”

  He stopped in front of her, trying to take her hands. She fisted them and looked up at him, her jaw very hard and a sheen of tears in her eyes. “Putain, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please don’t, Jaime.” He sounded like his father, in the early days, when his father still felt horrified at himself after he hit his little boy or his wife. “I’m sorry, Jaime.” He squeezed her hands frantically, trying to make them relax to his hold. God, he hated how he sounded so much like his father. Merde, worse, he sounded like himself, when he was young enough to try to apologize his way out of a beating, before he set himself against his father in pure hatred.

  He seemed to be making it worse. That full mouth that had set so hard against him trembled now, and the sheen grew until it shivered on the edge of her lashes, ready to fall. “But why did you say that to me?” he asked desperately. “As if I’m here for money?”

  A far more horrible thing to say to him than fuck you to her. God, fuck you—that was just one of the more polite ways people expressed themselves to each other when he was growing up. It didn’t hurt, like reaching into a man with nasty claws when he was trying so hard to be a prince for you and suggesting he was just some poor, desperate butcher who could be bought.

  “I wasn’t even talking about you,” she said angrily. “I was saying something important about me. So fuck you.”

  His eyes widened at that, and then involuntarily he grinned, desperately relieved to have his own given back to him again.

  He dragged her hand up to his mouth, and it stayed balled in a fist as his lips brushed it, as if she wanted to hit him. He bet she felt fine expressing anger by making a fist. He bet where she grew up, people didn’t actually go around hitting each other whenever they got mad. “I’m a self-absorbed bastard,” he said, wishing to hell that wasn’t so true. “Tell me what you were trying to say.”

  She wrenched her hand away, and he had to let her do that, because he was trying to be the good guy. It didn’t help that even after eleven years on his own, he still had to remind himself over and over what good guys did, to override his own instincts to just hold on. She
turned, anger in every line of her body, walking away, but when he fell into step beside her, she didn’t try to shove him in the path of an oncoming car or anything. She expected him, she wanted him, to fall into step beside her. So, good, they were just in a fight, like a normal couple, and he was doing the right thing now. He wasn’t being too aggressive or too pushy, he was supposed to be following her while she walked her mad off, making amends.

  “Tell me,” he coaxed again, after a couple of bridges.

  She sat down abruptly on the low concrete bank of the canal, where the water was so close she could have trailed her hand in it. It was a more awkward seat for him, with his longer legs, but he joined her. “I have a lot of money that I didn’t earn,” she said finally. “I think it’s safe to say that, right now, that’s the most important thing I can offer to most people who meet me.”

  His eyebrows shot up at that incredible underestimation of herself. “How many people who meet you even know that? You wear jeans and sweaters.” He understood, vaguely, that there were all kinds of prices for jeans, but hers looked ordinary to him. He was pretty sure Guillemette, whom he didn’t exactly pay a fortune, wore higher-end clothes than Jaime did.

  Jaime gave him an odd, dry look but didn’t answer his question. “I had this idea of contributing to people, of helping them rather than making money off of them, when I was pretty young. And I’ve been doing that. God, I had value; I changed thousands of lives. But—I know there are so many people who are still suffering, who still need help. And yet—it’s like I’ve hit a wall.”

  She looked away toward the cobblestones, her back to the water. He had this sense of not being told something. “What kind of wall?” She wanted to save everybody?

  As far as ambitions went, that certainly put becoming one of the best chocolatiers in the world into a different perspective, didn’t it?

  She flexed her hands around that something she was not saying. “This wall between me and—going back to it. I can’t think my way through to do it anymore, and here I am, stuck. I’m such a damn baby.” She sounded so angry, suddenly, as if she despised herself.

  Did that make him the mud in which her wheels were churning? He frowned, deeply disturbed by the possibility, but forced himself to focus on her self-contempt. “What kind of work did you do, exactly?”

  A glance to his face that skittered away. She seemed to choose her words. “Labor practices and sustainability. It ended up more and more being work against child labor, particularly child slave labor.”

  Her words shook him, profoundly. He stared at his scarred, ugly hands, the forearms pressed against his knees, remembering the first day in that abattoir at age twelve. He hadn’t realized it then, but at least, if he had known anything about his own country’s legal system, he would have had some kind of choice. If you called a terrifying leap from the familiar situation he knew he could survive into the foster care system a choice.

  “I had a lot of backing,” she said very dryly. “Don’t imagine me a hero, because I very clearly am not. But, with that backing, I did manage to do a lot of good.”

  He didn’t think he was imagining a hero at all. A hero. He was dating a hero. Him. “Then why did you stop?”

  “I told you.” A hard twist to her lips. “Because I’m a spoiled baby and can’t face it anymore.”

  It must be a terribly hard thing to do. He wondered if she would ever be ready to talk about the details with him, to go beyond her vague “development work,” or if talking about it was just too difficult. He had read once that many emergency room nurses or doctors quit because, even though they might do so much good, they just could not stand to face the badness of the world another day.

  “You wore yourself out.” A light clicked on. Her face as she sat in his salon, soaking up the taste and the moment. He reached out and closed those rough hands of his around her slim, heroine hands. “Are you using me to—to fill yourself back up again?”

  Her eyes met his. For a moment, her face was naked. “Yes,” she whispered, as if ashamed.

  Oh. Not mud then. Him. As renewable energy for a heroine. He pulled her in tight to him, despite the public place. He seized her too hard and had to force his hold to relax. “And you thought that was a problem?”

  He had always insisted he made chocolate that could nourish the gods. It was about damn time he found a goddess.

  CHAPTER 18

  “You’re looking great,” Cade told Jaime as they sat at the café in the Tuileries again. As the spring grew balmier, it was almost impossible to stay inside. Jaime, used to equatorial climes and still too skinny to have any insulation, shivered a little but forced herself to tough it out. “A sense of empowerment from dumping Dominique Richard, by any chance?”

  Jaime rubbed her arm. Its muscles were getting stronger, the bones less prominent. “A sense of empowerment from keeping him, maybe. I’m pretty sure he’s the source of any strength and power I currently have.” Just sitting in his salon, she felt stronger. He was that salon’s source, and the closer she got to him, the safer, and warmer, and more beautiful she felt, until, when he had her in his arms, nothing in the world could ever be ugly again.

  Cade worried the inside of her lip, watching her. “I doubt it,” she said finally, dryly. “Maybe you need to draw up a little CV of your own achievements. I’m pretty sure most of that strength and power comes from you.”

  “I’m working on it,” Jaime said wryly. She glanced fleetingly at her sister and then away. “I feel a little—crumpled.” She made a can-crushing gesture with her hand and something flinched across Cade’s face. “Like I can’t stand on my own two feet.”

  “I believe that’s normal right now,” Cade said between her teeth. “It’s called convalescence. Can’t you cut yourself some slack?”

  “That’s what I’m doing right now, cutting myself some slack.”

  “Oh, is that what you call slack?” Cade pressed her fingertips together and studied her sister. “And Dominique Richard is your crutch?”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t feel awkward like a crutch. His strength both filled her and wrapped around her, warm and whole. A sun with muscles to hold onto her.

  Cade’s expression was both intrigued and wary. “Dominique Richard. You have no idea how strange the idea is. Jamie—it worries me that you might depend on him.”

  “Why?” Jaime’s mouth twisted. “Do you think it broke me, Cade? That now I’m one of those clinging vine women who can’t stand on her own two feet?”

  Cade stared at her, her face whitening. After a moment, she spoke grimly. “By ‘broke,’ do you mean that literally or figuratively?”

  “Oh, let’s leave the literal side out of this.” Jaime made a shoving motion with one hand, as if she was trying to scrape a big load of manure off the table. “I’m perfectly fi—”

  “I know,” Cade interrupted sharply. “I know you’re fine. Let’s just take that as a given, that you’re perfectly fine. So you don’t have to say it anymore.”

  “Well, why do I have to say it? Is that all I’ll be for the rest of my life, some broken body, too stupid to keep out of trouble?”

  “It was three months ago, Jaime. Three months and the rest of your life aren’t exactly the same thing.”

  “Right. Right.” Jaime scrubbed a hand over her face and gazed at a giant, black, twisted metal sculpture of a mother spider that loomed over the tulips and well-tended grass. Lucky her, the Tuileries were hosting a nightmare as a temporary exhibit. She shifted her chair away from the lurid vision and focused on a classical, green-tinted statue of a fleeing nymph. Casting a terrified look back over her shoulder.

  For God’s sake. She focused hard on the table instead. “You know, I’m just fine, until I think about going back there. And then—” She repeated that crumpling motion with her fist, illustrative of her soul collapsing like an empty can.

  Cade knit her fingers, her problem-solving mode. Jaime wondered if her sister’s boardroom adversaries knew Cade’s tells
like that, the way she pressed just the tips of her fingers together in a haughty peak to assert her control over a situation, the way more and more fingers would thread as the problem got more complex, requiring ever greater care to resolve. They were all threaded now. “Have you actually caught yourself up on the political situation since you’ve been in the hospital? I would argue against personally going back there anytime soon.”

  “That might be a stronger argument if you and Dad and Grandpa hadn’t always argued that I shouldn’t be going to these places.”

  Cade bit something back, but Jaime knew exactly what it was: And Dad and Grandpa and I were always right.

  “You weren’t right,” Jaime said out loud. “I did a lot of good.”

  Cade rubbed a hand over her face. “I’m not arguing that, Jaime.”

  “I could do more. I was supposed to be organizing a Round Table on the Cocoa Economy in Abidjan. You remember? I mentioned the idea to you just before . . .”

  Cade was silent. Thoughtful. Cade, who could reorganize the world in the space of a boardroom meeting, but who had never managed to re-organize her sister. “Well, if you’ll take my advice,” Cade said finally, proving that she could no more stop trying than Jaime could, “if you want to have the people who can make a difference actually come, you’ll organize it in Paris. Because until the political situation calms in Côte d’Ivoire, none of the chocolate manufacturers will send someone down there. But you could probably fly farming cooperative representatives up here. And government officials, if it’s settled by then who they’re going to be.”

  Jaime frowned. “I want to get those CEOs out on the farms, so they can see something when this is discussed besides how much more sustainable cocoa costs.”

  Cade made a low, deeply annoyed sound. “Damn it. Why do I always have to be the pragmatist? Sure, personal, one-on-one visits from the billionaires of the world might be better. But here’s a thought: rather than killing yourself over an ideal, why don’t you find what’s doable and get it done.”