The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  “You don’t hit your employees. You might yell at them or in some psychological way be a bastard—”

  “But you don’t,” Pierre said. “You don’t yell at them or psychologically abuse them.”

  “No, they walk all over me,” Dom said, aggrieved. Sylvain and Philippe probably got to yell at their team once in a while to keep them in line, without suffering mountains of angst over it.

  “They don’t abuse you?”

  Dom’s eyebrows went up. It had been sixteen years since anyone had been able to get away with abusing him. “No, I think it’s a pretty happy place to work for everyone, to tell the truth.” He could feel light coming out of his salon and kitchens from blocks away. It was a heaven to hell contrast with the abattoir where he had started his working life. He loved it, the contrast. Every single day he walked into his salon, he loved it.

  “That’s an amazing accomplishment in and of itself, Dominique. All your work is amazing.” A diehard fan, Pierre came in at least once a week.

  Dom couldn’t stop a pleased smile. But he said, “Those are employees. The relationship is different. There’s been no real test of me, ever. I’ve never allowed one.” How the hell could he be so selfish as to make Jaime his guinea pig? He needed to let her go.

  But she said he was her sun. If he let her go . . . she might be cold and empty. And who would destroy anyone who tried to hurt her?

  “Hmm.”

  Dom had forgotten how annoying Pierre’s hmms were.

  “You said once a long time ago that you had never hit anyone smaller than you.”

  “No.”

  “Not ever. Not even young on the playground.”

  “I got in a lot of fights, but I think they were with boys pretty much my size.” He had been a big child, but it wasn’t until his teenage growth spurt that he had turned into such a bruiser. He hadn’t really had anything against any of the younger, smaller kids, anyway. It had been the bigger ones, the ones who tried to bully him or others, who drove him into a rage.

  “You know, Dominique, I tried to tell you once before, and you left and never came back, but I’m going to say it again. I think you might be selling yourself short in relationships. I don’t think you’ll let yourself ever do what your father did.”

  His hmms were annoying, but fundamentally, Pierre was such a damned good guy. “How can you be so sure?”

  “I can’t be sure.”

  Dom’s heart sank. He wanted sure.

  “But I have much greater hope in you than you seem to in yourself, Dominique. You’re not so good at hope, but I’ve never seen anyone to match you in determination. You just go and do what you decide you want yourself to do. If you don’t know how, you find out how. Like now.” Pierre nodded at him.

  Dominique stared at his big taut hands, trying not to admit something. That maybe, he was focusing on the question of whether he should let her go because it was easier than the real fear: when and how she would leave him. He took a deep breath, concentrated on it, let it slowly out. “So . . . how? How do I do this deeper relationship thing?”

  “Have you considered that both of you could come see me together?”

  Dominique shook his head, repelled. “She doesn’t need it.”

  Pierre’s eyebrows rose a little bit. “Someone who was traumatically beaten just a few months ago? Are you sure?”

  “She’s very strong,” Dominique said stubbornly. He saw her sitting in his salon, the still, absorbed focus of her. She had him. He was her healing. Thinking about it that way made him a little uneasy. He could feed her senses and her body, he could warm her, he could let her soak up everything she wanted from him. But . . . he wasn’t a doctor.

  “It might help you two to understand each other. Given her past experience and yours—you’re going to have some issues you need to communicate about.”

  Dominique gave him an appalled look. “No. I mean, she can communicate about whatever she needs to, but she doesn’t need to know anything about my past.” Drag her into that ugly period of worthlessness? She thought he was her sun. Not some dirty mongrel that had heaved itself out of the mud.

  If Pierre raised his eyebrows one more time, he might glue the things in place. “Do I take it that this woman doesn’t, in fact, know anything?”

  Dominique shook his head vehemently.

  “All she knows about you is that you’re one of the world’s top chocolatiers, and she has no idea what you climbed up from to get there?”

  Dominique knew he was looking unbearably smug. But, come on, it was quite a disguise to pull off.

  “Well. You asked how to work on having a deeper relationship. Honesty might be a good place to start.”

  Was his psychologist crazy? “Pierre. She trusts me. You want me to be honest with her and ruin that?”

  Pierre gave him a very wry look and waited.

  “Fuck that.” She let his hands curve around her skull. She let him lock her body under all his size and muscle, and she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him while he did. He was never, never, never going to let her find out that no woman in her right mind would trust him with herself. “Pierre—you’re a good man, and I respect your advice. But I would lie comme un arracheur de dents for this woman.” Lie like the lowest worm there was.

  No texto from Guillemette. He swung back by his salon, but Jaime hadn’t come by.

  She hated his knowledge of the attack. He could tell.

  Pierre would probably say he should let her see one of his wounds, let her know that he knew what it was like, to have someone hurt you, to keep on doing it after you were on the ground and not fighting anymore and not even conscious to receive it, to do it when all you had done was want to love them.

  But everybody knew that boys raised violently became violent men. He knew it. He rode that violence inside him like a wild beast all the time, trying not to let it buck him off. He couldn’t tell her that she should leave him.

  She thought he was her sun. She thought she wanted to soak him into her soul, that he was that beautiful. When they used the chocolate in the enrobing machines to coat something with nuts or fruit in it, they had to purify it afterward: pour it all through stretched women’s pantyhose, let the sieve catch even the finest bits that corrupted the chocolate’s purity, then return the chocolate to the cleaned enrobeuse, maybe temper it again, as if all its past use and abuse had never been. He wished he could do that to himself for her.

  He didn’t want her to realize he wasn’t a sun.

  He hated it when she didn’t come. He got that cold, desperate feeling in his stomach, the fear trying to push out of the shell he locked it into. But she hadn’t come once before, right? When she was feeling exposed and vulnerable.

  So he went to the gym, and she wasn’t there, and he cut his workout short and went to her apartment. She wasn’t there, either, and he kept trying to tell himself not to be an idiot, not to squeeze all the breath out of her by grabbing onto her too tight. She didn’t have to be glued to him.

  He had stepped back out onto the street—lecturing himself that he couldn’t hang out there waiting for her to show up, that was too louche, too creepy, something his father would probably have done—when he saw her. Coming up the street with her hands empty, no shopping, a tiny backpack of a purse. Her steps fractured when she saw him, and the man striding briskly behind her flowed off to the street around her and back to the sidewalk without even breaking pace, still talking on his phone.

  Dom let him pass and looked back at her. Her eyes were wide, somber. Merde.

  He left her door and met her halfway. Three quarters of the way. It took her a while to start moving toward him.

  “I missed you.” He smiled down at her, while his heart pounded sickeningly.

  Her face softened into a shy smile. His heart eased a little. “You must get tired of me sitting in your salon all day.”

  “Ah, non,” he said involuntarily. “Non. Non.” It bathed his whole body in warmth to know she was
sitting there. Soaking him up. Sometimes he still stood in the little corner of glass and stone, smearing chocolate prints against the glass as he watched her, the poor child outside the candy shop he couldn’t quite believe he had the right to enter. The size of his chocolate prints, compared to the little foggy ones they often had to wipe off the front of his own windows, was . . . humiliating. Like his insides should really have grown at the same rate as his outsides.

  He reached out and stroked the tips of his fingers along the line between her hair and cheek, to prove to himself that he could. That she would like it. “I like feeding you.”

  Her smile bloomed.

  “Come for a walk?” he coaxed. “I know a restaurant you will love.” Thank God for his city. He had a thousand restaurants she would love. That was three years of nightly temptation.

  But her smile faded. She bit her lip. “I can’t.”

  His heart clutched with panic again. Normal, he tried to tell himself. Normal that she would sometimes have other plans. Don’t, don’t do something stupid or clingy or creepy. Don’t you dare ask her what they are. “All right,” he said easily. Easily. God. He trailed his fingers over her shoulder, down her arm, lifting the tips of her fingers in the tips of his. For all the world as if he was confident and normal. “Come by tomorrow and I’ll make you something special.”

  Her smile kicked back up. Her eyes clung to his. “All right.”

  He looped his arm around her, turned them both into the nearest doorway, and kissed her. She pressed herself instantly against him, as if she liked the feel of him along the length of her body. He smiled down at her, deeply relieved. “I’ll miss you tonight.”

  Her hands flexed into his shirt, grabbing fistfuls. “Me, too.”

  So . . . he tried to feel like a completely normal person when he left her, and not like he wanted to throw his arms around her legs so that she had to drag him with her every step.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Jamie. I’m just trying to tell you. He’s a total bastard.” Sylvain stood at his granite kitchen counter, running a knife through shallots with blurred speed as if they were Dominique’s fingers. Sylvain in a kitchen, the murderous poet.

  Cade toasted Jaime silently with her wine and wandered out into the living room area as if this subject had nothing to do with her. Lying traitor. She had invited Jaime to facilitate this lecture.

  “You know, I had other offers for this evening,” Jaime said coldly. Strolling around Paris hand in hand with Dominique. She hated proving she was strong again and not a clinging vine. It made those hours of brutal physical therapy look like a piece of cake.

  Next time you’re trying not to cling, go take in a show. They’re dancing Firebird and The Rite of Spring at the Opéra Garnier. You might find it motivating. You can decide whether you want to be the sacrificial virgin or the bird that rises from the ashes. Instead of defending her sex life to her family.

  Someday she had to tell Dominique her last name, so she could make him join her for these cozy dinners. But for now, it was nice to be anonymous. He couldn’t Google her and find the five pages of results that suggested she had done nothing with her life but get beat up.

  Although seeing Sylvain’s face if she arrived with Dominique Richard in tow as his dinner guest would have been priceless. Not worth adding one more possible blow to her relationship with Dominique, but otherwise hilarious.

  Dominique’s face, though, when she had said she was busy that evening. That hard, guarded look. Her whole right side felt empty, as if it should be pressed against something. That broad swath of skin over her shoulders and down over her biceps, where his arm would have draped, was cold . . .

  “I’m just—I’m worried about you.” Sylvain studied her, a man whose very first acquaintance with her had been when she was a battered pulp being hauled around on a hospital bed, and who was never going to get over it. “You’re vulnerable right now. Et il s’en fout.” He doesn’t give a damn.

  Jaime remembered the shower, being held like a teddy bear. “That’s not true, Sylvain.”

  He gave her a frustrated look. “He’s a very good flirt. You wouldn’t necessarily know qu’il s’en fout.”

  “He’s not, really.” Cade drifted back from the living room. “A good flirt. I mean, he is in a direct way, but the long, elaborate, sensual seduction—not his thing.” Her gaze lingered a subtle moment on Sylvain, giving Jaime far more insight into her sister’s sex life than she was at all comfortable with.

  Why the hell did Cade feel so comfortable barging into hers? “Cade, can you call up a picture on your phone of the man you think is Dominique Richard? Because I’m really not sure we know the same person.”

  Cade’s eyebrows went up, and then she looked uncomfortable. Oh, great, Jaime had given her a visual. This was ghastly.

  “I don’t mean to be any ruder than the two of you are, but my personal life is none of your business.”

  And God knew, comparing the way Dominique Richard had flirted with each sister was not her idea of fun.

  Sylvain gave her a blankly uncomprehending look. “We’re your family. How in the world could you say that?”

  Cade grinned at her smugly. “He’s got a little sister of his own.”

  It pissed her off beyond belief, the way Cade always thought of her as the little sister who needed guidance. “Is she all grown up, too?”

  “Oh, no, she’s only twenty-one.” Sylvain sounded appalled.

  “Sylvain, didn’t you start your own business at twenty-one?”

  He dumped all the shallots in a pan and gave her a long, steady, disgruntled look.

  “Look, I am in exactly the situation I want to be in, and if you would give me the respect of believing I wouldn’t let myself be in any other type of situation, I would appreciate that.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you,” Cade informed her fiancé ironically. “She’s using him.”

  “Oh, pour l’amour de Dieu.” Sylvain attacked some mushrooms far more viciously than the weak little fungi merited. He stopped after a moment to give Jaime a hard look. “He’s not violent, is he?”

  “Violent?”

  “You can just feel it simmering in him all the time, violence.”

  “You’re just saying that because he’s so big and he looks so . . . rough.” Rough-edged, hard, bad-boy, leathers . . . trying to hide that soft ganache center of his. He was so gentle with her.

  “No,” Sylvain said impatiently. “Putain, Jamie, I grew up in the banlieue, too. Not as bad a one as his, but I know the difference between bravado violence and the real thing. He’s got it in him.”

  “Maybe with you! You’re not exactly his friend and ally.”

  “How many times did you say he got arrested?” Sylvain asked Cade.

  “Sylvain!” Cade hissed. She gave Jaime an awkward look.

  Jaime’s blood boiled. “Did you have him investigated more after you heard I was going out with him? What the hell, Cade? Did I do that to you with Sylvain?”

  “You didn’t even know about Sylvain or care,” Cade said impatiently and with an old anger. “You were off in Papua New Guinea at the time. And, to answer the question, once. He got arrested once, when he was eighteen. A knife fight, but he didn’t have the knife. The times before that were calls to la D. D. A. S. S. when he was a lot younger.”

  Jaime absolutely refused to take advantage of Cade’s continued prying into other people’s private lives, but . . . “What’s la D. D. A. S. S.?”

  Cade raised her eyebrows at Sylvain.

  “They check on family issues,” he said reluctantly. “And some other things.”

  Jaime’s eyebrows plummeted. She walked away through the living room to stand at Sylvain’s great balcony windows, open to the spring night.

  “Don’t start getting le coeur tendre!” Sylvain called after her, frustrated. “Have some sense!”

  “Jamie? Sense?” Cade asked incredulously, and Jaime’s head almost exploded. How could her family ho
nestly believe that she had reformed cacao farm labor practices in difficult parts of the world without at least some sense being involved? Did they think it was all wild-eyed activism and pure luck?

  Yeah, they did, didn’t they?

  “What were the calls for?” Jaime asked stiffly, looking back.

  Cade shook her head. “You know those kinds of records are sealed. I don’t know how my team managed to find out they even happened. His mother left when he was pretty young. It could have been teachers trying to make sure he was being cared for properly.”

  If his teachers were trying to make sure he was all right, then he must have been showing some pretty obvious signs of not being all right. No mother and—what kind of father sent his son to work in a slaughterhouse? She flinched at the possibilities, her heart curling in her in pity for a little boy, in awe of a grown man. Was there nothing he couldn’t rise above, to become that big, rough, gentle man proffering her wild chocolates with a coaxing smile?

  Damn it, how could she ask him to stick himself with a woman who couldn’t rise above anything?

  “I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” Jaime said abruptly, harshly. “We can talk about something else, or I’m leaving.”

  Cade sighed. Sylvain looked frustrated, biting his tongue.

  But they talked about something else.

  After dinner, Cade nestled against Sylvain on the couch, while Jaime curled against the lonely edge of an armchair, trying not to feel miserable. They didn’t mean to rub her isolation in her face. But at that moment, she wanted nothing so much as to spend the rest of her life exactly like them: in Paris, in some simple, quiet apartment, curled up against . . .

  She looked down at her hands. Feeling a wash of need that terrified her. Couldn’t she stand on her own anymore?

  The irony. She had spent so much of her life wanting not to be like Cade or their family. She had been the independent one, the one who was wild and free. And now she was just begging for a nice, safe cage.

  Begging for it from a man who had never had a cage in his life, who had broken through every bar that held him.