The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  “I’ve always stayed the whole night,” he said, startled. “I leave for work.” Still pressed back against his desk, he stared at her. “You didn’t know that?”

  She shook her head.

  “So when you wake up and I’m not there, you’ve been thinking—what?”

  “That it’s understandable you would need space. That I need to let you breathe.”

  There was a silence. “No,” was all he said, the word packed tight with meaning. “No. I—breathe better when you’re right here.”

  With a little sigh, she stepped forward and sank into him, letting all her tension leave her. Her face rubbed against the chef’s jacket, wishing it gone.

  One of his hands unlocked from the edge of the desk, flexing to restore circulation. He brought it warily to press between her shoulder blades. “And you? Do you need space to breathe?”

  He smelled of rich deep chocolate and something green underneath it, some experiment perhaps. “I breathe better here, too,” she said quite honestly. She drew a breath. “I have an unusual question for you.”

  “Me, too.”

  She hesitated. Maybe he was going to ask the same thing? Did she want him to? Her heart squeezed quite tightly at the possibility that he might be thinking along the same lines. “Go ahead,” she whispered.

  “What’s your last name?”

  CHAPTER 28

  Jaime seethed when she found out what had happened. Dom found it vastly reassuring. She snapped at him for jumping to negative conclusions; she growled about her interfering family. It was all so stable. Safe. Apparently you could annoy the people you loved without provoking a wild rage or driving them away. It was just something that happened sometimes. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” she snapped.

  A list of the first dozen or so major things wrong with him flashed through his mind, but he snuck a glance and saw with relief that this was a rhetorical question.

  “Couldn’t you have just told me my grandfather was being an interfering old—was doing his usual thing? Instead of brooding and imagining things. I don’t see why my last name has to make such a big difference.” She set her mouth in the closest thing to a sulk he had ever seen her manage, as they approached the elegant old building on the edge of the Jardins du Luxembourg. Sacks loaded the arm he didn’t have around her. Jaime had been to the Belleville market while he was working.

  “Because it’s not the kind of last name you forget to mention, that’s why. You didn’t want me to know it.”

  “Dominique. How long have we known each other?”

  “A month.”

  She looked confused.

  “Two weeks,” he corrected himself reluctantly. Didn’t she realize that those two weeks she’d sat in his salon counted as knowing him? “In another three days.”

  His attempts to grab onto long-term were so pathetic.

  “And you made it clear what you thought of the Coreys and Sylvain. I wasn’t exactly dying to let you know I was one of them.”

  Dominique stopped dead. “Sylvain. Oh, putain, he’s going to be my brother-in-law.”

  Jaime stubbed her toe on the edge of the sidewalk. He held onto her as she hopped, cursing, and only when she finally put her foot back down and gazed up at him with wide eyes did he realize what a presumptuous thing he had just said. He flushed. “In a manner of speaking.”

  Jaime flushed, too, and looked away. “You’re invited to the wedding, by the way,” she mentioned as he opened the apartment building door for her. They stepped into rich elegance, red velvet carpet going up the sweeping stairs, a gold-framed glass-doored elevator waiting beside them, a well-dressed security guard nodding a respectful, Bonsoir, Mademoiselle Corey, Monsieur.

  Just in case he needed any clearer sign that in going to this dinner, he was going to war. Alien territory, filled with hostiles. He was already getting hungry for their blood.

  “I’m going to Sylvain Marquis’s wedding,” he repeated, with flat horror. Sylvain Marquis, putain. He tried to keep his voice neutral. “When is it?”

  “In June.”

  June. He forced his lungs to keep working properly when they seemed to have swollen up like big yellow balloons. June. That was another month away. One more month, at least.

  Yes, it was official. His attempts to believe in long-term were pathetic. No matter what Jaime said about not leaving, he was almost grateful to have to go to Sylvain’s damn wedding just because it guaranteed another month.

  They stepped into the elegant glass-and-gold elevator, a disappointment as Parisian elevators went. The first time he was in an elevator with her, and it turned out to be a spacious one that left them in public view the whole time. Just another unexpected drawback of dating someone with more money than God.

  He frowned suddenly. “What the hell was Sylvain doing making chocolates just for you? That’s incestuous, even for him.”

  “Making chocolates for someone isn’t always sexual!” Jaime snapped.

  He raised his eyebrows. There might not be anything sexual about a huge Corey factory making chocolate, but when he worked . . .

  “He was there,” Jaime said abruptly. She didn’t have to say when. Her tone said it all. “He came with Cade.”

  Oh, God. “Minette.” He pulled her in tight against him, involuntarily. God, Sylvain would have seen, then. Seen what Dom dreaded even to imagine, the way Jaime had looked right after the attack.

  He wrapped her tighter against him, pressing her face against his chest. Sylvain could make her all the chocolates he wanted, in those circumstances. Dom wished he had been there himself to feed her. But if he had known her already then . . . if that had happened to her under his watch . . . he wasn’t sure how he would have survived it. “Ma minette,” he whispered, stroking her red-caramel hair. It felt softer today. Now that he had discovered her scar, she had stopped trying to weld her hair with hairspray into a mass that would never let it peek out.

  Meaning he was the only person whose gaze mattered?

  The elevator doors slid open directly onto the apartment foyer. The apartment itself clearly took up the entire top floor.

  “Dominique.” Cade grinned, gave Jaime a quick hug, and then tilted her face up for Dom’s bises. “I’ve been really looking forward to this.”

  Yes, he bet she had.

  “Me, too,” James Corey said cheerfully, shaking his hand, looking wickedly pleased and speculative all at once. His namesake grandchild glowered at him.

  “Dominique,” Sylvain said with intense reluctance, extending his hand for the briefest of shakes. He looked as if someone was trying to force a boot down his throat.

  Dom grinned, feeling better and better about this dinner. He loved cramming himself down other people’s throats and making them like it.

  The last man to greet him was the only one of the group he hadn’t met: a man in his fifties, with well-cut gray hair and blue eyes, who studied him critically. “Dominique Richard,” he said coldly.

  Dom gave the man his sharpest-edged smile, the one that made it clear he was capable of going for the jugular. So this was Jaime’s father, the current head of the largest chocolate-producing corporation in the world? If you wanted to call it chocolate.

  That made it, what, four against one tonight? Good. He liked being able to fight all his enemies at once. Fewer than that, and he felt like a bully picking on people smaller than he was.

  “Mack Corey?” Dom retorted in a similar tone. He disliked the man already. He couldn’t make sure his own daughter was surrounded by a small armed force while she traveled in danger zones?

  Mack Corey narrowed his eyes at the criticism inherent in Dom’s tone. Dominique nearly laughed as he extended his hand. Come looking for a battle with me, did you?

  Mack Corey matched the shake with the experience of a man who had handled a million aggressive business shakes. “I’ve heard a lot of bad things about you.”

  Had he? And had he shared them all with his daughter? Probably, the bastard.


  Because Jaime was listening, Dom bit back on the urge to tell her father to fuck off. “I’ve heard plenty of bad things about you, too.”

  He walked on past him, to set Jaime’s sacks in the kitchen. The cooking area was set off from the main living room, but no walls separated it from the rest of the glossy, modern apartment. Floor-to-ceiling windows took up one entire wall, an uninterrupted line without curtains or shades, providing a beautiful view of the Jardins du Luxembourg. These windows continued on to form one wall of the kitchen, so that working there was like working suspended above the city. Four surrealist, metal stools were tucked under the blue-flecked granite kitchen bar. On the other side of it were stovetops and a refrigerator hidden discreetly behind a wood face that blended with the rest of the cabinets. The dining table, set far enough from the kitchen to make it obvious that the people who cooked in it weren’t always the same people who ate at the table, was of the same blue-flecked dark granite, suspended from some type of wiring so fine it seemed to be floating, at first look.

  A huge black couch in the living area faced the extraordinary view of the gardens. Near it was a suspended fireplace, clean lines, lit, a fine mesh making sure its sparks would not hit the extravagant fall of ferns and plants filling the wall near it. All around the space, similar falls of ferns saved the modern elements from being too harsh, invoked a sense of peace and simplicity.

  He had been in apartments as luxurious. It was quite common for oil sheikhs, for example, to keep apartments far more extravagant than this in Paris, to show up once or twice a year to use them, and to hire a top name like Dominique Richard to make something to awe their guests at parties. But it was surreal to realize this type of environment seemed normal to Jaime, of all people.

  When he turned from the counter, Mack Corey was standing on the opposite side of the bar, his arms folded on it as he studied Dom coldly. “You haven’t heard I was arrested for a knife fight or am famous for womanizing.”

  Damn it. So Jaime knew about the knife fight? Well, she did now, that was for sure.

  “No, but I’ve heard your company used child slave labor until your own daughter stopped it.”

  Mack Corey stiffened. Cade and her grandfather froze, Cade in the act of reaching for a bottle and James Corey in the act of bringing a drink to his lips. Sylvain raised an eyebrow, amused and almost impressed. Jaime looked up from the vegetables she was taking out of the totes and glanced back and forth between the two men with an odd curl to one corner of her lip.

  “Our cacao is provided by thousands of plantations, and we haven’t always been aware of working conditions on all of them,” Mack Corey said icily.

  “That’s convenient,” Dom said. “But we can talk about my arrests or my womanizing if you find that an easier focus for your conscience.”

  Mack Corey shut his mouth hard. James Corey looked from his son to Dominique with lips pursed on a whistle. Cade’s eyes were quite wide as she stirred a drink and slid it down the bar neatly into her father’s hand. “Dominique, maybe I should get you something?” she suggested pointedly.

  “Water. But go ahead, drink up,” he told Mack Corey. “You’ve had a long flight to get here and rescue your daughter from me, and you probably deal poorly with failure.”

  There was an instant’s silence. “Well!” James Corey said brightly. “This is fun. Jamie, is this the cream of the crop, or are the other guys you’ve dated all like him?”

  That eighty-year-old bastard. He had thirty years more practice than his son at pure genius meanness, didn’t he?

  “The cream of the crop,” Jaime said briefly, in a tone that brooked no argument at all, as she folded her cloth grocery bags. The counter was now crowded with plantains, coconuts, small red bananas, papayas, floppy bags of spices tied by hand, and some kind of bean he didn’t even recognize, despite his experience in kitchens.

  “I’m sure Jaime is the cream of the crop for you, too,” Mack Corey told Dominique coldly. “Considering her worth. No wonder you’ve stuck with her longer than with anyone else.”

  Jaime fixed her father with a brilliant, hard look.

  “That’s funny,” Dom told him. “That’s exactly what I think myself. I’m not sure you and I evaluate worth the same way, though.”

  James Corey said something to his son in English, grinning. Mack Corey looked surprised and exasperated, but he unfolded his arms and backed off for a little while.

  No wonder Jaime went around thinking people might be interested in her for her money. Dom fixed a disgruntled look on Cade, as the nearest family member he could take things out on. “No other reason someone might be interested in her ever occurs to you people?”

  Cade looked rueful. “Dominique, you’re a notorious womanizing badass, and you latched onto my sister when she was down. What do you expect us to do? Trust you?”

  “No, but you might try trusting her,” Dom said, annoyed, and turned back to the vegetables and spices spilled over the counter.

  Trusting her.

  Trusting her.

  To have picked him because he deserved to be with her?

  Sylvain reached across Jaime’s body for one of the bags of spices, his arm brushing hers in passing, his eyes sparkling with interest, and Dom took one long step forward and inserted his body between the two of them, bumping both of them in the process. “Pardon,” he said to Jaime, even while his big body shifted her a foot farther down the counter. “What are you making?”

  “Whatever Jaime tells me to,” Sylvain said easily, not reacting to the bumping beyond a slanted, warning glance. Why the hell did Sylvain get blessed with those poet’s good looks? He looked like the kind of person women would fight duels over. “She’s in charge tonight. You ever had your honor defended by punitive use of spices before?”

  Jaime gave a little, smug smirk. “I’ll keep it mild for you,” she said patronizingly.

  “Thank you,” Sylvain said. “But it’s cruel to give people false hope. Just tell me what this little spice is, and I’ll try to forgive you, though.”

  Dom closed his hand around the bottom of the bag and yanked it deftly out of Sylvain’s relaxed grip, hating him for his clear familiarity with Jaime and her cooking. He had never tasted Jaime’s cooking. “If you’ve got unusual spices, I want to know about them,” he told Jaime. “Don’t share them with him. He’s boring.”

  “You’re melodramatic,” Sylvain retorted. “Don’t stab me with that knife. I hear it’s been a good ten years since the last time you were in jail.”

  His jaw clenching, Dom stopped with his hand around the butcher knife he had just picked up to help Jaime.

  “I’ll tell you what—” Jaime deftly inserted herself between the two men. He felt a sudden sympathy for her father. Even after two months in the hospital, did she still have no instinct for self-preservation? “Dominique, you chop on this side, and Sylvain on this side, and the next person who says a word gets to chop the onions.”

  “I prefer the middle,” Dom said, scooping up the onions and putting himself back between the two of them. So he couldn’t be nudged aside again, he started mincing, not even looking at the onions while he did it. Despite Sylvain’s conviction that he had hung the moon, Dom was the one who had actually worked in a three-star kitchen on his path to becoming chocolatier-pâtissier. It was fascinating to watch Jaime while he did her petit commis work, how familiar she seemed with the exotic vegetables and how awkward with the kitchen equipment. Where had she learned to cook this dish, in a village hut?

  “I wasn’t actually the one with the knife,” he mentioned to her, softly enough that le salaud Sylvain couldn’t hear him defending himself. He just wanted her to know—he had some redeeming qualities. He hadn’t actually tried to knife anyone in his life.

  She smiled far too easily as she slid him the yams to peel and dice next. How comfortable was she with this knife-fight news? What more did she already know about him? He moved briskly through the hard vegetables, not really watchin
g the peeler or lethally sharp knife he was using because he was eyeing her. Jaime had no knife skills to speak of, but she knew what she wanted to do with this recipe. She toasted spices in a skillet over the gas flame, the scents rising around him, teasing him like some secret perfume she wore. This was her life. Before that scar on her arm. “Who taught you this recipe?”

  “A family. The grandmother and the mother and their little girl, mostly. They were—very happy.”

  He didn’t know what to do about that. He had a deep fear that the more she remembered the happiness she had created, the more driven she would feel to force herself back to make more. For people she thought deserved it more than he did. What was he talking about, for people who did deserve it more than he did. Yet despite his rivalry with those happy memories of hers, he loved seeing her face relax into them, instead of tensing as if the only thing she could see of her past life was the way it had ended.

  He took a bite of the papaya he had started cutting for her, sweet and soft, and proffered a square to her lips. She smiled against his fingertips and took the papaya from them with a little kiss.

  What if he could actually go on being this insanely happy his entire life?

  Her father called something to her in English, and she left the kitchen area for a moment, leaving him and Sylvain alone. He had bought some English-language programs the other day, but he hadn’t had time to start practicing. Maybe he could find an audio program he could listen to at the gym. Maybe Jaime could get him started by teaching him all the parts of the body. He grinned a little at the vision. And some of the verbs that went with those parts of the body, too.

  Meanwhile, instead of getting lost in erotic English lesson fantasies in the middle of a family get-together, there was something he needed to say, and this might be his only chance without an audience.

  “Thank you,” he said abruptly, stiffly, to Sylvain. There, he had gotten it out, all right?