The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  Sylvain’s supple eyebrows went up, his own knife pausing as he sent him a stunned look.

  “For”—Dom jerked his chin over his shoulder, in the direction in which he could hear Jaime speaking in English—“the chocolates, when she was . . .” He swallowed hard.

  Sylvain’s eyes widened, fixed on him, fascinated. “Putain, mais tu es amour—” He broke off. It was the first time since they had known each other that Sylvain had ever started to use tu with him, and even Sylvain wasn’t obnoxious enough to say the whole sentence out loud. You’re in love with her.

  Dom stared at the papaya a long moment, the first time he had ever lowered his gaze in Sylvain’s presence. “Was it bad?” he asked despite himself, harsh and low.

  “Richard.” Sylvain gripped his arm in an instinct of compassion that was stronger even than their enmity. “Don’t ever look at the photos.”

  Merde.

  Jaime did punish them with spices. At least she tried, but the plan backfired, as despite watering eyes, most of the table seemed to enjoy it. James Corey grinned, and Dom was utterly fascinated by the masochistic explosion of flavors in his mouth. He wanted to kiss her with his stinging tongue and see if he could transfer heat that way.

  “Dad thinks you actually don’t care about money,” Mack Corey said incredulously a few bites into the meal, glaring at Dom as if he had grown two heads.

  “It’s a fixation they have,” Sylvain apologized blandly from his end of the table. “They’ve devoted so much of their life to making money, they can’t wrap their minds around the possibility that someone else could have found much better things to do with his time.”

  “Actually, it’s her freckles that appeal,” Dom told Jaime’s father with the sweetest, meanest smile the world had ever seen. “They go everywhere.”

  Mack Corey flushed crimson and clutched his fists on the table. James Corey gave that whistle he had been holding back for some time. Cade flinched. “Dominique, franchement.”

  Sylvain looked amused.

  Dom didn’t dare look at Jaime. He folded his arms on the table, let the muscles stand out. “Also, maybe her courage, her strength, her overdeveloped sense of responsibility toward the defenseless, her taste for the wild and different, and the way she can just stay so still and absorb things.” Why did everyone, including Jaime herself, think her money was the thing that was the most valuable? Who the hell cared about that? “I can think of a few other qualities that come before money, too, but they’re none of your damn business.”

  Jaime slipped a hand over one of the fists he had lodged in each crook of his arms. He loosened the one she touched enough to turn his hand over and close his fingers around hers.

  Across the table, Cade gave him that look she shared with her younger sister: long, steady, evaluating. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the family resemblance before, except, to be honest, he had never paid that much attention to Cade. She inclined her head slightly to him and raised a silent toast to her sister.

  Since his entire concept of family presumed they were the enemy—to Jaime if they were a bad family and to him if they were a good one—this gesture threw him a little.

  On his right, James Corey gave a sudden crack of laughter. “You know, Richard, I can’t make up my mind, but I actually might like you. At least you’re better than that Doctors Without Borders guy she was dating last fall.”

  Dom slid a glance at Jaime beside him. She had a startled, annoyed look on her face, as if maybe her grandfather’s knowledge of the doctor guy had caught her by surprise. “I’m better than someone in the Médecins sans frontières?”

  “His sense of peace and self-sacrifice extended to his girlfriends,” James Corey said with remembered dislike. “He sold himself cheap, too. Why else do you think I get all that junk mail from MSF these days?”

  Sylvain rested his chin on his fists and gazed at his future grandfather-in-law with a dumbstruck expression. “It’s amazing,” he told Dominique. Was Dom the closest thing Sylvain had in the room to a kindred soul at this point? Poor bastard. “It’s like money is the only way they know how to process things.”

  “Did you fly into Ghana and buy Alec off?” Jaime demanded incredulously. “Grandpa, you know, having guys stop calling me after three dates for no reason I can figure is not that great for my self-esteem. Plus, three dates. Isn’t that a little premature? And you say I waste money.”

  “Yeah, well, having them think you’re worth sacrificing for a cause would be a lot worse for your self-esteem, long-term,” her grandfather retorted. “You already have enough complexes about that kind of thing. Besides, he was an idiot. A quarter million.” He snorted. “Tax deductible, too.”

  Jaime looked up at Dominique. “I don’t know if I should even ask, but how much did he offer you?”

  “To screw up my chances with you? Twenty million. But I thought we were talking about spinach at the time.”

  Jaime stared at him.

  In the background, Sylvain muttered, “I’m begging you, James, stop with the spinach.”

  “I didn’t start the bidding that high,” Dom told Jaime, feeling oddly defensive. He had no idea why the guy before him had only gotten offered a quarter million in comparison.

  “Twenty million?” Mack Corey asked his father. “Are you crazy? You’d better not have been planning to sell shares.”

  “You could tell right away he wasn’t going to break for a paltry quarter million,” James Corey said impatiently. “There’s such a thing as shock value. You know that, Mack. Or you should by now. How long have I been trying to teach you the business?”

  Jaime managed to blink a couple of times, staring at Dom. “And you weren’t even interested?”

  Dom gazed down the table at Sylvain, his palms turning upward in a moment of complete, shared what-the-fuck?

  Sylvain shook his head and made a little twisting motion of thumb and forefinger near his temple, indicative of people who were crazy.

  “Instead of you?” Dom asked Jaime, which was the closest he could come to expressing how utterly self-destructive he would have to be to choose any sum of money over the right to lean his big body over hers and watch her mouth soften in anticipation.

  “Very screwed up sense of values, in this family,” Sylvain said dryly. “Especially of their own value. You just have to be patient. Sorry about that. I know patience isn’t on your very short list of virtues.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Cade and Jaime stood in one of the windows with a long-range view of the Eiffel Tower, Jaime leaning back under one of the huge ferns, so that she seemed to be posed between a jungle and the glowing lights of the epitome of civilization. Dominique, Sylvain, and James Corey were over by the table still, talking about spinach in chocolate, Sylvain with a groan, their grandfather with passion and indignation, and Dominique shaking his head. Their father had moved away to the kitchen counter to handle something over his phone.

  “Well, he’s impressed Dad,” Cade allowed. “He loves men who don’t give a damn what he thinks of them.”

  “He’s being a bastard.”

  Cade’s eyebrows went up. “Dad or Dominique?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Well, I know who I think, but they do say love is blind.”

  “I was talking about Dad!”

  Cade grinned. “I think the two of them are evenly matched.”

  “I bet he and Grandpa weren’t this bad with Sylvain,” Jaime said bitterly.

  Cade had to admit it was true. She held up a hand to forestall Jaime’s protest. “And you’re right, of course, Jaime. It’s because they don’t trust you to take care of yourself.”

  Jaime closed her mouth. She hadn’t been going to phrase her protest quite like that. She had been going to say it was because they thought she was the goof-off, irresponsible one. That she didn’t take care of herself had a slightly different focus. Kind of an accurate focus, in fact.

  Cade’s eyes locked with hers. “And it’s
true. You don’t.”

  “I am right now. That’s about all I am doing, is taking care of myself.”

  “Well, it’s about damn time. You know, Jamie, what happened to you would be enough to traumatize anyone—it sure as hell traumatized all of us and we didn’t have to live it, only observe—but you might have had burnout building from way before that. Even I’ve been burned out, in my way; that’s how I ended up making headline news as a thief. That, and I think I could seriously accuse Sylvain of entrapment.”

  Jaime frowned uneasily. “If you get burned out, Dad can hire a replacement for your job. If I get burned out . . . there’s no one to replace me.”

  Cade’s mouth twisted wryly. “And here I spent so much time thinking I was irreplaceable. Actually, Jaime, you might be surprised how many highly qualified people a well-run non-profit could draw to it.”

  Of course Cade would see it that way, the organizer, the one who instantly knew how to run the world. Jaime was so used to not wanting to run the world. The Lone Ranger was more her hero. Someone who got to ride off into the sunset, help without taking on all that desk work. Would the Lone Ranger have been much more effective if he had entered politics and reformed law enforcement in the Wild West, rather than going one silver bullet at a time?

  “You know, I would really like to do this with you,” Cade said. “Work on developing a plan across corporations, push them to follow through, expand what you’ve been doing for Corey beyond our own companies, so that one hundred percent of the cacao beans in the world come from sustainable practices and fair trade. With my business knowledge and your firsthand awareness of the issues, we could really do something here. We could eliminate this problem. I know we could. A three-year plan, maybe a five-year plan . . . we could do it. Jaime—when are you going to have enough of being on the far side of the world from us? Because I would like to know you better again. To work with you. I think we could be a rather interesting team.”

  “You’d try to boss me around,” Jaime said wryly.

  Cade made an impatient movement with one hand. “Maybe. I haven’t noticed you ever letting me succeed before. Unless you’re still thinking about that Monopoly game when I got you to trade the dark blues for the light ones when you were six.”

  “Bottom line over ethics,” Jaime murmured, with the singsong rhythm of an old exchange of insults.

  “I was eight. My ethics have improved.”

  “Oh, that’s what all the breaking and entering was about. Improved ethics.”

  Cade ignored that jibe in a resigned way, as someone who had survived quite a few comments on her career as a thief. She left the support of the window and shifted closer to Jaime, pushing persuasion. “Jaime, people do move up from field work. They do shift into administration, as the field work wears them out, as they realize their skills and knowledge can accomplish perhaps even more in a different way. It’s not a weakness.”

  “It feels like a weakness.”

  Cade pressed a thumb and forefinger to her knit eyebrows, massaging. “You are so hard on yourself.”

  “Yeah.” Jaime’s ironic glance took in her sister, her father, her grandfather. “I wonder where I got that habit.”

  Cade opened her hand, in silent acceptance. “But I think it got worse for you. Maybe from seeing so many people who needed help. You have such a guilt complex.”

  “Well, I should have a guilt complex. The inequality between my luck in the birth draw and that of other people’s is . . . there’s not even a word for how big it is.”

  Cade looked a little guilty herself.

  Jaime went back to the earlier subject. “Even with the focus on broader organization, I still need to go into the field sometimes, to keep everyone honest. I so hate this ‘we didn’t know’ claim.”

  “Can I come?” a rough, low voice asked as an arm wedged its way between her and the window frame, forcing a place for itself over her shoulders. She looked up, startled.

  “When you visit the farms,” Dominique explained. “I’ve wanted to go to the source for years. Célie has been after me to take her along, too. It’s one of the dreams of her life to go visit cacao farms in different parts of the world. I just haven’t managed it yet.”

  For a moment, she couldn’t even process the idea. Then a hard little bud deep inside Jaime, that she had been afraid was locked forever by fear, suddenly loosened its green husk, the petals starting to peek through and unfurl.

  Dominique gave her a funny little smile, shy and aggressive all at once. As if he was going to impose himself no matter what, but wasn’t sure of his reception. “It would be fun,” he told her softly. His fingers curled around hers. “A lot of fun.”

  Fun. Fun to look across a fire at him as the villagers grilled crickets or some other challenge-gift for their palates; she bet he would eat them, too, just like she had, and grin while he did it. Fun to think of curling up in a hut with him, of laughing at some of the discomfort, or sharing fury at some injustice discovered. Fun to watch his bright curiosity at the cacao production, watch him taste all the new flavors, watch the stars that nearly touched her hair cling in his.

  She had been concentrating on getting the courage to go back. It felt like a long time since she had been able to think of fun. From long before the attack, even. It had been fun once, hadn’t it? Not, obviously, when she saw people suffering, but work on labor practices actually let her work with a lot of people who weren’t suffering, or whose lives were growing exponentially better because of her role in them. It wasn’t an instinct for martyrdom that had first drawn her to her work, but the richness of the experience. Her flight from the world of business as a teenager into what she had found so different, and exotic, and rewarding.

  “Do you know I’ve never tasted the fruit?”

  “It’s sweeter than a mango,” both sisters murmured at once.

  Dominique looked jealous, his lips shifting subtly as if he was trying to taste something. “See? I’m sure I could do something with that.”

  Maybe she didn’t need to stock up on his strength so she could leave him and brave alone a world that she now knew held terrors. Maybe she could take the source of strength with her. Would it be so weak? Maybe it was all right to let someone hold her through the nightmare, until she got through to morning. She helped people because she needed to help them and they needed the help. Maybe he could help her, if he needed that and so did she.

  Eventually she would grow stronger, wouldn’t she? The memories of that attack would fade before the present. Could she do it all? Could she base herself here, keep that warm, golden shelter of him that seemed to renew everything about her, work on developing a project across corporations, and, as her confidence regenerated, take short trips into the field? And come back here, to him?

  She linked her fingers through his, which spread her own fingers far too wide, uncomfortably so, but she did it anyway and held on tight.

  Her hand was a silly, tiny thing against his, but for the first time in a long time, it looked stronger again.

  Sylvain cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose I could come once in a while?” he suggested wistfully.

  Dominique glared at him. “No, you could not. Go to Tahiti or something that costs a million dollars with Cade.” He tightened his fingers around Jaime’s. “This is mine.”

  “We can go visit some of our cooperatives if you want to,” Cade intervened with asperity. “Whenever you want to. Ignore him.”

  “Yes, but traveling with Dominique sounds like so much fun,” Sylvain said acerbically.

  “Cade travels with bodyguards in those parts of the world,” Mack said roughly, coming up to the group. “And Jaime can start doing it, too. Or did you think you could fight any attackers off by yourself?” he asked Dominique contemptuously.

  Dominique looked at her father as if he would seriously like to punch him. It appeared he was not destined to start getting along with her family any time soon. “No,” he said. “She needs bodyguards, too. I
’m not an idiot.”

  Mack Corey went white around the mouth. Even Jaime had to admit that was a very low blow. Her father had sat at her bedside with his face red and rigid, his fists interlocked, his eyes strained until she had thought he might have a stroke or a heart attack with the tears clogging his insides. He had regularly insisted on bodyguards for her, from the very first time she had ever set foot in a developing country. She had regularly shrugged in cavalier assurance that she did not need them, she knew this world, and left them behind at some hotel. She doubted anyone could beat himself up more than her father about the fact that he had let her get away with it, had taken her word for it that they weren’t really necessary.

  She studied Dominique curiously. Everyone had told her so often he was a bastard, he was aggressive. She realized she was finally seeing the side of him they saw, all the time. That meeting with Sylvain had not been exceptional, and neither had his encounter with those two men at the manifestation. He fought. He fought people back like an enraged pit bull. Dirty, hard, and going straight for the jugular. No wasting time nipping at the ankles.

  But his employees walked all over him.

  He put rosebuds on his wall.

  And that rough, big hand of his ran over her, every time, as gentle as velvet.

  “You think she would agree to bodyguards for you?” James Corey asked snarkily.

  Dominique rubbed his hand over hers and raised his eyebrows at her, not presuming to speak for her.

  She liked that. She liked that he never tried.

  “I would,” she said. She was not entirely sure she would even be able to get off a plane in Côte d’Ivoire again without having her own personal army waiting for her. That was how sick and panicked she still got at the thought. Sticks . . . the look in those men’s eyes, the pleasure they took in breaking her . . .

  She focused hard on the hand holding hers, riding through the image, getting it to fall back. Something else to remember was that if Dominique was traveling with her, he also would be exposed to any possible attack. And she thought she knew, if they were attacked, where he would put himself. Between her and everyone else. Going down fighting.