The Chocolate Touch (20 page)

Sylvain drew supple, gorgeous eyebrows together. “You know, Jamie, just because you feel weak doesn’t mean that every action you take
is
weak.”

Cade smiled approvingly and snuggled a little closer to him on the couch.

Sylvain had the lousiest taste in armchairs, Jaime thought glumly. She might as well have been trying to snuggle up to a rock on Mars. Her sister and Sylvain looked so sure of each other. Cade might be restless and Sylvain might be balking at some of her efforts to take charge, but neither of these things threatened their relationship. Their love seemed to be a given, and everything else was just adjustments to make around that happy, immutable center.

Leaving the apartment, she struggled against need and loneliness. Cade had called her a taxi, but she paid off the driver at the edge of the Seine and got out, slowly crossing the bridge. Notre-Dame gleamed to her right, the Louvre down the river to her left, and far away the Eiffel Tower, glowing pristinely, emitted no sparkles at the moment. A group of men heckled her, trying to get her to sit with them, and her skin tightened in uncontrollable overreaction, her pace quick as they called after her, laughing and contemptuous both:
Miss, miss.

Once she reached the Marais, people left her alone, same-sex couples mixed generously with the heterosexual ones on the sidewalks, beautifully or daringly dressed people strolling between bars and cafés along the seventeenth-century streets.

If she had had his number, she might have called him. If she had known where he lived, she might have shown up at his door, unable to spend a night apart. Hoping he didn’t have someone else there, that he was glad to see her.

But she didn’t know any of those things.

She recalled his brush-off of that brunette:
She’s not going to call me later. She doesn’t even have my number.

She stopped at a bar and got hit on by a pretty blonde with curly hair, which she found infinitely easier to tolerate than being hit on by men in the street. She laughed and shook her head, and regretfully informed the blonde that she was traitorously dating a
man,
and was told with a wink that one night could change her mind. Finally, she couldn’t draw out her single drink any longer or field the advances with any more deftness, and she had to go back to her dark, empty apartment.

She tried a couple of things, to be strong. She took a shower. She answered a voicemail from her father, talking for a while. She tried to open a book. And still, she found herself pulling her comforter over her head and sobbing into its darkness. Just sobbing and sobbing, because she was so lonely and so cold and for all those other reasons that cruelly struck her like a rain of fists.

O
n Wednesdays, Dom usually had lunch with the wine-seller down the street, a friendly relationship that had developed despite Dom’s lack of interest in the other man’s products. Dom enjoyed it. He didn’t have many people approximating friends, and the others were all kitchen friendships, people he had gotten to know working his way up, busy, ambitious workaholics like himself, with few windows for socializing.

This Wednesday, he was bad company, falling out of the conversation over and over without realizing it, his face growing grim. A whole day and night without seeing her except for that moment in the street made for a too-long stretch that uncurled fear in him, from that tight, hard knot where he always carried it.

When he walked into his shop after lunch and saw her sitting there, relief hit him so hard it left him shaky, and he had to practice breathing calmly as he walked over to her table.

After one quick glance up, she didn’t look at him. Her hands closed tightly around her cup of chocolate, and she focused on it as if she was trying desperately not to do something. Her sweater sleeves had fallen back to expose the goose bumps on the lower part of her forearms.

He flipped a chair around to sit beside her and forced himself not to pull her straight into his lap and wrap her up. Damn public places. Even his own. He laid his big hand over that goose bump–ridden forearm—one good thing about the size of his hand, he could wrap it around the whole exposed area of skin and have plenty left over to slide his fingers up under the sleeve and cover more. His fingertips brushed against the scar she liked to hide high on her forearm. Probably from a broken bone jutting through the skin. Oh, God, try not to think about it. He curled his hand around her head and kissed her. Too long, too intimately for the middle of his own
salon.

All the tension drained off him. When her lips parted, the fear slunk back into its huddle in his middle.

The hand not caught under his hold slipped to clutch a fistful of his shirt. Again, he felt her fighting not to do something.

“It’s all right,” he whispered, pulling back enough to study her face. She looked like she was coming down with something: circles under her eyes, a hint of red around the rims. “Go ahead and do it.”

Her hand flexed in his shirt. “Do what?”

“Whatever it is you’re trying not to do. You can do it to me.”

He had survived everything else, after all.

She shook her head, her mouth a bitter twist as she forced her gaze back to her chocolate. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Then why don’t you tell me?”

Blue eyes locked with his in one moment of naked honesty. “If I could, I would crawl into you and never come out.”

It shook his whole body, like the crash of a demolished building. He had to wait until the shock waves settled down. Then he stood, pulling her up with him.

“Guillemette.” He managed to keep his blush down to the barest hint of heat on his cheekbones. “Could you tell them upstairs I’ll be out for a while?”

He took her to his apartment because it was closer. In the end, that decided him, and if it hadn’t been what decided him with quite a few other women in the past, he would have felt much less like the
merde
he was when he brought her there, too. He saw her eyes flicker and her face close when she realized they had been standing just beneath it the other day and he had never told her.

She closed back into that steel center of hers where he could never reach.

But he could lure her out of it, into his hands.

He could.

“Crawl into me.” He pushed his apartment door closed behind him, pulling her in against his body. “It’s all right.” He yanked his half-buttoned shirt and T-shirt over his head in one gesture, and wrapped her up, lifting her, his bare back against the door. “Go ahead.”

“I love you,” she said into his chest, and pure terror washed over him.

“Oh, God, don’t say that.” He carried her into his bedroom, pulling off her clothes as he went. “Don’t—are you going to leave me?” He buried them under his comforter, wrenched her clothes off, pressed his mouth into the join of her shoulder, his hands too hard on her hips. “Please don’t say that,” he begged almost inaudibly against her skin.

She froze against him.

“No, don’t. Don’t freeze. I’ll do anything, Jaime.” He dragged his hands over her roughly, everywhere over her, trying to mark her as his so they could both remember it. Even if she was gone. “Tell me what’s wrong. I can fix it.”

He sounded so much like himself as a child, the first few times his mother had thought about leaving, it was horrible. Damn it, he had put that all behind him.

“I know,” she said into his skin. “I know. You fix everything. Everything about me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to say it. I didn’t mean to. I just—” She shivered all over and tried to bury herself deeper into him, as if he was the only heat source in a blizzard. He could feel her lips press together against his skin, the way she folded them in, trying so hard not to say something; she couldn’t even kiss him. “I can’t get enough of you. I’m like some vampire, I’ll suck you dry.”

“No.” He stroked her body urgently. “You said I was the sun, and you can’t suck that dry. I promise I won’t run out. I promise. You make me feel—”
like I can give out heat and love forever. And never, ever falter.

He rolled onto his back, pulling her on top of him, so that his hands could move more freely, so that she could feel all the hard, big strength of his body, how her entire weight could lie on it and he could hold it easily. He knew the value of strength, that was one thing he knew very well.

It was to make himself unassailable. And now to make her unassailable, too. At last somebody
needed
his strength.

He had suddenly the clearest understanding he had ever had of the way his father had gone so wrong. A man’s strength was supposed to be against the
outside
world: to fight it back from himself and those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it
inward,
against the very people you had been given that strength to protect, because you couldn’t deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness.

I love you,
she mouthed against his skin. Even he knew that much English. His body flicked as if at the impact of a fist. His hands tightened on her, but he said nothing. He didn’t try to stop her again. He had told her he could take anything she wanted to do to him; he had to take this, too.
I love you
. Her lips brushed across him, telling his body a secret his mind wasn’t supposed to know. This time it hurt less like a fist and more like the pressure of a massage, his muscles slowly relaxing to it, no longer flinching but soaking it up.

He raked a hand through that short hair of hers, nuzzling along her scar through the veil of her hair. She shook her head, trying to knock his mouth away. He kissed it anyway, firm, one last time, then let himself be shooed down over her face, her throat. He tricked her. Tracing over her shoulder and down her arm, kissing every centimeter of her scar there before she realized what he was doing.

“Stop it,” she said in English, pushing at his chest. But he had tricked her there, too. She couldn’t push him away, because he was the one underneath, pressed against the bed. She could get away herself, but she couldn’t force him back no matter what she did. Let her push him. He liked the pressure of her hands against his muscles.

“Mmm.” He let her know it. Caught her other hand and pressed it against his chest, too, let her know how much pushing he could take. “I like that. Even harder, if you want. I’m a little sore.”

The heels of her palms ground in instantly, a sweet, intense ache in his overworked muscles, with the force of someone who had been on the receiving end of physical therapy. “Why?” she whispered.

He shrugged, and her hands rode over the muscles that rippled with the movement. “I work out too much when I . . . need to deal with things.”

He had gone back to the gym, the night before, when he left her in the street because she had “other plans.”

“What things?”

It would probably not be reassuring to her to know that she couldn’t do something else for an evening without driving him to extremes. His hands found a scar he hadn’t seen the day before. Neat and surgical, on her belly. They must have had to operate. Which could only have been because she had received so many blows to the belly that . . . “
Mon coeur
.” He squeezed her too tightly to him again, fighting the need to interrupt his lovemaking to go throw up. Sexy.

He rolled them over, putting himself between her and the rest of the world.
“Jaime,”
he whispered, combing her hair back, kissing her again. “I love
you,
” he whispered in the shadow of the comforter.

Her body jerked under his. Her eyes went very wide, staring up at him. He shrugged the comforter off them enough so that he could see their color. Fall forever blue. “You can’t possibly,” she protested. Why was her voice so afraid and so hungry, as if he was holding out something delicious to taunt a starving woman but was planning to snatch it away?

He shrugged. “That’s what people once thought about me becoming
Meilleur Ouvrier de France.
That I couldn’t possibly. But I did it, just the same.”

A little spark of annoyance in her eyes. Jaime did humble the way a convalescing wounded fighter might take occasional naps. “Meaning that it’s hard to love me?”

“It’s horribly hard,” he said, betrayed into honesty. “It’s the most gut-wrenching thing I have ever done in my life, and that’s saying a lot. But I’m going to do it, nevertheless.” He kissed her, delving into her mouth, taking his time about it, proving to her that there was at least one aspect of loving her he knew exactly how to do.

When he lifted his head at last, she stared up at him, her lips parted but her eyebrows flexed, caught between softness and perplexity. “You can’t mean it,” she said finally. “How could you? It doesn’t make sense.”

Oh, he knew
that.
For him to crumble so completely and utterly at her feet, just from her sitting so quietly at his table, eating him bite by little bite?
He,
who had spent his entire adult life keeping women as far away from his heart as he possibly could? No, it probably didn’t count as anyone’s idea of normal.

“I’ll make it make sense,” he promised the tender space where the muscles of her shoulder stretched under pale freckled skin toward her breasts. “Just give me time.”
Don’t leave me.

She tucked her arms up between them as if she wanted every last centimeter of herself to be in the shelter of his body. Who knew that having her under his protection could be so utterly arousing? “Why do you get to say it, if I’m not supposed to?” she challenged.

Because he didn’t say it as if he was about to wrench himself away from her. He wanted to keep her safe from him—she must maintain her independence—but if he could manage that safety, he would never leave her. His worst, most sickening fear was that even if he couldn’t manage to keep her safe, he probably wouldn’t have the strength to leave her. That would be up to her. His father had clung desperately to his mother, despite his violence. “Because I mean it,” he made the mistake of saying.

It was like watching half-melted chocolate get hit with water. That luscious warmth seized, catching her between pleasure and a terrible mess. “
You
mean it? What am I doing, joking? Or just too weak to know what I’m feeling?”

Merde, Dom. You, of all people, know that you can ruin the shiniest, most beautiful thing you ever saw with one careless drop of water. Don’t screw up!
“Have you ever said it to anyone else?” he asked, proving that no matter how great the treasure he held in his hands, some part of him could persist in destroying it.

Her eyebrows drew down. Yes, she had come here wanting to crawl into him, and what had he done with that? Managed to piss her off. “I had a boyfriend in college.”

It should have been the triumph of his argument, but he didn’t want to win his argument. Jealousy curled in him, sick and thick, at the thought of anyone else tracing his fingers over those pixie-dusted cheekbones. Anyone else curling that body in under his protection. “Had,” he forced himself to say. “You told him you loved him, but you aren’t still with him.”

Her eyes were ice-cold. “He had another girlfriend on the side. The one he was actually attracted to. You know what?” Her body jerked against his arms and for a moment he forgot and held her against her will. “Just let me go. I don’t have to defend myself to you. I said it. You don’t like it. But it’s not an
insult.
”

Shit. He lifted an arm enough so she could slide out from under him if she insisted, but he didn’t roll away and make it easy. “Jaime.” Her name flicked over her and held her, mid-slide, as if he had caught her with silk ribbons. “You said the same thing. You said I couldn’t mean it.”

She hesitated, arrested, her blue eyes catching his again.

“Why do you think that? That I can’t mean it?” How clumsy was he at this?
Get some damn jewelry, Dom.
Although he couldn’t imagine what kind of jewelry could convince a woman who had so much money people dated her for that rather than herself. It seemed as if she might want something she couldn’t buy, instead.

Her body turned back toward the offered shelter of his, pupils dilating, mouth softening, as if he made her entire being fuzzy. Melted. He fought to control the surge of arousal at the thought.

“Because you’re so beautiful,” she whispered. Her hands lifted to stroke over his shoulders and arms, shaping the muscles. “You’re so wonderful. How could you
possibly
—” She broke off. “For someone everyone thinks is so arrogant, sometimes you ask the
stupidest
questions. As if you have no idea how extraordinary you are.”