The Chocolate Touch (7 page)

Gray marble gleamed in long, polished counters full of equipment. People moved around in white, along with one girl in her early twenties in black. Five small
en-robeuses,
nothing at all like the great factory machines that she knew, were placed in one area of the main room, one coating chocolate right then as a woman fed little squares of ganache into it while another touched up squares as they left the flow.

Metal forms of all shapes and descriptions hung from nails on the walls, reaching halfway to the high ceilings. A young man was artfully placing pastries on plates, adding little decorative touches before he left the room to take them down to the tables below. The girl in black passed from an opening on the far right end of the room to an opening on the far left, carrying a big bowl. Someone started to roll out dough on one of the marble counters.

The girl in black reappeared in the opening to the left at the same moment as a tall, brown-haired man appeared in the opening to the right. The two of them looked at Dominique and Jaime and then exchanged fascinated, charmed glances before they disappeared back into their separate rooms, with . . . twitching lips?

“Come!” Dominique said happily, pulling her in. He reminded her of children on the cacao farms, how they would talk to any adult who would listen, desperately wanting to show off how well they could do something of value. Like carry loads twice their own weight on their shoulders, or, later, after she had made her first rounds and reforms of the farms and was coming back to ensure her plans were being carried out, how well they were learning their letters and how to draw and what their doll’s name was.

“This is
beautiful,
” Jaime said wonderingly. She had never imagined a
laboratoire de chocolat
so beautiful. Light, open, full of happiness. His
salon
was exceptionally beautiful, but this was even brighter, more active. It felt like the kind of place
her
cacao should end up, the cacao harvested in the hushed heat under the banana leaves, broken free from red or yellow wrinkled pods by willing hands, starting out as white fruit sweeter than a mango. Dominique insisted on fair trade chocolate from his processor, which got some of its supplies from farms under the Corey umbrella. She knew every step of his supply chain, might even have spread the beans out to dry in the sun with her own hand. She knew the fruity alcoholic smell these beans had once had as they fermented, the stinging sweetness of the memory blending with the rich, dark, warm intensity of the chocolate it had become.

An enormous block of chocolate rose above them on a counter that must be designed for such weight. Chisels in different sizes lay beside it, but the block itself was untouched. “What’s this?”

“I’ve got to do something for the Chocolatiers’ Expo next week, but I’m still thinking.” His hand flexed into her back, and he studied the great block as if his gaze could pierce through it. “Sometimes you have to see what comes out of the chocolate.”

She smiled, wondering suddenly if she could talk him into letting teenagers from the cacao farming cooperatives have an internship in his
laboratoire.
She could create a four-week scholarship, rotating through different farms, giving one teenager at a time that month in Paris. Make them part of the beautiful final end product their work went into creating.

The image of an excited adolescent was blotted out, knocked from her mind by darkness as if by a blow to the head. She took a deep breath of that comforting scent of chocolate and concentrated on the feel of Dominique’s hand against her back.

He kept his hand there, her body yielding to his lead as if she was waltzing, as he guided her down the length of the room, stopping spontaneously at anything he thought would please her. “Try this.” He offered her an éclair fresh from a tray.

His eyes brightened at her expression when she bit into it, the dark, dense flavor of the soft, cold cream, the spark in it of something fresh, something tantalizingly different she could not identify.

“Pâtes de fruits.”
He stopped in front of a tray of gleaming sugared jewels of color. “Have you ever tried my
pâtes de fruits
?” He started to hand one to her, realized her mouth and hands were still full of his éclair, and hesitated, then ate it himself.

Her eyes snagged on his mouth, jealously, wondering what flavors were melting in it. Not chocolate. Something brighter, clearer, tart maybe, making his tongue sting just a little—

Something sparked in his eyes, lambent, hot. She looked away before she could blush—oh, damn, too late. What
had
been going on with that beautiful brunette downstairs? What had he been thinking to send her away in order to show Jaime his kitchens? Had he gone blind?
Could
he possibly know Jaime’s name and need financial backing? He had opened this extravagant new space quite recently, and the economy was probably affecting people’s indulgence in exorbitant chocolates; maybe he had over-extended.

He turned them into a doorway and shifted her in front of him. The heat from his body sank into her back and butt, curled through her body, the way the heat from the cream steaming in front of her wafted over her face, bringing with it the scent of some witch’s secret garden. “This is the
cuisine,
where we do all the hot work, the baking, the caramels. Amand’s working on a caramel right now, see?” She looked across the workspace to the tall, brown-haired man stirring a large pot, releasing scents of butter and sugar into the air. The pot had not yet started to boil, but he concentrated on it intently, biting down hard on his lower lip. The corners of his lips twitched.

“Do you know anything about how chocolate is made?” Dominique asked eagerly. His presence only inches behind her was melting every muscle in her spine and thighs until it was all she could do not to sway back against him.

She still hadn’t decided what to say to that question when he started explaining it to her. “See, we have verbena infusing right here.” He guided her to a pot full of cream in which floated a branch of long, narrow green leaves.

The lemony, fresh scent of the verbena wafted over her face, brightening the tranquil scent of the cream. His big hand on the small of her back was like some hot stone in tribal massage, its heat dissolving her.

“Once it has infused, we’ll add the chocolate for the ganache.”

His hand curled over her hip and whirled her around, to guide her into another room. “And this is a cooler room, where we set our ganaches and keep our new batches of chocolates to refill the displays.”

The young woman in the black chef’s jacket stretched her body far out over two long metal frames, scraping chocolate ganache smooth between them. She focused diligently on that smoothing, and every couple of seconds her lips trembled and she had to press them tightly together. She shot one glance up at Dominique and Jaime, her eyes alive with laughter, and bent her head quickly over the marble table again.

Past the marble table at which she worked were wheeled wire shelves, scattered with metal flats, half full of lovely finished chocolates. “
Tiens,
try this one, it’s one of my favorites.” Dominique proffered a chocolate, his thumb almost brushing Jaime’s lower lip.

She caught her breath and looked up into his eyes.

What in the world was going on here? Did he like sycophants so much he would turn down a beautiful woman in order to melt a perfectly ordinary specimen into a puddle at his feet? Or
did
he know who she was? Or . . .

She closed her mouth around the chocolate, because, whatever his reasons, hers were . . . that it allowed her lips to brush the hard tips of his thumb and index finger. Their warmth and texture shivered from the sensitive skin of her lips all through her, as his chocolate hit all the taste sensors in her mouth, from a touch of
fleur de sel
to bitter to sweet, and started melting on her tongue.

She didn’t care what his reasons were. She didn’t care if he could be attracted by money, and she didn’t care if he just liked groupie sex. No matter what his motivations, she would still be the person who ended up receiving the most. All his sun and warmth and intensity . . .

“Dom,” someone said, and it took a moment for the word to penetrate, both for him and for her. She blinked, confused, as those dramatic black eyebrows slashed down and he finally turned toward the speaker.

“Excuse-moi,”
said the speaker, a short, broad-shouldered man who sounded genuinely regretful. “I’m not sure I understand what you want me to do here. Could you—?”

Dominique gave him a dark look, but excused himself to Jaime and moved away into the cooking room. Jaime looked after them with raised brows. His team called him
Dom
? Used
tu
? Sylvain’s team called him
Chef,
or
Monsieur,
and kept a punctilious
vous
at all times.

She tore her gaze away from Dominique’s broad back and wandered around the
laboratoire
. The enrobing machine’s flow of chocolate had a hypnotic pull. Such a delicate, intimate cascade compared to the great flows of chocolate in the giant enrobers back home in Corey. Much darker, too. Little chocolate centers disappeared under it, fed by an older woman in white who set them quickly and rapidly on the wire mesh, coming out the other side glistening with their chocolate
robes.
A tireless acrobat, the younger woman wielded the tiny tip of her knife like a fairy godmother’s wand, bending to fascinating right angles to touch those
robes
up to be perfect for the ball.

Jaime wanted to be those ganache centers. Disappearing in melted chocolate, hidden from the world inside that warm darkness. She glanced involuntarily toward Dominique, half-turned toward her as if he was trying to keep her in sight, and bit her lip.

She realized the two women at the
enrobeuse
were sneaking bright, curious glances at her, smiling a little, and flushed, shifting away.

All the walls around the stairway were pure glass. Could she see that beautiful
salle
from here? Maybe the white rosebud wall? She slipped around to the point where the glass, framing the open spiral stairs, made a tiny one-person space against the farthest wall from those rosebuds.

Yes, just here you could see parts of the
salle
. That was the table where she usually sat, right there. A waiter was clearing off her uneaten pastries.

A movement back in the kitchens drew her eyes. Dominique Richard had returned to find her. On the other side of the stairwell and through two walls of glass, their eyes met. He stood very still. Very big.

Something in his stance made her glance around for her escape routes, like prey. But there were none. If she left this slim, final corner of glass, she would be moving toward him, and he would be able to track her movements every step of the way.

A hungry predator, he didn’t wait for her to come to him. He prowled after her, closing her into that final corner of glass.

Predator? Where did she get these ideas? She wasn’t the yummy brunette. He was too big a predator to track someone her size as his prey. It would be like a panther tracking a cricket. Something a panther would only do if it was starving, and he could not possibly be starving.

He stopped in front of her, blocking her into that little corner between glass and wall, his shoulders brushing either side of it. The void of the stairwell fell away behind her, just the other side of a sheet of glass.

His body heated the whole space. She shivered in it, stroked all over before he even touched her. He was so close she could see even the faint pink breaking out along his smooth jaw, and that sent another wave of heat through her. Was his skin so soft then? Or did he just shave too fast, impatient to burst on with his life?

“Do you ever stand up here and peek at the
salle,
if there’s someone famous?” she asked.

He glanced toward her usual table and back at her, an odd, wary expression on his face. “There’s often someone famous. And we’re usually very busy.”

“And you’re famous yourself.” Too famous to linger here, spying on clients, of course.

He grinned, quite pleased he hadn’t had to point his fame out. “Are you?”

It sounded like a genuine question. Maybe he didn’t know who she was, after all. “No,” she said honestly. Not for her accomplishments, anyway.

He leaned in a little closer. No, that was her wishful thinking. She was definitely the world’s most pathetic groupie. She wanted him to pick her up and press her back against that glass wall. She didn’t want to remember how exposed the glass left them to the world. She tilted her head, her lips soft and openly begging. What stroked
his
skin all over? “Your kitchens are so beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

For once, a compliment seemed to glance off him. She wasn’t sure he even heard it. He closed one of those big hands around her wrist and rubbed his thumb over the bone there. “You don’t eat enough,” he said softly.

A shaft of anger shot through her. She wanted to yank her wrist away to spite . . . to spite her own face, since she was the only one who would suffer for it. All she did was eat and go to the gym and wander around this city, which was another kind of exercise. She was devoting her whole existence to getting strong again. Damn it, she was doing the best she could.

His gaze drifted over her set jaw. A frown flickered across his face. Then he rubbed his thumb over her wrist again, and she dissolved. She couldn’t think past the feel of his thumb on that ultra-sensitive skin. “Do you ever go out with strange men?” he asked, low. “And let them feed you mortal food?”

Her gaze shot back to his face. Heat bloomed all through her, taking over her sex and her nipples and the color of her face, that hated scarlet blush of hers flaming, a red flag to guarantee he noticed all her weaknesses. “It’s hard to stoop so low. After yours.”