The Chocolate Touch Read Online Free PDF Page B

of her paying, deeply uneasy with it, as if his whole joy in that past half hour of chocolate selection had just been messily squashed.
    She glanced up with a smile as she took the sack and hesitated at his frown. A little of that strong coolness of hers came back, that look from the very beginning, as if she would be happy to hang on his smiles but wasn’t going to allow his anger anywhere near her. “Thank you very much, Monsieur,” she said.
    And he was still feeling the monsieur like a wound in his soul when she walked out.

C HAPTER 3
    J aime walked down the Boulevard du Temple, away from the roiling life around République, back into the more sophisticated Marais, the sack from Dominique Richard hanging from her fingers. She felt happier than she had in three months, and the happiness seemed to fill her like helium did a balloon, opening up the cramped limp person she had become until she could finally dance in the wind again.
    As a test, she tried to think about older moments of pure happiness, times when she had seen how her work with cacao farms had changed people’s lives so completely. And she hit a huge ugly wall, just as she always did these days. Hit it and flinched back, unable to reach those memories.
    So. Dominique Richard. Her body tickled all over at the memory of him looking at her, feeding her chocolates.
    How different her impression had been the first time she saw him, standing in Philippe Lyonnais’s salon de thé, aggressive, hard, arrogant, dangerous. Maybe he had been angry about something. He probably hadn’t realized he was giving her that hard stare. Maybe the strong lines of his face, the black shaggy hair, the glittering, somehow rough eyes, gave him a false air of aggression. Once he started talking about his chocolates, he turned into a passionate boy. No, that wasn’t quite it, not a boy. Watching him choose his chocolates for her was like being stroked all over, gently, by those big, hard hands of his.
    God, she could stand to be stroked. Even if it was just for a short fling, to soak up that warmth and pleasure as long as she could.
    She flushed all over, wistfully. A fling how, exactly? She could hardly buy him, not Dominique Richard of all people, and she didn’t really know what besides money she had to offer him right now. She felt emptied out. And she hated the way her bones were sticking out and making her look so fragile. She wanted to look invincible.
    At the best of times, she was small and kind of silly looking, with all her freckles. Not someone men with no financial interest swooned over. Most men she met knew she had money, but her few experiments hanging out with her friends anonymously in bars had made it clear that the men who didn’t know who she was were going to pick out her friends and ignore her. Once in a while the shy, awkward men settled on her while their cockier friends went for her girlfriends, because the ones who lacked self-confidence and didn’t know who she was thought she seemed a surer bet. More likely to take what she could get, maybe.
    It had taken the boyfriend disaster and those bar experiments to make her fully grasp how much her ready supply of dates was predicated on her last name. Before that, she had thought at least some of them must . . . just like her. Not for any particular reason. Just because she was her.
    That naïveté had faded. Still, she had believed in herself, in the value of her passionate ability to change the lives of the downtrodden. And now she had lost that, too. The only non-monetary value she knew she had.
    So how could she possibly draw a big, sexy, intense man who could produce chocolates like miracles out of his own hands?
    But there was nothing wrong, of course, with indulging a crush by sitting in his chocolaterie, thinking about him and letting him sell her chocolates.
    It was not as if she had one single other thing in life right now that she would rather do.
     
    “You should be running Corey Chocolate,