When his head ducked, he saw those whiskey brown eyes deepen, darken. He heard her breath catch. Felt the sudden trembly chill in her fingertips. And then his mouth dived down and settled on hers.

She tasted like warm, dark chocolate. Rich. Soft. Meltable.

Nothing in the universe tasted exactly like chocolate. Not good chocolate. Not really exquisite chocolate.

But she did. And no, it wasn’t the Bliss she’d been indulging in that put that “exquisite taste” idea in his mind. It was her. Her mouth. Her taste. Her lips molded under his, melted under his. She went still, on the inside, on the outside.

And damn it. So did he.

Praise for the work of USA TODAY bestselling author Jennifer Greene

“Jennifer Greene’s writing possesses a modern sensibility and frankness that is vivid, fresh, and often funny.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Woman Most Likely To…

“This is a must read book. Great job, Ms. Greene!”

—Old Book Barn Gazette on

The Woman Most Likely To…

“Combining expertly crafted characters with lovely prose flavored with sassy wit, Greene constructs a superb tale of love lost and found, dreams discarded and rediscovered, and the importance of family and friendship….”

—Booklist on Where Is He Now?

“Crisp, pulls-no-punches humor….”

—Publishers Weekly on Where Is He Now?

Blame It on Chocolate
Jennifer Greene

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Recent books by Jennifer Greene

Lucky

Hot to the Touch

Wild in the Moment

Wild in the Moonlight

Wild in the Field

To incurable chocoholics everywhere.

Of all the vices worth enjoying, this one seems awfully close to number one.

I gined ten pounds researching this book for you.

Taste-testing the best truffles on the planet was hard work! But worth it.

Trust me on this….

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

WHEN THE ALARM CLOCK BUZZED on Monday morning, Lucy Fitzhenry leaped out of bed. It was hell waiting for that alarm. She hated wasting time on sleep when her life was so brimming full. She wasn’t just jazzed to start the day; she was kite-high and dancing-ready.

She made it three feet across the room before the nausea hit. One second she was fine, the next she was beyond miserable. Thankfully she made it into the bathroom before a major upchuck.

Afterward, she knelt on the cold tile with her elbow crooked on the toilet seat, too weak to get up—at least for another couple seconds—feeling infuriated in general.

She knew she was getting an ulcer. This was the third time in the last two weeks her stomach had done the revolt thing, and healthy twenty-eight-year-old women with cast-iron stomachs didn’t hurl for no reason, so that had to be it. An ulcer. An ulcer caused by stress.

It was tough for a fussy perfectionist who’d always been big on responsibility and doing the right thing and making everyone happy to suddenly take on wickedness. She was trying. She was putting her whole heart into it. But it definitely wasn’t coming naturally, so she had to struggle at it, and changing one’s personality was unavoidably stressful.

Her stomach rolled one more time, but the ghastly part of the nausea seemed to have passed. She hoped. Slowly she pushed to her feet, opened the glass doors to the shower, and flicked on the faucets.

She’d had the clear glass shower doors put in last week. That, and her sleeping naked, were two visible signs that she was gaining on her wickedness goal. Another concrete measure of progress were the purple satin sheets on her bed. Temporarily she didn’t have a guy to vent all this new wildness on, but one thing at a time. Her stomach needed to recover from all these personality upheavals before she gave it any more stress.

By the time she climbed out of the shower, she was not only feeling fine again, but picking up speed. She ran naked into the kitchen to pop a bagel in the toaster, then charged back to the bedroom to raid her closet. Since ninety percent of her wardrobe consisted of either designer Gap or designer Old Navy, the day’s clothes decision was hardly tricky. She opted for Gap today. T-shirt. Sweatshirt. Jeans—not her favorite pair; they bagged a little in the butt, but she should have known better than to buy a size seven without trying them on; they were always a little big.

Back in the bathroom, she poked in her contacts, smacked on lip gloss, and ran a brush through her chin-length blond hair—her hair was so fine it was already nearly dry. Then she claimed the bagel and streaked for the front door…taking ecstatic, if hurried, pleasure in galloping over the white carpet. White. WHITE. White, thick, plush and totally impractical. The print over the fireplace of the eagle flying over silvery-green waters was another splurge—she fiercely, fiercely loved that picture. But both the print and the carpet were further proof that she was mastering the indulgent, impractical, wicked thing.

Of course, the carpet wasn’t paid for. And neither was most everything else. But as of two months ago, she was no longer renting. The duplex had a mighty mortgage, but it was still hers-all-hers. Possibly she was the latest bloomer of all late bloomers at twenty-eight, but what the hey. She’d had to fight harder than most for true independence, and for darn sure, she was grabbing life with both fists now.

At the front door, she yanked on the jacket her parents had given her for Christmas—a white Patagonia number that was crazily impractical considering her work, but unbeatably warm. And on the first of March in Minnesota, there was still a solid, crusty foot of snow on the ground, the temperature cold enough to make her eyes sting. She locked the door, still pulling on her white cap with the yellow yarn daisies. She’d have hat hair all day, but who cared? She’d look like a train wreck after the first hour of work anyway.

With the hot bagel crunched between her teeth, she slid into the driver’s seat of her old red Civic, turned the key and begged it to start—which it did. The baby just liked to be coaxed on cold mornings. Praying for the Civic had become a second religion. The Civ had more than 200,000 miles on her. Lucy’s newest theory was that if she gave the car enough wash-and-waxes and changed its oil long before it asked and vacuumed it twice a week, it’d be too happy to die. At least until she got the living room carpet and couch paid for.

In Rochester, where she’d grown up, people knew what rush hour was. Not here. Eagle Lake probably put up traffic lights out of pride, although some cars did show up to keep her company once she reached the highway. Originally she’d chosen Eagle because it was a nice, long drive from her parents—and also because there was already a solid nest of singles and other young couples in the area—but it was a good half-hour commute to her job. She finished the bagel, tuned the radio up for a kick-ass beat and was singing hell-bent for leather when her stomach suddenly produced an unladylike belch.

Not AGAIN. Yet the nausea came on like a battleship, heavy and ugly and overwhelming. Her skin turned damp and hot so fast she barely had time to pull over to the shoulder and brake. Hands shaking, flushed and hot, she leaned over the passenger side, argued with the door, thank God got it open, arched her head out…and then nothing.

The bagel stayed in. The bite of freezing wind on her cheeks seemed to help. Eventually she sank back against the headrest, feeling weak and yucky, cars speeding past her. The practical voice in her head ordered her to quit messing around and call the doctor, enough was enough with this nausea thing.

But her emotional side kept trying to figure out what she’d done to deserve this. Yeah, she was trying to be more wicked, but basically the sins on her conscience wouldn’t fill a list. She’d skipped school once in kindergarten. She’d thought evil, evil thoughts about Aunt Miranda—but then, so did everyone else in the family. She’d gone to a party one time without underpants. She’d let Eugene hang on too long. She’d borrowed her sister Ginger’s blue cashmere sweater in high school and got a spot on it and never ’fessed up. And yeah, there was that one other occasion.

She’d come to call that one other occasion the Night of the Chocolate.

But as quickly as that memory surfaced, she shuffled it, fast, into the part of her brain labeled Denial. God—if there was a God, and she thought there was—just couldn’t be paying her back for that one. She’d already suffered enough.

When it came down to it, she’d lived like a saint 99.99 percent of her life. She dusted under the refrigerator, never took a penny that wasn’t hers, always flossed. Her family relentlessly teased her for becoming a fussy old lady before she was thirty—which really hurt her feelings.

The point, though, was that this stomach upset thing wasn’t a sign that her life was about to spin completely out of control. It was just an ulcer or something like that. A something that a visit to the doctor—however inconvenient and annoying—would resolve once and for all.

And just like that, she felt better. Her hands stopped trembling and the weak feeling almost completely disappeared. Cautiously she restarted the car and pulled out on the road. She didn’t turn the radio up and sing like her usual maniac self the rest of the way—why tempt fate? Sometimes it paid to be superstitious.

Twenty minutes later, she was still okay. In fact, not just okay, but feeling totally fine when she spotted the thousand-acre fenced-in estate. She turned at the tasteful, elegant sign for BERNARD’S.

The sign didn’t bother spelling out Bernard Chocolates. It didn’t have to. Anyone on four continents—at least anyone who appreciated fine chocolate—would easily recognize the name.

Even though it was Lucy’s second home, getting through the property every morning was more complicated than joining the CIA. Still, she was used to it. At the front gate, she simply popped in ID to make the electricity security fence open.

The driveway immediately forked in three directions. The road to the right led to the plant. The middle road meandered up to the Bernard mansion. Humming now, Lucy took the familiar third road that curled and swirled a half mile, bordered by lush pines and landscaped gardens.

A moment later she reached another electric fence—this one fifteen feet tall, with a gate that was both locked and manned 24/7. Instead of waving her through, Gordon hiked outside when he spotted her crusty Honda. “Hell, Miss Fitzhenry, I was about to call the cops. You’re seven minutes late. I was afraid you must be in an accident.”

Sheesh. Was she that predictable? “I’m fine, honest. Did you have a nice weekend?”

“Oh, yes. Me and the missus saw a good movie, had the grandkids over. In the meantime—both Mr. Bernards are up at the house. Asked me to tell you to stop by around ten this morning if you could.”

“Thanks. And you have a great morning,” Lucy said as she rolled up her window, but her pulse suddenly bucked like a nervous colt’s. Her pulse, not her stomach, thank heavens. The nausea seemed to be totally gone—but she still couldn’t stop the sudden bolt of nerves.

The nerves were foolish, really. Any day now, she’d known the Bernards would summon her for a serious meeting. Her last experiments had been beyond successful—so successful that they affected the entire future of the company. That was great news, not bad.

It was just that she normally met with Orson Bernard, not his grandson. On paper she reported to the senior Bernard, and God knew, she adored the older man, loved being with him and working with him both. Still, Orson was well over seventy and long retired. Everyone knew who really signed the paychecks these days.

It wasn’t as if Lucy didn’t like Raul Nicholas Bernard. She did. Orson’s grandson was too darned adorable and charming and sexy not to like. Everyone liked Nick.

She just always got rattled around him. He knew it. She knew it. Probably the birds in the trees knew it—which made her reaction to him all the more embarrassing. Realizing she was chewing on a thumbnail—a habit she’d broken at least ten years ago—Lucy firmly blocked that tangled thought train.

Behind her, the fence clanged shut. She caught Gordon’s wave from her rearview mirror and had to smile. Physically Gordon resembled a sublet Santa, but his background included intensive years as an army ranger.

It regularly tickled her funny bone that she could conceivably work in a place that required such expensive and extensive security. Funnier yet was that she actually had power over the security staff. Her. Lucy Fitzhenry. A woman who couldn’t control her own flyaway hair, couldn’t drink champagne without a fit of the giggles, and required a daily milk-shake to maintain 110 pounds.

Her mood turned serious as she took the last curve. A huge structure loomed in sight—her building. Her baby. From the front, the architecture resembled any other high-tech contemporary office structure. Sleek, lots of windows, clean lines. Past the office was the giant lab that everyone shared, then the spiderweb of individual labs, and far back—not in sight from any road—came the network of greenhouses.

She parked in the front row and hustled inside. This early in the morning, the core staff were holed up in their offices, trying to shovel through paperwork chores before they could move into the real meat of the day. Reiko, who must have had her hair scalped on Saturday, yelled out, “Hi, what happened to you?”

Lucy had to ask about Reiko’s squirt-aged son—who she’d love to marry, if he wasn’t a mere four—then sprinted on. Or tried to. Fritz and Fred had offices next. They’d both graduated from MSU last spring, although Lucy secretly thought that they weren’t men but druids. They were never tucked or brushed. Ever. Not even once, by accident. Their brains were sharper than lobster traps, but their humor was primordial and they were so dorky that she’d be amazed if they’d ever had a date. She was even more amazed how much she loved them. Still, like drone twins, they both showed up in their doorways at the same time to yell out, “Hey, Lucy, were you sick? Did someone die? Will the world survive your being late?”

“Would you cut it out, you guys? You act like I’ve never been late, for Pete’s sake.”

Actually, she hadn’t, but she was still offended that everybody labeled her so anal. You’d think she always colored inside the lines.

Which she did. Almost always. Except for that one serious time—but cripes, why did that have to keep popping into her mind today?

The instant she reached her office, she hung her jacket on the rack and switched on the computer. Her office was the size of a minute, but the walls were painted a pale peach and had a wily mile of ivy winding this way and that around the window and file cabinet. A stuffed Garfield supervised a corner of her desk. The only bare wall had floor-to-ceiling old posters of ads—Fry’s Cocoa, Bensdorp’s Cacao, Xocolata Amatller, Caley and Berne. No French labels.

French chocolate wasn’t brought up at Bernard’s. Such was considered on a par with yelling the F word in church.

Her favorite poster came from some trade show promotion that she didn’t remember—but the picture was of a woman wearing a dress made out of chocolate. Lucy only had to look at that dress to salivate.

She thumbed through the incoming mail and e-mail messages accumulated over the weekend, then grabbed a mug of tea from the break room and took off for her real work.

The central lab was quiet. It wasn’t the kind of lab that had beakers and Bunsen burners. The lighting was fabulous, the white floor clean enough to serve dinner from, and the work counters looked like someone’s designer kitchen—which, in a sense it was. This morning, though, the melangeur and conching machine and tempering kettles gleamed in the silence. Even with nothing going on, the smell of cacao haunted the room…a sexier smell than Chanel No. 5 any day, Lucy thought.

Past the labs came the greenhouses. She passed by Reiko’s projects, then Fred’s. The third greenhouse was her personal emotional Tiffany’s—or that’s how she thought of her work, as bringing her something worth more than any diamonds a lover could buy. She clicked in her security code, then entered.

Instantly, she was in another world, and so deeply immersed she forgot the time, the day and everything else. In a standard greenhouse, plants were organized in precise, tidy rows. Lucy’s setup was more a complex undercover garden of cacao plants, with youngsters mixed with mature and older growths. What a stranger might think was exotic and wild was actually a carefully planned environment.

She checked temperature, moisture levels, scents.

Back when she was seventeen, she’d entered college to become anything but a doctor. A degree in botany had seemed distant enough from medicine, but still, she’d never expected working with anything like this. It was a dreamer’s paradise.

Mentally she thought of cacaos as plants, even though she knew darn well they were trees. The history was part of the fun, or she’d always thought so. The original mama of all the cacao plants showed up somewhere around l5,000 years ago and was named Theobroma Cacao. Of course, Theo’s offspring had hugely evolved since those first wild, straggly trees in the Amazon basin of Brazil.

It didn’t smell like the Amazon here. It should have. The best cacao didn’t have to come from the Amazon, but ten thousand years hadn’t changed certain facts about chocolate—good cacao only grew in rain-forest conditions. Period. No exceptions. All attempts to coax chocolate from any other growing environment had failed.

Lucy knew the lore as well as her own heartbeat and she’d fought as fiercely as any mama lion for the survival of her personal babies. Bending down to study one of her oldest plants, she lifted one of the oblong, wrinkled leaves to study the football-shaped criollo pad. This one was heavily pregnant and close to bursting—which, in principle, couldn’t possibly happen.

The soil here had none of the “required” fecund, decaying matter of a rain forest but was plain old Minnesota topsoil, give or take certain nutrients. The temperature was cool, rather than equator-tropical. And the shade and mist absolutely required for cacao plants to thrive was the opposite here. Her babies loved slightly dry soil and adored sunlight.

All these experiments could have failed. There should have been no possibility of growing cacao under these conditions—at least not good chocolate. For damn sure, not unforgettably outstanding chocolate.

Sometimes the impossible came true, though. Sometimes a girl had to take a chance that no one else would take, if only to find out what she was made of.

A woman had priorities, as far as Lucy was concerned. Growing up, she’d heard a zillion times about how civilization was destroying the rain forests. She’d listened. She’d cared. But come on. Maybe the greenhouse effect was destroying rain forests, risking natural cures for cancer, risking changes in the climate across the globe, risking the future of the planet and all that yadda yadda. Lucy had bought the bumper stickers, for Pete’s sake. But it’s not like she had the power to save the earth. Cripes, she couldn’t even control her own hair.

But realizing that losing the rain forests would mean losing chocolate for all time had changed her perspective, because it made the problem personal. A world without chocolate was unthinkable.

The problem was enough to make even a quiet wallflower type suddenly turn power-hungry. The first day she’d taken this job, she’d sunk her teeth into the work with ardent, uninhibited, unbridled passion.

Reiko’s gentle voice suddenly came through the intercom. “Hey, Lucy. You got a call from the big house. Nick and Mr. Bernard figured you got your hands in mud and forgot the time—obviously they know you, cookie—but it’s after ten.”

Damn. It couldn’t be. She just got here. But when she glanced at her Swiss Army watch, it was twelve minutes after ten already.

Good thing her stomach problem had cleared up because she streaked the building at a breakneck pace. Even though she did have that tiny tendency to get lost in her work, she was never late and positively never late for a meeting with the Bernards.

It was faster to run cross-country than to drive. Seven minutes later, out of breath, her work boots damp and her hair flying, she charged into the mansion through the kitchen door—it had been well over a year since she’d wasted time bothering to use the formal front door.

Although her parents were a long way from poor, the Bernard wealth was something else again. For the first six months, she’d been lost just trying to find a bathroom in the place. The mansion was built like a castle, three stories, with turrets and mullioned windows and porticos. There were rooms for this and rooms for that and rooms probably no one had been in for the last century—which was about how old the house was.

As she pushed off her boots and whisked off her jacket, she heard the housekeeper singing down in the laundry room and the sound of a vacuum upstairs. Didn’t matter. She knew where she was going. There were meeting places all over the mansion, but for small gatherings Orson always choose the sunroom—a six-sided room built of waist-high stone and then glass walls climbing to a hexagonal peak.

She loved it almost as much as he did, and as expected, she found him ambling from window to window, enjoying every view. Orson was tall and lean, his face a rectangle of expressive wrinkles, his head balder than a pool cue. Never mind his age, he was still more full of hell than any ten men in her own age bracket.

“Lucy!” His face lit up when he spotted her, and ignoring the employer-employee relationship entirely, wrapped an arm around her shoulders in an affectionate hug.

“I’m sorry I was late. I don’t even have an excuse. Gordon told me you wanted me here at ten. I just got busy in the greenhouse.” She hugged back before stepping away, thinking that he always made her feel more like a co-conspirator than a minor underling of a major business magnate. He was shrewd and warm and as stubborn as an old goat. Possibly he’d been a bear to work for in his younger days, but Orson was using his retirement to go for dreams he’d never had a chance to when he was younger. And she was one of his happiest co-conspirers.

“I guess we’ll forgive her, eh, Nick? Get yourself some coffee or tea from the table. The three of us need to have a powwow.”

She swallowed quick before turning to greet Nick. Then wanted to swallow a second time.

Nick had suit days and working-clothes days. Today he was in serious navy-blue, and he wore a suit the way a young Cary Grant used to, all careless grace and elegance. Usually she could handle him in a suit, because there was so much natural distance between her dirt-under-the-fingernails and his classiness that they might as well speak different languages. When he was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, though, she had to admit he made her heart thump.

This morning, the sharp white shirt and formal navy-blue didn’t seem to do the distance-job. Her throat still went dry. Her pulse soared like a leaf in a high wind. He had his grandfather’s long rectangular face, the strong jaw, the strong cheekbones, the startling blue eyes. His hair was a thick dark brown, and no matter how ruthlessly he brushed it, it never lay quite straight. It wasn’t curly or wild exactly, more like it had an irrepressible rebellious streak. Just like him.

Near anyone else, she didn’t worry about her appearance—between messing with dirt and chocolate, she just didn’t have a job requiring haute couture. Around him, though, she felt hopelessly conscious of her kid-like jeans and flat figure. She could put forty-seven style products on her hair and it’d still be fine and flyaway. She always chewed off her lipstick. If she could afford to shop on Rodeo Drive, Lucy had the sneaky suspicious she’d still end up looking like an all-American kid sister. Glamour just wasn’t her. And that was okay. With everyone else.

“Nick,” she said warmly, “How’s your Monday going?”

She’d fantasized about him all her life. Maybe technically she hadn’t met him until she hired on at Bernard Chocolates, but that was neither here nor there. He made her feel hot and achy the way she always dreamed a guy would make her feel. Every cell in her body, every pore, came alive when he was in the same room. His smile gave meaning to the word yearning. His eyes gave in-depth potential to the whole concept of lust.

It was so tiresome.

“So far, the Monday’s been a little wild. How’s yours going, Luce?” He handed her a mug, peach tea, a scoop of sugar, without having to ask. It wasn’t the first meeting they’d had together.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been quietly considerate with her, either.

Unfortunately, his being nice never stopped her heart from thundering, her eyes from looking, her pulse from hiccupping every time she was around him. She took her mug and settled on a chair next to Orson, hoping that she’d get a grip before she had to kick herself.

In the beginning, she’d found her reaction to him kind of kicky. She hadn’t had a crush in years; it was kind of fun—and God knew, he was a sexy hunk, so why not enjoy it? But time passed. She was serious about her work, and both wanted and needed to be taken seriously—which he did. The crush thing just stopped being cute. It shamed her to respond in such an immature way to a guy who’d always been good to her—in a big-brother, thoughtful-employer kind of way. Nick Bernard may only be in his early thirties, but they might as well have been a century apart in experience and lifestyles.

When she and Orson settled in the thick, soft upholstered chairs, Nick pulled over an ottoman and hunkered down, then motioned for his grandfather to start the dialogue.

“Lucy…you know we’ve got our miracle. The quality of those experimental plants is beyond anything we’ve ever dreamed. But now it’s time to do something about it.”

“Yes, sir.” This was exactly the subject she was expecting and she couldn’t agree more.

“It’s not time to stake the company on it, or to put all our bets in one basket yet.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“But it is time to make a move. If this develops the way we hope, we’ll be buying land and creating an extensive cacao forest in several locations. But for now, we have ample space to put up five or six more greenhouses—enough expansion to play with some products and real production. Obviously we’ll want to stagger the plantings, so we’ll have varied ages and varied crops coming into production at different times.”

“Of course, sir.”

“I’m unwilling to take this off-property where there’s such a huge security issue. As I know you understand, word of what we’re doing could have an explosive effect on the Coffee and Sugar Exchange. We’re talking an immediate effect of millions, if not billions. But that’s potential. All we know right now is that we’ve got a taste of something that looks like gold. It hasn’t been completely tested.”

She put down her tea. Somehow she couldn’t finish a hot drink to save her life this morning, but for darn sure, she was too excited to drink it now. “I know, I know. And I just totally agree with everything you’re saying.”

“Well, good. Because this is really your brainchild, Lucy.”

“Oh, no. Not really. I mean, I think of it as my baby—but you both know I only hired on after the whole experiment had been started. It wasn’t originally my experiment—”

“Yes, but you’re the one who took it on. Who brought it to fruition.”

“Only because Ludwig was such an incredible teacher.” She hadn’t forgotten the old man—Orson’s horticulturalist—who’d brought her into the fold, made mincemeat of her botany degree, and then taken the time to give her the intensive, practical education that mattered.

“This is no time to be modest, Lucy. I know what Ludwig did. But I also know what you accomplished on your own in the last few years. More important yet, we know that we can completely trust you, right, Nick?”

Lucy glanced at Nick, only to feel uneasiness stir. Whatever was on Orson’s mind, Nick clearly didn’t agree with his grandfather. His handsome face went still, his expression cool. “Yes. We trust you, Lucy.”

He didn’t say but, but she mentally heard it. Orson continued on.

“When we take all this public—several years down the road—I don’t know what kind of management setup we’ll need. Or what part you’ll want to play in it. But right now, we want to expand and yet stay private. Put serious money into more extensive experiments and yet not take untoward financial risks.” Orson leaned back and crossed his leg over a knee the same way his grandson did. “Lucy, I wonder how much you feel you could handle.”

“Me?”

“I’d like you to manage the project. Handle the labor to get the additional greenhouses up and running. Plan the planting program. All of it.”

“Me?” she echoed.

“I don’t know why you’re sounding surprised. The staff already thinks you’re a terrific boss.”

“But I’m not exactly a boss,” she objected. “I never thought of myself that way. Once Ludwig left…well, we all function as a team. Reiko’s older than I am. And Fritz and Fred…well, they’re more like puppies than employees. I mean, I’ve never actually given anyone orders to do anything—”

Orson smiled affectionately. “Actually, you do, Lucy—but in a way that everyone appreciates. And I have total faith you can handle the promotion. In fact, there is absolutely no one else I want to do it.”

When he mentioned the salary that went with the promotion, she almost fell off the chair. She wanted to. Actually, she wanted to leap on the couch whooping and screaming, but of course she didn’t.

“Mr. Bernard, I’d love a chance at this. I can’t tell you how hard I’ll work and try to deserve your trust in me.” She tried to sound her subdued best, but her head was still yelling ohmygodohmygodohmygod. New car, here we come! Hell’s bells, she might even move up to an Accord.

Here she’d been so sure this day was doomed for a nosedive because of that ugly bout of stomach trouble. Had she ever been wrong. And really, she should have known. She’d worked hard and long to make a life plan come together. Her life wasn’t going so perfectly by accident, but because she’d fought so hard. Darn it, she deserved it.

But just then, she glanced at Nick again.

CHAPTER TWO

NICK STARED out the sunroom window, jingling the change in his pocket, watching Lucy charge across the lawn back to the greenhouse. The dogs had found her—no surprise. The only shock was that they hadn’t found her before this.

Baby was a full-blooded Great Dane, where Boo Boo—well, Boo Boo’s name was self-explanatory. Baby had been bred with a ribbon-winning sire and dutifully stood for him, but the minute she’d been brought home, she took off and found her own choice of lovers. Boo Boo was the result. The dog’s coloring and size were pure Great Dane, but the ears drooped and the tail was wrong and his expression was downright dopey.

Either way, both dogs were bigger than Lucy. The faster she ran, the more they appeared to be chasing her, but that wasn’t really true. They simply bounded and leaped around her, thrilled to have their favorite female visit. They adored her. When Boo Boo latched on to her wrist, he never left a mark. When they lavished kisses on her face—and she screamed—they just wagged their tails, understanding that she wasn’t remotely annoyed.

Nick wanted to shake his head.

Lucy—whose creative horticultural talents could potentially bring in a multiple seven-figure windfall for Bernard Chocolates—had a red nose, a dog-licked chin, a silly flower hat that had fallen in the snow, and jeans with a hole in the knee.

“She’s too young,” Nick said to his grandfather.

Orson stepped behind him, carrying a fresh mug of coffee. “I know she looks young. But she’s just under thirty. You were running the manufacturing operations at that age.”

“But that was only because I had to. Because Mom and Dad died. Because you were ill. And because Clint couldn’t tell a balance sheet from a bowling ball.”

“Your brother is just as smart as you are. He could have taken the ball if he’d just had the interest, the ambition. Once he got that young woman pregnant, everything went downhill for him. The point being, when your parents died, you were both too young to run a company. Technically. But you grabbed hold of the challenge and made it happen.”

Nick had heard the refrain of this story too many times before. It was Orson’s gospel. Gramps would have forgiven his grandsons all kinds of goofs—car wrecks, losing a few million, run-ins with alcohol or drugs, probably even a bank robbery—but he was ancient-old-school as far as women. A man didn’t get a woman pregnant and leave her. Period. Unfortunately, Clint had made exactly that mistake. Orson had never forgiven him, no matter what Clint had said or done since.

Every once in a while, Nick tried playing go-between. It always worked the same way. Trying to intercede always resulted in his head getting kicked from both directions. But right now, his older brother’s problems weren’t on the table. The situation with Lucy was.

“Lucy isn’t me. It’s not the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t, but we’re not asking her to run an international manufacturing operation, either.”

Nick heard the stubborn note in his grandfather’s tone and knew the old man was spoiling for a fight. Orson loved to fight and most of the time Nick gave in. The Bernard Experimental Station was one of Orson’s wild-haired follies, which in itself didn’t bother him. Orson, after all, had turned Bernard Chocolates into the multimillion-dollar operation it was. If he wanted to fritter away some money, God knew, he was entitled. This situation, though, was different.

“Lucy knows that new breed of cacao is potentially worth a fortune. She’s not used to pressure. She’s not trained for it. It’s not a fair thing to put on her shoulders.”

When Orson didn’t immediately argue, Nick focused again on the view below.

She was almost out of sight now, but not completely. A copse of tall blue spruce formed a privacy barrier between the house and experimental station. She had almost reached the woods.

Her hair looked more silver than blond, especially in sunlight, and was finer than filament. She wore it chin-length and simple, but it whished around her face every time she moved.

He knew she wasn’t as young as she looked—it had to be challenging to look mature for someone who barely reached five-three and had that baby-fine hair. He’d never seen her wear makeup. Maybe she troweled on five pounds of face paint when she went out, but he only saw her at work. Makeup made no sense in the damp, warm environment of the greenhouses. Her skin was so damned gorgeous, he thought she’d be silly to goop it up anyway.

The eyes, though. God. A guy could look into those hazel eyes, get lost and never find his way out. They were dark gold and mesmerizing, framed with a thick fringe of short lashes. Sometimes, talking to her, he could look and look and look in those eyes. Forget who he was, forget how different they were, forget how young she was.

“She doesn’t have the background to take on this kind of responsibility,” Nick said firmly.

“Oh? What kind of background is that?” Orson’s tone was wry. “She took Ludwig’s experiments and turned them completely around. On her own. Alone. She’s creative, bright, intuitive. She works harder than any three men. She’s responsible to the nth degree.”

“I know all that,” Nick said testily.

But Orson wasn’t through singing her praises. “Everybody loves her. She may not think of herself as a leader, but everyone else does. She’s always at the head of the pack, making the work fun for everyone else, bringing fresh ideas and spirit and excitement to every project she’s involved with.”

“Gramps, I know all that. And I like her, too. It’s just…” Nick wasn’t used to fumbling, but it was hard to find the right word to phrase his objections. Saying everyone liked Lucy was like saying the sky was blue. Of course they liked her. She was like a fresh breeze on a dark day, always upbeat, always finding the right thing to say. And she listened. She tilted her head just so, listening to whoever was speaking intently. She heard people. She didn’t just talk. She really heard people.

Like him.

One time—God knew how she’d gotten him talking—Lucy had definitely heard him.

Orson was still musing on the nature of the project. “Obviously there are areas we’d have to take on ourselves. I don’t know how many extra employees we’ll need to hire. And security is a critical concern—but you can take that on, can’t you, Nick? She’d be in charge of the growing, the plantings, the direct work. But you could oversee that, as well.”

“You don’t think I have enough to do?”

His grandfather regarded him patiently. “I think you’ll find time for this because you’re as excited about the idea as I am.”

“Maybe.”

“You thought it was an old man’s foolishness. That I was throwing away money on these experiments. That there wasn’t a chance any of them could possibly work.”

“Don’t rub it in.”

“But you were as thrilled as I was when the results came through. That chocolate was better quality than any we’ve ever produced. Better than any we’ve ever tasted from any company. Anywhere on the globe.”

“All right. All right. So I’m as excited as hell,” Nick said irritably.

Orson smiled, but then he turned serious. “It’s not just that I feel Lucy has earned the promotion and opportunity. I do think that. But also there are few people in this life that I completely trust. That girl has integrity. She wouldn’t pick up a dime on the street that wasn’t hers.”

“That’s partly why I think she’s too young. She’s naive. That kind of young. Still idealistic. All that shit.”

“So am I,” Orson said mildly.

Nick shot him a grin. “Yeah, but you’re hopeless. Besides, you’re my grandfather, so I can find a way to protect you whether you want me to or not.”

Orson smiled back, but then he simply looked thoughtfully at his grandson. “Do you have some personal reason you’re not comfortable with Lucy?”

“Of course not.” Nick easily and immediately put that question to bed, but he thought damn right he had a reason.

She was attracted to him. It was an embarrassment for her—a problem that cropped up the minute he showed up, that other people noticed, that made it hard for her to work with him. He didn’t want her hurt, and didn’t want to put her in any situation where he knew she could be hurt.

But explaining that to his grandfather would only make it more awkward for Lucy—and himself. The answer was simply to stay as far away from her as possible.

“Look, Gramps, put her in charge, if you want. Give her the promotion. But we’ve got a dozen irons in the fire over the next few months. I’ve got to be in Europe part of that time. So let me think on it, see if I can find someone else who can watch over her and the project.”

“Someone besides you.”

“Exactly.”

“We both know this is something that could revolutionize the chocolate industry. We just can’t put it in the hands of a stranger,” Orson said.

“I know. I agree.” It was a worry in itself that Lucy had been the one to come through with the miracle. If Nick had ever believed it could happen, he’d have hired massive, unprecedented security for the project from the get-go. But that was like fretting over spilled milk. “I’ll find the right person.”

“As long as it isn’t you,” Orson repeated again.

“It won’t be me,” Nick expressed with absolute certainty, then glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to get rolling. Madris going to drive you to the doctor’s this afternoon?”

“Between you and Madris, someone’s hounding me nonstop. I’m sick of it.”

Nick turned away from the window completely, ready to concentrate completely on Orson now.

She was out of sight.

FOR A MONDAY that started out darn worrisome, it sure turned out fabulous. The instant Lucy got home, she dropped her jacket…on the floor. Peeled off her boots. Then, as an afterthought, chucked the rest of her clothes down to her underpants.

Yes. With the word promotion singing through her head like an aria, she danced through the house, flipping on the tube to the Oxygen channel, then boogie-wooing into the kitchen to pour herself a half glass from her dusty bottle of Gallo, then sipped it, still dancing. She started getting chilled from running around without clothes, but who cared?

Promotion. What a bubble-popping, orgasmic, rainbow-pretty word. Dollar signs paraded in her mind. Big, beautiful dollar signs. Now she’d have money to pay for the white carpeting. Money to upgrade the Civic. Money to pay off her Pottery Barn couch and the purple satin sheets and the museum print of the eagle.

She was gonna be…okay, not rich…but solvent, solvent, solvent.

And more to the point, oh, way, way, way more to the point…she was going to be a major player in the chocolate thing. It was actually going to be her baby. Seeing the advent of chocolate not dependent on rain forests. Developing the most fabulous chocolate products in the known universe. Creating products that no one else had—that no one else had even dreamed of.

Her.

Lucy.

Lucy Fitzhenry.

Was actually going to make history. Chocolate history. So it wasn’t world peace or a cure for cancer, but sheesh. When push came to shove, what was one of the most absolutely critical things in life?

A rhetorical question, of course, as she sashayed over to her private stash by the computer drawer. One truffle before dinner. Oh, yes, all the rules were going by the wayside tonight. If those who called her an obsessive-compulsive fuddy-duddy could only see her now…having chocolate before dinner. With wine. Walking around the house near naked. No looking at the bills. No cleaning. No doing anything constructive.

And they said she’d never manage being wicked. Hah. She was just swallowing the last sip of wine when the doorbell rang.

She froze, then spun around, cracked her toe on a chair leg, winced, and then hobbled into the bedroom, yelling, “Hold on! I’ll be there in a minute!” As fast as she could, she yanked on yoga pants and a sweatshirt, yelling out another promise at the top of her lungs, and then pedaled for the front door.

Because she was wicked—not crazy—she naturally looked through the peephole first. Her jaw dropped even as she hurled the door open. “Dad! What on earth are you…?”

She started to ask what her father was doing here, but since he was standing there with a suitcase, some kind of crisis was self-explanatory. The suitcase itself showed more proof of a crisis. It was one of those old-fashioned cases—hard-shelled like a turtle, gray, the kind that was too heavy to carry but you just couldn’t kill it off; throw it off a cliff and it’d land without a dent. Only this one had three socks clamped in its teeth. One white, two black.

“Dad?” she asked more gently, by that time pulling him into the light by the front door.

“Your mother kicked me out. She told me to get out and stay out.”

There. Her worst nightmare. The reason she’d stayed home so long and never moved away like every other self-respecting, independent adult woman. Only damn. She’d always feared her parents would argue each other to death if she wasn’t there to play referee.

“Come on, give me your coat.” He was just standing there with the suitcase, looking at her like a lost soul. Luther Fitzhenry was a surgeon. Cardiac. One of the most brilliant at Mayo—which was saying something. She’d inherited her slight height and skinniness from him. He couldn’t be over five-six and was built leaner than wire. But his heart was huge, and showed clearly in his gentle facial lines and soft blue eyes.

At the moment, he looked a lot more like a confused, lost puppy than a brilliant surgeon. “She says I’m never home. That I’m always at the hospital. That we’re already strangers so I might as well just leave.”

“Okay, okay. We’ll talk about this in a minute, but first let’s calm down.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go, Lucy. If I could just stay here. For a night or two.”

“For a night or two,” she echoed, trying not to feel panicked at the terrorizing thought that he’d stay longer.

“I won’t be a problem.”

“I know you won’t.”

“I just didn’t know where else to go.”

“Uh-huh.” She led him into the living room. He plunked ked down on her green microfiber sofa—the unpaid-for sofa from Pottery Barn—and looked around bewilderedly.

“I love your mother, Lucy.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“You know I don’t drink.” He leaned forward with his long hands hanging over his knees. “On second thought, I would. Chivas on the rocks.”

“Um, Dad. I can’t afford Chivas. It has to be wine or beer.”

“Oh.” He looked at her hopefully. “If I gave you some money, could you go buy some Chivas? I don’t want to put you to any trouble. It’s probably too much to ask. Never mind.” His thick, light hair was graying a little, and right now standing up in strange spikes. “I don’t need a drink. Just completely forget I asked.”

“Dad.”

“What?”

“I’ll go out, get you the Chivas. Just relax now.”

“I love your mother, Lucy.”

“Yes, you said that. I know.”

“She says I never notice anything she does. That I was a spoiled young man and now I’ve turned into a spoiled old man. That I’m self-centered. That I never see her. I keep trying to figure out what brought this all on—”

“Her birthday?”

“No. It can’t be that. I bought her that Mikado watch she wanted for her birthday—”

“That was last year, Dad.”

“Well, it wasn’t that. It was something else. I think…she may have reupholstered the couch. Or bought a new chair. Something like that. I walked in and she just seemed to get madder and madder—” He looked at her pitifully. “Whatever you do, don’t go out just for me.”

Okay. She went out, found a liquor store, bought his Scotch, came home. By then he’d fallen asleep—with his shoes up on her couch. She pulled off his shoes, covered him with a down throw, and then jogged back to the spare room.

She had a bed and various odd pieces of furniture in there because her parents had pawned off all the furniture they didn’t want when she moved out. But since she rarely needed a spare bed, she’d tended to fill up the room with stuff. Unfortunately her dad could trip on things like the exercise bike and cross-country skis and snow gear, especially if he woke in the middle of the night, so it all had to be cleared out and cleaned up.

On the third trip to the garage, her stomach turned a triple somersault, making her stop dead. Not now. Not again. She hadn’t had time—or she’d forgotten—to call a doctor that day, but then she realized, she also hadn’t had any dinner. Except for the truffle.

The truffle was fabulous. When it came down to it, there was no such thing as a bad truffle. But it did seem as if she had a tiny propensity to get in trouble with chocolate lately.

That sudden insight was so unpleasant that she immediately hurled it in her mental-denial bin and aimed for the kitchen. Because her dad was still napping, she did the mac-and-cheese thing, finished making up a fresh bed for him, and then made the usual nightly calls…Ginger, her sister. Merry, her best friend. Her cousin Russell miraculously managed to connect between her calls—something was new with him, she could hear it in his voice, but he didn’t mention anything except stopping over soon. And finally, her mom got a turn at the phone lines.

“Is he there, Lucy?”

“Yes. Do you want to—”

“No. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want him to know I called. And I don’t care where he is. I just…” Eve sighed on the other end of the line. Lucy could picture her mother, so beautiful, her blond hair never looked fussed-over but always wonderfully styled, makeup just so, elegant as roses. But angry. “I just wanted to be sure he was all right. That’s all. Kick him out, Luce.”

“Mom, I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. I’m sure he’s talked you into staying tonight, so that’s fine. But if you let it go on, he’ll suck all the energy right out of you, taking and taking and taking. You’re a grown woman. You don’t have to take care of your parents. We’re adults. Kick him out and don’t look back.”

It occurred to her around midnight that she hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone about her promotion. God knew, she wanted to. There just never seemed to be a chance. She was just nodding off, so tired she hadn’t even flossed, when a short, scrawny shadow showed up in the doorway.

“Lucy, are you awake?”

She jerked to a sitting position. “Yeah, Dad. What’s wrong?”

“I just wondered if you had anything around to eat. I don’t want you to bother. I don’t need anything. Just tell me where to look. And then go back to sleep—”

If he’d opened the fridge or cupboard, he’d have found various kinds of food. But apparently he’d done that. And nothing he found looked like grilled chicken and green beans and a baked potato, which was apparently what he was in the mood for.

“I don’t suppose you have any pistachio ice cream for dessert?”

“Nope. I’ve got chocolate. And Cherry Garcia. And some cookies. And bananas—”

“Your mother always has pistachio ice cream.”

“Uh-huh. Dad. I’m not going out after midnight for pistachio ice cream.”

“Good heavens, honey. I’d never ask you to do such a thing—”

“I have to work tomorrow. I’ve got a big day. I have to get some sleep.”

“Me, too. Although I think I’d better cancel my surgical schedule for a few days. I’ve never done that, but I think I’d better. Only every time I start thinking, I seem to get more…unsettled. Which is probably why I couldn’t get my mind off the pistachio ice cream. I know it’s foolish. I know…”

Okay, she thought. He’d had a terrible, terrible day. He was afraid that Eve meant it this time. Lucy couldn’t imagine her father surviving a divorce. He probably couldn’t take a shower and find a towel on his own. He was brilliant in the operating room, but real life always seemed to bewilder him.

So she went out and found his ice cream.

It was past two when she tumbled back into bed, musing that this had been an extraordinarily wild day. Tumultuous. Filled with both exhilaratingly wonderful events…but worrisome ones, too. Still, through it all, she’d barely spared a moment thinking about Nick Bernard.

That was progress, she thought.

Major progress.

Only thinking about him last thing before sleep meant, inevitably, that every darn single dream had him in the star cast.

CHAPTER THREE

EVEN THOUGH Nick drove the satin-black Lotus from the house to the labs, the dogs managed to beat him. He could have walked, but the whole idea of driving was to avoid the slobber and dog hair. He had a business flight at noon, was hoping to stay clean until then.

“But that was silly thinking on my part, wasn’t it, girls?” he murmured when he opened the car door and was immediately assaulted—lavishly, lovingly assaulted—by the two tail-wagging dimwits. Baby was the kisser. Boo Boo was the devil incarnate—trying to climb in the Lotus, nearly killing them both, threatening the soft leather seats, then after kissing him senseless with her long, wet tongue, taking off with his driving glove. Two pawprints the size of footballs showed up on his gray slacks.

“Women,” he muttered, although he really didn’t mean to disparage the gender. Not when the female gender was found in dogs, anyway. Women were another story entirely. Some days it just didn’t pay a guy to get up, you know? Linnie had called that morning.

Their conversation was still sucking the energy out of him. When he first met her, Linnie had seemed every guy’s daydream. She had no morals. No inhibitions. Money of her own. Nothing was too wild for her, in bed or in life. She was fun, crazy, unpredictable. Hell, when she dressed for a party, you never knew if even her critical parts were gonna be covered.

It had been an entertaining, worthless, fun affair—until he’d broken it off. It never occurred to him that she’d care. She’d never hinted at wanting more than an occasional good time. There were other guys in her life, he knew, and that was totally okay with him. He only called it off because he was so damned busy, really didn’t have time to do the planning, the partying, couldn’t just take off and vacation whenever she had the whim. He never thought it’d be a big deal to her. He just thought calling a friendly halt was being honest.

Apart from the ear blistering she’d given him—and that was several months ago—she’d kept calling ever since. She needed an escort for something. Then a favor about something else. This morning was another one of those “something elses.” And when he couldn’t—he honestly couldn’t—she did the ear blistering thing again.

All his life—as of kindergarten anyway—girls had chased him. All his life, he’d liked it.

Only lately, he felt like he was batting a zero. Nothing he did with women was right. “Including you girls.” He crouched down to scrub both Baby and Boo Boo’s heads before straightening again. “You can’t go into the greenhouses. You know that.”

They went up to the door anyway, wagging their tails, expectant. They knew Lucy was in there.

So did Nick.

Not a good idea to see Lucy when he was already having a bad-woman day, but there was no help for it. The new project loomed like a mountain in his mind. They needed to figure out how they could best work together, talk about both the details and the big picture, establish some timetables, put a plan on paper. Possibly Lucy didn’t need every possible t crossed—but he did. Either that or he was going to drive himself bonkers worrying about it.

The truth was, that guilt had chewed on his nerves ever since the night—around seven weeks ago—when she’d called him with the news about her experiment’s success. Until that night, he’d had no measure of how strong her crush on him was. Until that night, she’d never been this awkward around him.

He’d screwed up. Nick took all the blame because it didn’t matter what Lucy had done. What mattered was that he’d been in a far better position, life-wise, to anticipate and cope with certain kinds of awkward problems. She was naive. He wasn’t. It was as simple as that, and although he’d been ultracareful around her ever since, it hadn’t helped. If they got a good working arrangement agreed on, though, he had high hopes they’d click a ton more naturally.

Right?

Right.

He pushed open the door, still mentally coaching himself into an upbeat frame of mind. She wasn’t expecting him for another half hour, but he knew she always got in early. With any luck, they could get this conversation finished before she was really busy—or he had to leave for his flight.

The lobby was empty and silent except for the pitiful moans of the Great Danes left outside the door. The lobby, predictably, was empty, but right after that came the long hall to the offices. Lucy’s was empty, but he heard the sound of her voice from the coffee room down the hall.

Reiko, the young mom of a four-year-old boy, seemed to be counseling her. “I just think you should go home. Get some rest, Lucy. You’re obviously exhausted.”

“Honestly, I would if I could get any rest at home. But he didn’t go into work today, so I know he’s still there….”

Nick hesitated just outside the door. He didn’t want to eavesdrop, but he also didn’t want to interrupt some personal, traumatic conversation. His pulse gave an unexpected buck at the idea of some man living in Lucy’s house—someone keeping her up all night, somehow making her afraid to go home.

“You don’t think he had an affair?” Reiko questioned.

“No, no. He’d never do that.” Lucy’s voice sounded wearier than a lead weight bell. “I just couldn’t sleep all night. He was up every hour, needing something—”

“You can’t work all day and take care of him all night, Luce.”

“I know. But I couldn’t turn him away in the middle of the night! And I don’t know whether to try to help the two of them. Or stay out of their problems. Whether to let him stay, or insist he find another place. So far it’s only been the one night, so I just can’t see doing anything until he gets his head on straighter.”

“You stayed with them forever.” The cadence of Reiko’s voice had a hint of her Japanese mother’s. There was a musical softness, a rhythm and gentleness—with steel behind it. “Where my father grew up, a child was responsible for his or her parents their entire lives. But this is America. There should only be two people in a marriage.”

“Yeah, well, as soon as I finally felt I could leave home, they almost immediately started fighting again.”

“But that’s not your fault. It’s theirs.”

“I know, I know. But that doesn’t help me figure out what to do about the situation now. I mean, would you have turned your own dad away—”

Nick had been becoming more and more confused until he heard the word dad. Finally it clicked. She’d been talking about her father. Not a man. Not a lover who may or may not have been having an affair, who was wearing her out at night with his demands, with…Nick swallowed hard. Ridiculous, to realize how high and hard his blood pressure was pounding over something that was none of his business to begin with. Reiko spotted him.

“Hey, Mr. Nick, how’s it going?”

“Fine, fine. How’s the little one?” he asked, referring to her little boy, but at that moment Lucy spun around and spotted him, too. She promptly turned peach-pink and dropped her porcelain mug…which, of course, promptly shattered in a half-dozen pieces, coffee spilling everywhere.

Talk about immediate chaos. Both women immediately yelped, and then both talked ten for a dozen as they ran around for paper towels or rags. Nick just scooped up the porcelain shards and carried them to the closest wastebasket, both women fussing the whole time.

“You’ll cut yourself, Nick—”

“Let me clean that. It was all my fault. Neither of you have to help—”

Okay. Once they recovered from that minor debacle, he managed to finally slip in a word. “I know I’m early, Lucy. But I just need a few minutes with you—” That wasn’t strictly true, but he figured if they started out with a productive, short meeting, they’d have a better shot working out the hairier issues the next time.

“Sure, sure, of course. But unless we need to be sitting at a desk, let’s walk toward the greenhouses, okay?”

He definitely liked the idea. It was always easier to walk and talk than to be stuck sitting still. Besides which, they had to go through the labs to get to the greenhouse area, and he always loved wandering through the lab. Bernard’s major manufacturing kitchens had similar equipment—conchers, winnowing machines and all. But everything was in smaller size here, with more done by hand. And the best part, of course, was getting to sample some cacao nibs or the latest experimental chocolates, or just poke a finger in whatever liquid concoction the staff was stirring up next—at least if someone didn’t slap his hand.

“Don’t touch,” Lucy scolded.

“The last I noticed, I own the place,” he reminded her.

“I know, I know. But every process in here is a serious secret. And touching anything could monkey with an experiment’s results.”

“Nothing’s supposed to be a secret from me,” he said, his eyes narrowing on a fresh batch of roasted shelled cacao beans in a tray on the far counter.

She steered him firmly toward the door to the greenhouse marked BLISS, saying patiently, “I know you’re the boss. But you’re just a teeny bit dumb, Nick, as much as we all love you. Your gramps has the touch. The understanding. The instinct. You don’t.”

“Hey,” he said, in his most injured voice, but he wasn’t offended—even remotely. It was always like this. Lucy was a wreck around him outside, or in the offices, or up at the house. But the closer she got to her own venue, the more comfortable and bossy she got—and the more fun. It was like watching the transformation from an obedient, boring Cinderella into a fine, confident, sassy wicked witch.

She key-coded herself—and him—into the greenhouse, then motioned him in first. “Now, Nick, I totally realize that you’re the brilliant one from the business side of the fence. Orson has told me a zillion times how Bernard’s was just a small-potatoes family chocolatier until you were a teenager and started nudging him with marketing ideas. And then taking the whole thing over. So I know you’re brilliant. But you need people like me to do the dirty-hands stuff—”

“You’re just saying that so I’ll stay out of the chocolate samples.”

“True.”

“I’m kind of offended that you think I’d mind getting my hands dirty. It’s not true. As a kid, I played in mud nonstop.”

“That’s nice,” she said as she smacked his hand one more time—he’d almost reached another sampling plate right before they entered the greenhouse wing. After slapping him, twice now, she just went on doing the miniature wicked witch thing—albeit in sneakers. “You just don’t understand how delicate the process is. You have no reason to. It’s not your problem. But everything has to be right.”

“You think I didn’t realize that?”

“Oh cripes. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Of course you know all that, but in your job, you need all that knowledge at an intellectual level. Where in mine…well, I just don’t know how anyone could do my job well if they weren’t an obsessively fussy perfectionist.” She said it tactfully, as if she felt sorry for him that he couldn’t have that character trait. “You also have to be messy. And those two things usually don’t go together. Which is why it’s so darn hard to create really good chocolate.”

He found it fascinating that she had the arrogance to think he needed a lecture on the chocolate business. But damn. She always saw things so differently from him that his curiosity was invariably aroused. “Say what? What does messiness have to do with creating good chocolate?”

“Well, maybe messiness isn’t the right word. But you can’t do everything by the book. You can’t just tidily follow a recipe and hope it’ll turn out. Because each cacao bean is different, every batch of chocolate has the potential to turn out differently. So to make the best stuff, you have to be flexible. Sensitive to the smells, the tastes, the textures. The nitty gritty of it all.”

“I get it now. You have to be a hard-core sensualist. Like you.”

Her jaw dropped. “No, I didn’t mean that. I’m no sensualist.”

“The hell you aren’t,” he murmured. And lightning suddenly crackled in the air. Not outside. Inside.

The Night of the Chocolate was suddenly between them, the memory in her eyes, in her arrested posture. The doors were closed behind them, locking them into the greenhouse environment. The climate wasn’t hothouse here, but it was a world different from a freezing Minnesota March morning. A tangly jungle of cacao trees of all shapes and sizes looked exotic and wild. The air was warm and moist, every breath flavored with pungent, earthy smells.

But this morning, he couldn’t enjoy it. He wanted to kick himself. Sometimes he got on so well with Lucy—he really liked being with her—when she was naturally herself. And he’d blown it up by bringing up that night, a memory that was obviously awkward and miserable for her.

Hell. He couldn’t bat a run today to save his life. He tried pitching from a different stadium. “You know why I wanted to meet with you. We don’t have to pin down everything this instant but we do need to talk about plans. How to work together. A time frame.”

“I know. Orson filled me in that you were going to be stuck working with me.”

“Not stuck.” Damn, the woman started disappearing from sight the minute they got in her Bliss greenhouse. She wasn’t being evasive. It’s just that she checked the temperature on something and the water level on something else, and suddenly she was off.

He trailed after her. “The building of the greenhouses—I’ll take care of that. Won’t take that long if I get a crew on it. But I need your input on the details. You want this set up to be a model for all the new ones, or do you want variations? How many kitchen-labs do you want attached to the new project. All that kind of thing.”

“No sweat. I’d love to work all that out for you—in fact, I could map out a drawing of the ideal layout—have it for you by tomorrow, if you want. One thing we need to immediately discuss, though, is trees.”

“What about trees, specifically?”

“Well, for starters, cost. What exactly is my budget?”

“Hmm. As much as we love you, Luce,” he said wryly, mimicking her own phrase from earlier, “I tend to think you’ve got the same money sense as my grandfather. Not that you’re dumb. Just that you’re a ton stronger at the creative, vision end than figuring out how we’re going to pay for it. So how about if you just tell me what you need, put it on paper, and then let me worry about the budget side of things.”

“Um, are you insulting me?”

“Definitely, yes. You and Orson are two peas in a pod about money.”

“That was a really nice compliment. Comparing me to your grandfather. You know I love him.”

“He thinks the world of you, too. But moving on…”

“Oh. Yeah. About the trees. The thing is—I need to start ordering rootstock now. It’s such a major complicated process to get stock from South America and Africa. And if there’s any chance you can get the greenhouses up and ready to rock and roll over the next few months—I really need to get those orders going pretty promptly.”

“Okay.”

She stopped carrying around hoses and a dirt-crusted fork and peered up at him. Those soft hazel eyes looked bruised-tired. Almost golden in color. Cat’s eyes, he always thought. Sometimes sleepy cat’s eyes, sometimes sensual as a kitten in the sunlight. Usually sensuality and innocence didn’t naturally go together, but that was just it, in Lucy’s case…

“Nick?”

“Sorry, didn’t hear you.”

“I said, do you understand how Bliss was created?”

She was getting formal and bossy and pedantic again. The way she got when she was nervous. What the hell’d he do wrong this time? “Sure I know how Bliss was made. Did you forget I’ve been part of Bernard Chocolates since I got out of diapers?”

“You’ve been part of the family business…but from everything you’ve ever said, I understand you were always part of the manufacturing and business side of the chocolate fence. All the parts involved in getting from the cacao beans to the candy. But I wasn’t sure if you were familiar with the first part—how you get to the cacao beans to start with.”

“I know the basics. The names of the beans. Where they come from. Where we get them. What they cost.”

For some unknown reason, she handed him a hose—a dripping hose with a little mud on it—while she rambled down another aisle and ducked her head under some more plants. “But all those basics are really complex. In fact, I really believe the reason Bernard’s chocolate is so fabulous is because we’re meticulous about every single step in the process. Like in the roasting process, we’re fussy right down to the seconds on timing. And we use way more cocoa butter than lecithin. And we don’t just buy the best beans, we work really hard to discover unique blends.” She surfaced for air, before ducking under another plant. “In fact, that’s always been one of my favorite jobs. Experimenting with different blends…”

“Um, Luce, could we stay on target?”

“I am. This is the whole point. That we’re meticulous about everything. The winnowing. The grinding, the dutching, the conching. The tempering…hold this for me for a second, would you?”

Out of nowhere she handed him a football-sized purple pod. Purple, as in ripe. Granted, he wasn’t wearing a suit, just dress slacks and a decent shirt. His jacket was already hanging in the jet. But his intention was definitely to fly directly to a meeting in short order, which meant that holding onto a dripping hose and a prize-ripe cacao pod wasn’t precisely an ideal situation.

“Lucy,” he started to say—in his most patient, understanding voice. But she was still ranting on.

“Because that’s the thing, Nick. All those parts of the process are like pieces of a puzzle. Every truly great chocolatier has its secrets that no one else has. Anybody could end up with an edible chocolate bar or a nice-tasting truffle. But Bernard’s has always gone the long mile to find the better secrets, the better process, to do the work…”

He’d lost her. She’d disappeared somewhere where the pods looked the ripest. That was the whole problem with working with a perfectionist. She had to get every detail said and when she got on the subject of chocolate, she was like a windup toy with an ever-ready battery.

From the beginning, Nick had wished he’d had Lucy on the sales force. Hell, he’d have hired her to be the sales force—if he could pin her down for two seconds when she was cleaned up. Almost the whole time he’d known her, though, she was invariably up to her knees in smells and water. Worse yet, she was even fussy about her mud.

He mentally snoozed as she kept talking. There was no point in trying to cut her off. Lucy was always going to dot every i. But time was dipping by. In principle he’d hoped to take off by ll:45—and he’d figured that the initial talk with Lucy wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. There were only a couple of things they absolutely had to get straight this minute. Only she was still talking. They hadn’t settled anything. And he’d already been here a good hour.

Worse yet, as if she couldn’t pause long enough to have a discussion about a project worth millions, she kept working. Moving. Bending. Lifting. Pinching. Turning on water. Turning off water. At the corner of one aisle, she was swiftly collecting a good-sized heap of purply-red pods.

“But the important issue, Nick, is that all chocolatiers concentrate on the same processes. What that really means is that the best are always competing with the best. All the great chocolate makers buy the best cacao, hire the best chemists, discover their own blend of the best beans. So there’s been nothing to really…revolutionize the industry, you know? Until now, when…”

Momentarily he couldn’t hear her, because her voice became muffled and indistinct when she disappeared deeper under the trees. But she emerged eventually with two more ripe pods.

“…What really mattered was when your gramps got into the rain-forest crisis. Experimenting with ways to raise and breed cacao trees in an environment that didn’t require that rain forest climate. Which has been tried before, of course. But not successfully in a way that produced great beans. Much less unbelievably revolutionary great beans—”

“Yawn,” he said aloud, trying to tactfully send her a signal that he knew all this. And whatever he knew or didn’t knew, he couldn’t listen to her ranting all day.

The signal didn’t work. From beneath a branch she tried to hand him another hose—then peered out with an impatient glance when he didn’t take it. How was he supposed to take it? He already his hands full. “Forget the hose. But hold onto that one pod, okay? I want it separated from the others. Anyway. We had two problems—first to find a way to grow fabulous cacao beans from a plant that would thrive in a non-rain-forest climate. A regular climate. And then…”

She hopped down from the forest level, looking like a kid who’d been playing touch football after a rain. Smiling. Knees and hands and shoes filthy. A swipe of dirt on her chin. “…and our second problem was to produce a superior bean. A bean better than anyone had ever seen before. And further, to produce several new varieties of superior beans—because you always need a blend to make different kinds of chocolates…”

He gave up. Put down the hose. Carried the sacred pod around as he ambled to the front work center, where there was always a thermos of fresh coffee and mugs. He poured himself half a cup, ambled back. Undoubtedly she wouldn’t notice his absence. She’d forgotten him—which was a lot better than her being weird and jumpy and flushing whenever he looked at her sideways—but it was also a major comedown. Women had chased him on three continents. He knew his way around women.

Hell, he could usually find a way to cope with Lucy, too, but not when she was near her chocolate. No man could conceivably compete for her attention compared to chocolate. Ever. And she was really winding up now, her tone as breathy and excited as a woman near orgasm.

“…So the thing is, the revolutionary thing is, the experiments I’ve been doing for your grandfather truly broke totally new ground. We weren’t just blending beans. We’ve been blending trees. Marrying a little Trinidad with a little Jamaica. Seeing if the delicate ‘Arriba’ bean from Ecuador would dance with the Rolls Royce criolla from Venezuela. And from there, if we could find those offspring willing to reproduce in a midwest climate…”

“Lucy.” He really doubted he’d manage to successfully interrupt her, but she’d climbed into another group of trees and tarnation, the day was wasting.

“…. So that’s what’s so exciting, Nick. That’s the thing. You want six more greenhouses, that’s great—but I need to get the seedlings and root stock and stuff started. I mean I’ve got my own rootstock established now. I can fill a couple. But we need to repeat some of the experiments as well, because…”

Her voice dropped off. Which was impossible. Lucy never quit talking, not about chocolate, and when she was in that mid-orgasmic-beyond-excited stage, tornados could rumble and she’d never notice. He said immediately, “Where are you? What’s wrong?”

When she didn’t promptly answer, he plunked his coffee mug on the ground, set down the sacred cacao pod with it, and started jogging up and down the aisles.

“Where are you?” He was just about to get seriously testy when he finally located her. She was hunched over at the end of an aisle, leaning against the work counter by the coffee, holding her stomach and looking pea-green. “You’re sick?” he asked.

“No. No. I’m just a little tired today—” She suddenly gulped, then whirled around and ran.

Completely confused, he chased after her. She stabbed in the code numbers by the door, and then tore out. He realized in two shakes that she was obviously headed for a restroom, but she was in such an all-fired hurry she never closed the door, just made it to the sink before hurling.

Nick had always been one to run a two-minute mile away from someone being sick that way, but Lucy…maybe she was slight, but normally she was stronger than an ox. He’d never heard of her taking a day off work. She had an exhausting amount of energy, never lost the whole bouncy bubble thing, always cheerleading even the lowest of the crew. So seeing her face look like pea soup shook him.

“What is it, you’ve got a flu, a bug, what? Could you have some kind of food poisoning?”

“Oh God, Nick. Go away.”

But he didn’t go away, couldn’t. She was through being sick, but now she was cupping cold water to take away the taste, splashing cold water on her face, and just hanging over that sink like she barely had the strength to stand.

“How long have you been sick this way?”

“Actually for more than a week. It comes and goes. I was going to call a doctor, but that seemed so dumb. I feel fine. And I kept thinking it’d go away. And besides that—”

“What?”

“Besides that, my dad’s a doctor. Practically every family friend is a doctor. They all work at Mayo. So trying to see a doctor without my family finding out and worrying and prying—” And then she repeated, “I’m fine now. Just go away. Give me a minute.”

“You’ve been hurling for more than a week? And still trying to come to work besides?” He raised his eyes to the ceiling. Women. “I’ll take care of this.”

“You’ll take care of what?”

“You,” he said irritably, and reached for his cell phone.

CHAPTER FOUR

HAVING GROWN UP with doctors, Lucy not only failed to treat them like gods, but could easily tell the real silver from the tinsel. Dr. Jargowski was totally darling, with his gentle eyes and sneaky sense of humor and unshakeable patience. Unfortunately, he was a quack.

“Don’t be silly,” Lucy told him irritably. “I can’t be pregnant.”

“You are.”

She redraped the cloth in a lot more modest fashion, mentally damning Nick from here to Poughkeepsie for bullying her into this waste-of-time doctor visit. “You don’t understand. This has to be an ulcer. I have a great job. A job I absolutely love. But a few weeks ago, things changed—the job’s even more wonderful, really, but it also become much more serious and stressful. And I’m a type A, you know? A worrier. A perfectionist. Anybody who knows me would tell you that I’m prime ulcer material—”

“You might find this hard to believe, but I’m usually the one to make a diagnosis, not the patient, since I happen to be the doctor,” Dr. Jargowski said with wry humor, and gave a subtle nod to the nurse, indicating she could leave the room now that the pelvic, private part of the examination was over.

Lucy didn’t care whether the nurse was there or not. “Well, the blood tests and exam have to be wrong. Maybe I have weird insides, did you think of that? Maybe I have a hernia or something making me nauseous. Maybe I have, I don’t know, fibroid tumors in my stomach—”

“Try to trust me a little, would you? ‘Weird insides’ is not a medically descriptive term. And you’d be making medical history if you showed up with fibroid tumors in your stomach, since that’s an impossibility. The symptoms, in fact, are not emanating from your stomach at all.”

“Look, would you listen to me? I don’t have a guy! I haven’t seriously dated anyone in almost two years! And of course I go out. But I don’t casually—” She waved her hand expressively.

“Ah. Well, even if you don’t normally…” He waved his hand in the same expressive gesture “…it definitely appears that you must have. At least once. Around seven weeks ago.”

Men. Men, men, men. Outside, Lucy found that the late afternoon had deteriorated into a drizzling, drooling rain—which was going to melt all the snow and make everything icy. That was probably a man’s fault, too.

She dove into her car, locked the doors, started the heater and defroster on high and then sat there, freezing to death while she waited for it all to work. Eventually she thawed enough to move—or at least to lean over far enough to click open the glove compartment.

She used to keep pepper spray in there, but over the years she’d come to define “emergency supplies” a little differently. Thankfully she didn’t waste time storing plain old candy bars for the serious crises, because now, she could go straight for the truffles. After downing three of Bernard’s best, the steam had cleared from the windshield and her body was no longer stiff as an icicle.

Now she was just completely hysterical.

She drove home snuffling and blubbering and talking to herself. There was no one she could tell. No one she could face. Hell’s bells, looking at the woman in the mirror shamed her. Twenty-eight-year-old responsible women just didn’t make mistakes like this. And Lucy was more than responsible. She was ultra-responsible.

In the privacy of the car, she had to admit there was a slim, very slim, possibility that the doctor wasn’t a quack.

It was even vaguely, remotely possible that the Night of The Chocolate could have involved some completely unplanned, unexpected, impossible-to-prepare-for—impossible-to-imagine—behavior on her part.

It was about the Bliss, she thought morosely. Bliss just wasn’t regular chocolate. And the night she’d tested the new Bliss, she’d discovered right away that there was something chemically…extra…in the new beans. Something powerful. Something dangerous. That had to be it. What else could explain something that could change a sensible, practical, basically shy woman into a raving nymphomaniac?

Oh, God. She’d buried the memory so deep she was positive it’d never find its way to the surface again.

She moaned several times during the drive—every time that memory edged closer to her consciousness. On the inside, she felt like an eggshell with spider cracks, cracks that were slowly seeping over the whole surface of the shell. Her whole life was about to explode in a big, messy phlat. There was no way it’d ever go back together the same way.

Please God. Let this be a mistake. Let me have an ulcer. Let me have a tumor. Let me have anything but a pregnancy. Come on. You know this isn’t fair. Nobody should have to pay for the one single thing they did wrong, should they? Can’t you find some really good sinners to vent on?

Her car swerved and she had to give up the sniveling. The temperature was dropping, turning the roads to black glass. By the time she reached home, she’d leveled the glove compartment’s supply of emergency truffles and her chin had locked in a grim line. Her hands were stiff from controlling the wheel so hard. Whether her life was a disaster or not, she just wanted to get inside her house and put up her feet for a while. She was whipped.

She’d almost forgotten her dad was installed at her place until she pushed open the door and found all the lights on. “Dad?” The TV blared from the living room. It sounded like sports in a foreign language-although truth to tell, most sports sounded like a foreign language to her. Her fresh-painted white boxes in front of her green couch—the boxes that functioned as a coffee table, she thought—were littered with magazines, three dirty glasses, a bowl of aging cereal and a spill of loose pocket change.

“Da—?”

“Oh, there you are.” Her dad strolled in from the kitchen, his hair unbrushed and sticking straight up, his feet bare. He’d been top of his class at Harvard Medical School, had students trail him down the hall whenever he spoke, had an international reputation as a heart surgeon. And he’d turned into a waif. “I was getting really worried. And really hungry.”

“Hungry—”

“I don’t care what you make, honey. You know I’m not fussy. I don’t want to be any trouble. Don’t you usually get home from work sooner than this, though? I’ve had a terrible day. Terrible…”

“Oh, Dad.” She pushed off her jacket and reached out her arms. Luther made an attempt to fold into them. “Have you talked to Mom?” At the look in his eyes—holy kamoly, for an instant there, he looked as if he were going to cry, so she hastily changed the subject. “I don’t always cook during the week, so I’m not sure what’s around. But we’ll look, okay?”

“Everything’s such a mess….”

She noticed that. Oh God, oh God. The kitchen in her duplex was hardly state-of-the-art, but it was still hers. There was no one to tease her for keeping the counters spotless and the sink smelling like fresh Soft Scrub, and she’d slowly been collecting Staub. It cost more than she could afford, she admitted it—and suffered lots of guilt for indulging herself—but she’d only been buying a piece at a time. Which meant she had three. Her dad must have tried to heat something for lunch in the red Staub terrine. The remnants looked like baked cheese. All-day-baked cheese. Well-well-well-well baked cheese.

“My nurse cancelled my surgical schedule for another week, but eventually I have to go back to work. Obviously. It’s just…I don’t know where to go. How to function. I can’t commute from here, but I can’t go home….”

“Okay, okay…” She squirted soap in the sink, started the water running, patted her dad, ran back out in the cold to fetch the mail, started a pot of tea, opened the fridge. “I could do some fresh pasta with chives and mozzarella and mushrooms—”

“How about burgers?” Her dad sank in a kitchen chair. “What if I can never work again?”

Lucy pawed through the freezer again. “Or we could have some veggie lasagna. With a fresh salad—”

“How about pork chops? With your mother’s mint sauce. Unless that’s too much trouble.” Her dad covered both his eyes. “I never cheated on her, you know. She’s the only woman I ever loved. I adore her, Lucy. I don’t know what I did that was so wrong.”

“All right, all right. We’ll have burgers.”

“She said…she didn’t love me anymore.”

“Oh, Dad—”

“She said I couldn’t find my own shoes. That I needed a keeper, but she wanted to be a wife, not a keeper. She said I couldn’t find my own shoes, my own wallet. She said I couldn’t find my own life. Lucy?”

“What?”

“She was right. I can’t. What am I going to do?”

She gave him some lettuce to shred. Then some more tea. Then started working with some ground round—in the long run, she refused to stuff her dad with the cholesterol-packed diet he wanted, but tonight just wasn’t the right time to argue with him.

She just didn’t seem to have a choice about putting her own crisis on a far back burner. She cooked. Picked up. Cleaned. Listened to her dad. Tried to fit in a general plan for Project Bliss to give to Nick in between it all, but of course, the phone kept ringing.

Right before nine, someone rapped on the back door. She found Russell hunched on the porch. At nineteen, her cousin was cuter than an Abercrombie model, all boyish charm and shy smiles. He’d glommed on her when they were kids, followed her around like a puppy, and once she’d moved into her own place, he’d shown up regularly.

She gave him a big hug, but whispered, “Maybe it would have been better if you called first this time—”

“I couldn’t, Luce. I had something really important to discuss with you.” He only stepped in as far as the doormat, standing there in the dim light with too thin a jacket and no gloves.

“And you’ve driven all the way from Mankato—”

“It’s not that far, but…aw hell. I just have to get this off my chest. And you’re the only one I can discuss this with—”

“What?”

“I think I’m gay.”

“Gay,” she repeated, and thought, nope. This wasn’t happening to her. Maybe she was the crisis counselor in the family. Maybe she’d been born with the assignment of being the Listener and Soother for the Fitzhenrys. Maybe with so many dramatic people in the clan, they naturally gravitated toward the nondramatic, boring one. Only for Pete’s sake. Her whole world had fallen apart today.

And right now, if she’d even wanted to throw up, she couldn’t have scheduled the time.

A voice called out from the living room. “Who’s that, Lucy? Your mother?”

Russell mouthed, “Who in God’s name is that? Your dad?” and she yelled back cheerfully, “It’s Russ, Dad, just come for a visit.”

“Well, tell him to come on in.”

Russell whispered, “I can’t.”

She said, “You’re going to have to now. Come on. I’ll get you something to eat. Take off your jacket.”

“I only wanted to talk to you. I don’t want anyone else to know about this,” he said desperately.

“And we won’t be talking about this in front of my dad. But right now, there’s no way to pretend you’re not here.” She would have thought she was stating the obvious, but Russ still had to be herded into the living room.

“So, I’ll bet the girls are really chasing you, huh, Russ?” was the first thing her father said, making her wince—but it was typical family teasing. Girls had adored Russ from grade school on, and as far as Lucy knew, he’d adored them just as likewise. She had no idea when the gay question had started troubling him, but soon enough could see that discussion was going no further—not tonight.

Her dad immediately perked up for the company. At some point he miraculously found the beer at the back of her refrigerator, and a short time later Russell came back from the kitchen with her one and only partial bottle of wine. She raised a serious protest about his drinking and driving, but her father readily settled that by insisting that Russ could spend the night.

She made up the second twin in the spare bedroom, blinked a bleary-eyed good-night to them both around eleven, and crashed in her bedroom. Literally crashed. She pushed off her shoes and dove, head-first, for the lilac-flowered duvet cover. Between the feather bed and down comforter, her bed was conceivably the softest thing in the universe. So soft that she determined that she was never moving. Ever again. Even for a minute. Even for a second.

She’d never gone to bed in her clothes—it was unthinkable—but honest to Pete, she couldn’t move. For the first time all day, she felt…safe. Part of the feeling came from being cocooned in all the soft, luxurious down bedding. And part of it came from the purple. She’d really hard-core nested with color in here. The fake Tiffany lamp was lavender, the carpet a pale lilac. The old brass bedstead definitely wasn’t purple but she’d found it thrown out in an alley, brought it home, and buffed it within an inch of its life. The dark purple satin sheets, the swoop of dark purple drapes…for a woman who dug in dirt most days, the room was an unabashed female hideaway. Exactly what she craved.

She’d had more than enough stress today. She’d think about everything tomorrow, but for right now she just needed…

The telephone rang.

Of course her dad could have answered it. Or Russell.

But when the receiver next to her bed rang again, it was obvious no one else was going to pick it up. And it could have been her mother. Or Ginger. Or something wrong at the lab or greenhouse…worry built up so fast and thick in her throat that she grabbed the phone and then almost dropped it.

“I’ll be back in town tomorrow, Lucy,” Nick said, “but I had to know what the doctor said. Are you all right?”

That voice. It made her think of dark chocolate, but not just dark chocolate…a dark chocolate mint with brandy inside, or maybe with a little vanilla mascarpone filling in there, too. It was a voice that flowed into a woman’s mind and seeped into her fantasies. It was a voice that tended to make bone tissue turn liquid. It was a voice with so much pure lusty male vibration to it that it could probably make a puppy puddle.

“Lucy?” Nick repeated. “Are you all right?”

“There’s no ulcer, no tumor, nothing terrible. Thanks for calling, Nick. And thanks for arranging for me to get into a doctor so quickly. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She hung up.

Then unplugged the phone. Thank God there were still some land lines left in this world.

NICK BARELY STEPPED out of the car before the front door opened. Out bounded Baby and Boo Boo, accompanied by his niece.

“Hey, Uncle Nick! Bet you didn’t expect to see me, huh?” Gretchen had turned twelve a few weeks ago. Nick had figured out that was some monumental thing to her because she’d changed her whole style of clothes, but what that all meant completely eluded him. This morning she had on a down jacket over a corduroy shirt that showed her skinny tummy—and here it was, freezing like a banshee outside. She was so gawky, all hair and big eyes and knees, so shy she could make herself sick in public situations. But not with him. She adored him almost—almost—as much as he adored her.

“Hey, shorty. What’s this, you’re already skipping school at your young age?” He pulled her into a hug, loving the smile she beamed up at him. She was smaller than the dogs. Although God knew, almost everyone was smaller than the dogs.

“Nah. There was a teacher in-service day. So I had it free. And I’m supposed to be at Dad’s this week, but he’s busy and he and Mom are fighting anyway, you know? So…I thought I’d come out and see Gramps and you.”

Nick couldn’t kick his big brother from here to the South Pole, but often enough, it was tempting. Clint and Gretchen’s mother had never gotten married, thank God, but they still couldn’t seem to resist fighting in front of the kid all the time. It killed him. The squirt likely wouldn’t be half so painfully shy and misfit-y if somebody was around to actively parent her.

“Can I hang with you?” Gretchen asked.

“Hmmm…” He had to talk to Lucy this morning. Immediately. It wouldn’t wait—not after hearing her voice last night—not if he was going to keep his sanity. The rest of his work, he could either shuffle or make-happen around a few hours with Gretchen. He’d done it in the past. “I need to have a half hour with Lucy at the lab. Alone. A real serious meeting.”

“Oh. Okay.” Her face fell five feet. “I understand.”

He could tell she did. He could tell she’d had to understand too damn many things, too damn many times, for a twelve-year-old. “How about this for a plan? We can walk over together. You can hang with Reiko or Fritz or Fred. Or just wander around. In fact, you could help make sure I get that time alone with Lucy. We’ll get our meeting over a whole lot faster if we aren’t interrupted by anyone.”

“I could do that! I’ll make sure nobody interrupts you!”

“And then we’ll do the day. I still have some work, but you can hang. Have to go over to the plant—but you’ll love that anyway. And I’ll finish what I have to and then we’ll split, okay? You bring your fiddle?”

“Uncle Nick! I play the flute, you know that!”

“Yeah, I know. And you’re so good I was thinking maybe you could play for me a little later, huh?”

“You don’t really want me to.”

Damn kid never thought anyone wanted to be with her. “Yeah, I do. Give me a second to pick something up from the house…and then we’ll walk to the labs with the dogs, okay?”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

Okay. So walking with a twelve-year-old kid wasn’t exactly a great way to get his psyche prepared for the talk with Lucy. But he usually had a gift for multitasking. Hell, he’d just traveled from Paris to Berne and back, did some moving and shaking to get the construction on the new greenhouses started, contacted security people, initiated a new contract with their Berne people—and that was just the last two days. Surely he could handle a reasonable discussion with a twenty-eight-year-old woman?

“So Uncle Nick…then Uncle Nick…and after that, we like…”

Gretchen, God love her, treated him like a hero. Sometimes, like this morning, it made him feel lower than pond scum. He adored her. He’d adopt her if there was ever a need. But he wasn’t the kind of hero she wanted him to be. If the world were the right kind of place, she’d have a dad who’d earned that kind of respect, and a ton of other role models who could do a better job than him.

But right now she was chattering nonstop, at least until they reached the doors to the lab. She quieted instantly, doing her shy thing. The dogs, by contrast, howled as if someone were killing them because of being left outside.

The place was as deserted as a carnival in the rain, no sign of life in any of the offices. All the noise and action emanated from the communal lab, where the whole staff clustered, bustling around some fresh chocolate tests. Reiko and Fred and Fritz called out welcoming hellos to both him and Gretchen. So did Lucy.

But he saw what she tried to pull off. She took one look, startled when she saw him, beamed out a cheerful hello and dove for the side door.

He caught up with her midflight, with what he hoped was an unobtrusive hand plucking her shirt-tail. “We’ll be in Lucy’s office for a few minutes, everyone. You okay, Gretchen?”

“Sure,” she said, which was what Gretchen always said, but in this case, Reiko was already inviting her to try the new chocolate. The kid’d be okay.

Lucy would probably be okay, too.

Whether he was going to be okay was the real question. Because one look at her face and he knew this was going to go bad. Very bad. Maybe very, very bad.

As soon as they were out of sight, she said, “I know, I know, we didn’t finish our Bliss project discussion the other day—”

“No, we didn’t. And we need to get that done damn quick. But that’s not all we have to discuss right now.”

“What?” At the door to her office, she moved in first, quickly, as if allergic to being that close to him. He’d felt the startled tremor streak her spine when he’d touched the back of her shirt. And now she didn’t hide behind the desk, but she moved as far as the windowsill, where she could lean, arms under her chest, chin up…as if she were braced for a blow.

He latched the door and leaned there, giving her some space, but for damn sure blocking the exit. “So,” he said gently, “you’re pregnant.”

“Huh?” She shook her head as if disbelieving such an incomprehensible ridiculous statement.

Aw, hell. Politicians lied better than she did. Nick felt as if a lead ball—with spikes—had just dropped in his stomach. Yeah, he’d guessed the truth from her voice last night. From everything. Until that instant, though, he thought there was still a chance of some other answer. Fear of disaster didn’t always mean a disaster was going to happen. Only he saw those hazel eyes shifting from his like a thief in a bank.

He wiped a hand over his face, wishing he could wash himself into a state of invisibility. “You’re pregnant,” he said again. “By me.” For a second there, he wasn’t dead positive if he was saying it aloud for her sake or his.

“For Pete’s sake. I’m going to sue that doctor. I realize it was your doc, but all the same, he can’t just tell someone else a patient’s confidential medical infor—”

“Luce—” He had to interrupt her. “No one told me. I just added it up. Your sudden throwing up, the timing, your swearing there was absolutely nothing wrong. Only you’ve never even taken a sick day, much less mentioned ever having an upset stomach to anyone. So…I looked at a calendar. The night you called me about the successful experiment—”

“That night doesn’t have to mean anything. For all you know, I sleep with zillions of guys. Regularly.”

He didn’t say, when cows fly. But straight arrows like Lucy just didn’t tumble for strangers. Or on a whim. Hell, her greenhouse floor was clean enough to eat from; she was that persnickety. “Look. You don’t have to make up stories. We’re in this fix together—”

“You’re not in any fix, Nick. I am. This was totally my fault. You never came on to me. Never invited anything. Nothing would ever have happened if I hadn’t…” She swirled her hands.

“Is that supposed to mean you didn’t intend to tell me?” When she didn’t give him the correct answer for that question, he said, very very quietly, “You just agreed to take on a mountain of extra work—to become an integral part of a chocolate project that could throw the cacao market on its ear and shake up the whole chocolate industry. Yet you didn’t figure you needed to mention that you had a major health issue like a pregnancy on your plate?”

“Well. No.”

Okay. He didn’t have a temper, he’d told himself a hundred times. And if he did, there were very few people who could push it. But Lucy headed the list. Ramifications of this pregnancy—her pregnancy, their pregnancy—kept popping in his brain like mini-explosions. What to do. How. Where. When. But first, he obviously had to deal with that sick, panicked expression on Lucy’s face.

“Luce…listen to me. We can work out whatever you want to work out. We can make happen whatever you want to happen.” He heaved out a wary sigh. “Although you know my grandfather will only have one solution.”

“No one has to know it’s yours. And that includes Orson,” she promised him.

“That’s no solution.”

“I’ll get a mountain of pressure from family, too. Everyone will have an opinion about what I should do and try to railroad me into doing it.”

“Caving into pressure from any side is no solution, either.”

“So,” she said, as if that single word were a finished thought.

“So,” he echoed, and took a step forward, meaning to touch her. Why exactly, he didn’t know, when he had never initiated a personal contact of any kind with Luce before. But the instinct to touch seemed to bubble up from a well of frustration and helplessness—feelings he had no tolerance for. This was all going crazy wrong. So far their whole conversation had been awkward and weird and unnatural. For darn sure, he’d wanted to face her, wanted to have this out. Wanted it down in black ink, what they were both going to do—if there really was a pregnancy.

Only in both his head and heart, he just couldn’t seem to totally believe it. That single occasion, hell, it hadn’t even been a whole night. One single crazy, crazy hour had led to this. In fact, when he’d wakened the next morning—in his own bed, alone—he thought he’d dreamed the whole thing. It just seemed incomprehensible that anything intimate could have happened between them.

And now Lucy was shrinking from him.

Nick couldn’t remember feeling lost. The feeling was alien to everything he knew about himself. When his parents died, grief had overwhelmed him, but he’d had to take on responsibility and grow up so fast that he’d never had time to wallow. God knew, he’d made mistakes. And he’d played around plenty. But from the time he was a kid, he’d had the power to make all the major decisions about his own life with nominal outside interference. Now, though, there was Luce. Who didn’t seem willing to even talk to him, much less include him in giant decision-making that affected both of them.

This wasn’t just…upsetting and unsettling. He couldn’t feel more lost if he’d been dropped in the South Pole without a compass.

“Look, Luce,” he tried again. “Let’s work from stuff we know we can agree on. I’ll pay all your doctor bills. And for anything else you need or wanted related to this—”

“Actually, I don’t think I’ll need help. You know what great insurance I have from Bernard’s. But don’t worry. I’ll ask if something gets beyond what I can manage.”

Shit and double shit. Strangers could be having this conversation. Not people who were supposed to have been lovers. “Okay, skip any talk of money for now. What about…the pregnancy itself. I mean, I don’t know whether you’re scared or happy or angry or what. Have you thought about what you want to do?”

Her shoulders drooped just a little as she shook her head. “I just found out yesterday. To be honest, Nick, I’m still reeling.”

It was the first honest, natural thing she said. “Me, too,” he admitted. “I don’t know what to say, what to do. But it seems like the place to start is with the sure things. If you’re absolutely sure you want to keep the baby, that’s one thing. But if you’re considering—”

“An abortion? Or adoption?” She swallowed hard, as if trying to talk through a stone-size lump in her throat. “I’ll consider everything. All the options. But the only thing I’m positive of right now, Nick, is that you and I don’t even like each other. Not really. We had a moment. That’s all. There’s no basis for a marriage or anything crazy like that.”

“I wasn’t thinking marriage.”

“I’m sure you weren’t,” she said swiftly. “I just wanted to clear the air, make sure you know that I’d never pull that chain in a hundred years.”

She’d stiffened up all over again, as if braced for him to say something hurtful. He started to answer her, but then the doorknob rattled, followed by strange scratchy noises. “Not now,” Nick called out, but the knob just rattled again.

“Uncle Nick, it’s not me!” He heard Gretchen’s voice pipe up, and glanced at Lucy, who was obviously as distracted by the child’s voice as he was. Her lips twitched at Gretchen’s obvious fib.

“If it isn’t you, how come I can hear your voice?” Nick said wryly.

“Because it’s Baby and Boo Boo. Somehow they got in the front door. And they ran all over the place. They’re trying to find Lucy. And I can’t hold them. But don’t interrupt your meeting! I’m right here! I won’t let them in! Don’t you worry, Uncle Nick!”

Any other time, he’d have laughed—and Lucy undoubtedly would have, too. This time she just said quickly, “We can’t discuss this now, Nick. Not at work. And besides that…”

Yeah, he knew. Besides that, outside the door was clearly bedlam.

Of course, pregnancy was a kind of bedlam, too, but for now, hell, both his personal life and Project Bliss seemed like trying to handle balloons in a high wind. He’d not only lost control. He couldn’t imagine right then how the hell he was ever going to get control again.

CHAPTER FIVE

SATURDAY MORNING, just after ten, Lucy opened the bathroom door in a rush and ran smack into Russell—or, more specifically, her forehead rammed into his. Both winced.

Lucy recovered quicker, but her sense of humor was starting to slip on the subject of her cousin. God knew she loved him. Totally. The way you can only love good family—through their bad habits and the good stuff both. But damn. Ever since he’d shared his revelation with her, he seemed to think talking about it with her every spare second was going to make the subject easier to deal with. It wasn’t that far a drive for him to commute from school in Mankato, but he was starting to become a dust catcher at her place. Last night he hadn’t gone home at all.

When she’d first moved into her own place, she’d imagined—she’d actually totally believed—that she could go to the bathroom by herself. Indulge in her wickedness, by herself. Run around naked if she wanted to, by herself.

“I know you want to talk some more, Russ, but honestly, I just can’t right now. I told you. I’m having lunch with my mom—and it’s a solid hour and a half drive from here—”

She flew past him toward her bedroom, still zipping her favorite black jeans and toweling her hair dry at the same time. Russell, who seemed to think his announcement about being gay meant she wouldn’t mind dressing around him, followed as far as her doorway. “I just don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you to talk to.”

“That’s crazy, Russ. You spent all last night talking to my dad, you get on with him like a house afire. You know you could tell him—”

“No. He’s great, but I couldn’t tell him this. Or anyone else.”

“I’m just not sure why you picked me. I love you. You know that, but honestly, I know nothing about this kind of thing.”

“That’s not the point. The point is that you’re the one person on the planet I completely trust. Not just trust that you wouldn’t tell, if I asked you not to. But also trust that you wouldn’t condemn me.” He watched her pull on the white sweater with black stripes, a gift from her mother, and then attack her hair with a dryer.

“Are you sure you’re gay?” Lucy asked over the dryer’s whine.

“I admit I’m not dead sure. But I think I am.”

“Did you actually sleep with another guy?”

“No.”

“Kiss another guy, make out?” Cripes, she couldn’t hear over the dryer so she switched it off, opened some pots, did the cheek and lip thing, then the earring thing, then grabbed her hairbrush. Somewhere she had some pull-on black boots. Dress boots. Soft kid leather. Heels.

“Well, no. But the feelings are there.”

“Well, everybody gets feelings. When I see a beautiful woman in the movies, I notice her, and believe me, I’m not gay.” The boots were in the very back of her closet. She rubbed off the dust, then backed out and hopped on one foot to pull the right one on. “For Pete’s sake. I think everybody notices their same gender and can respond to their attractiveness and looks—without automatically thinking you’re gay. Or that there’s anything weird at all.” She pushed hard—they were those kinds of boots that fit great once you had them on, but it took ages to get them on right.

“You think?” Russell asked. He still stood slouched in her doorway when she pushed past him toward the kitchen. He was wearing what he’d worn last night, when he’d claimed he wasn’t sleeping over—the oversized shirt, the canvas pants, the no socks.

“Come on, Russell, you know that. It’s just common sense. Only the homophobic types get hysterical if they have a feeling now and then. But I think you should ask someone with some life experience in this—”

“No,” he said in a panicked groan.

“Okay, okay. But I knew one homosexual person pretty well. She’s a woman. I met her in college. She was a good friend then, we just kind of lost touch after graduation. But I could try to track her down if you want me to ask her for some information or advice.” She almost choked when they walked in the kitchen. Her pristine white counter and gleaming sink had disappeared. All she saw were beer cans. Coffee mugs. Leftover pizza. Crumbs. Mysterious and scary stains on the floor.

She had a fond memory from a few weeks ago—before the Night of the Chocolate—when the kitchen was still hers, all hers, and even the corners in the cupboards had been spotless. Even the corners of the top cupboards. Even under the refrigerator. Even behind the trash bin.

“Did you actually do anything with that friend? You know, experiment or anything?” Russell was now leaning in the doorway to the kitchen.

“No.”

“But did you want to experiment? Did you think about it?”

“No. Cripes, Russell. It never occurred to me. I don’t think it occurred to her, either. She was just a regular kind of friend.” She grabbed her fringe bag, passed by the fresh round of messes in her living room, and shot a passing, desperate look at her picture over the fireplace. The only thing still normal in the whole place seemed to be her picture of the lone eagle flying over the lake. Her life was starting to feel like it had moved ten points off center and was never going to come back in focus again. Except for the eagle. The eagle was still all hers. She grabbed her coat. “I have to go. I’ll be late for lunch with Mom as it is.”

“But you’re not getting…impatient…about talking with me about this, are you?”

“Of course not. We’ll talk whenever you want.”

“I know your dad’s at the store. But I may stick around with him today. If he wants to go to a movie or something.”

“Sure, sounds great. Only if I come home to find this place even more of a sty, I’m going to kill you both.”

“Sure, Luce. Sure.” He stood motionless and woebegone as she smooched his cheek.

She ran outside, only to feel a startling gush of wind. The ground was a muddy, soggy mess from all the melting snow, but even though the day was ugly, the sky polka-dotted with clouds, the breeze had a cocky scent to it. A springlike whisper of sweetness. She wanted to savor it, only damnation, guilt kept biting her conscience, so she ran back in the house. “Russell,” she said irritably, “I love you. And you’re going to be okay. All right?”

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