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
