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
