Blame It on Chocolate

“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.