Jennifer Greene - Blame It on Chocolate

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.