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 couldnt control her own flyaway hair, couldnt 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 sighther 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 backnot in sight from any roadcame 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 Reikos squirt-aged sonwho shed love to marry, if he wasnt a mere fourthen sprinted on. Or tried to. Fritz and Fred had offices next. Theyd both graduated from MSU last spring, although Lucy secretly thought that they werent 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 shed be amazed if theyd 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 Ive never been late, for Petes sake.
Actually, she hadnt, but she was still offended that everybody labeled her so anal. Youd think she always colored inside the lines.
Which she did. Almost always. Except for that one serious timebut 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 adsFrys Cocoa, Bensdorps Cacao, Xocolata Amatller, Caley and Berne. No French labels.
French chocolate wasnt brought up at Bernards. Such was considered on a par with yelling the F word in church.
Her favorite poster came from some trade show promotion that she didnt rememberbut 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 wasnt 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 someones designer kitchenwhich, 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 rooma sexier smell than Chanel No. 5 any day, Lucy thought.
Past the labs came the greenhouses. She passed by Reikos projects, then Freds. The third greenhouse was her personal emotional Tiffanysor thats 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. Lucys 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, shed entered college to become anything but a doctor. A degree in botany had seemed distant enough from medicine, but still, shed never expected working with anything like this. It was a dreamers 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 shed 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, Theos offspring had hugely evolved since those first wild, straggly trees in the Amazon basin of Brazil.
It didnt smell like the Amazon here. It should have. The best cacao didnt have to come from the Amazon, but ten thousand years hadnt changed certain facts about chocolategood 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 shed 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 burstingwhich, in principle, couldnt 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 conditionsat 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, shed heard a zillion times about how civilization was destroying the rain forests. Shed listened. Shed 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 Petes sake. But its not like she had the power to save the earth. Cripes, she couldnt 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 shed taken this job, shed sunk her teeth into the work with ardent, uninhibited, unbridled passion.
Reikos 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 timeobviously they know you, cookiebut its after ten.
Damn. It couldnt be. She just got here. But when she glanced at her Swiss Army watch, it was twelve minutes after ten already.
Damn. It couldnt 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 doorit had been well over a year since shed 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, shed 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 centurywhich 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. Didnt matter. She knew where she was going. There were meeting places all over the mansion, but for small gatherings Orson always choose the sunrooma 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.
Im sorry I was late. I dont 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 hed been a bear to work for in his younger days, but Orson was using his retirement to go for dreams hed never had a chance to when he was younger. And she was one of his happiest co-conspirers.
I guess well 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 didnt seem to do the distance-job. Her throat still went dry. Her pulse soared like a leaf in a high wind. He had his grandfathers 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 wasnt curly or wild exactly, more like it had an irrepressible rebellious streak. Just like him.
Near anyone else, she didnt worry about her appearancebetween messing with dirt and chocolate, she just didnt 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 itd 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 shed still end up looking like an all-American kid sister. Glamour just wasnt her. And that was okay. With everyone else.
Nick, she said warmly, Hows your Monday going?
Shed fantasized about him all her life. Maybe technically she hadnt 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 Mondays been a little wild. Hows yours going, Luce? He handed her a mug, peach tea, a scoop of sugar, without having to ask. It wasnt the first meeting theyd had together.
It wasnt the first time hed 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 shed get a grip before she had to kick herself.
In the beginning, shed found her reaction to him kind of kicky. She hadnt had a crush in years; it was kind of funand 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 seriouslywhich he did. The crush thing just stopped being cute. It shamed her to respond in such an immature way to a guy whod always been good to herin 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.
Lucyyou know weve got our miracle. The quality of those experimental plants is beyond anything weve ever dreamed. But now its time to do something about it.
Yes, sir. This was exactly the subject she was expecting and she couldnt agree more.
Its 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, well 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 greenhousesenough expansion to play with some products and real production. Obviously well want to stagger the plantings, so well have varied ages and varied crops coming into production at different times.
Of course, sir.
Im unwilling to take this off-property where theres such a huge security issue. As I know you understand, word of what were doing could have an explosive effect on the Coffee and Sugar Exchange. Were talking an immediate effect of millions, if not billions. But thats potential. All we know right now is that weve got a taste of something that looks like gold. It hasnt been completely tested.
She put down her tea. Somehow she couldnt 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 youre saying.
Well, good. Because this is really your brainchild, Lucy.
Oh, no. Not really. I mean, I think of it as my babybut you both know I only hired on after the whole experiment had been started. It wasnt originally my experiment