Free The Chocolate Touch by Laura Florand Page B

it had some things in common with Sylvain’s, Sylvain concentrated purely on the production of chocolat, no pastries, no caramels other than those incorporated into the chocolate itself. And Sylvain’s was on the ground floor, with windows high up, in a more expensive part of Paris and therefore a more cramped space.
    Dominique’s . . . really was like ascending into heaven. The spring light of Paris came in from all the great casement windows, two of which were open on this gently cool day, to let in air. He was a couple of streets back from République itself, not on a major traffic artery, and the street noise was just a gentle reminder that the world was alive.
    Gray marble gleamed in long, polished counters full of equipment. People moved around in white, along with one girl in her early twenties in black. Five small en-robeuses, nothing at all like the great factory machines that she knew, were placed in one area of the main room, one coating chocolate right then as a woman fed little squares of ganache into it while another touched up squares as they left the flow.
    Metal forms of all shapes and descriptions hung from nails on the walls, reaching halfway to the high ceilings. A young man was artfully placing pastries on plates, adding little decorative touches before he left the room to take them down to the tables below. The girl in black passed from an opening on the far right end of the room to an opening on the far left, carrying a big bowl. Someone started to roll out dough on one of the marble counters.
    The girl in black reappeared in the opening to the left at the same moment as a tall, brown-haired man appeared in the opening to the right. The two of them looked at Dominique and Jaime and then exchanged fascinated, charmed glances before they disappeared back into their separate rooms, with . . . twitching lips?
    “Come!” Dominique said happily, pulling her in. He reminded her of children on the cacao farms, how they would talk to any adult who would listen, desperately wanting to show off how well they could do something of value. Like carry loads twice their own weight on their shoulders, or, later, after she had made her first rounds and reforms of the farms and was coming back to ensure her plans were being carried out, how well they were learning their letters and how to draw and what their doll’s name was.
    “This is beautiful, ” Jaime said wonderingly. She had never imagined a laboratoire de chocolat so beautiful. Light, open, full of happiness. His salon was exceptionally beautiful, but this was even brighter, more active. It felt like the kind of place her cacao should end up, the cacao harvested in the hushed heat under the banana leaves, broken free from red or yellow wrinkled pods by willing hands, starting out as white fruit sweeter than a mango. Dominique insisted on fair trade chocolate from his processor, which got some of its supplies from farms under the Corey umbrella. She knew every step of his supply chain, might even have spread the beans out to dry in the sun with her own hand. She knew the fruity alcoholic smell these beans had once had as they fermented, the stinging sweetness of the memory blending with the rich, dark, warm intensity of the chocolate it had become.
    An enormous block of chocolate rose above them on a counter that must be designed for such weight. Chisels in different sizes lay beside it, but the block itself was untouched. “What’s this?”
    “I’ve got to do something for the Chocolatiers’ Expo next week, but I’m still thinking.” His hand flexed into her back, and he studied the great block as if his gaze could pierce through it. “Sometimes you have to see what comes out of the chocolate.”
    She smiled, wondering suddenly if she could talk him into letting teenagers from the cacao farming cooperatives have an internship in his laboratoire. She could create a four-week scholarship, rotating through different farms, giving one teenager at a time