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cop out, leaving her a pushover for a gorgeous bad-boy.
    Thank God for her heart. The only part of her that still knew how to seize life.
    She smiled up at him, just to thank him for existing and letting her sit there all squooshy about him. Men like him were wonderful. They made themselves larger than life, superstars, someone you could sit in a corner and fuzzily swoon over.
    Well-mannered toward his guests, he could have no idea of the effect his courtesy had on her. Superstars didn’t. It might cross their minds that women came to them easily, but they had no idea how hard the woman was fighting to keep her head on straight. They never understood how much power they had without even trying.
    Not that Jaime was trying to keep her head on straight. She was using all of what she had once thought a considerable willpower for other things. Besides, why resist? Thank God she was able to enjoy the fun and infinite security of having a crush on a man out of her reach.
    His near-black eyes brightened at her smile. He definitely liked female attention, no matter whom it came from. She gave him a little more of it, the way she used to throw her panties onstage with all the others lying at a rock star’s feet. You’re amazing. Here’s my tribute.
    He came closer to her table, and this time she relaxed into the sense of being loomed over. There was no harm in him. He meant no threat to her.
    “Did you like the chocolates?” he asked with a smile that made a woman feel at the center of his world.
    She blushed. After her workout at the gym the evening before, she had lain in her bed, nibbling on his chocolates instead of falling asleep, lured deeper and deeper into fantasies about him with every bite. Some of those fantasies sparkled back through her mind as she looked up at him, and the blush was uncontrollable. “Of course. I like everything you make.”
    His smile widened into a grin. Oh, he liked to be praised, didn’t he? He looked like a boy who had just won the marbles off everyone else in the schoolyard when he grinned like that. It melted her middle.
    He pulled out the chair opposite her, and she started. How much time did one of France’s most famous chocolatiers-pâtissiers have to spend with her? Talk about courtesy to his clients. And what did you do with a crush when he actually sat down and talked to you?
    “Which was your favorite?” he asked hungrily.
    It amused her to realize that he just wanted his vanity stroked. Now that, she could do, especially if it kept him near her longer. “All of them.”
    He radiated pleasure. It reached right into her erogenous zones and radiated there, too. “Allez,” he coaxed, lapping up her praise and begging for more. “There must have been one or two you liked a little more, a little less.”
    She shook her head. “I liked all of them.” Flavor after astonishing flavor, always a surprise, always delicious, combinations of exotic flowers and herbs and vinegars with a darkness that came inside and shook her mouth and through it her whole body. She had loved his chocolates. Tonight she was going to go right back out on another trip around the world, escorted by their dark and delicious creator, curled up in her bed. Imagining him pulling her in against that hard body and feeding them to her . . .
    “You ate them all?” Was that a visible swell to his chest?
    Yep, vanity. She gave him another starstruck smile, enjoying how easy it was to feed his ego and make him happy, and nodded.
    He was pretty much openly gloating at this point. She half expected him to get up and do one of those soccer victory dances. “Do you like caramels, too? Would you like to try some?”
    “I liked yours.” She had never had any other caramels besides the chewy mass-market ones a Corey subsidiary produced, and she hadn’t especially liked those. But three of his had curved like a gift around the plate under her hot chocolate the other day, a very nice little client-relations gesture. Warm