He had left? He had dug his hands into her butt and looked at her chocolate and walked out? Again?
“He just waltzes in and out however he pleases, doesn’t he?” Geneviève said. Magalie gave her a betrayed look. Was that just a thread of respect twining through her offended tone?
They all filed out of the kitchen and looked at the crown of a dessert left sitting in its open box on the table under the witches’ hats.
“It’s for you, Aunt Aja,” Magalie said very quietly, after a moment. “He wanted to thank you for the tea.”
“I doubt it,” Aja said. “You only open a present for the person it’s for.”
Chapter 11
The entire tenor of the street had changed. It was simple. Philippe had brought a team of twenty chefs and assistants into this contained place, and they were all of them fit, most of them young, many of them single, and nearly all of them male. When they came in, extremely early in the morning, or emerged at their odd hours for lunch and breaks, or got off in the afternoon, they walked down the street with controlled, long, graceful strides, those detail-hungry eyes of theirs eating everything up, as first they hunted for food, learning the best places to calm those greedy metabolisms, and then they started hunting for everything else the street had to offer.
Some of them were very cute, too, and all of them made a woman wonder exactly how carefully they might explore new tastes and textures.
Magalie was pretty sure Claire-Lucy could have caught one of them just by standing on her doorstep in a noticeable way, but she grew shy and retreated into her toy store. Where she created a display of retro toy cars, the extraspecial ones that a little boy some twenty years ago might have craved and maybe never gotten.
Aimée, the gallery owner across the way, took up her own painting again and started doing it in the predawn hours in front of the Lyonnais shop—“for the light on the pastries,” she told all the passing chefs who asked. Philippe and another of his chefs stopped beside her, then Philippe laughed, and the next thing Magalie knew, Aimée was strolling into the shop with them, before it even opened.
Magalie didn’t even want to talk about why she was up at that hour of the morning, looking from her window down the street.
Geneviève, Aja, and Magalie had lined either side of their window with giant chocolate thorns. They circled the entire display, from the bottom to the ceiling, making a menacing frame to the three-dimensional tableau of a witch and a princess in a tower that paired subtly with the one they were working on with Sylvain at his place.
Magalie stepped back to the other side of the street when it was done and frowned in sudden doubt. It just seemed as if a certain kind of man might see thorns and immediately draw a sword.
She frowned harder and went inside, antsy and irritable, and accidentally wished so much gumption onto the diamond-waving woman at a table worrying about a cheating spouse that the woman walked straight down to Philippe’s and right in the door.
I meant your own gumption! Magalie shouted in her head. Not his! And she dumped the whole batch down the sink in pure rage.
Late that evening, Magalie wiggled her hand through layers of coats to the doorknob, opened the door a sliver, and slipped from the kitchen into another world.
The courtyard door was so small that only she, Aja, and children could go through it easily. Geneviève had to bend. Philippe Lyonnais would have to. Maybe that was one consequence of Magalie’s diminutive height: she had never had to learn how to lower her head.
Freezing air hit her as she stepped into the small cobblestoned courtyard. An old fountain against the opposite wall stood unused, the small basin under the lion’s mouth full of herbs. She had wanted to clean it out and set it in motion again. Geneviève had resisted. Aunt Aja had said she wasn’t sure it could be done without spending a fortune on plumbing. Now Magalie’s gaze snagged on the lion, its stylized head so similar to the one in the corners of the Lyonnais ceilings. As if it had been crouched in her courtyard all this time, waiting for her to wake it so it could pounce.
She kept her distance from it as she crossed the courtyard to a white door that led to a winding stair. Narrow and steep, it climbed and climbed, past the second floor that the aunts occasionally talked about remodeling but instead filled with flea-market finds, past the aunts’ flat on the third floor, past the fourth, fifth, and sixth ones, which they rented out to the wealthy and sporadic, like the fourth floor’s famous American actor who only appeared on random weekends between film shoots. It climbed to the seventh and top floor, Magalie’s little apartment, a small but airy studio with windows from knee-height to the ceiling, a tiny kitchen area, and room for a bed, a reading corner with a comfortable chair, and a little space to move around between the two without bumping into things, which was more than could be said for a lot of Paris apartments. The building had been a gift to Geneviève when she was Magalie’s age from a lover, the wife of a powerful politician. The very act had infused Geneviève’s youth with romance and power. Magalie couldn’t in a million years imagine someone giving away ownership of a part of the heart of Paris.
Magalie’s free lodging in it was one of her greatest perks, for her salary from La Maison des Sorcères was certainly not enough to cover rent on such a place otherwise. She accented the apartment’s airiness with white sheets and white translucent drapes that floated away from the blue shutters, so that she ascended every day from her dark, warm cave to an ivory tower.
In her closet, she kept a lavender sachet, made by her mother from her family’s own fields. She had a local artist’s rendering of lavender fields on her wall, spiky semi-Impressionist blurs of purple. But her photos she kept mostly in a large album on a shelf near her bed. Partly she did so because the small size of the apartment required utter simplicity to avoid clutter, partly because so many photos were of her amid groups of friends to whom she no longer belonged that she liked to keep them contained between the album’s covers, where they couldn’t accidentally make her sad.
The first thing she did was kick off her boots, slide them neatly away out of sight, and pull on fuzzy socks in pink stripes with a silly kitten on them. Her feet flexed in delicious relief. It was one of her favorite moments, the first step in those silly, fuzzy socks.
She pulled off all her careful clothes, swapped them for fleece pants in a subtle pink plaid and a loosely clingy cream-colored knit top, over which she layered a huge, thick terry bathrobe. She pulled the clasp out of her hair, and it fell around her shoulders, the roots sighing at the release.
She took a clementine from the bowl of them sitting on her tiny counter and began to eat it, the oil from the peel scenting the whole room, the flavor tart and clear after an afternoon spent with chocolate.
And then she stood there wondering if she should have made herself go out, should have called her Paris university friends or gone to the theater, should have done something with her evening other than wallow in solitary comfort.
She was an early riser, particularly in winter, but that might have been a consequence rather than a cause of her tendency to sink into her bed so early and pull her covers up all around her. She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn’t, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back.
You couldn’t cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber, things like trying to go out with men she barely knew, or dancing in Paris nightclubs, or hanging out with friends in bars over in that world past the banks of the river.
She had been something of a party creature in her high schools, still was one to dance all night at New Year’s celebrations or weddings when she w
ent back to Provence, but there was something harsher about dancing here, forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers. Occasionally, one of her friends from the university, the longest continuous friendship she had ever had, could talk her into it. But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.
Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly lonely.
It was important to have a really good book.
Tonight she stood looking out the window, eating her clementine and then some yogurt for supper, and fought a flashing vision of a cozy, warm restaurant, someone smiling at her from across the table, pouring her wine, talking over all the choices on the menu.
The man she saw in the vision shattered under closer attention. You didn’t go out to dinner with someone who considered you to be the main course.
She huddled her bathrobe more closely around her, trying to stand near the radiator under the window and keep a little back from the chilled glass at the same time. It was such a cold, clear night, she could see three stars, rare in Paris.
Magalie braced herself for one last second, then shed her heavy terry robe and slipped under the covers. The shock of their cold hit her, and she curled into herself, tugging them tightly around her to warm them fast with her body, shivering.
The loneliness that had snagged her while watching Cade Corey and Sylvain Marquis jumped out of nowhere and grabbed hold of her again. She wanted a warm body to share this bed with, to press against as they fought the first chilly touch of the soft sheets. A hot, muscled strength that grinned a lion’s grin at her and pulled her in tightly, letting her soak up his heat.
She pulled the comforter over her head, trying to block out that vision of honey-colored hair and muscled shoulders.
But it kept sneaking back, in bits and pieces, even after she’d read all the way through her book and curled up to go to sleep. She would roll over and dream an arm curving over her side, a hand resting against her tummy. She would rub her head hard into her pillow to clear it and imagine warm breath against her hair and neck. She would dream a laugh, a sureness in his strength that wasn’t afraid of her.
Maybe she needed to date more. The tea shop didn’t seem to attract her type, though. At least, it did attract humble people, but so far she and they just hadn’t clicked.
For no reason, a vision flashed through her mind of Philippe Lyonnais rending some poor humble man limb from limb and dropping the body parts off the river wall, grinning bloodily as they floated past the island. His territory defended.
The vision made her hot all over.
With anger. Hot with anger. She was not his territory.
Maybe she should try fantasizing about Sylvain Marquis. He was pretty sexy. Almost married to a princess, true, but then, men like him always married princesses. That didn’t mean she couldn’t fantasize a little in privacy, did it?
Every time she tried to get a good black-haired fantasy going, though, she found herself running her fingers over tawny hair on a forearm, or golden-brown hair curling over a muscled chest, or through a thick mane that . . .
Maybe she needed to count sheep.
A lot of them.
And no lion had better laugh and eat one while she was doing it.
Half a kilometer away, Philippe pressed his bare forearm against the window in his Marais apartment. He let the cold shock him, then seep into him. After a long moment of gazing toward the Île Saint-Louis, as if he could see through buildings, he lowered his head to rest it against his arm.
He needed to go to bed. He got up at four-thirty in the morning. And he had had an emotionally trying afternoon, what with yet another beautiful rich woman showing up in his shop with a sack from La Maison des Sorcières in one hand and throwing herself at him. He didn’t know why Magalie was wishing these women on him—whether as a red herring to protect herself, or in the hope of ruining his life by making him fall for the wrong woman. Neither plan was going to work for her, but the fact that she was willing to try it made his head explode.
How could she even stand the thought? It drove him wild. He sure as hell wouldn’t send any men her way.
He was going to get her for that. He was going to make her eat her heart out over every single woman she had thrown at him.
And he was going entirely crazy, of course, to think that Magalie could create love potions any more than she could create potions to turn him into a toad. It was just a damn cup of chocolate, for God’s sake, and one that was completely inferior to his creations, too.
He needed to just give himself some credit. If a woman filled herself up on witch chocolate and still got lured in by his windows, it was a sign of how great his power was.
Powerful enough to triumph over one stubborn little witch, anyone would think.
Damn it.
Magalie had some trouble when the man at the sporting-goods store directed her away from the classiest pair of running shoes to the third-classiest. She gave him an incredulous look. Sure, the idea was that she didn’t give a damn what she looked like, but there was no sense going crazy, either. “Je vous promets,” he said, “they’re better for the way your foot turns in.”
In the clothing section, she chose black knit pants and an elegant running top that clung in just the right places, to make it clear she wasn’t running because she needed to. She didn’t care what people who saw her thought about her, but it was important that it be clear to those people that her indifference was justified, too.
She didn’t tell anyone. She slipped out like a secret the next morning, just before dawn, the city all asleep. She didn’t want to look too weird. Like she didn’t belong here.
The island was silent. The witch-hat of a church steeple cast its dark silhouette against the first hints of light.
She walked quickly to the end of the island, trying not to let herself pause in front of the Lyonnais window. But she couldn’t help noticing the treasure chest: a genuine jeweled chest several centuries old. He had probably bribed some collector with one of his pastries to lend him the piece, she thought irritably. The chest was tilted onto its side, and from it spilled his macarons, like something a dragon might die for: blood red filled with dark chocolate ganache, garnet flecked with genuine gold, one that was pure onyx, another a green so rich it could be emerald, another burnished amber.
She walked faster. The websites on running said she was supposed to warm up, and there was no point in anyone on the island seeing her doing something they would think ridiculous. At the peak of the bridge crossing over to Notre Dame, the sky in the east showed pink. No violinist to see her on her way. No one. Paris before dawn was more peaceful than a child, as peaceful as an intense, sophisticated society queen in her rare few moments of repose.
Magalie set out, running surprisingly easily. It felt so light. To be here, not dressed for battle, concentrating only on the dawn-gentled city and herself.
The websites had said to walk and run, walk and run, going five kilometers but not all running. The walking part was the hardest. When she slowed down, she missed the feel of her high heels clicking, felt vulnerable and awkward. She ran more than the plan said she should to start, along the water, through the city, because she preferred the feel of flying.
When she unlocked the door to the shop at two that day (the aunts refused to serve desserts to people who didn’t eat a proper lunch first), she was braced for another sparse day of rare visits from old habitués that felt nerve-gratingly like pity, or the occasional woman longing for some magic in her life. Instead, she found a vaguely familiar man standing there. Lean, tall, high-energy, an angular, intellectual face. Young, her age at the most. And he smelled . . . he smelled of caramel and bananas. He smelled of Philippe Lyonnais, in fact.
She stared at him, realizing that his vague familiarity was because he was one of the young men who were loosed from the Lyonnais kitchens at odd hours, to hunt the streets. He had something green stuck und
er a fingernail, and another streak of the green on his cheek. Yes, he was a chef. One of the Lyonnais chefs.
He smiled at her, his eyes brightening flatteringly as he took her in. “Are you open yet? I keep noticing your displays every time I pass, and I can’t resist anymore.”
In the absence of the prince himself, there was something immensely satisfying about suborning one of his subjects. Magalie smiled and beckoned him in.
Chapter 12
It took Philippe two weeks to realize that one of the reasons Magalie’s chocolate seemed to taunt him so pervasively, even in her absence, was that his employees were bringing its scent back into his kitchen on their clothes after every damn break they took. One of his chefs had just strolled back to work with a hot-chocolate mustache that now stained the white sleeve he had scrubbed guiltily across his face at Philippe’s fulminating gaze.
And he still had not gotten her to step into his own shop once. It made him want to rend things.
Instead, he escalated. Putain, but he would make her regret that.
The magazines and blogs raved about Philippe’s display windows: “irresistible,” “the epitome of temptation,” “an ecstasy of touch, taste, and sight,” “heartbreak itself to walk by and not walk in,” and “no one can pass untouched.”
Except one.
She was driving him mad.
She hadn’t tried one confection he had put into his windows. He hadn’t even caught her lingering for one mere second to look at them. She hadn’t acted tempted in the least.
She sent other women his way, for God’s sake. He was pouring everything he had into those window displays. And she acted as if her whole, entire being didn’t bleed with longing. As if she could sleep at night.
He couldn’t. He woke up dreaming of chocolat chaud.
Thick, luscious, dark chocolate. Stirred in a warm cave of a kitchen by a slim hand that wore its perfect manicure like armor, a shell she couldn’t go out into the world without. Rich hot chocolate stirred in a kitchen where the aroma was a drug that overwhelmed all who entered. What was she stirring into it? What wishes or curses? I’ll drink it, I’ll drink it. Can’t you take just one bite of something of mine, so I can taste yours? Soon he was going to be begging her on his knees to deign to taste one of his pâtisseries. His. Philippe Lyonnais.
The Chocolate Kiss Page 9