The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  He strode out onto the street for a breath of fresh air and not to stroll by that witch house yet again. It wasn’t his fault the nearest park was closer to her end of the street. And that he needed to stretch his legs a lot.

  He glanced down the street, despite his best efforts.

  A tall, dark-haired man stood looking at the witches’ display window and then opened the door with easy familiarity.

  Philippe stiffened through every muscle of his body. Sylvain? What the hell was Sylvain Marquis doing down there?

  Not that he gave a damn what Sylvain Marquis was doing, of course. The man made good chocolate—Philippe would give him that—but that hardly made him a worry to Philippe Lyonnais. But just what did he think he was doing on this street in the first place? This was Philippe’s territory.

  And going into . . . A great clawed paw reached inside him and raked. Was she eating Sylvain’s chocolate? Was she feeding him hers?

  He started down the street, a long, angry prowl.

  When he stepped into the salon de thé, the silver bell rang a crisp warning note. Magalie, Geneviève, and Sylvain were all bent intimately over a small table, a stretch of paper before them, Sylvain’s poet’s-cut hair falling forward to brush the hair wisping expertly from Magalie’s chignon, the black strands of both blurring together.

  Philippe drew a choppy breath, rage pounding up inside him like some enormous drum that made it hard to hear anything else.

  He knew that Sylvain Marquis was busy naming all his new chocolates after a pretty billionaire who melted every time he smiled; Philippe had just agreed to do the pièces montées for their wedding. But how well did he know Sylvain’s character, after all? He looked like a damn ladies’ man, certainly.

  And his hair was touching hers. And Aja was bringing out a tray of tea and chocolate. That Sylvain could drink. Nobody was trying to humble him. And Magalie’s eyes were sparkling with pleasure. The rage pulsed until Philippe’s ears buzzed with it, a bass that was too close, too loud.

  “Sylvain,” he said, crisp and cool, as if the very neutrality of his voice could bring himself back to reason.

  Geneviève gave something over the door behind his head a stern look. “I might need to fix that bell. How did you manage to get in again?”

  Sylvain glanced up and lifted a quick hand to clasp his. “Philippe. How is the new salon doing?”

  “As could be expected,” Philippe said, which was about as modestly as he could put “record-breakingly well,” and he had no idea why all three women gave him a look as if he had just been impossibly conceited and needed to be taken down a peg. He almost didn’t care about the attitude of the older two women, but the withering dismissal in Magalie’s eyes made his blood burn.

  Only Sylvain seemed to respect his phrasing. “Congratulations.” He reached out and clasped his hand again. “You’ve worked hard for it.”

  Sylvain would know about working hard for success in their world of ultra gourmet cuisine. It was maddening to have the one person in the room Philippe most wanted to lift up and throw out of it be the only one to give him his due.

  “And now that you’ve shared that with us,” Geneviève said, “you’re welcome to go away. Advised to, even.”

  “Maybe,” Magalie said with a silky, malicious smile, “he can’t stay away. Maybe he wants some chocolate.”

  He stared at her for a moment, his breathing too deep, the scent of her chocolate filling his lungs until it was almost but not quite a taste on his tongue. Bordel, what would it taste like?

  His impulsive stride to harry Sylvain Marquis out of his territory had brought him here with nothing with which to tempt Magalie in exchange. He felt the disadvantage keenly. Sylvain had probably brought the witches a damn gift of his damn chocolates. Which she had probably eaten. Putain de bordel de merde.

  He tried to make out what was on the roll of paper over which they had all been bent. Drawings. Something fantastical. He recognized the slashing, flamboyant lines of Sylvain’s sketching, as he had worked on special projects with the chocolatier before. The two other styles were a whimsical curving line, almost like a fairytale laced with a cartoon, and an angular, cryptic hand that spoke of another generation. That last must be Geneviève. Meaning that whimsy twined with laughter was Magalie’s?

  He leaned one elbow back on their display case, as purchase against the longing that swelled through him and tried to take him over. He was never going to come near her without something tempting in hand again. Something tormentingly, excruciatingly tempting.

  All three women fixed his elbow on their display case with a cold look.

  He kept it there, though. The cold, flat hardness of the glass was good grounding.

  He searched his mind for a solid, practical reason to have barged in. He needed to stop coming here just because he couldn’t keep away. It made him look pathetic. “I happened to spot Sylvain and wanted to catch him. To get your opinion on one of the pièces for your wedding,” he added to Sylvain.

  All three women looked at him with, if possible, increased disfavor. He wondered what they had wanted his motivation for coming down here to be. To beg their forgiveness for his existence, maybe?

  Well, at least he had slipped in the fact that Sylvain was about to get married. In case Sylvain hadn’t gotten around to mentioning it to Magalie himself.

  Sylvain, the black-haired bastard, looked at him with a slight, perplexed flex of supple eyebrows. “You want me to give an opinion on your work?” he clarified neutrally.

  “It’s for your wedding,” Philippe said, goaded. Surely that made it seem plausible?

  “Well.” Sylvain grinned a little. His gaze flicked lightning fast between Philippe and Magalie. “I’m always happy to give you any advice I can.”

  Le salaud. “Why don’t we talk about this outside?”

  Where Sylvain’s forearm, lying across the drawing, wasn’t almost brushing Magalie’s, each of them clutching a pencil in happy harmony.

  “I just got here,” Sylvain said, looking so amused Philippe might have to hurt him. “But I’ll stop by when I leave.”

  Philippe tried again to make out the drawing without seeming to. Sylvain lifted his forearm so that the paper curled back over itself and over Magalie’s arm in the process, hiding the sketch completely.

  Philippe dug his elbow hard against the glass behind him and curled that hand into a fist. “This is my street, Sylvain,” he said, goaded beyond caution.

  All three women stared at him, and then he could actually feel the flame hit the gunpowder, the tension in the room flash a white heat. Geneviève rose and went to the door. “I’m sorry, but we don’t open for another hour. And then not to you.”

  His face flamed with frustrated fury at this palpable lie. He was never going to get anywhere with them. Magalie had come out hating him; every step he took was wrong. And all he wanted to do was grab her and drag her out with him so he could have this fight in private where it belonged.

  He held her eyes for one long moment. And then, putain de merde, gave a sixty-year-old woman the respect of letting her throw him out of her own place and walked back out the door. With Sylvain grinning like life was just one delicious spectacle.

  “Your street?” Sylvain checked dryly an hour later. The kitchen was closed for the day, but Philippe had stayed.

  Philippe plunged his whisk into egg whites and whipped them hard, by hand. He had excellent equipment for whisking egg whites, but sometimes whipping them by hand relieved a great deal of frustration. “It is mine. I’ve claimed it.”

  Sylvain opened his mouth again, thought better of it, and closed it. After another moment, watching the egg whites mount under the speed of Philippe’s whisking, he said, as if he already knew the answer, “I don’t suppose you could try the humble approach?”

  Philippe dusted superfine sugar in and whisked still harder. “No.”

  Sylvain shook his head, started to speak again, and again changed his mind. As the egg whi
tes stiffened to peaks, he finally said, “You know why I asked you to do my wedding, don’t you, Philippe?”

  Philippe looked up at him, surprised. “Because I’m the best.”

  “Exactly.” Sylvain didn’t seem to find anything wrong with the statement. Sometimes it was nice to talk to a man who knew the difference between arrogance and accurate self-assessment. “Enfin, with the sugar and egg whites and all that.” Sylvain made a wave of his hand, clearly excluding all Philippe’s chocolate from claims to superiority. “So you don’t need my input on the pièces montées.”

  “Of course, I don’t,” Philippe said, annoyed. Trust Sylvain to be obnoxious enough to make him admit the ruse. He drew the whisk out, the egg whites light as air, clinging to it nicely. “Have you drunk her chocolate?” he asked, despite himself.

  “Yes.” Sylvain gave him a small, malicious smile.

  Philippe wished he had more to whisk, but any more and the whites would start breaking down. “And?” he asked the man considered to make the best chocolate in the world.

  Sylvain’s smile got, if anything, more gloating. “You should try it sometime,” he said.

  Philippe slammed the whisk back into the bowl, and fluffy egg white spattered all over him. Sylvain brushed a bit off one of his black eyebrows and raised it diabolically.

  “I’m not trying her chocolate until she tries something of mine!” Philippe snarled. “Anything. I don’t care if it’s a grain of sugar off the tip of my finger. Something. Of. Mine.”

  Sylvain’s eyebrows shot right up to the top of his head. “She’s never eaten anything you’ve made?”

  Putain de merde. How had he managed to let that slip to the man whose fiancée had been willing to face prison just to get more of his chocolates?

  “Not ever? Why? Is she diabetic? No, that can’t be right. I’ve seen her eat chocolate.”

  While Philippe had never gotten close enough to Magalie to see her eat a damn thing. He snarled again.

  Sylvain gazed at him with incredulous pity for a long moment, until Philippe could barely refrain from upending the bowl of egg whites onto the man’s head. “Eh, bien, tu n’es pas dans la merde,” he said at last conversationally.

  Since when did Sylvain use tu with him? They both knew that vous was the basic rule of survival for a professional, sometimes-cooperative rivalry such as theirs.Was it impossible to maintain vous with someone currently as pathetic as Philippe was? “I realize that I am in deep shit, merci, Sylvain.”

  Sylvain eased a long step back, probably to be out of reach of an upside-down bowl of egg whites. He slipped his hands into his jacket pockets and stood there easily as Philippe started dusting ground almond over his egg whites, still pretending to himself that these macarons were going to turn out all right.

  “Been thinking of that grain of sugar on your fingertip a long time, have you?” Sylvain smirked.

  “Get the fuck out of here, Marquis.”

  Chapter 13

  Magalie finished hanging the moon just before a beast rattled the doorknob, so she knew it was going to be one of those kind of days.

  Her favorite.

  It had been a week since Aunt Geneviève had kicked Philippe Lyonnais out of the shop in front of Sylvain Marquis, and she was beginning to think he had given up barging in. She had started catching herself stirring the oddest wishes into the chocolate of his sous-chefs, as if through them she could find the chink in his armor.

  But when she had stopped, in the secret of the predawn, before his display windows that morning, heading out for her run, she had seen his newest creation in pride of place, sugar spun out like two crossed blades on the top of a pale vanilla macaron, across which tiny individual grains of raspberry scattered like blood.

  The battle was still on. She had had a very good run that morning.

  She was up to three out of five kilometers now. And even the walking parts were starting to feel less awkward, as if the freedom of running carried through in her long, open walking stride, minimizing any judgment from those she passed. She had spent five years feeling as if the island was her walled garden and that stepping beyond it was launching herself onto a battlefield. But the long, curving quays of Paris and the city’s arched bridges, with the cold wind streaming over her—they were starting to feel like hers, too.

  At five or six in the morning, she didn’t get lost in the mass of people, reduced to nothing; there were hardly any other people about, and she felt too free and herself to care.

  The doorknob rattled again. The beast was out without a hat, despite the hint of snow, his honey-colored hair curling against his neck in a rich mane. Some people had blue eyes you never even noticed, so that after years of friendship you still might not be sure of their eye color. But not his. They pinned her right through the glass window, picking her out unerringly among the dangerous thorns and the looming, primitive, snow-dusted, dark-chocolate firs. A chocolate witch picked jewel-like flowers made from crystallized violets and mint leaves in the shadow of the trees. Farther off loomed a chocolate tower, from the one high window of which draped a long braid carefully made from fine strips of candied lemon peel.

  The beast outside the tea shop stood slightly lopsided, because a little girl with eyes as blue as his was clinging to his hand.

  Typical of him. To use a little girl to get into a witch’s house. He knew he was banned.

  She climbed down off the stepladder, trying so hard not to show how sore her legs were from her last run that she barely remembered to duck the moon she’d just hung. It dangled, chocolate so dark its brown was almost black, just a few inches above her forehead. Taller people would run into it if they got too close to the display case below it, but this was the type of hazard her aunts liked to have in their salon.

  She unlocked the door and held it open, and the visitors passed her in a whirl of cold air from the street. The cold air freed a space in the rich, thick scent of chocolate, and just for a second she smelled roses and sunshine. A lion that smelled of roses and sunshine? What was he working on now?

  She sneered at him.

  He smiled back sharply, showing his fangs.

  “Is she a weapon or a shield?” she asked over the little girl’s head.

  “A lock pick,” he said, and closed the door behind him, confirming his entry.

  She contemplated swirling a love potion into his chocolate, to make him fall in love with some horribly inappropriate frog in the belief that she was a princess.

  If she could ever get him to drink her chocolate.

  “Are you a witch?” the little girl asked, hushed and eager, looking around.

  Magalie studied her. Her hair was the same tawny shade as Philippe Lyonnais’s and curled over her shoulders in rough, large locks. A lavender pageboy cap attempted to restrain it. “That’s an indiscreet question.”

  Oh, mouthed the little girl, her eyes growing rounder and even more delighted. She looked around at the conical hats of all descriptions, so beautifully rearranged by the beast holding her hand. Besides the hats, the shelves and walls were crammed with images from the aunts’ artist friends—from pen-and-ink to mosaic to woven and needing a good dry-cleaning—as well as with teapots and strange, whimsical souvenirs and a cuckoo clock that looked like a house covered with elaborate candies. As the little girl looked at it, a witch suddenly popped out of the clock’s bonbon door and laughed evilly.

  That clock was always five minutes slow.

  “My uncle is a prince,” the little girl said confidingly. She flourished a little hand, clearly quoting all those stupid TV shows on him: “Le Prince des Pâtissiers!”

  Not confident that her own laugh would be wicked enough to follow the cuckoo clock’s, Magalie settled for a curl of her lip as she turned away—turned far enough for the girl not to see it, but not so far that her uncle wouldn’t catch it.

  He curled his lip right back at her. He looked as if he was about to rip her gazelle throat out when he did that. And then run his tongue
lingeringly over her blood on his teeth.

  In his dreams. Because he was so fit and powerful and dwarfed her, even in her boots, she supposed some blind outside observer might see her as a gazelle to his lion. But he would be very much mistaken.

  “Yes, he’s made his royal status clear to us,” Magalie said.

  He gave a little shrug of one broad shoulder, in an it’s-hardly-my-fault-you-noticed way.

  “You knew!” the little girl said happily. “See, Tonton? I told you everyone could tell you were a prince.”

  Magalie tapped the toe of her boot. “Oh, yes, he makes it very obvious. The Beast was a prince, too, by the way.”

  “I believe he was turned into a Beast,” Philippe Lyonnais said in his rough, rich, I’ll-eat-you-when-I-choose voice. “After carelessly opening his door to a witch.”

  “If you’re a witch, could you find a beautiful princess for him?” the little girl asked.

  The beast-prince stopped the snarling smile long enough to send his niece a betrayed look.

  Magalie tried her own throat-ripping smile. “If I find the perfect princess for him, trust me, I will send her his way.”

  The look that Philippe sent her this time was pissed off and almost human.

  “Oh,” the little girl said, looking very happy. “I know you’ll find someone beautiful.”

  Philippe set his mouth.

  “Don’t worry,” Magalie reassured the little girl. “We get princesses in here all the time.” With their window full of a great dark-chocolate forest, and witches swooping through the snow-sugar-powdered chocolate firs, they attracted all manner of princesses in search of magic to deal with the world in which they found themselves.