The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  Right about the time the stink of scorched sugar was hitting his nostrils, and he was thinking about strangling Magalie with his bare hands, the laboratoire’s door opened, and a young, somewhat plump woman with frizzy chestnut hair peeked in. “Hello,” she said shyly, glancing around the room as if searching for someone.

  She had a little sack stamped with a dark brown witch in one hand.

  Claws pushed at his fingertips. Fangs grew. How could she, how could she, still be trying to save herself by sacrificing other women to him? “I’m sorry, we’re working,” he said flatly. “Hygiene laws. No one is allowed back here.” He jerked his head at his intern to show the latest princess-victim of Magalie’s out.

  Grégory, closer to the door, moved in front of the intern and sent Philippe a reproachful glance.

  What? How courteous was he supposed to be to Magalie’s victims? Maybe they shouldn’t drink her damn chocolate.

  If he could resist it, he didn’t see why everyone else had to be so weak-willed.

  “I’m sorry,” Grégory said kindly to the invader. “Did you need something?”

  “I was just curious.” She hesitated, casting a hopeful look up at him. “I own the toy shop down the street. I’m Claire-Lucy.”

  “Grégory Dumont,” Grégory said warmly. “Don’t mind Monsieur Lyonnais. So you’ve just come from La Maison des Sorcières? What do you think of their chocolate? Isn’t it the best?” The door swung closed behind them as Grégory escorted her out.

  Fortunately for him. Because, given that Lyonnais did serve chocolat chaud at its own tables, Philippe was that close to throwing something at him.

  I am going to kill her, he thought.

  But not before she looks at me with those brown eyes of hers and begs for more of me.

  Not before she couldn’t get the taste of him off her tongue.

  Chapter 15

  The city greeted Magalie with a hush, like a lover that didn’t want to awaken. A lover who was, just for that moment before returning to consciousness, completely hers. The bare trees along the quays were etched black against the slowly fading sky, a thin wisp of gold clinging to the horizon beyond them.The lights that illuminated the Louvre in the night had switched off. The conical towers of the Conciergerie were black, like the trees against the sky. Just for a moment, everything was subtle, everything was gentle.

  She could hear the dull thud of her feet on the paving stones, a gentler, softer sound than her aggressive daytime boots. The water was deep gray, the light as it grew allowing winter brown to seep back into its color. She ran between the border of bare trees and the wall above the river, along the upper quays.

  Running like this, all her anger and armor against Philippe seemed unnecessary. When he crossed her mind, the vision of him made her smile. She saw his laugh as the ganache exploded over his hands.

  Running, she didn’t worry about La Maison des Sorcières, not after the first kilometer. Right now, it seemed as if they might be able to make ends meet on Philippe’s employees alone. She kept wishing beautiful lives for them, on the theory that that was a nice, positive way to make them all desert His arrogant Highness and just spend their days drinking her chocolate, but so far, it didn’t seem to be working.

  She glimpsed the Gothic Tour Saint-Jacques down a side street to her left, cryptic and aloof but losing with the dawn that surreal sorcerer’s magic it held under a dark sky or a full moon. The fountains of the Hôtel de Ville were stilled for the winter, the ice rink that lay now before it empty and chill, the utter loveliness of the Renaissance façade making one forget the drama and violence the city hall had witnessed over the centuries.

  She turned her head to gaze at Notre-Dame across the water, against the pink and gold rim of clouds. Breathing hard, she barely noted the man in street clothes with a gym bag slung over one shoulder. As she came abreast of him, something teased through her absorption, and she turned her head toward him.

  Just as she ran into the hard barrier of an arm thrust out. She bounced off it, and he didn’t even try to catch her. “Magalie?” Philippe Lyonnais was staring at her with his lips parted, his gym bag drooping to the ground.

  For a second, the quiet wonder of the morning stayed with her. She stared back at him.

  The very last person she would have had discover her flushed from cold wind and internal heat, sweaty but chilled, her hair in a ponytail, her classy black and blue running clothes clinging damply in embarrassing places that showed exactly how much and where she sweat.

  His hair was damp. There was a gym around here, wasn’t there? He had been working out, too, but he had showered after and dressed in elegantly casual street clothes. And was heading now to make some diabolical concoction, which she would see in his windows as she came back onto the island.

  She found her back to the wall that kept pedestrians from falling into the Seine at moments like this. This time, he didn’t shift his arm to the wall beside her to half lock her in.

  Well, of course not. She was sweaty and nasty.

  Philippe’s expression was oddly . . . soft. Did the morning workout soften him, too, leave him clean and light? Focused? Because he was very focused, as he always was. On her. She ran a sleeve over her forehead, wiping away perspiration.

  “You run,” he said softly. He was studying her so intently. Still more softly, as if he was speaking to himself: “I never imagined you like this.”

  He seemed to blame himself, as if he had assumed he had imagined her every conceivable way. Which was rude. How could he ever presume to think he knew all her facets?

  Unless he spent a lot of time imagining her . . .

  Her breathing and heart rate didn’t seem to be slowing down at all with her stop. There was no justice that he should see her like this. But, with the freedom of that dawn run still filling her lungs, it felt oddly . . . right.

  She wished she had seen him twenty minutes earlier, sweaty and messy and pushing all his strength against weights.

  Her breath caught. She had stopped running, but her heart rate actually began speeding up.

  Or ten minutes earlier, his muscles still engorged from the exercise, stepping out of his shower . . .

  She leaned over, clutching at her stomach with one hand and the wall with the other. Maybe she had overdone it on her run. She was starting to feel a little dizzy.

  A hand closed around her shoulder. Shock stung her that anyone would want to touch her while she was so sweaty.

  “Ça va?” he checked.

  She tossed her ponytail off her neck, looking up at him incredulously. Not for him so much as for her. That gentled lion’s voice, that concern, was doing something strange to her muscles. No, it was the run. It was the run leaving them weak.

  Leaving them feeling so . . . soft. Malleable.

  “Non,” she said, surprising herself with honesty. No, it wasn’t going very well at all.

  To her astonishment, she found herself being lifted, and then her bottom hit the cold stone of the wall, and hard hands held her firm there, making her sit but making sure she didn’t faint and fall backward into the river.

  She peered at him. Didn’t he want her to fall backward into the river? Talk about a good laugh at the enemy’s expense. She would probably only get hypothermia, not die.

  He gazed straight back at her, from astonishingly close. Her position on the wall put their eyes at the same level. She could see the striations of the blue, the tawny streaked lashes, the crinkle lines around the corners.

  She blinked first. Stirred or maybe even minutely swayed against the pressure of his hands at her hips. They flexed to hold her more firmly.

  “Ça va?” he said again.

  She stared at him mutely.

  He tilted his head a little, that way he had when he’d seen her for the very first time.

  And again, he just gazed at her. The cold was drying the sweat on her skin. But her heartbeat kept picking up and up and seemed to be almost sending strange hiccups through her
blood. Behind him, a bare-branched tree rattled in the wind. He had set her between two green bookseller cases, partly sheltering her from the wind, but still that wind came off the water and whirled around them.

  Her island was just on the other side of the water. A bridge away. He could see it, past her, her safety. She could only see him.

  “Maybe you’re too healthy to eat sugar,” Philippe suggested, but softly, musingly, as if he was talking about theories for a fairy story. “Maybe that’s it.”

  One hand left her hip and looped around her wrist, his callused thumb rubbing gently, searching for her pulse.

  She knew when he found it, because his thumb stopped. His whole body gathered a great stillness, the one before a lion’s spring. Why couldn’t she get her heart rate down? She had stopped running. Maybe he would attribute—

  He leaned in on her, almost without moving, his eyes holding hers.

  “I prefer chocolate,” she managed, still with that—that running-induced pant in her voice.

  His thumb started to rub again, pushing up under the edge of her sleeve, tracing the fine veins and tendons while his index finger kept track of her pulse. “I can make you chocolate, Magalie. But I wouldn’t presume.”

  “My own chocolate,” she said with effort.

  He smiled a little. “Of course.”

  “And Sylvain Marquis’s,” she added in pure defiance of her damn pulse.

  His eyes sparked in annoyance, and his hand on her wrist tightened fractionally, but he only shook his head. His face drifted another centimeter closer, there in the shelter of the bookcases and the predawn. “That’s because you haven’t tried mine yet.”

  Her mouth watered, and it wasn’t for chocolate. This was a really bad time for this conversation. She felt so . . . open. So unguarded.

  It was well-known that running left you vulnerable to all kinds of infections for a few hours after. What had she been thinking, to breathe in his scent? Like a lethal illness, it seemed to be propagating inside her at an alarming rate.

  And it didn’t even have any sugar or vanilla or roses or lime on it. Right now his scent was just cleanness. A male body that had come only minutes before from a shower.

  “Maybe,” Philippe suggested softly, a hint of danger sneaking in, “you’re afraid.”

  It was several minutes since she had stopped running, and her breasts still rose and fell just as hard. His finger never left her pulse. “I don’t eat poison. But I don’t live in terror of it. I know it can’t get me unless I let it,” she said defiantly.

  His hands tightened on hip and wrist, and he pulled her body forward, as if on a surge of temptation to prove her wrong. He caught himself an inch from her mouth, his arms almost completely enclosing her, his chest expanding in a hard breath. His warning snarl heated her whole wind-chilled face. “Magalie. Do you want me to be a beast?”

  Delicious fear burst through her like the boom the second before fireworks filled the sky with colors. If he were a beast, what would he do?

  “You already are one,” Magalie managed.

  His hand spasmed up to grasp the back of her neck. “No, I’m not.” He pulled her hard against his mouth.

  The fireworks exploded. Searing through the air with a high, sizzling sound, and she found herself surging up with them. Her hands slid over his shoulders for purchase, and those shoulders felt so hard under the layers of leather and cashmere. The feeling of it was more even than she had thought, larger, denser, a press of sensation against her palms that drove them frantic.

  She scrambled into him, dragging her hands over his back, one finding purchase in his damp hair, cold in the winter wind. Her head angled, her lips opened, as their kiss escalated immediately to an intense and intimate battle. Him starving, her starving, who would get to consume whom?

  They kissed and kissed and kissed. Philippe held her hard against him, between him and the wall, her legs closing around him, her hips pressing into his lower abdomen, frustrated by clothes and the fact that the wall put her just a few inches too high for the pressure she wanted.

  They kissed with tongues and teeth and, pulling back, lips that rubbed and enticed, and tongues that sought again. Her fitted running jacket and jersey seemed no barrier at all to his hands, but Magalie’s ran frustrated over his leather, and one found the bottom of his sweater and slid up under it.

  He took a fast breath, straight from her mouth, and flinched at the first press of her cold hand against his ribs. But then he just buried himself deeper in her, letting her cold hands run everywhere they willed.

  Lights slid gently over them and past, an early-morning car on the boulevard beyond Philippe. Their intimate shelter was illusory, protected only by two green walls and dawn. And Philippe. His body blocked hers from view, wrapped around hers, his hand covering the back of her head, his mouth so hungry.

  The muscles of his abs and back and chest under her hands felt hard and warm and resilient, still engorged from his morning workout.

  He kissed her while the day broke, the passage from dusk to light a secret trace of pink, like the forgotten blush of a woman who had seen it all. He kissed her while more and more cars passed in the street. He kissed her until it penetrated that a couple of the honks might have been for them. He kissed her until the light drove them apart.

  They stared at each other.

  For a second, both were absolutely still. Philippe’s face looked utterly naked. Meaning her own must look . . . Magalie pushed him so hard, she nearly shoved herself back into the river. He had to catch her to save her.

  She felt a wild urge to hit him, kick him, do something to save herself. But she didn’t even know entirely from what. Simultaneously, an urge drove her to turn her head, just a little, to rub the corner of her mouth, her cheek, softly against his lips. To see if, now that the first wildness had passed, he might press the most delicate of kisses just there by the lobe of her ear.

  “I’ve got to—I’ve got to finish my run,” she said. What? Oh, that sounded inane. Fumbling. Imbécile.

  “Magalie.” Her name was almost a whisper, it was so soft, so enticing.

  She wriggled her body down to the sidewalk and away from him, plying her elbows to drive him back. “Cardiovascular and all that,” she muttered.

  “I don’t think you need to worry about your heart rate slowing down, Magalie,” he said, wielding that unforgivably pointed truth like a skewer to hold her in place.

  She twisted away from it, trying to come up with a riposte. “I’ve got to finish my run.” Pathetic.

  “Magalie.” Her name caught at her as she turned and took her first step. She glanced back. His muscles were all coiled, his body full of that menacing stillness just before the spring. “If you run, you damn well better feel like a zebra every step of the way.”

  Chapter 16

  She was so pissed off at that sense of being a zebra by the time she got back to her apartment, she couldn’t stop cursing herself for running. How else could she have gotten away? Walked? He would have kept pace. Caught a taxi? At six in the morning? And, anyway, any kind of running was running. She suspected he would have gloated at her zebra retreat no matter how she’d made it.

  She was not a damned zebra to his lion. He was a toad to her witch. Or . . . a beast. A toad seemed a little . . . small and scaly. It might be she’d prefer to turn him into something she could sink her hands into.

  Of course, the only choice to avoid the zebra role would have been not to retreat at all. But that might have left her . . . what? A zebra rug in front of his fireplace?

  She was not a damn zebra.

  She finished climbing the stairs, feeling her run-tired muscles all six flights. En route to a shower, she got stopped by the mirror and stood staring at herself.

  Her hair had escaped her ponytail, whipped free by the wind. Her face was bare of makeup. She never wore a lot of makeup, anyway, but there was a world of difference between a skillful application of natural-looking improvements and seei
ng her eyes and mouth and cheeks completely bare, stripped further by the wind. Her face was flushed and sweaty.

  She didn’t understand.

  He had kissed her when she looked like that?

  She turned the water on hot and stepped under it, letting it pour over her endlessly like a substitute for the warmth she had fled.

  She finally stepped out only because the heat of the water had faded to tepid and was moving to chilly, and the chill brought her some strength. But rubbing herself dry with her enormous white terry-cloth towel, she shivered again, her skin too sensitive, too hungry for texture and warmth and touch.

  After five years of learning how to dress like a Parisian, she pulled out all the stops. Her armor that morning was invincible, designed to bring anyone to his knees while keeping her on her feet. Soft folds of silk fell around her shoulders: a shift one way could have that supple neckline spilling sideways to bare a shoulder, another and the extra cloth slid down between her breasts in a plunging neckline, another still and it drooped behind her, exposing the nape of her neck, a hint of her back. Below the neckline, it grew snugger, kissing the peaks of her breasts, her ribs and waist, and coming down over her hips to her upper thighs. A subtly patterned legging, with a motif up the sides that somehow suggested the old-fashioned line of stockings, disappeared under her top. Large green, fine filigree leaves dangled from her ears. She spent half an hour on her hair, the wisps escaping from her chignon just right.

  Over the leggings she pulled on thigh-high boots. She had to make a special quick trip into the Marais to get them. She had been putting off buying them because they were so expensive, and now this year they were really already on their way out of style. But she wanted the leather climbing up her thighs. She wanted that toughness with its vivid, strong message beneath that silk.

  When Philippe walked into La Maison des Sorcières, Magalie felt . . . like a zebra.