The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  No one ever in her life had done anything like this to her. Not ever. Taken one part of her body and rendered her mindless. Or rendered her precious? He made love to her wrist until they both knew exactly how helpless she was, her body dragging so heavily against the hand that held her that anyone would have thought she was past consciousness.

  Then he pulled her up at last. Grabbing her hips and dragging her up on his thigh, dragging hard so that her sex rubbed against his leg. Her head fell back now, no muscles left to resist, and he took her mouth the same way he had taken her wrist—with prickle of beard, silk of lips, graze of teeth, the questing of his tongue.

  The scents from their coats rose around her, hers, his, and the cold city scent the coats still carried from outside. The clasp at the back of her head hurt, pressed too hard against coats and door, and she pulled it out.

  His mouth was open against hers, his tongue tangling with hers when she did it. She felt his gasp steal air from her as her hair spilled down.

  His hands were occupied, on her torso: rubbing the silk over her skin, kneading it into her muscles and breasts and bone, slipping his hands under it, sliding everywhere. His hands taken, he pulled his mouth free from hers long enough for a gesture that entirely undid her: he pressed his face into her freed hair and stroked once the length of it to her shoulders, like an animal.

  She buried her hands in the pelt of his hair, shivering.

  He pushed her top up all the way to her shoulders and drew back enough to meet her eyes. A question.

  She closed hers and lifted her arms above her head.

  That gesture, waiting in the dark of her own eyelids for him to draw the silk over her head, was even more her undoing than his face stroking her hair or his mouth on her wrist. The moment of choice and the choice she had made—to agree to this, to all of this—left her hot and damp and fragile with arousal.

  “Yes,” he breathed, a growling purr. “Yes. I knew—” He broke off, his thumbs tracing the edge of her black lace bra, pressing gently into the soft skin, slipping under it, his palms cupping her nipples. They rubbed, and then rubbed harder as she arched.

  “Knew what?” Still she had a trace of challenge left. How dare he know?

  “Nothing.” He gave a rough, strange laugh, as if there was so much tension in him, it squeezed the laugh almost to nothing. “I just dream really well.”

  She arched again helplessly, pressing her sex into his thigh as his hands grew greedier on her breasts. “Dreamed—me?”

  “God, yes.”

  “Like this?” The coats burred against her bare back.

  “It’s one of the ways.” He helped her with that ache in her sex, gripping her hips, dragging her hard up and down his thigh and then grinding her against his sex through his jeans.

  Her thighs wrapped around his waist. Need pressed through her, frantic, relentless. Midnight-dark eyes, heavy-lidded, fixed on her face at that, and he ground her against his sex again, rotating this time, rocking her.

  Her eyes widened desperately. She clutched at him, almost afraid.

  “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “Yes, yes, yes. Let me in.” His hand found the side zip on her pants so fast that he must have located it sometime before and kept track of it just for this chance. He pressed his hand in through the tight fit of the panel over her pelvis, slipping his hand down to find the folds of her sex.

  The silver doorbell chimed.

  Philippe jerked his head up. Cold horror shot through her.

  He tried. Cursing, yanking his hand away, wrenching at the coat behind her, he tried his best to get her at least covered.

  But Geneviève and Aja blew straight back into the kitchen before he could even get the coat free of the hook.

  Philippe was the only one who didn’t freeze in petrified embarrassment. Cursing viciously, he kept his body between Magalie and them, slipping her paralyzed arms into the overlarge sleeves, zipping it up over her bare skin. One of her breasts was spilled lopsided out of her bra, the nipple rubbing against his jacket lining. Oh, God, oh, God . . . Philippe looked into her face and cursed again. “All right, go,” he said, in furious resignation, easing back enough to pull the door open and push her through it, his body still her shield.

  “What kind of poetry does your friend write, exactly?” he snapped at the aunts as the cold froze her bones and she fled. In all the times she had heard him angry, she had never heard him this angry. Wild with it. “Haiku?”

  Chapter 19

  Magalie would never, ever, in a million years forget the cringing horror of that moment. Caught half-naked in the kitchen by Geneviève and Aja with Philippe Lyonnais.

  Oh, God.

  She writhed with it, all night. She curled into it, in fetal humiliation, and then found her hand trying to take advantage of the position to slip between her thighs and relieve the desperate, hot, unsatisfied desire.

  She threw herself back the other way, locking her hands in fists under her pillow, and saw Aunt Geneviève’s face again.

  Then she saw Philippe’s, flushed and damp and purely furious.

  Then she saw Aunt Aja’s.

  Then she wondered what the hell hers had looked like and flinched into a ball again. Since she had been half-naked at the time, what did her face matter?

  She kept hoping the writhing would be interrupted by a knock on the door, the return of her intruder, so she could throw things at him or at least commiserate with someone. And then get rid of this hot desperation between her thighs. But he never came.

  She thought about running away from home.

  But she couldn’t stand the idea of losing her place here. This was the truest place she had ever had.

  She considered wearing a mask around her aunts for the rest of her life, and dark sunglasses with it.

  Maybe not only around her aunts but whenever she had to walk by Philippe’s shop.

  Walk by Philippe’s—

  God, she was never going to be able to walk down that end of the street again. He had stolen half her island from her!

  She tried to calm down and think of something else, and then flinched into her arms again, covers pulled entirely over her body, as she saw their faces.

  That bastard Philippe. She would kill him.

  He had done it on purpose. “I’ll show you why I didn’t want Christophe in your kitchen.” He had planned it. In advance.

  Maybe not planned to get caught by Geneviève and Aja, because a more appalled, furious expression than his when that silver bell chimed, she couldn’t imagine. But planned to seduce her. As if she was some pathetic person who could be seduced by calculation.

  Which, apparently, she was.

  That bastard.

  She had no doubt what that bastard had planned to do with his fingers just before they got caught. Oh, God, why couldn’t that poetry reading have taken just five minutes longer?

  She delayed as long as she could going downstairs the next morning, and thus ran right into Geneviève and Aja coming out of their apartment, having apparently delayed as long as they could. She jumped. They jumped. Everyone looked somewhere else.

  “I’ll just—I’ll just go start the tarte crusts,” Magalie said and ran down the stairs as fast as she could.

  It didn’t get better from there. Magalie dropped things. Spilled things. Aja and Geneviève cleared their throats at odd moments and gave each other embarrassed looks that she caught whenever she lifted her head.

  She burned the crusts. She cut her finger just when she finished stirring a pot of chocolate and had to start all over because her blood dripped into it. And when one of Philippe’s chefs, Grégory, showed up, she had just flipped a fresh tarte out of her hands and was scrubbing it off her shoes, trying not to cry. She glared at him. The employee of her enemy was not her friend. Plus, for all she knew, Philippe had been gloating to him.

  No, now she was growing ridiculous. More ridiculous, if that was possible for someone who had gotten caught in flagrante delicto by her own aunt
s the night before. Even she knew that gloating over any aspect of his sexual affairs with his employees wasn’t Philippe’s style.

  Grégory looked distressed by her glare and glanced for help at Claire-Lucy, who was sitting in her favorite corner, nursing a cup of chocolate. “I just, ah, was hoping for some chocolat chaud. Do you need help?”

  “Probably,” Claire-Lucy murmured. She was watching him very curiously, her mouth a little stained with chocolate.

  Magalie was not letting another man into her kitchen at the same time as she, ever. If that damn bastard Philippe could get to her, she was clearly sugar that would melt at a drop of water. “I’m fine. Just give me a minute.”

  At least she hadn’t worn any of her nice boots today. Of course, that was Philippe’s fault, too. Cringing before even the slightest hint of sexiness in any combination of clothes she put on—had she marked herself as a slut?—she had eventually unearthed the only pair of flat shoes she had besides her running shoes—thick, fuzzy, warm snowboots, resistant to all kinds of ill-treatment. With those, she was wearing jeans and a heavy, dolman-sleeved, midnight-blue sweater that emphasized a small waist but otherwise did absolutely nothing to indicate sexual desperation in any way. She would have worn a sack, but the dolman sweater was the closest she could find in her entire wardrobe. She had twined her hair in one simple braid behind her head and left off makeup and was looking about as subdued as it was possible to look.

  A decision that was already starting to wear on her.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Grégory searched her face. “You look a little tire—different.” His head tilted, as he digested the look. He didn’t seem entirely turned off by it.

  She went and got his chocolate. Sitting at the table, he gave her another crinkled, surprised look when she brought his tray to him. “I don’t think I ever realized how small you are.”

  Maybe she should go back upstairs and change. There was only so much wallowing in humiliation she could take. This was getting old already.

  “Monsieur Lyonnais sent something for you.” Grégory looked wistful.

  Magalie stiffened. And missed her heels in the worst way when she tried to brace herself aggressively. “I don’t want it.”

  “Really?” Grégory brightened just a little. In her corner, Claire-Lucy ran a finger around the rim of her cup of chocolate, broodingly.

  “Yes.” Magalie folded her arms, just to make sure that whatever Grégory had brought couldn’t be forced into her hand. “Why should he send me anything?”

  To see if he had cracked her finally so he could gloat to himself that she had been the first to cave in? If Grégory opened some Lyonnais box on another tempting, luscious concoction, she would go completely mad.

  Grégory looked puzzled. “C’est la Saint-Valentin.”

  She knew that, of course. That was the reason they had a witch hiding a rose-heart in her basket in their display case, to remind women not to hand their hearts out to any idiot who walked along just because of some stupid holiday. Aunt Aja made extra-strengthening teas today, and Geneviève made tartes that were pure chocolate darkness to nourish a woman’s depths and fight off any silly feeling of emptiness.

  Magalie stared at Grégory with a strange, blushing confusion. What did it mean that Philippe was sending her something—via an employee—on la Saint-Valentin? Unlike the confusing American version of Valentine’s Day, la Saint-Valentin in France was pretty straightforward. No cards to be passed out to all your classmates, so no way you could be caught out cardless when you were five years old and your French mother didn’t know and your American academic father was clueless. In France, Saint- Valentin gifts were for your spouse, your lover, or your very clearly declared intended lover, and that was about it.

  She swallowed and folded her arms more tightly. “I’m not eating it, and I don’t want to see it.”

  “It’s not a pâtisserie.” Grégory handed her a small sack that bore the logo of an innovative New Zealand-influenced jeweler in the Marais. Magalie had often lingered in front of her display windows. Beyond the island, the Marais was her favorite quarter.

  The card inside it bore no message. Just one word, a firm, slashing signature: Philippe. The large square box opened to reveal a tiny green pendant, subtly intricate, so that you turned it and turned it to see a woman, held in a crescent, her slim form stretching up so that she strained to just reach the top tip of the crescent. A card from the jeweler also lay in the box, explaining the symbolism: the Polynesian goddess-heroine Hina and her moon. She glanced involuntarily at the moon above the display case, remembering Philippe rattling the door as she was hanging it. The chain stretching away from the Hina-moon pendant was pure, shimmery silver, so pale and shining it was probably platinum. And so spiderweb delicate, it looked as if the brush of a finger might break it.

  “He’s busy—that’s why he asked me to bring it. He wanted to make sure you got it early. He said he would be by later.”

  He wanted to make sure she got something early—as if she should be expecting him to send her something on la Saint-Valentin? As if she could be hurt if he didn’t? Magalie flushed crimson, staring at it.

  She had to fight the urge to hug herself, cuddling something precious. If she had been alone, she would have.

  “So you and he . . . ?” Grégory let his voice trail off, and there was that hint of wistfulness again. Magalie eyed him discreetly and realized something else Philippe had just done. By asking one of his chefs to carry this gift to her, he had very clearly marked her as his territory to that same chef.

  It made her blood boil, but not in the nice, hot, rapid boil she was familiar with. It was more like bubbling chocolate, rich, tempting, something you ought to pull off the burner quickly before you ruined it—too slow, too delicious for a proper rage. Or maybe more like bubbling caramel, golden, hot—and, according to Philippe, something he’d mastered completely.

  Not her. Her caramel was scorching.

  “You should see what he’s been working on today,” Grégory admitted. He shook his head a little. Once again, his eyes met Claire-Lucy’s, inviting her to share his ruefulness. “Or maybe, being you, you shouldn’t.”

  Chapter 20

  Philippe was afraid. He had seen Magalie’s face the night before when her aunts found them, and he knew something could go very, very wrong here. She could cast him out farther than he had ever been, so that he didn’t just need lockpicks and temptation and determination to get back in but a compass and very strong rowing arms to cross the vast, cold sea.

  He was so afraid that on that busiest day of the year, when demand for his most perfect creations could not be satiated, when men got off work early and waited in line for an hour to find the one thing that would brighten a lady’s heart . . . he delegated all of it. For the first time, in all the years of Valentine’s Days, he had his own heart to worry about.

  He focused until all the noise of the kitchen, and even the intern upending an entire tray of freshly finished Couronnes, crushing strawberries, pistachio, cream, and cake on the floor, didn’t distract him. Someone told him later that it had happened.

  At the half of a marble counter that he had taken for himself, he whipped aged egg whites. By hand. A little smile played over his mouth at the intensity of the whipping. God knew, he needed something on which to take out his frustrations after last night. That morning’s brutal workout at the gym had not done it.

  He dusted in sugar so fine that breathing on it raised a cloud around his hand, like the puff of a magic spell. He added coloring until the meringue was as brilliant red as heart’s blood, knowing that when it cooked, it would pale to a perfect pink, and no one would ever know the intensity of the passion that had gone into it. He rubbed almond meal in his palm, ground so fine it felt silky and warm against his skin, processed it with equal parts confectioners’ sugar, and folded it in.

  While the meringue shells baked, he experimented with the ganache that would fill them. It was la Saint- Va
lentin. And she had indeed turned him into a beast. Maybe he should offer her a rose.

  White chocolate and cream, rose syrup, and three drops of attar of roses. No, it needed something more. He prowled his shelves of ingredients, dry and fresh, in and out of his refrigerators. Occasionally he tasted something. He stopped before a case of rambutan, picked up from an Asian market in Belleville. The little red monster-fruit was prickly and hard on the exterior, but for the curious person who braved it, the skin could be split easily enough to reveal the silky, sweet interior, a clean, fresh flavor similar to lychees.

  A little smile played around his mouth. If this was indeed the flavor that would match with the roses, how appropriate.

  Splitting the skins on rambutan after prickly rambutan gave him immense satisfaction, especially as his fingers gained in deftness, and they fell to him more and more easily, the rubbery little thorns a pleasant defiance against his fingers. Especially as that defiance yielded. Rambutan, roses, cream, white chocolate . . . as the chocolate melted under the hot cream, as he blended the ingredients together into something unctuous and extraordinary, he thought of pale skin and pink secrets, of melting a person and making her body yield everything to his touch.

  Let me in.

  I will make you notice me.

  Not the greatest anger or the greatest will in the world will keep your mouth locked tight against me.

  Still it needed something. A heart. He thought of that rose heart hidden in the witch’s dark-chocolate basket in Magalie’s window. A secret in the middle, that last burst of bliss, her body helpless as he held it . . .

  As the ganache cooled, he prowled the fillings they had made the day before, until a deep, intense red on one of the shelves of his cold-storage rooms caught his eye. Raspberry gelée. Normally intended to be tucked in tiny heart shapes into one of his dark chocolate macarons, for Valentine’s Day, but he wouldn’t offer Magalie chocolate. Her life was full of chocolate. The gelée was as intense in color, heart’s-blood red, as the meringue had been before it baked to a soft, deceptively gentle pink. One small square, the exact size of his thumb on her pulse, on her breasts, on her mouth, on her . . .