From the door of his apartment, one could look straight across the wide-open living space and parquet floor to great windows through which came lights and colors and life on the streets a few floors below. Lamps glowed through curtains and blinds in the windows of the equally old building across the street. The open curtains on Philippe’s own windows made her feel extraordinarily exposed. But no lights were on in the room to show her to those outside. The space was gently illuminated only by the lights in the street.
She crossed to the windows slowly, mostly so as not to look at him yet, conscious of the muted sound of her footsteps on the parquet, quieter still on the opulent carpet in the center of the room. I come in peace, her absence of heels seemed to say.
“Do you want me to draw the curtains?” Philippe asked just behind her shoulder. She did not start. Even though his bare feet had been perfectly soundless, she had felt him behind her every step of the way. The same way, no doubt, that a zebra felt a lion prowling behind it. That so pissed her off, the zebra image. “No one can see in unless we turn on the lights.”
The activity in the streets below promised fun to anyone who ventured out. Just witnessing it made the evening seem exciting. She was not retired in her cozy room, where she had started feeling so lonely.
From his furniture came an impression of elegance and quality, a modern, clean look in muted colors. The thick carpet across which she had walked was a rich gray, for example. It surprised her, with the intense jewel tones and flamboyant structures he used in his work. Did he, too, seek something quieter when he retired into himself? Or was muted simplicity the best foil for his dramatic creations?
She turned to face him, and he stood a foot away, watching her. He did not move back to give her room. But he did not lean forward to make her feel enclosed, the way he had many times before. He waited. A pulse jumped in his throat.
“May I take your coat?” he asked, and her eyes flicked up to his. A second of silence beat between them. If she took off her coat, she was planning on staying. If he offered to take it, he was inviting her to.
“Yes,” she said. And heard the breath he drew.
When he slid her coat off her arms, he did not touch her at all. She could feel him, behind her, not touching her. So graceful and practiced with that coat removal, with his elitist, Sixteenth-Arrondissement education.
She set the sack on his small dining table, in the kitchen area of the large living space, so cleverly divided by furniture from the “living room” area. She had seen an article a week before on his sister’s interior design of his shops; she must have done this place, too, but it was very different. The clean, elegant juxtaposition of age and modernity was exquisite.
From the sack, she drew the Lyonnais box and set it, opened, on the center of the table, so that he could see the rose-heart macaron.
He said nothing. From behind her, she could feel the intensity of his focus. Waiting.
“The poodle only got the raspberry,” she explained, and she had to clear her throat. “I fought her off for the rest.”
Another beat of silence. “And may I ask what about that made you so furious? Other than the fact that it came from me, of course.”
Her face flamed. She set her jaw, trying to force the explanation out. “It was—she only ate the raspberry, one raspberry—and then she, she let the . . . you know that German shepherd that wanders around the end of the quay?”
He made a half-strangled sound. Was that a half-strangled laugh? She gave him a burning look. “The, uh, the unneutered male German shepherd?” he asked. Oh, yes, he was definitely strangling a laugh. His voice trembled with his effort at neutrality.
She rapped her knuckles down hard on the table and said nothing. Her mouth set defiantly.
He burst out laughing, wrapping an arm around his middle and leaning forward to grab the back of a chair with the other. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” he apologized between gusts as she glowered at him. “I’m just—I’m seeing—oh, you must have been so mad.” He said that with pure delight.
She glared at him, imagining him bursting into flames from her look alone. Oh, if only that were possible.
“And all that from just one of my raspberries?” he crowed.
She turned completely around, fists clenched hard. The bones of her fingers kept trying to warn her that it would hurt if she hit His Highness’s jaw, but she could barely resist, nevertheless. “Do you think I am a bitch in heat?”
He stopped laughing, staring at her in shock. “Bon Dieu, Magalie. Of course not.”
The shock was so sincere, the fury in her started to relax.
His lips pressed together. Laughter snuck up past them, like steam escaping from under a pot lid. The lid abruptly abandoned its effort, and he burst out laughing again. “Pardon, pardon,” he apologized helplessly. “I just—I keep seeing—you must have been livid.”
Well, he certainly enjoyed the thought of making her livid, didn’t he?
She pulled the next item out of her sack and set it down with a thump.
Philippe stopped laughing as if she had flipped a switch. Next to his open box now sat a small Ziploc bag of couverture chocolate. Exactly as much as she would need to make a pot of chocolat chaud. In the same bag were zipped one cinnamon stick, nutmeg, and one vanilla bean. She pulled out a glass bottle of milk and set it on the table with a click.
The silence built between them until they could hear every laugh from every happy couple in the street below.
“Très bien,” Philippe said. “A sip for a bite. Go ahead, Magalie. Do your worst.”
Chapter 25
As she poured milk into a pot, and cream, Philippe took a small carton of raspberries out of his refrigerator, allowing Magalie a glimpse of fruit, yogurt, and not much else inside it. He bit into one of the raspberries, and her mouth watered at the thought of the sweet tartness on his tongue. Her breasts tingled as if he were closing his teeth around her. Satisfied with the flavor, he selected the largest, reddest raspberry in the flat and placed it exactly in the center of the macaron. It took him almost no time, as if he were a laser beam, so focused, so fast, and the result—once again stunning.
She had to tear her gaze away. She so desperately wanted to bite that macaron right out of his hands.
She dropped the cinnamon stick and vanilla bean into the liquid and added a quick grating of nutmeg, turning on the stove, and Philippe came to stand with one palm on the counter, watching her from less than arm’s length away. He pressed the side of his head against the cabinet, his eyes slumberous and utterly focused at once. “I think this is the most erotic thing I’ve ever done.”
She flushed and fumbled with the spoon. He just watched with lazy eyes that were not lazy at all.
“Or had done to me,” he clarified.
She wanted to say something about taking things for granted, but when she met his eyes, she saw that he didn’t take this evening’s outcome for granted at all. All of him—every muscle, every nerve, every bit of intellect and instinct—was concentrated on making sure that outcome was what he wanted.
“It’s as if I fastened my own wrists to a bed with silk scarves while you looked me over,” he breathed.
The flush spread to her breasts and filled them with so much desire that it had to find an outlet downward through her body, spearing through her, heating her.
“But the advantage is, I still have my hands free.” His low voice brushed her whole body up and down like fur.
She tried to concentrate on the stick of cinnamon, bobbing helplessly in the sea of white she was bringing to a simmer. The scent warmed her face.
He shifted with the same easy, deliberate movement she was using to stir the pot and came up behind her. One of his hands rested on the counter to one side of her, his other curled over the edge of the unused part of the stove. His body did not actually touch hers but was held so close to it with such a fine control that any shift on her part would mean she touched him.
Sh
e could feel his heat running all through her body, crossing that minute space. She shivered with it. It felt so very much like coming in out of the cold. The shiver brushed their clothes against each other.
“May I take your sweater?” he murmured, each word a glide of warm air over the part in her hair. “These sleeves.” He fingered the open material draping from her wrist. “You know you can’t work in them properly.”
She hesitated a long moment, head bent, his breath drifting over the back of her head, her exposed nape. Absorbing the feel of him, just there but not touching. Absorbing the moment. Then she released the wooden spoon and stretched both arms at an angle behind her. Yielding him the sweater.
He could have pulled the cardigan over her head. He didn’t. His arms circled around her enough to reach the buttons. Just enough. Still he did not tighten his hold into true contact. Very gently, the sweater tugging against her, he worked each button free—over her breasts, under her breasts, just over her navel so that her belly sucked in and the cinnamon-nutmeg-vanilla scents filled her lungs, down to the last one, just over the mound of curls hidden by her pants.
She swallowed the scents and bowed her head so far that the skin stretched taut over her nape.
He did not kiss her there.
The sweater glided down her arms with the gentlest of tugs, no hurry. He knew exactly how long it took to infuse cream so that a flavor permeated every part of it.
There was a soft sound, a puff of breath against her nape, when he saw what was under the cardigan. She shivered all over at that puff.
“Magalie. Silk?” He stopped tugging, the sweater pulled down to her forearms, her arms caught behind her back. One hand trailed delicately up her back over her top, the silk transparent to his touch. “You did it on purpose,” he breathed roughly, but there was no accusation in his voice, only delicious, husky praise. “An impractical sweater for cooking. If I hadn’t taken it off, would you have, Magalie? Complained it was getting in your way, and . . . and under it . . . you wanted to be able to feel my slightest touch?” He breathed on her nape. All the hairs on it rose to him.
His fingers skated up her back again—the slightest touch. Her spine arched helplessly.
He laughed suddenly, a rough, confounded sound. “Surely you weren’t worried that it would only be slight?”
Not exactly. Her worries and desires were far too complex to say.
He pulled the sweater free of her arms and tossed it aside. His right hand closed hers around the spoon, as if he was giving her a lifeline. “Don’t let my chocolate burn, Magalie.”
Of course she would not let it b—
“How long do you let it infuse?”
“Fifteen minutes.” Her voice was a thread of a whisper. Why did she let him steal all her authority?
He gave a small, exultant laugh. “You might want to set a timer.” And his mouth pressed to her nape.
She made a small sound of such intense pleasure that his left hand closed around her left wrist and tightened there as if he had to squeeze something desperately or lose all control. “Pardon,” he said and released her before she could even protest the pain, closing both his hands instead around the oven door handle on either side of her.
While her spoon trembled its path through the infusion, sending cinnamon and vanilla rocking in a stormy white sea, he kissed his way down her spine. He never touched her with any other part of his body. Just pressed his mouth through the silk inch by inch, until he was kneeling behind her, his lips at the small of her back, just above the low waist of her pants.
She sagged over her infusion, making soft, helpless sounds. He laughed out loud, the triumph making her pride rear its head, the joy in it making her softer still and puzzled with wonder.
He surged up, his body brushing the length of hers in a burst of power as he came to his feet. “Is it ready yet?” He was grinning as if he couldn’t contain his exultancy, but behind the warm fire in his eyes was still that intense, controlled focus.
“I—I don’t think that was quite fifteen minutes,” said Magalie, who had no idea. It had felt as if she had gone to heaven for all eternity while it lasted, but now that he had stopped, her whole back was begging for more.
His grin sharpened into something feral and hungry, but the blue eyes were rich with pleasure at what she had just asked for.
“Well, if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you must never stint on any preparatory step,” he allowed and teased the spoon out of her hand with a long stroke of his index finger down the heel of her palm and under the curl of her fingers. Keeping her fingers peeled back, he lifted her wrist, wickedly exposed, and grazed his faintly rough jaw all along the exquisitely sensitive inside of her forearm from wrist to elbow.
And purred roughly with delight when she gasped.
“Your wrists handcuffed to the bedposts?” she managed dryly. She was so proud of that dry tone. It felt like holding onto a little bit of herself. “Really?”
Again he laughed, a soft, joyous sound, intimate and dangerous. “I don’t seem vulnerable to you, Magalie? Submitted to your every desire?”
She twisted and for the first time gathered the strength of will to study his face, head-on, for a long moment. He just looked back. Her body was so much smaller, her position by far the more exposed and defenseless. And yet for that one long moment while he held her eyes, he did look vulnerable, almost as if he was tied naked to her bed, of his own volition, gazing at her as she prepared to undo him.
Arousal flooded her. Arousal that undid her. That had always been the problem. He undid her. And her was all she had.
She twisted back to the infusion fast, like a fencer might twist to avoid a killing thrust. She scooped the cinnamon stick and vanilla bean out of the milk with the spoon, dropping them onto a small plate on the counter. What had she thought she was doing, coming here? As she sat up there in her creamy tower gazing at his “heart,” what burst of idiocy had said, Yes, you can do this. You can give up yourself.
Philippe brushed the faint prickle of his jaw over the nape of her neck.
Oh, God. She had never known that her perfect, pseudo-careless chignons could leave her so vulnerable. She had never known that she could love it, that vulnerability. That she would be willing to just bow her body forward over the glass stove and beg him to do anything to her he wanted to.
The hot burner kept her straight. She scooped the ovals of chocolate with trembling hands and dropped them into the pot.
The milk spattered at her abruptness. With his jaw still at her nape, circling sleepy and sensual like a cat, sparkles from it running through her everywhere, his hands closed over hers, and he rubbed every burning drop of it away with his palms.
She had often felt those little burning drops while she made hot chocolate. She had never before had anyone there to smooth them away.
She linked her fingers through his and lifted one of his hands to her mouth. She kissed his knuckles, holding his hand cradled against her lips for a second. She couldn’t help it.
Behind her, his body went very still. The cheek against the nape of her neck stopped moving.
When she brought her hand back down to stir the chocolate, he turned his head and kissed her nape, just the silk touch of his lips, no prickle at all. His palm slid slowly away from the back of her hand, a leisurely wandering path up her arm, over skin and then silk that whispered between his calluses and her skin, up to her shoulder.
She added a spoonful of bittersweet Valrhona cocoa, darkening her usual chocolat even further for him, and whisked the mixture into smoothness.
His thumb came up to trace the corner of her lips, which from his position behind her he could not see. The touch of his thumb made her want to nuzzle her face into his hand, to whimper and beg. “You’re not smiling,” he whispered.
No. What she felt was too intense to smile.
“I like the smile.” His thumb teased at the corner of her mouth as if he could coax one to life. “It makes me fee
l in the most erotic danger.”
A slow one grew, from some deep and powerful place in her belly. No smile before over her chocolate had ever felt like this one. Slowly she stirred the chocolate three final turns.
“What are you wishing for me, Magalie?”
To render him completely and utterly helpless with desire for her.
She shook her head, refusing to answer.
“You’re going to make me drink it blind, aren’t you?” His thumb traced over that dangerous smile, end to end and back, then stroked down, over her chin, down the length of her throat, to nestle in the hollow there.
“Do you have a chocolate pot?” she asked.
He did, sitting high up on the back of a top shelf of his cabinets, someone’s idea of a Christmas present for a top pastry chef. He stretched up over her head for it, all the long strength of his body against her back, and brought it down for her.
She poured the chocolate into the pot, then slipped the moulinet in and rubbed the rounded end of the thick wooden stick between her two palms, hard and fast, frothing the chocolate to give it an exceptionally smooth richness.
A low, growling sound vibrated from his chest through her back as he watched the movement of her hands on the wood. Her hands slowed involuntarily, as she stared at the form of the wood and realized why. Her blush took over her body, and her hands faltered. She couldn’t froth it properly. She was burning up.
She reached blindly for a cup, and he moved away from her to stand just a couple of feet beside her, watching her as she poured his fate. For a moment, the silence was so absolute she could hear the liquid flowing from the pot, then the clink of the pot as she set it down.
The scent of chocolate now filled his apartment. As if she had made the place her own.
She swallowed and stared at the dark liquid in the white cup for a moment. All around them the apartment was dark, lit by nothing but the utility light over the stove and the illumination coming in from the street through the great expanse of windows.
The Chocolate Kiss Page 20