The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  Magalie set her jaw mulishly. That verb crack did not sit well with her. It made her sound like a crème brulée, with nice, shiny burnt caramel on the top but all you had to do was get a spoon and tap it, and you would find the insides all soft and rich and vulnerable.

  Or like a raw egg oozing out its middle. She scowled.

  “Are you listening to what I’m telling you, or are you just getting mad?”

  She looked up at him. Flakes of snow were layering his shoulders, and the hair curling from under his cap was damp from melted snow, making it look dark brown, hiding its gold. He was a beautiful man, strong, handsome, and very focused, and just standing still looking at him for too long made her feel like the snow, melting lovingly against him.

  She frowned worriedly, pulling her lower lip in under her teeth. She was really not comfortable with the idea of being water.

  Philippe heaved a quick, hard sigh at her silence and frowned. “I take it you’re not in love with me.”

  Magalie gasped as if he had just shoved her over the side of the bridge into the icy cold water. “I—I mean—I don’t—I—” The feel of him, the taste of him, the laugh that swept out and embraced the world. Those feral, dangerous looks. One pâtisserie after another laid out before her like a dare. Her absolute inability to make him back up a step. The taste of him. His happiness right now. The way he had curved her face into his shoulder in the shower the night before, taking her against the wall. That curl of his hand over her, oh, God—as if she was precious.

  “I . . .”

  He didn’t interrupt her. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t lose patience or seek to cut the moment short to protect himself. He just waited for her to stumble to a halt and stare up at him. A long way up at him. This damn slippery snow was really cramping her style.

  With no more words, she could only stare. Wondering if he was going to turn around and walk away.

  “Intéressant,” he said finally, a little flatly, when it was clear she had nothing else to say.

  He took her hand again and led her onto her island. “Let’s go warm up.”

  He stopped first at his dark and empty shop, which seemed a good place to linger to her. But he didn’t shrug out of his coat, just stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, gazing at the curving display case in the ornate palace.

  “How about that one?” he said with a little jerk of his chin.

  Magalie followed the gesture to the row of chocolate éclairs, glossy and perfect, voted the best in Paris three years running. Long, thick, blunt-ended, and . . . she gave him an indignant look, while a blush climbed up her face.

  He looked innocent but with a little curl he kept trying to press out of the corners of his mouth. “It’s chocolate,” he offered, guilelessly.

  Even a day old, they were probably exquisitely delicious. Just the right size for her mouth to close over it, her teeth to sink into the glossy dark-chocolate surface, finding the cool chocolate cream spurting into her mouth from inside . . .

  She swallowed and folded her lips in over her teeth, pressing them together as hard as she could.

  A blush was feathering his cheekbones, too. Whistling a little when he could manage the sound through his grin but moving stiffly enough to make her wonder exactly what was happening to his body under that coat of his, Philippe stripped off his gloves and pulled one of his pastry boxes from under the shelf behind the display case. “Allez, Magalie, what tempts you the most in here?”

  Involuntarily, her eyes went to him. He was big and strong and controlled, his hair curling dark and snow-damp under his hat, his energy even in this quiet moment seeming to fill the whole elegant space. There was a drop of water clinging to his lashes, melted snow. He looked up at her silence, and the drop fell onto his cheek.

  He grinned when he found her eyes on him, that quick, hot surge of triumph that both made her giddy with pleasure and made her want to stamp her foot and say she was not his conquest. “Why, thank you, Magalie.”

  She stuck out her chin.

  His gaze went instantly to her throat. “May I say the compliment is entirely returned?”

  She flushed slowly with pleasure, despite herself, feeling again a glimpse of that moment the night before when she had felt completely free and strong and proud in her nakedness, Lady Godiva. To be the most tempting thing in this room full of world-famous temptations . . . how could he possibly mean it? Was it true he felt that way about her?

  He moved with sudden impatience, surprising her by the careless, quick way he selected half a dozen macarons and pastries and filled the box. He didn’t do impatience, and most certainly not with his own works of art. “Tiens. On y va.”

  On the way out, he put his phone to his ear. “You guys able to move around in the vans?”

  Magalie glanced at him in surprise.

  “Go ahead and clean out the display cases when you get a chance to stop by,” he said. “They might as well make someone happy. Oui, bien sûr, à tout à l’heure. Restos du Coeur,” he explained to Magalie with a shrug as he hung up.

  The organization of soup kitchens and vans that fed the homeless and the hungry. “You seem pretty familiar with them.”

  “Well, they come by three times a week. There’s not much I’ll sell a day old.” He shrugged again, stopping before the main courtyard entrance to her building. “I’m not the only person they’ll get a windfall from today. Or a snowfall.” His grin flashed.

  She looked away from it, her heart squeezing too tightly again. He picked up her hand by the index finger and nudged its gloved tip against the code panel.

  She realized suddenly that this had been his goal since at least the Place des Vosges. Not to go back to his apartment. He wanted to be in her place. As he stood close to her and therefore loomed over her in her stupid snowboots, his will tried to wrap around her body and force the code out of her fingers, his eyes hungry, eager.

  She gave him a narrow look and, just to be completely annoying and keep up some boundaries badly in need of shoring, she curved her shoulder and left hand over the code panel, blocking what she entered from view.

  “Nice, Magalie.” Now there was an edge to his voice. Like her aunts, she was totally opposed to shame, but she felt it trouble her, nevertheless. The morning in the snow, his whisper in her ear, the heart of a dessert that had broken her own heart with its beauty, and she was hiding her entry code from him. Maybe particularly because of that rose-heart and its power. “Any delivery boy can have it, but not me?”

  “I’m not worried about the delivery boys,” she said and realized belatedly that that admission wasn’t going to shore up boundaries at all.

  He gave her a penetrating look, the line of his mouth relaxing. “Worried about me, are you?” he murmured as he followed her up the winding stairs. His voice came from about the level of her butt. It was probably just as well she was wearing a long, heavy coat.

  “When the weather warms up, can you put on a short skirt and those lace leggings of yours and let me escort you home up these stairs?” he suggested, making her bottom tighten and the back of her thighs tingle. Did the man have one constant stream of fantasies going about her?

  What an arousing thought.

  She didn’t answer him, but it occurred to her, oddly, that there was no reason they wouldn’t be seeing each other in the springtime. It was mid-February. Warmer weather was only a couple of months away. And she wasn’t planning on being moved out of this city by anyone, and he wasn’t moving, so . . .

  Her eyebrows knit in concentration, wondering if she could do this.

  It was hard to trust in happiness, coming from another person, but . . . there was so much of it, around him. It squeezed her heart until she couldn’t breathe.

  He frowned at her doorknob, giving it a tug to make sure it was at least locked. “Magalie, sérieux, someone could break this lock with one hard kick.”

  She turned in the cave of space between his arm, his body, and the wood, suddenly enchanted by
the feeling of it all. His size, his closeness, his presence at her door, the snow still melting on them, its scent losing its crispness. On the other side of the door was still her refuge, but at his approach, any loneliness or cold in it had already fled.

  He brought both arms up to frame her head with his forearms against the door. “Let me in, Magalie?” It was the coaxing tone that made her realize how much he wanted this. How carefully he had been aiming toward it all morning, and maybe even longer than that.

  She had a choice. It felt both sweet and therefore scary to rise up on tiptoe, kiss his snow-cold lips, and unlock the door.

  Chapter 28

  Philippe was in the witch’s tower, and it was all he could do not to wave a damn sword in victory. He didn’t want her to kick him out of it, though. She didn’t have any visible thorns planted at its base to blind him, but it was a long fall, nevertheless.

  He had taken over the tiny space between her little stove and the floor-to-ceiling window that opened inward from the iron railing of a pseudo-balcony front. His body blocked her miniature refrigerator and what there was of her counter space, but that was on purpose. He enjoyed shifting out of her way when she needed to access something and letting her movements brush him. Enjoyed it so much that his sword-waving was getting pretty obvious, now that his coat was off. He kept his stance open, not hiding it from her, wondering what she would do with the knowledge.

  She had taken off her caked snowboots at the door, as he had his, but with a slanting glance at him, she had pulled on those thigh-high boots, turning him to molten lava instantly. Now she was stirring that chocolate of hers, and he might as well have been her cauldron, bubbling and melting at every turn of her spoon, thickening and rising and clinging to it, until with one stroke of her finger down the back of the wood, she would see exactly how desperate he was for her.

  So he might as well tell her. She seemed to like that.

  “You have no idea how hot this makes me.” To be in her most inviolate space, with the snow sliding past her windows, and her stirring just for him the chocolate that was both the very symbol of cozy warmth and the epitome of pure temptation. And those damn boots. He was barefoot, a little sign of vulnerability and also of making himself at home, and she was in those boots she knew he lusted after. He loved it.

  Her breasts rose and fell at his words. He smiled a little, looking out at her glimpse of the Eiffel Tower and his name down the street, blurred through the snow. Life was very, very good.

  He had a lot of work ahead of him, but, God knew, he loved his work.

  He slanted a glance down over her butt and thighs and the long leather of her boots and tried to keep his grin contained to something that wouldn’t entirely tempt fate. Oh, yes, he had never shied from work.

  “What are you wishing on me this time?” He was dreaming of running his fingertip from the top of her head down her spine and over that saucy butt to dip under the top of her boots and skirt around her thighs when he realized that he probably could. She might not throw the pot of simmering cream over his head, even.

  So he did—from the part in her hair, down around the clasp that held her chignon, back to the line of her spine, down over the nape of her neck, down her back, over the small of her back, over one buttock, and then curling under the edge of leather, following it to her inner thigh.

  Her spine flexed under his fingertip, her bottom tightened, and the fine hairs on the nape of her neck rose. Oh, yes, he thought with visceral satisfaction that surged arousal painfully through him. She wanted him. He had that.

  He kept his finger tucked in her boot, there at her inner thigh, with malice aforethought, letting the trapped finger wiggle and flex from time to time, his other fingers drifting against that inner thigh, as if he might do something more purposeful with them. But never doing it.

  It was so much fun to be cruel. Especially to someone who had just stabbed him, out there on the bridge in the snow.

  “Are you wishing me to melt?” he suggested, letting his thumb drift so absently higher on her inner thigh and then tucking it down politely again as if catching an inadvertent stray. Her lips parted when he did it, and she had to pull the lower one in with her teeth. Her bent head tried to indicate a focus on her chocolate.

  He never knew he was such a sadist. “Or trying to turn me into a beast?” He pretended his finger was uncomfortably twisted between her leather and legging and that he was trying to wriggle it free. His other fingers grazed randomly with his efforts over whatever was within reach. There was quite a lot of interesting territory that could be “accidentally,” oh, so fleetingly in reach.

  “Or maybe just to warm a man up on a cold day?”

  She lifted eyes that were utterly dazed, her mouth open for him, her gaze clinging to his own lips.

  He gave her inner thigh a little squeeze to thank her for his victory, and suddenly his hand found its way free, and he strolled over to her other window, the one he had to kneel on her narrow bed to look out of. His body pointed out to him that he was not just a sadist but a masochist, but he got a rush of hot joy out of abandoning her, nevertheless.

  Look like he’d slapped her when he told her he loved her, would she?

  Oh, yes, he was going to have a lot of fun this afternoon.

  “Drink it and find out,” she snapped at him. He allowed himself a very mean grin at the snow through her window. Frustrée, Magalie?

  He rose from her bed, his knee marking the comforter with a stamp of possession that was a promise of things to come. She was going to let him into that bed. Oh, yes, she was. If he had his way, by the end of it, she would want to tie him up and never let him out.

  You cruel bastard, quit torturing us with these images, his body begged.

  He came back to sip some of the chocolate. She gave it to him hot, very hot, and he took his time playing with it, blowing on it, finally allowing himself one small sip. That sip shot straight through his body and grabbed a fistful of his heart.

  He gave her his most vindictive smile. “I don’t feel any different.”

  She thumped her own cup down onto the counter, making no attempt to drink it. He had never seen her drink her own chocolate. It was the kind of thing that could make a man really cautious about poison.

  He leaned in and kissed her thoroughly, breaking apart the line her mouth had formed, turning it back into that soft and open and malleable thing and making sure she got a very good taste of her own chocolate off his tongue while he did it.

  “Try some of mine, Magalie.” He opened the pastry box he had filled at the shop.

  “You didn’t even make those for me.” She sounded sulky, either about her chocolate or his tormenting of her, or maybe a combination. “They were from the display case.”

  “Magalie, everything I’ve made for the past four months has been for you.”

  The sulk softened out of her mouth. Her eyes rose and clung to his in the way they had multiple times last night and this morning, as if trying to find out the truth behind his façade. What façade? He had never in his dealings with her been remotely subtle.

  She looked back at the box, and he knew before she even tried it that she was going to do something to steal her power back, just by the subtle, almost shy curve of her mouth. Slowly, she drew one perfectly manicured fingernail down the length of the choux of the chocolate éclair, just below the glossy chocolate glaze. His whole body seized at this effort to subjugate him.

  She lifted the éclair from its paper wrapping, her fingers handling it so carefully, and brought it to her mouth. Her lips parted around it, and he had just a glimpse of white teeth before they closed over the chocolate. She let her lashes fall, her body sigh, a long, little sound of pleasure.

  Arousal beat through him, a flood force that caught him up and tossed his body any way it wanted. He reached up and closed a hand through the handle of one of her cabinets, hanging on for dear life.

  “Magalie,” he said with thin, lethal warning. “I was goin
g to do this to you anyway, but now you are really going to pay.”

  Chapter 29

  Magalie was just starting to dream of taking control of the situation, her mouth closed around the lusciously suggestive pastry, when Philippe pulled it out of her hands, leaving the cream clinging to her lips and driving her to instant temper. What was wrong with him with his tormenting, broken promises, the touch pulled away, the taste pulled away? And hadn’t he gotten her message with the éclair? Why couldn’t he just be her victim? He had seemed to like it the night before.

  He wrapped her hair around his hand and held her head back, studying that cream on her lips. She knew what he was waiting for her to do, and she tried to refuse him the gesture, but she couldn’t, couldn’t just leave that cream clinging to her lips forever. Involuntarily, eventually, her tongue slipped out and licked it off.

  His teeth showed in fierce triumph. Eyes dilated blue-black. “Good girl,” he said approvingly, and she gasped. She hadn’t done it at his command.

  But it nevertheless felt annoyingly and erotically like a reward for good behavior when he pulled her up off the floor and kissed her, lavishly, thoroughly, with no hurry to end. Pushing her back against the cold glass of her window, so that it seeped into her back and her butt while his heat consumed her breasts and belly and the thighs she lifted to wrap around him.

  He kissed her . . . forever. Time seemed to blur, until there was nothing but their bodies and their mouths. Until she had always been locked away in this tower, not alone but with a man and his hardness and lips and teeth and tongue. Until she always would be there, the new Lady of Shalott, weaving bodies instead of threads, and a curse be on her if she stay. She wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could.

  He rode her pelvis over his arousal, adjusting her hips to his liking with every change in angle of his kiss. How could he be so deeply aroused and in so little hurry? He just kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, until all the rest of her life drifted away. And there was only his mouth. Only his body.