Geneviève narrowed her eyes at him as if she suspected impudence. Philippe just leaned back against the counter, his presence competing firmly with hers to dominate the overcrowded kitchen, until Magalie felt like the stuffed inside of a sandwich fighting valiantly to prove she was the best part.
“And you.” Geneviève pointed a firm finger at her niece. “No more showing that Christophe our recipes in his kitchen.”
Philippe beamed at her. “Tante Geneviève, I believe we shall deal very well together.”
“So presumptuous,” Aunt Geneviève said of him, resigned, and sailed out to deal with the customers who had just heard her complaining about them. She was trying her best to make sure her complaints were audible, but instead of driving people away, the complaints kept showing up on new food blogs as her “charming idiosyncracies.” Now that Christophe had spoken, with no lesser authorities than Philippe Lyonnais and Sylvain Marquis to back him up, all the food bloggers were following in his wake. There had been some blog called A Taste of Elle that had used so many exclamation points about them, Magalie had double-checked the doses in Aunt Aja’s tea. They didn’t want to give anyone a heart attack.
Magalie hadn’t yet told Tante Geneviève that her behavior was being labeled a “charming idiosyncracy,” because, well . . . things could get ugly.
At her exit, Aunt Aja, too, picked up a tray and left the kitchen, making herself discreet.
“I’m pretty sure Christophe is dating someone new now,” Magalie said. They had come by again the day before and sat there at one of the little tables for a long time, talking, Christophe and the woman named Chantal. She didn’t toss her head nearly as much when she was around him, either, as if he reassured her somehow.
Philippe made a firm noise of approval at Christophe’s dating someone else.
“Also, I think your chefs might be infiltrating the place. I’ve seen Grégory in Claire-Lucy’s toy shop twice, and one of your guys—Olivier?—is definitely flirting with Aimée. Are they good guys?”
“I can’t really claim to keep up with their dating habits, Magalie. You’re the one who has been feeding my team hot chocolate for weeks. They’re probably whatever you made out of them.”
Magalie gave him an exasperated look. Now he was starting to sound like the aunts. As if he really believed her chocolate could change people, instead of pretending to believe it, the way she did.
Philippe smiled a little, shifting easily out of her way when she reached for something. He drank an espresso-size cup of her hot chocolate, watching her as he did it with warm eyes and desire slumbering in them, held in abeyance at that hour of the afternoon.
“What did you wish on me this time?” he murmured, sipping slowly, as if he wanted to savor the chocolate or the moment as long as possible.
That the afternoons like this, him stopping in her kitchen, and the evenings when he came back, could go on forever. She stared at the remaining chocolate in the pot, dissatisfied with her wishing, because wishes could only be for the inside of a person. You couldn’t wish things from time. Besides, that one sounded like a wish she would have to wish on herself, and she wasn’t sure her chocolate worked that way.
She wasn’t even sure her chocolate worked. It was a nice game, but Philippe certainly seemed immune.
“I don’t feel any different,” he said. As he always did. “Unless—did you wish me happiness by any chance?”
Brightness spilled through her. He smiled and kissed her, so that she tasted the chocolate on his lips, and happiness unfurled inside her and tried to reach out and latch its roots into him.
She frowned, wondering if she could turn happiness into a container plant. She had been doing a really good job of it before. Now the stuff was acting like mint, which her herbalist mother had always warned her about when she’d taught Magalie gardening in Provence. No matter what you did, mint eventually escaped and sent its roots all over the place.
“Who’s the lavender from?” Philippe asked suddenly.
She blinked. Had he somehow scented her thought?
“On the wall in your room. In your accent. On your underwear when you first put it on.” A blush sparkled across her cheeks at the memory of the times he had had his nose anywhere near her underwear when she first put it on. “Who did it come from?”
“My mother. You don’t hear Provence as much with Geneviève, because she came to Paris when she was eighteen, but she and my mother grew up in lavender fields near Chamaret.”
He smiled a little, his gaze running over her as if he was seeing a charming vision. “And you? Did you grow up in a lavender field?”
“Sometimes,” she said briskly, beginning to unload the tiny dishwasher of its last set of thimble-size glasses and handle-less cups. “Yes. All the summers.”
His eyes sparkled. “I can see you as a little girl in a field of purple. Can we take—” He caught his lower lip between his teeth abruptly. His eyes flared, as if he had shocked himself.
What? Her head tilted, and she studied him, scenting after something in his expression. What had he wondered? What had made him so wary?
“Could we take a vacation there this summer?” he finished slowly, watching her very cautiously.
That wasn’t what he had been about to say. Her eyebrows flexed together uncertainly. Summer was only a few months away, true. Not that much farther than the warming weather he had mentioned the other day. Still, from winter to summer seemed like an eternity to count on anything. Even though she had just wished for things to go on forever.
She took a deep breath. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to relax and count on the summer. But she felt physically sick when she tried to get it out. Her heartbeat raced, and her palms actually got clammy. “Um, yes,” she said hurriedly, refusing to let her stupid old issues keep her down, but she had to turn around quickly and focus on her chocolate, breathing carefully, trying to calm her stomach. “We can,” she said too loudly and too definitely.
There was a moment’s silence behind her. Then his cup clicked on the counter. He wrapped an arm around her from behind and squeezed her back against him so tightly that her breath huffed out of her and her feet left the floor. “See you this evening.”
He looped something silk-soft around her throat, tugging it just enough to make her feel leashed and a little breathless. “An advance,” he murmured and was gone.
Released from his hold, the softness slipped down her arms over her fingers: a garnet-red scarf.
“So where is your father from?” he asked that evening in her apartment, come to pick her up for dinner, leaning against her little counter watching her consider clothing options. A layer of scarves draped from the hook on the back of her closet door. She was starting not to know where to fit them all.
“America,” Magalie said in a tone that did not invite conversation.
Of course, Philippe ignored that closed door, as he did everything else that tried to keep him out. “You’re American?” he said, astonished. “I never would have g—”
He was saying I never would have guessed, and she could feel the reassurance growing in her with the words, that confirmation that she did, indeed, belong here.
But he broke off, with that intrigued tilt of his head. “So that’s what I heard, that little hint of Cade Corey.”
Cade Corey very clearly did not belong in Paris. Her accent marked her unmistakably as foreign every time she spoke. She only belonged because Sylvain Marquis had accepted her. Magalie folded her arms, dikes in place, protecting her island. Her belonging depended only on herself.
“I’m both,” she said, turning away. “American and French. Dual nationality.” She walked over to her favorite window, the one from which she could just catch a glimpse of the Tour Eiffel when it sparkled.
“What does your father do?” asked His Highness, who thought all doors were there for him to walk through and missed the whole point about locks and keys and shutting him out.
“He’s an apiculturalist.”
&nbs
p; “Bees.” Philippe laughed. “Bees and lavender. Bon sang, I can smell them in you. Under all that chocolate.” And then, abruptly, on another note entirely: “That salaud Sylvain. Is that where that new chocolate of his came from? The honey-lavender?”
She hadn’t even known Sylvain had put out a new chocolate. Magalie turned and gave him an incredulous look. Intimacy was clearly not her thing. How he could imagine she was engaging in it with more than one person at once was beyond her. “I think the closest we’ve ever gotten was working on that window of his.”
“That’s close enough,” Philippe said, pissed off. “He’s got a very good sense of smell.”
“He’s also crazy about Cade Corey, you know.”
Philippe made the sound of a man who hadn’t been born in the last rainshower. “He’s moved the date of the wedding. It was supposed to be in March, and now it’s June.”
“That’s because Cade’s sister is in the hospital. He told me about it while we were working on the window. She got hurt pretty badly in the Côte d’Ivoire, near some cacao cooperative. Trust me, no one is going to change Sylvain’s mind about Cade.”
Again that doubtful grunt. “Sylvain knows superior quality when he sees it.”
Her heart gave a funny jump that seemed to spill warmth from it all through her. “Superior to a beautiful billionaire?”
“Clearly.” Philippe sounded startled he had to point it out.
“I think he’s latched onto her,” Magalie said dryly. “I don’t know how they’re going to handle that question of place.”
“That question of place?”
“Well, he obviously has to be here. He’s the best chocolatier in the world.”
Philippe shrugged. “He’s not bad with bonbons.”
Magalie bit back a grin. “And she’s heir to a multinational corporation headquartered in the U.S. Here I always thought my parents had a tough choice between place and person.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, that alert look, the one he had in restaurants when he was trying to identify an elusive taste. “Your parents? Bees and lavender didn’t turn out to be the match made in heaven?”
“Oh, sure. But academic career at Cornell, lavender fields in Provence, back and forth and back and forth, trying to figure out a happiness that allowed them both to be who they wanted to be . . . There’s no way Sylvain and Cade can do that; someone will have to give it all up.”
“Cade,” Philippe said, like someone in the know.
Magalie slumped in relief. “Oh, thank God. If Paris had lost Sylvain to Corey Chocolate, I might have had to kill her.” But she wondered if it hurt Cade at all, to give up her place for Sylvain. Or whether she was just so convinced she owned the whole world, she didn’t care what part of it she was in.
Philippe pressed his lips together. “Have you been eating his chocolates all this time you’ve been snubbing my desserts?”
“I like chocolate.”
He folded his arms. “Magalie. I didn’t want you to make me have to do this, because you’re so sensitive about competition. But if you want chocolate, I can make you chocolate”—he leaned toward her a little, his teeth showing sharp—“that will melt your insides out.”
She lifted her chin at him, feeling those insides melt just at the thought of him trying.
He, of course, went for her throat.
There might be more than one reason he kept buying her so many scarves.
Chapter 32
Two days later, Philippe brought Magalie one of his boxes. She opened it carefully, her heart racing in anticipation. It was simple. The simplest thing he had ever brought her. A macaron of chocolate, its shell glossy and perfect and freckled prettily with a dusting of darker cocoa that had been baked in. The pieds, the ruffled band around the base of each shell, were, of course, exquisite. She picked it up, mouth watering already, just from the texture against her fingers. The ganache inside the shell was a pale, creamy color, with maybe just a whisper of purple but maybe not.
She looked at him. He was excited, eager to see her reaction. But he didn’t have that go-ahead-and-strip-naked-now look on his face that he did when he handed her some of his creations, either. So he wasn’t convinced she would have an orgasm on her first bite. This was a softer look, intense.
She bit into it, and—his standards for orgasms must be extremely high, because she still felt a mild one. A rush of bliss at the whisper of a crunch and the yield in the chocolate macaron, then the crisp, scented, somehow familiar flavor of the ganache. She opened her eyes again, letting it melt on her tongue. God, he was so good. “Lavender?”
He nodded, his eyes alight with pleasure. But he leaned against her window, his arms crossed. Still waiting.
She took another bite. More lusciousness. How did he manage to be so good? Lavender and chocolate. Her heritage and her present, her and her mother. Another bite, into the middle, and a thin cocoa shell hidden in the ganache yielded to her teeth, and its insides burst onto her tongue, a melting liquid honey caramel.
Oh. Her father was there, too. It was all of her. And it was delicious.
She looked at him, the bright, warm lion leaning against her cold window, so sure that she would love it. Had he spent two days on this? Dreaming up the best way to combine those three flavors in tribute to her?
Her eyes stung. She had to rub them quickly.
He came away from the window at once, scooping her up across his arms like a child, his eyes astonished. He laid her down on her bed and made slow, cuddling love to her, and they missed his dinner reservations.
“How much back and forth are we talking about?” he asked suddenly, later that night, as they headed out to get some falafel in his corner of Paris. There was still a softness between them, a gentleness that seemed to stretch from that earlier lovemaking into the evening. They were crossing the bridge over to l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s other bridges stretching away from them over the dark water in bracelets of illumination, the façade of l’Hôtel glowing in the night. The ice rink had been removed. Spring was coming.
It was funny how, subtly, after five years of bastioning herself on her island, her sense of place was expanding. First the running, then the snow, then walking the streets with Philippe, focused on the two of them and indifferent to anyone else—sometimes she felt as if her soul was unfurling, like great wings that had been caught too long in a cocoon. Or maybe just as long as they’d needed to be to get ready?
“I don’t know. Do you want me to try to count it up?”
“Yes.”
Seriously, he just walked through doors, as if someone was supposed to be leaping to open them for him. How many times did she have to slam one in his nose for him to get the point that her doors were sacred? But she felt so soft. She didn’t feel like struggling to hold this door closed. “I don’t really remember from before I was four or so, but I know I was born in the U.S., and I think Maman tried the first year there, and then my dad pulled all kinds of strings to spend the next year in Provence. I remember kindergarten was in the U.S., and what would have been first grade, l’école primaire, was here. In Chamaret, not Paris. Dad came over for the holidays, spring break, and Cornell lets out in early May, so he spent that summer here. Then Maman steeled herself and tried to go back again but only made it through half the year. I guess it was pretty cold in Ithaca that year. I remember having fun in the snow and then all of a sudden being in the middle of the mistral instead. That was second grade. Then Dad got a fellowship for two years here. That worked out really well; everyone was happy. I misunderstood; I thought we were going to be able to stay.”
Philippe’s hand flexed on hers. But he didn’t say anything.
“I was always misunderstanding things like that.” She shook her head ruefully. “Then back and forth a bit more. Sometimes Maman and I would be here; sometimes she would dig in there again and try to stick it out. We were always in Provence for summers; they worked something out with my school when it was a U.S. one so that I coul
d do May’s schoolwork from a distance. A couple of times they talked about divorce and treated it as a trial separation, but they never did it. And when I was sixteen, he got a Fulbright-Hays for another two years here.”
“He couldn’t just get a permanent job at a university here?”
“He was at Cornell.”
“Yes.” Apparently, he quite understood not asking a man to sell himself short. “And she couldn’t grow lavender there?”
“She tried.” Magalie spread her hands. Or one hand. The other was held in his. “It wasn’t the same at all.”
“No,” he said in a voice that spoke of a few summer vacations in Provence himself. “I can see how that would be.”
They were silent for a few minutes, waiting at the light to cross from the quay to l’Hôtel de Ville.
“The Lyonnais family has been in Paris for over five generations,” he said suddenly.
Well, whoop-di-do for you, she thought in American. “Shall I curtsy or just kiss your feet?”
His lips pressed tightly together, his fingers hardening on her knuckles. “You know, you wouldn’t find me nearly as arrogant if you would quit inventing it in everything I say. I mean that we tend to stay in one place.”
Her boot heels rang for two more steps.
“Forever,” he added. “We are Paris.”
Two more taps of her heels. Lyonnais was a part of Paris, that was true. For five generations, they had been marking the city with their macarons and desserts. They were as integral a part of it as the Eiffel Tower.
“I, for example, am never going to leave Paris, ever. I’m Philippe Lyonnais.”
“And not arrogant at all about it.”
He let out an annoyed breath. “I’m just pointing it out.”
Yes, she was getting an inkling of what he was pointing out. She twisted her head just enough so that she could look up at him without him, maybe, noticing it. They walked that way for several paces before she realized that not only was he perfectly aware she was studying him, and keeping his gaze straight ahead to facilitate it, but that he was subtly guiding her around obstacles on the sidewalk to allow her to keep doing it without interruption.
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