The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  Princes. She could see why they had driven traditional witches so wild.

  “Now that I’ve opened that shop on l’Île Saint-Louis, there will always be a Lyonnais shop on l’Île Saint-Louis. Forever. Or as close to forever as we’ll know. I’ll pass it on to o—my children.”

  That still set her back teeth, his claiming of the island. It had been her street before. Hers and her aunts’.

  “If they’re interested in it,” Philippe amended. “If they get some perverse, obstreperous blood from their mother’s side that makes them want to thwart me all the time for no reason,” he said broodingly, “and decide to become—become—qui sait?—engineers or something, then I’m sure there will be a niece or nephew who will continue the line.”

  As far as she was concerned, any child of Philippe’s would have obstreperous blood. She caught her mind going off on the oddest, most delicious tangent and yanked it back in a desperate grasp, redirecting the subject before her mind could terrify her again that way. “Did you know my aunts don’t really need the income from La Maison des Sorcières?”

  He shrugged. She couldn’t get over her knowledge of his body. Sometimes, when he shrugged like that under his coat, the thought of the way his naked shoulders looked as he did it, the easy flex of muscle, would run all through her. “I guessed. I researched the ownership of the buildings before I bought in the street, so I knew your Aunt Geneviève had owned that building for decades. You don’t pay three salaries and the taxes on that kind of thing with five tiny tables and thirty business hours a week, ten months of the year. I always knew financial concerns weren’t your real problem with me.”

  “And yet you managed to refrain from any cracks about me being a privileged princess?” While he carried a major business on his shoulders, his name and his skill its entire base, and never stopped moving.

  He looked blank. “Everyone knows witches don’t work regular hours. It’s princes who have all the responsibility.” His mouth curved a little at his assumption of the royal title. Probably waiting to see what reaction he could provoke. “Besides, you’re the daughter of a lavender-grower and a professor. Don’t kid yourself. You’re a peasant.”

  “You’re the son of a professor and a pastry chef!” she said indignantly. “Didn’t boys used to be apprenticed as pastry chefs if they failed at school?” Although his family of pastry chefs had been making enough money to land them solidly among the Sixteenth Arrondissement set for generations. “Why aren’t you a peasant?”

  “Some people are born princes, and some people make themselves one,” he said sublimely and shot her a grin, waiting for her next retort.

  She rolled her eyes and refused to give him the satisfaction.

  His next slanting glance warned her he was still digging for something. “So it must have been hell on boyfriends.” She stiffened. His eyes narrowed, as if that stiffening was the ring of metal under his shovel. “That back and forth.”

  She shrugged. “I tried pretty hard once when I was sixteen. Well, fifteen when I first learned the move was coming; I had a birthday in there before we actually moved.”

  He stopped walking, there in the middle of the Place Hôtel de Ville, with the gleaming façade rising up behind him as if it were his royal palace. “Explain ‘tried pretty hard’.”

  She shrugged again. What a stupid thing to make her eyes sting. Sometimes she wanted to shake herself. “I thought if I loved someone enough we could . . . stick. That it would make something permanent. That we would . . . belong together.” Her hand slipped away from his arm. She hugged herself reflexively, a gesture that conveyed exactly what she had been trying to do. “I was a complete idiot. I didn’t even want him to use condoms, so I could get pregnant.”

  “Good God,” he said involuntarily.

  “He was a little smarter.” She made a face at the memory.

  Philippe’s eyebrows flicked up. “Not that great?” he asked sympathetically.

  She wrinkled her nose. “It kind of hurt.”

  “The first time?”

  “Just . . . sometimes.” She shrugged. “I guess I take a while to warm up. To—” She shrugged again.

  “To people?” he suggested, his mouth wry.

  “That’s not exactly what I meant.”

  “To places?”

  “Were you even listening to what I was talking about?”

  “To . . . things?” A grin slipped out. “Shall we say it takes you a while to warm up to . . . things?”

  She pressed her lips together.

  “So . . . it hurt sometimes. And you never told him to wait longer, change his style, or just get the fuck off you?” She blinked at the thread of anger in his voice. He studied her for a moment and then closed his hands around her shoulders, in deep approval. “You’ve grown since then.”

  Yes, she had. Hugely. Primarily, she didn’t really need people anymore.

  Except . . . there was this man right in front of her right this second, holding onto her . . .

  She shrugged uncomfortably. His hands caressed over that movement through her coat as if he, too, could see her shoulders flexing naked. “I think it was more a question of forcing things.”

  “That’s what it sounded like to me, too.”

  “I mean—me trying to force a relationship to work out for the wrong reasons. As if I could fall in love and create a firm place. And a relationship that could last. That couldn’t be—” She made a little jagged motion of her hand, trying to express that fracture that occurred each time her parents went back and forth, the friends she had made whom she didn’t see for a year, and then she was back, but the friendship was all different, interrupted. And just when she got a few threads picked up or a new friendship going, she was gone again. “And him, you know—I mean, he was sweet enough and sincere enough, but probably at heart he was just a seventeen-year-old wanting sex.”

  Philippe was silent for a moment. When he started walking again, he laid his arm across her shoulders instead of holding her hand. And when he spoke, it was with wry humor, shifting the load of the subject gently off her. “I wonder if my first girlfriend makes that face when she remembers having sex.”

  “That’s pretty hard to imagine,” Magalie said involuntarily. Deep down, in secret, the mention of former girlfriends made a knot of anguish squeeze inside her. Why were they former? What had caused the impermanence? He hadn’t said anything about being in love with her after that first day of snow, and when it snowed in Paris, anything could be true. It would just melt later.

  Unaware of that doubt, he grinned, and his arm squeezed her slowly tighter. “Ma chérie, I know you try to humble me, but you’re not as good at it as you might think.”

  Chapter 33

  He made her a dessert with armor plates of chocolate mounted around it, like the hide of an armadillo or a dragon. Just at the top, those plates had been deconstructed, so that instead of closing the dessert completely in a carapace, the last few plates climbed upward in what would have been for any other pâtissier an impossible spiral, leaving the soft inside revealed and vulnerable. He called it Le Ventre du Dragon, the Belly of the Dragon, and a few of the critics got the Tolkien reference, still others lauded the tribute to the Chinese New Year, and everyone talked about how it made them drool.

  Magalie narrowed her eyes at it, understanding its primary message completely, but she ate it. It did melt her insides out.

  Philippe knew because she pretended to exaggerate its effect, attacking him with a laughing growl, pushing him back onto her bed. But when she had him there and aroused just from the push of her hands and his willing fall back onto her comforter, when she was sitting astride him and had ripped his shirt over his head, her laughter died. Her gaze turned very sober. And she stroked her hands all over his chest and shoulders, gently, as if she was touching some precious find. It took all his breath away, turning his body too taut and hard and hungry to leave him air.

  When she pushed him back and came down on top of hi
m, she looked like an erotic conqueror, which suited Philippe just fine. But the longer she touched him, the weaker she got. Her bones turned to water under his hands, until she couldn’t hold herself straight off him and was lying on his chest, her lips pressing kisses everywhere. He could see how that would bother someone like Magalie, how malleable she grew while all his muscles engorged, as if he was stealing her strength.

  He didn’t think he stole it. Yes, he felt stronger, incredibly strong. But he gave her back all the power he drew from her. Only, he didn’t know how to make her see that, except by what he was already doing.

  He had to take over the rhythm with his hands hard on her hips, her body grown too pliant and yielding to maintain anything like the hard drive his own demanded. “Harder,” she whispered into his throat. “I l—”

  His whole body jerked, his hands pulling her down on him spasmodically. But she broke off, pressing the words back into her mouth with the kisses she rained down on his throat, on the joint of his shoulder.

  Damn it, he knew that was what she had almost said. It couldn’t be anything else. I like it, broken off, didn’t sound like I love you.

  With his hands on her body, with his mouth, with a taunting rhythm, he tried to get her to say it, to break down and say it. But she never even started to again.

  “You just have no patience,” Aunt Aja told him one day. Him. A man who could work on perfecting grains of sugar for a new pastry all day. “You have to do things so dramatically. You haven’t let her have time to start counting on you. It only takes a few years.”

  “They say with really little babies, they cry whenever the mother leaves the room because they don’t understand that she still exists then. It’s something like that, I think,” said Geneviève, who had never had a child of her own but could speak with supreme confidence about it, anyway. “Well, except the reverse. Magalie used to think things kept existing when she left the room and had to learn that most of them didn’t.”

  They were walking back across the twin bridges behind Notre-Dame from Océane’s birthday party, the first Sunday in March, when Philippe started probing again. The man was relentless.

  Magalie had given Océane a collection of hats: a witch hat, a princess crown, a fairy garland, a firefighter’s helmet, and a beekeeper’s hat. Just making sure she kept the girl’s options open. The firefighter helmet, she admitted, had been a little random, but she hadn’t had much advance notice of the party. It had been a cute party. At least, everyone else there had seemed to find it cute, particularly her own role in it, tucked up against Philippe’s side, being shown off like she was his Meilleur Ouvrier de France medal.

  She knew vaguely that she was supposed to be annoyed by that, the whole tucked-up-under-his-arm-like-a-trophy thing, but she kept having trouble pulling it off. After all, the man had firsthand knowledge of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France competition, the Olympic training and intensity of it and what it took to win, so if he showed her off as if she was that valuable, it was hard not to be flattered.

  “So I take it the attempt to create a home by getting pregnant at fifteen didn’t work out?” Philippe asked. Winter was loosening its grip, and the day was prematurely springlike, so that he wore the leather jacket she had seen on him so much in the fall, unzipped, and under it a blue cashmere sweater showed through. She had bought the sweater for him the other day and thrust it at him in a way that defied him to make anything out of it.

  Of course, he had ignored that signal and made about as much out of it as possible, ending by putting it on her naked body and making love to her in it. He had said he didn’t like shopping and she did, and he wanted to get her trained to associate shopping for him with a great deal of pleasure.

  Which meant he was going to get the most annoyingly smug grin on his face when she bought him another one, but what else was she supposed to do when he kept wearing this one every day? Honestly. Anyone would think it was the only sweater he owned.

  “I did not get pregnant,” Magalie said, annoyed. No thanks to her. Thank God she was so much stronger now.

  “I assume he didn’t turn out to be your home, either.”

  She sighed. This was such an embarrassing story. Why had she ever let him drag any part of it out of her? “Well, I did pitch such a fit those first three months back in Provence that my parents agreed to let me fly back to the U.S. for Christmas and stay at a friend’s house. They were even considering making arrangements for me to live there, with that friend, and go to school there the rest of the year.”

  His eyebrows flexed together. “That’s a lot of independence to provide a sixteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know enough to use birth control.”

  She shrugged. “I was always very self-reliant.” And if she had gotten pregnant at sixteen, she would have done just fine with it, thank you very much.

  “Not much choice to be anything else?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He was clearly sitting hard on some opinions.

  “Anyway,” she said, speaking quickly, so she could dump this whole story into the trash where it belonged and get it over with. “He already had a new girlfriend, so all my fits turned out to be for a stupid reason, and I flew back after the break. Unfortunately, I had gotten the return ticket for the last possible day of the French vacation period and had to stick it out at the friend’s house until then, but . . . lessons learned and all that.”

  Philippe was silent for a long moment. At last, he shook his head wonderingly.

  “What?” she said defensively.

  “Teenagers are idiots. I think I would have had the sense to wait a couple of months for you, even at that age, but God knows. The whole pregnancy thing probably scared him. And you were clearly much better off. I hope the next guy was a better lover.”

  Magalie’s lips parted. Then shut. On a slow, slow smile.

  Philippe let go of her hand. “Well,” he said, rough and pissed off. “Apparently so. That’s a much better expression on your face.”

  She looked up at his hard-set jaw and scowling blue eyes. Her own eyes snagged on his.

  Philippe caught her chin. “Don’t you dare look at me like that while you think of him.”

  She coughed. He was getting very much the wrong idea, but at the same time, the truth just couldn’t be a good thing to let him know about her.

  He pivoted, grabbed her hand brusquely, and started walking again, his footsteps hard on the stone slabs.

  She cleared her throat, angled her chin off toward the flying buttresses of the cathedral, and tried to sound airy. “I don’t mean to go to your head, Philippe, but you are a slightly better lover than a teenage boy.”

  Philippe tripped. His foot caught on the edge of a stone, and he stumbled forward, his hand wrenching free of hers. He caught himself against the metal rail of the bridge, all the locks lovers and tourists had attached to it clanging, and twisted, still holding onto it for support, to stare back at her. “Did you just say—” He caught himself and shook his head so hard, it shook his whole body, like a lion coming out of the water. “I must have misunderstood.”

  She folded her arms under her breasts and gave him a very stern, superior look. “I’m really very fastidious.” She was, too. She had not wanted any sweating, stupid, grunting man in her space trying to take parts of her. She liked who she was.

  And she hadn’t wanted to trust one to make a space for her that would last. To value her the way she longed to be valued.

  Philippe released the metal railing and walked back to her. His chest rose and fell visibly in the blue cashmere, and he shook his head again, very slowly this time.

  “Wait. You’ve lived in Paris five years, working in the public eye, looking like you do so that a man can hardly keep himself from grabbing you and eating you up on the spot. You spent three of those years also as a university student, around hordes of men in their early twenties who must have been asking to borrow your class notes every damn chance they got. And you’ve never let
any of those desperate men through your defenses?”

  “I don’t like desperate men.”

  “Oops,” Philippe said, so dryly she knew she was missing something.

  She waved a hand. “I mean . . . needy. Weak. I don’t like weak men.” Had he just said she made him desperate?

  “Those are some walls you’ve got, Magalie.”

  She frowned at him. “Why not? I like who I am.”

  “I like who you are, too, Magalie. We’re in public, so let’s not go into the details of how much. I’m not asking you to change.”

  “Just to give part of myself away.”

  “All of yourself. But to me.”

  Clearly the fact that it was to him was supposed to make all the difference.

  Which, oddly, it did.

  “And you get to keep yourself at the same time. That’s the way it works, I think. Kind of like flipping a Tarte Tatin. Or jumping a gorge. If you try to be careful or hold anything back, you end up with one hell of a mess.”

  “You would think that,” she said repressively. But it struck a chord, vibrating inside her, knocking things loose. Lady Godiva. She’d bet Lady Godiva did not try to cover herself with her hair once she decided to ride naked through that town. She was too sure of who she was.

  He shrugged. “I’m not strapped into a safety harness over here myself, Magalie. But it feels to me as if jumping that gorge to you makes me ten times bigger.”

  Ten times bigger than he already was? Good Lord. She looked up at him, the strong chin profiled against the backdrop of the river and Notre-Dame. The trees in the little park behind the cathedral were just starting to hint at buds of green. The wind off the water tousled his mane. That blue sweater she had picked out for him really did do wonderful things for his eyes.

  He tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow, possessively, and started walking again. His mouth began to curve smugly, the curve growing and growing, so pleased with himself, she was surprised every other man who walked past him didn’t try to knock him off the bridge, just to wipe that smile off his face.