The Chocolate Touch

by Laura Florand

  Sylvain Marquis would drown himself in his own chocolate before he would ask Dominique Richard to do his wedding, of course.

  “Dominique,” Philippe said brusquely, not looking particularly thrilled to see him.

  “Philippe.” Dom didn’t try to shake Philippe’s hand, which was covered with powdered sugar. “Cade.” He kissed the slim, brown-haired woman on each cheek. Cade had once come into his laboratoire to try to buy his soul with a few of her millions, and he might have been tempted if he didn’t find Corey Bars as vile as he did. After all, he had sold his soul several times before, and the thing had been remarkably stubborn about surviving the treatment. In the end, the poor little rich girl had settled for Sylvain, and Dom always felt guilty when he saw her, for having forced her to stoop so low.

  Dom had flirted with her on principle when she was negotiating for his soul but remained fundamentally indifferent to her. That dark, mean part of him woke up often enough, with the beautiful privileged women who came into his shop, and he took advantage of their eagerness to be used by him. There was something intensely satisfying about being begged for more rough sex by a woman who would have thought him worthless scum ten years ago.

  But Cade had never shown the least desire to be used by him, and beyond the satisfaction of sex with them, princesses didn’t do much for him. Their lives were too facile, too privileged. Plus, for God’s sake, Corey Chocolate. He wasn’t Sylvain; he had standards. How could Sylvain even hold up that arrogant head of his, marrying the heir to a multibillion-dollar corporation that produced such mass-market pap?

  He frowned at Cade Corey, wondering what the hell Sylvain saw in her.

  “What?” she asked dryly, and he gave her a look of surprised approval. The first time he had met her, she had wanted something from him, and thus had tried to be conciliating. He liked her better today, when she couldn’t care less what he thought of her.

  Straight brown hair that was relentlessly silky, blue eyes, a steady I-own-the-world look. Odd, he kept feeling as if there was something different about her he should notice. “Nothing.” He shrugged and turned to Philippe. “So are you doing the Chocolatiers’ Expo? Cade, do you know who will be there?”

  “Corey will have a strong representation.” She pointed a finger at herself, which, being Cade, might mean that she thought she, by herself, was the strong representation. “Devon Candy. Caillebaut, Kraft, Firenze . . .”

  Dominique exchanged a look of mutual confusion with Philippe. “I meant the important people.”

  Cade made a little growling noise of frustration.

  “Me, you, Simon, Sylvain, I think those are the biggest names,” Philippe said. “Are you going yourself or sending some of your team?”

  “Myself.” Simon Casset would probably do one of his exquisite, impossible flights of chocolate and jewel-toned sugar. Philippe favored displays that allowed him to showcase multiple gâteaux in some elegant effect. Sylvain . . . “What’s Sylvain doing?” he asked Cade, since, being new to the Paris chocolatier scene, she might be naive enough to tell him.

  She smiled sweetly at him. “Working. Why aren’t you? Is business slow?”

  Seriously, if Cade got any more annoying, he might actually end up liking her. Or at least respecting her. She handled herself all right for someone who had originally dropped into the ultra-competitive Parisian chocolate scene acting as if she thought she could buy it up and stuff it in her pocket.

  Instead of responding, he studied Philippe’s current work-in-progress. All roses and pink and cream. A peek into some other, fairy-tale world. How did the man manage it? Was it that privileged Lyonnais past of his? Philippe was one of the few men as big as he was, but Dominique always felt bigger near him, oversized and clumsy. As if all his own edges were too hard and would break anything he ran into. His hands were far too big for his métier. Giant, hard laborer’s hands. They belonged to his first métier, the one his father had thought he deserved, that of a man who hacked meat off bones.

  He compared notes about the upcoming event, but it started getting embarrassingly obvious that he was just restless and had no real purpose in being here, so he strode out, looking for other places to invade and be obnoxious.

  He came out of the kitchens into Philippe’s Beauty and the Beast palace of a salon de thé, with its well-dressed crowd sitting among marble pillars under embossed lions’ heads and painted ceilings. And stopped.

  There she was. The woman who had not come that morning. She was sitting in Philippe’s salon de thé, with one of those rosy, airy, fairy-tale concoctions in front of her.

  He felt stabbed through the heart. Standing there, oversized for this froth of a place, in his black motorcycle leathers, with his shaggy hair and his stupidly shaved face. He, who shaved at best once every four days, had shaved every single damn morning for the past week. Why? For what stupid reason?

  She put a spoon to her lips, enjoying Philippe on her tongue. She looked as if she belonged there, probably more than in the rough stone surroundings of his salon, despite his stupid embossed rosebuds and velvet curtains. She set the spoon down and gazed at her dessert a moment, her face a little sad, tired.

  He shifted, accusingly, and she glanced up. Her gaze flicked over him, his size, his leathers, his hard stare. Her face closed entirely, and she looked back at him just as aggressively, until he half expected her to pull out Mace if he walked too close to her table.

  Fuck her, he thought, so bitterly and insanely wounded, anyone would think he had just discovered his virgin bride in the arms of another man on their wedding night. He strode out of the salon, and did not bump into anything or break it, but probably mostly because people and even things just seemed to shrink out of his way.

  It was a pure wonder he didn’t have an accident as he headed off into the Paris streets again. People kept shrinking out of his way there, too.

  CHAPTER 2

  He ran all his errands for the week, stopping by suppliers, bullying his way through traffic with aggressive, suicidal driving. When he got back to his salon de chocolat, it was around three in the afternoon.

  And she was there.

  Sitting at a little table by herself, with a backdrop of rosebuds, her hands curved around a cup of his chocolate. He felt an absurd, intensely painful urge to knock it out of her hands and yell at her for being a faithless tramp, pretending to be his when she had been that very morning closing her luscious mouth over Philippe Lyonnais.

  He was losing it. He crushed the urge, the way he crushed all his other destructive urges, like starting a fistfight with Sylvain Marquis at some chocolate show.

  His unknown habituée glanced up at the sound of his motorcycle leathers or the appearance of such a large mass of blackness in the beautiful room. Her eyebrows drew a little together, in clear recognition that she had seen him that morning.

  When she met his eyes, her face closed completely again, as if she was ready to knife him if he got closer.

  He turned away, trying to make his expression softer, more encouraging before she saw it again. Damn it, didn’t she know he was the one who had made that tarte au chocolat et au citron vert she was putting in her mouth? Well, not this particular one, because he had been out sulking, but he had invented the recipe and trained his chefs in how to produce exactly what he wanted.

  Guillemette came back downstairs with two plates in one hand, meaning they were busy and shorthanded, and Dominique shrugged out of his black leather jacket and ran up the stairs, so that l’inconnue could see he belonged there. He even thought of giving Guillemette a friendly order in passing, so l’inconnue could see he was in charge here.

  Damn it, he bet if Sylvain or Philippe walked into their own shops in street clothes, everyone would still know who they were. Customers didn’t assume some violent brute off the street had come in and was going to start causing trouble. The women didn’t start reaching for their Mace.

  Upstairs, in the most beautiful kitchen in Paris, a laboratoire fill
ed with light from great windows, and with long marble counters, and with all the glorious, gleaming, luminous space a man could want, he changed into his pastry chef’s jacket. Glee shot through him as always at the bleu, blanc, et rouge collar, his award for Meilleur Ouvrier de France, and it was all he could do not to crush it in his fists like a child overwhelmed by the thrill. But he didn’t. He slipped it on like it was nothing, the most natural thing in the world that he should have the right to wear that collar.

  Back downstairs, he made sure to start at the farthest table from her, circling the room, pretending to check on his clients’ contentment. He was lousy at that shit. He felt servile. If they didn’t like it, to hell with them, they could get out. But he pretended, for her, that he did this routinely, the great master chef deigning to talk to the guests just to brighten their lives.

  That’s how Philippe Lyonnais does it, he reminded himself. He had seen him. Like noblesse oblige, a favor from a prince for him to step out of his kitchens and smile at his subjects. And Sylvain didn’t even bother, he would bet. He probably thought it was sufficient noblesse oblige for him to have graced the earth with his existence in the first place. Bastard. Dominique wanted that arrogance, but on him, it always felt aggressive, hard-edged, forced, like some boxer trying to pound his way to respect.

  What was the matter with him, anyway? He didn’t weasel his way around women. He walked straight up to them, gave them a challenging look, and either they didn’t like it, in which case screw them—well, or not, to be exact. Or they loved it, and pretty much that was it for the romance, and they went back to someone’s apartment for a few hours.

  But . . . for some reason, he didn’t want her to look back at him with rejection or reciprocal challenge. He definitely didn’t want her to look at him as if she was mentally gauging her ability to kill him to defend herself. He wanted her to look at him like she looked at his chocolate, as if she was absorbing strength and happiness. And was in no hurry to leave it.

  It turned his heart all funny to think of being looked at by her that way.

  When he reached her table and at last allowed himself to turn so that his back wasn’t to her, she was reaching for her purse and had the bill out before her, which pissed him off immediately. All that pathetic spectacle he had made of himself, trying to be Philippe Lyonnais, and she wasn’t even going to wait around for him to get to her and finish the performance?

  “Mademoiselle,” he said to her bent head, and cursed himself immediately for the roughness of his voice. Why had he never worked on his accent, so he sounded all glossy like Sylvain? Nobody knew the instant Sylvain spoke that he was born en banlieue, in the rejected hem of Paris, trailing in the dirt. Why couldn’t he manage a nice, smooth purr, the way Philippe talked to Magalie? No, instead, rough and maladroit and . . . he felt as if he could bruise her just by speaking to her.

  She looked up. Her eyes flickered, pupils contracting, and he remembered someone once telling him how much he loomed over people, that he needed to sit or even crouch to put seated people at ease with him. But he had thought, Good. Let them be uncomfortable.

  It would be rude even for him, wouldn’t it, to just pull out the chair opposite her and sit down? He took a step back instead, although it cost him. Stepping back was not what he wanted to do.

  It worked, though. Her features relaxed slightly. Her eyes stopped contracting in rejection and started to look intrigued. Their blue reminded him of a softening evening, not too bright, not dark, a hint of gray; an oblivious person might not even remember they were blue. She wore a light sweater the shade of garnets with a wide V neckline, its hood draping over her head and hiding the nape of her neck. The fringes of her hair peeked under it, the color of one of his darker, reddish-toned caramels, the passion fruit one, maybe. The wide loose sleeves of the sweater were rolled at the wrists, the chunkiness emphasizing the over-thinness of those wrists.

  “Monsieur?” Her accent threw him. Mixed in with the expected Anglo-ness was something else, something that reminded him of the accents of immigrants from French West Africa when he was growing up en banlieue, in the teeming, poor, wild projects just outside Paris.

  “Cela vous plaît?” He nodded at the crumbs of his work left in front of her. Not much in the way of crumbs. Had she picked each one up with the tip of her finger and licked it clean? Do I please you, then? Do you like it?

  Her whole body relaxed, her hands going back to cradle the now-empty cup. The attitude that had first drawn him came back, as if she was soaking up every second of pleasure he could give her. “Oui.”

  He waited, half-hoping for a “thank-you” or “you’re wonderful, please can I have some more.” But she just looked at him curiously. At least she didn’t look as if she wanted to Mace him at the moment.

  “Are you one of the chefs here?” she asked suddenly.

  So much for his giddy pleasure in the bleu, blanc, rouge at his collar. There really wasn’t much you could do to get the message across if that failed; it wasn’t as if he could embroider his whole jacket with I am the best, the very best, in the world. Well, technically, the award was for being the best in France, but in his field, it was the same thing. “I’m Dominique Richard.”

  The gentleness of his tone reassured him. He had managed to speak to her the way he wanted to speak to her, like a caress over her skin.

  He was rewarded. Her eyes lit, making him feel giddy again. “Are you really? Monsieur Richard, what a pleasure.”

  She held out a hand instinctively. Definitely American, he thought at the firmness of her clasp. And putain, but her hand felt so delicate in his. The very firmness made it clear how fragile it was. But still, her accent—there was something going on with her accent that wasn’t the average American tourist. Where did those hard-rolled Rs come from? Some place Creole? Louisiana? Would Cajuns have that immigrant accent?

  “Merci,” she did say now, gesturing to her empty plate.

  Inside he swelled with smugness. Inside, he felt like one of his own house-made marshmallows, accidentally left too close to a heat source. Puffing up, getting all soft and gooey . . .

  “How long are you staying in Paris?” he asked, because he couldn’t help it. He had to know.

  Her eyes clouded. She tucked her hands together under the folds of her over-large sleeves, like a turtle pulling into its shell. “I don’t know.”

  He cursed the fact that he had let her hand slip away. He hadn’t known she was going to hide it. He had this crazy desire to lift it to his mouth and kiss it. Merde, she was American. He could probably get away with it. She probably thought that’s what French men did.

  That and kiss with their tongues. His gaze flicked over her mouth, and he had to bite down hard on the inside of his to keep that calm, gentle expression on his face.

  “Alors,” he said, realizing that he could not do one thing more. He, who had always been instant-sex or nothing . . . he could not even come onto her the tiniest bit more. If he did, she might not come back the next day. She might not be comfortable. “I hope we’ll see you tomorrow.” He smiled at her easily, casually, as if he was just practicing good client relations, which was hilarious since he had no idea how to do that. And moved over to the counter to speak calmly to Guillemette, although what he came up with for her, he had no idea. His young, crisp, elegant maîtresse de salle gazed at him with utter fascination but nodded a time or two as if he made sense. He might have to give her a raise.

  He was suddenly conscious of a presence at his elbow, almost brushing him, and his heart seized.

  He looked down at l’inconnue, hoping he hadn’t broken off too obviously in the middle of whatever the hell he had been saying to Guillemette. She was standing almost touching him. Of her own volition. She could have waited until he moved on before she came to the counter. She had wanted to be standing almost touching him.

  Or else she’d been completely indifferent to whether she did or not, but somehow he didn’t think so. A woman who was indiffe
rent about her personal space didn’t look at a man as if she was calculating how to knock him out if he got closer, as she had at first done with him.

  “I wanted to get a box of chocolates,” she told Guillemette on the other side of the counter.

  He broke into a huge grin. He couldn’t help it. “You already finished the other one?”

  Her eyes flicked up to him, arrested. Bordel, why couldn’t he have sat on himself? He had just revealed he’d been watching her, at least enough to know what she had bought two days before.

  I’m not stalking you, I promise. Seeing you at Philippe’s was a coincidence. Plus, he couldn’t stalk in his own place, merde. He was just . . . so damn big. He had the hands of a butcher. How would she be able to sit there again, worrying some brute might be spying on her? Up there with his hands plastered so hungrily against the glass. Thank God he had shaved.

  “Yes,” she said. “I loved them.”

  Bordel, there went that gooey, swollen marshmallow feeling again. What was wrong with him?

  Guillemette, meanwhile, slipped on a white cotton glove and pulled out one of his flat metal boxes.

  L’inconnue looked up at him. “Which ones would you pick?” she asked softly.

  Arousal washed over him. It shook him how helpless he felt before its flood, like a man who didn’t know how to swim. Women had come on to him before with that question; usually it meant he was going to have sex within the next few hours. Maybe that was all his reaction was: Pavlov’s dog. But he knew how to swim in those waters. He knew completely how to control them.

  And women with faces dusted all over in freckles did not come on to him that way. It was the glossy women, imperviously confident, or the pretty delicate ones with a pierced nose and belly button who liked to play bad, or women who were cheating on someone and had to act quickly.

  He held out a blind hand to Guillemette, who placed a white glove in it. He slipped that on, moving behind the counter. It cost him a little, to move away from her when she had come so close on purpose, but the counter between them also allowed him to relax just a little. He couldn’t accidentally hurt her, since there was a barrier between them. And he could maybe smile at her just a little more deeply without her feeling pursued.