The Chocolate Thief

by Laura Florand

  “Hi,” she said in English, in the longest drawl she had, as if she couldn’t speak a word of French, which was what he would probably believe even if she was talking to him in his own language. “I’m—” What was that woman’s name again? Oh, right. “Maggie Saunders. Sorry I’m late.”

  The man’s look of stretched patience deepened, and he handed her a chef’s jacket about four sizes too big for her. She grinned as she stuffed her hair more securely up under the paper cap he also gave her. Her own daddy would probably have a hard time picking her out of a lineup in this getup.

  Cade Corey, chocolate spy. That had a nice ring to it, didn’t it? Chocolate spy. She could imagine herself in World War II, some kind of Mata Hari takeoff, smuggling the secrets of chocolate out of France before the Germans got their hands on it.

  Then she imagined Sylvain Marquis in a beret, snorting at the idea that the Germans would know what to do with the secrets of chocolate even if they did get their hands on it.

  “Madame . . . Madame . . . Madame Sewn-DAIRRRRsss,” penetrated her consciousness.

  She blinked at the man now standing directly in front of her, finally remembering her fake last name. “Sorry.” She blushed. That was getting old, the blushing. She had too much self-confidence to blush back in the US.

  “If you could take this station,” he said, leading her to a great black marble counter squared around an empty space where someone could stand in its center. The other students had already placed themselves around it. The long, large room had a triple heart: this great marble island and another, and farther down at the other end, the Sollich enrobing machine and cooling tunnel. She recognized the German manufacturer, but this machine was nothing, a child’s toy, compared to the great enrobing machines and cooling tunnels in the Corey factories.

  Cade pressed her hands onto the counter’s smooth chill, excited beyond measure. The sense of a dream on the brink of fulfillment took her insides and wrung them like a sopping rag, tighter and tighter until the water had to go somewhere and nearly sparkled in her eyes.

  She had taken artisan-chocolate workshops before—at the Culinary Institute in New York, for example. With Alice Medrich on another occasion. But those had been American. Here she was in France. About to learn the secrets of the best chocolatier in Paris.

  Well, he thinks he is the best, she corrected herself hastily, remembering the disdain on that handsome face. True, the mayor also thought he was the best. As did his lovely friend Chantal. And most of the population of the city. But that did not mean he really was the best.

  She had to keep that in mind, because he was clearly too stuck-up for his own good as it was. She stuffed her hands into the chef-jacket pockets, determined to get hold of herself, and her knuckles brushed against something startlingly hard and cold. She pulled them back, then brushed the item carefully with her fingertips. It was a key. She tried to keep her face expressionless as she wondered what that key unlocked.

  “Je suis Pascal Guyot, le sous-chef chocolatier here, and I will be leading the class for you,” the man who had let them in said, moving to stand in front of the class. Cade felt let down.

  No, relieved. Relieved, of course, that Sylvain Marquis would not be sharing his secrets in person. This way she didn’t run the risk of his recognizing her.

  She bent over to tie one of her shoelaces, and while she was bent over, she slipped the key from her jacket pocket to her shoe, which was the only place she could manage to hide it subtly. They needed to start putting pockets in yoga pants.

  “When we talk about the chocolate,” Pascal Guyot said, “the first thing is to be clear what we discuss. For example, a chocolat noir at 70 percent does not react the same way a chocolat au lait does to anything—to heat, to tempering, to the palate. A chocolat noir at 72 percent that comes from the Caribbean will react differently than a chocolat noir at 72 percent that comes from the Andes.”

  Cade again pressed her hands onto the marble, focusing on the pleasure of that chill, the words blurring a little around her ears. She knew this stuff. The Corey chemists had the science of chocolate down to a hundredth of a degree. Chemistry had been one of her minors in college.

  Her gaze swept the room, trying to take in everything. Liquors lined part of one wall, some of which she could pick out from where she stood—white rum and dark, and the bronze of Armagnac. Great burlap sacks slouched against the walls, black words stamped on their sides. What did those words say? What was in those bags, and from what lands had they come?

  Bottles of opaque dark brown glass whose labels she could not read lined a shelf—what flavors did he have there? A chef pouch of vanilla lay open on a counter, beans glistening brown against its gold backing, with more vacuum-sealed pouches in a crate under the shelf of extracts. She could smell that vanilla even from where she stood. It provided the undertone to the chocolate, modulating it, giving it sweetness.

  “With M. Marquis, we work with a supplier who roasts our cocoa nibs—to our own specifications, of course,” Pascal Guyot said. “Most chefs buy their chocolate in bars, such as these here.” He gestured to a pile of chocolate chunks in various gradations of color, clearly rough-hewn from larger blocks.

  They roasted their own cocoa nibs to exacting specifications at Corey, too, Cade thought. They had been doing it for nearly a hundred years. Nobody gave them any credit for it.

  “If everyone would come get their bars,” Pascal Guyot said.

  The weight of the chocolate chunks sparked excitement through her again.

  She might have gotten in under a fake name and as a spy, but she was going to be working chocolate in a Parisian laboratoire.

  * * *

  Chapter 7

  Sylvain shrugged off his coat in the entryway just off the workshop, smiling a little as he heard a heavy Japanese accent struggle with a question in French. Some chocolatiers left these things to their sous-chefs, but he always liked the workshops. Once in a while, they got a jerk, but usually the students were passionate amateurs of chocolate making, delighted to be there.

  It was a pleasant feeling, to teach such eager and enthusiastic students and to know that they were eager and enthusiastic for him, for what he had to teach. They reminded him of himself when he was a teenager. And they made it very clear to him that he had come a long way from that teenager, Dieu merci.

  He pulled on his white chef’s jacket and the chef’s cap that only he had the right to wear and came in, nodding at Pascal and scanning this new crop of students.

  He spotted the Corey capitalist so immediately, it gave him a jolt of alarm. Surely he shouldn’t have instantly penetrated her disguise of white cap and chef’s jacket twice as big as she was.

  She looked—mignonne again. She was busy trying to edge her cute little body so that the Japanese woman between him and her blocked his view. Unfortunately for her, the Japanese woman in question was even smaller than she was.

  He gazed at her for a long moment as the realization of what she was trying to do sank in and started to simmer in him. First she had tried to buy him. Then she had said she preferred Dominique Richard, of all people. Then she had paid for his and Chantal’s dinner the night before as casually as if she were tossing a coin to a beggar.

  And now she was trying to steal his secrets.

  He hesitated between smugness and outrage. It was nice to be pursued so desperately. She had to know it was a long shot. How many of his most prized recipes did she think he was going to reveal in a workshop for amateurs like this?

  She gave up trying to fiddle with her cap and hide her face as he continued to look at her. Her hands dropped to the marble countertop and fisted there. A flush colored her cheekbones.

  She had flushed last night. Repeatedly, as she sat there looking so lonely and recalcitrant, arrogant and vulnerable. She had closed her eyes in a moment of pure bliss the second those ravioles du Royan in their crème au basilic had touched her tongue, just as he had known she would.

  And then she
had met his eyes and flushed crimson and not eaten another bite.

  She had been too busy being obnoxious.

  He walked quietly past the other students, without interrupting Pascal, and stopped in front of her.

  Her fists clenched so tightly on the marble, he wondered if she was going to bruise her knuckles against the stone. Her eyes were so intense, for a moment it looked as if she was biting back an urge to beg.

  Beg?

  Why do you want this so badly? he wanted to ask her. What could you possibly be seeking here that would make someone like you bite back the word please?

  The Corey family owned something like 30 percent of the cacao plantations in the world. Owned them. They funded entire institutes that were the only thing standing between chocolatiers like himself and infestations of witches’-broom that might destroy all the crops. They were even famous for leading the movement to improve worker welfare on cacao plantations.

  The knowledge of their power and generosity should have made him nicer to her, but . . . she had paid for his dinner as if he were a beggar.

  No, worse, as if he was her chocolate gigolo or something.

  “Mademoiselle Corey,” he said urbanely, loud enough that her famous name could be heard by all the other students there. “Of Corey Chocolate,” he added, just in case they hadn’t made the connection. “What a pleasure to have you join us. Are you hoping to learn something new about chocolate?”

  She bit her lip. She was a little bit stuck, wasn’t she, since her eyes had just begged him to let her stay? She couldn’t very well claim she didn’t want to learn something from him about chocolate. Nor could she hit him, which it looked as if she might like to do.

  For some reason, her clear desire to do him violence sent a lick of excitement through him.

  He needed to get control of these licks of excitement. Last night had been bad, with that crème au basilic. He was such a sucker for a pretty, proud woman who savored the finer things in life.

  He maintained a façade of cool superiority, but he could feel his heart thudding as he dueled for control with her.

  “I would love to learn what you do with chocolate,” she said in French, in a clear voice she probably used to carry across boardrooms when billions of dollars were in play, making sure everyone could hear her.

  He pressed his lips together. She had taken the high road, honesty, which gave her moral superiority right off the bat.

  “I told you so two days—” She broke off, fumbling for the right word in French.

  Grégory was right, damn him; her accent was adorable.

  “I told you so it was two days. Before. Two days before,” she managed.

  “Oh?” he challenged. “Not Dominique Richard?”

  “If Dominique Richard is willing to teach me some of his secrets, I would be happy to learn from him, too.” She made sure the name Dominique Richard carried just as clearly through the room as her last sentence had.

  She was doing a hell of a job of keeping her dignity for a woman wearing some fairly ghastly eye makeup.

  And Dominique Richard was a damn flirt. He would probably be willing to teach her quite a lot of things.

  “I’m flattered you should choose me first,” he said. Which was the truth. Flattered and insulted both. Mostly, it pissed him off that she had even had a second choice. Him or nothing—that’s what it should be.

  She bared her teeth at him. “Oh, you were just the only decent chocolatier offering a workshop at a time when it was convenient for me to be in Paris.” Still that clear, carrying voice.

  He narrowed his eyes. He was quite sure her name hadn’t been on the list of students. He would have noticed. But he decided to take the high road, too, and not challenge her false pretenses. No, let that be the little sword he held over her head.

  Decent. Decent chocolatier.

  “Pascal, I think I’ll join you today. Mademoiselle Corey, vous permettez?” He stepped closer to her, physically crowding her personal space.

  Because she was stubborn, or arrogant, his body was actually brushing hers before she gave ground to share her counter with him.

  Excitement leaped sky-high in him. Worse than last night in the restaurant. She was a good head shorter than he was. He could feel her smallness and arrogance all the way through to his bones, like a beat in him that was driving him crazy. And here, in his domain, he knew he had something she wanted.

  Pascal began speaking again, telling the students to look at the blocks of different types of chocolate they had just taken back to their stations.

  Sylvain picked up the darkest, the purest. Crumbs clung to it from when it had been hacked from a larger block.

  He smiled, looking down at it in his hand. The finest crumbs were already starting to melt against his skin.

  He had something she desperately wanted. His chocolate. Now he wanted to see if he could use that to make her desperately want him.

  * * *

  Chapter 8

  Cade thought if her heart beat any faster or more blood rushed to her cheeks, she might pass out. To cool herself down, she drew up an image of Chantal, la Parisienne parfaite, and tried to mentally paste it to the inside of her forehead.

  “This is one of my favorite moments,” Sylvain murmured to her, his voice a brush of sound, too low to interfere with Pascal’s lesson, too low for anyone but her. “The chocolate is untouched, virgin.” Chocolat, he said. Not that clumsy, cute English word chok-lat but a caress, a mystery, sho-co-la. “I choose it. It is beautiful as it is, perfect; anyone could eat it forever. Yet I bring something else to it, blend it with another flavor that makes people encounter it in a new way, a richer way.”

  His voice burred over her skin. All the fine hairs on her arms rose to that voice and to the words that seemed to talk about more than chocolate. Made her want to be his chocolate.

  “I pour it into another form worthy of it, something as beautiful as its essence, so that just looking at it fills people with desire.”

  She realized her lips had parted, her breath had grown shallow. She kept her lashes lowered, her gaze focused on that dark block in his hand. On his strong, square palms, on the long, adept fingers.

  “Tenez.” He handed it to her.

  She did everything she could to take it without touching him, but he shifted his hand at the last second, and his fingers brushed hers. She sank her teeth into the inside of her lower lip.

  “We have here criollo—do you know it?”

  “I probably produced it,” Cade told him in a clipped voice. It was arrogant to say “I” and not “we,” but he was provoking. Did she know one of the four major types of cacao? True, they didn’t really use it in Corey Bars—too expensive for their market—but she knew what it was.

  “No,” he said definitely. “No, part of this came from a small grower in Venezuela. I liked their crop this year, épicé et voluptueux.”

  Spicy, voluptuous. Oh, God. Why were even those words dissolving her?

  “The rest came from Madagascar, and perhaps some of that may have been from one of your plantations.” His brow knitted. “It’s strange that a company capable of encouraging such a quality primary production could end up with . . . what you end up with.”

  Cade thought of the poor, maligned Corey Bar in her purse hanging in the entryway. Millions of people were biting into a Corey Bar right this minute, and it was making all of them very happy. Only one or two people were biting into one of his chocolates, she reminded herself. And they almost certainly had at least six-figure incomes. They could find other things to make them happy.

  “In what percentages did you combine them?” she asked. “What kind of conch did you use, and how long and how hard?”

  His lips curved in a very male smile that took her technical question in a completely different direction.

  She tried to ignore that, but she could feel all her erogenous zones flushing with heat. “How much cocoa butter did you add?”

  He laughed and shook
his head. “You might be able to flirt that information out of Dominique Richard, but I think I can hold out a little longer.”

  Her skin burned. Had that been yet another contemptuous dismissal? This time implying that her flirting was not effective?

  Why was he accusing her of flirting? She was standing there in humiliating Goth eye makeup, a sweatshirt, and an enormous pastry-chef jacket. He was the one talking about virgin chocolate with which he could do anything he wanted.

  “Now . . . what do you want to make of this chocolat?”

  “Anything you tell me to,” Cade said, trying to be flip, to remind him that she was taking lessons and had to do what the instructor said. But it didn’t come out quite right. Her tone was too low, too absorbed.

  “Anything?” Sylvain gave her a little smile that made her feel like the teacher’s pet. “Vraiment.”

  Utensils had been laid out on each counter, waiting for the students. He picked up a great butcher knife, its blade as sharp as a stage whisper. His chef’s jacket, of course, fit him perfectly, made for him, so that his straight shoulders and lean waist were clearly defined. Elbow-length sleeves revealed lean, corded forearms, the muscles of his profession. “Veuillez m’aider à hacher ce chocolat, mademoiselle.”

  There was only one knife. How was she supposed to help cut with it? She looked around for another one.

  “Tenez.” He physically took her hand and put it over the handle of the knife. His hand on hers.

  Her skin felt sunburned, as if she needed to douse it in aloe and cold water.

  “Do you know how to hold a knife, mademoiselle?”

  Yes. She had taken artisan chocolate workshops before, just not in Paris. And she liked to cook. At least once a month, she cooked. She always made it an elaborate, gourmet affair. But she kept silent, while his long, warm, agile fingers positioned hers, open, on handle and blade, so that she could shave off bits of chocolate without cutting off her fingers.