The Chocolate Thief

by Laura Florand

  At the very last second, passing the stacks of chocolate boxes, she found herself reaching out and taking one, two, three, four of them, as many as she could carry. She didn’t really mean to do it. But she couldn’t stop herself. She wanted his chocolate, and she didn’t want to have to come into his shop tomorrow and humiliate herself by letting him see her buy it.

  She stopped herself from grabbing a fifth, but only because she could envision them all toppling out of her hands as she tried to cross the street.

  And she snuck back up to her lair, her tower, with her loot, to curl up with it, gloating.

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  The first thing Sylvain noticed when he opened the workshop the next morning was that there were four boxes of chocolate missing. He stopped, puzzled. He had been the last one there after the class ended yesterday, and he was the first one back, so—something immediately did not add up. Pascal and Bernard had their own keys and the security code, but why would they sneak back to steal chocolates?

  “That’s odd,” he murmured.

  “Qu’est-ce qui est bizarre?” asked Christophe. Sylvain had promised the food blogger he could come visit his laboratoire after the man had written up a visit to his shop with extravagant praise. Justified extravagant praise, bien sûr.

  “Some of the boxes we prepped yesterday are missing.” He looked around, expecting to find them set in another spot.

  “A chocolate thief?” Christophe asked, intrigued. As the words sank into his imagination, his eyes grew dreamy. “I think I might just have discovered my third career. Imagine sneaking into laboratoires every night to steal the finest chocolates.”

  “To eat or for the marché noir?”

  “Both, really,” Christophe sighed blissfully. “You could probably make a killing on the black market if you didn’t eat all your ill-gained goods.”

  “Well. The thief would have to steal more than four boxes to manage that,” Sylvain said arrogantly. No one had ever eaten just one of his chocolates. Not since he was sixteen years old.

  Maybe the boxes had just been . . . just been what? He tried to think. He had been the last one out the door the night before and the first one back in. Who would have moved them, sold them, taken them home?

  He went into his office to double-check his laptop, which lay untouched on his desk. Or . . . he stopped.

  A chocolate thumbprint mark. There was nothing unusual in that; he often left chocolate thumbprints on documents on his desk. But this thumbprint was a lot smaller than his.

  He laid his thumb beside it and studied the difference for a long, thoughtful moment.

  When he came back out into the main room of the laboratoire, Christophe was running his hand over one of the marble counters, looking around, and smiling.

  “What?” Sylvain asked him.

  “I’m just imagining the kind of person who would steal chocolate,” the curly-haired blogger said, quietly happy. “He certainly picked the right person to steal it from.”

  “She,” Sylvain said, remembering the size of that chocolate thumbprint.

  Christophe blinked in pure joy. “Oh, that’s perfect.”

  Sylvain raised his eyebrows.

  Christophe stared at him. “Doesn’t that make you happy? A woman thief sneaking into your lair to steal your chocolate? Don’t you want to hide out here overnight to try to catch her en flagrant délit?”

  Sylvain opened and closed his mouth. Yes. He did. “I think we might be a little premature in deciding there’s a thief. I’m sure there’s a much more innocuous explanation.”

  None leaped to mind, but—a thief who stole chocolate but not his laptop? He might have to marry her. He could feel himself falling in love just at the idea.

  He hoped she had worn black leather pants.

  “Well, where would be the fun in that?” Christophe asked indignantly. “Can I hide out and catch her? If it’s going to be wasted on you.”

  For a food blogger, however famous, who was here as a special privilege, Christophe wasn’t showing nearly enough humble appreciation and respect, Sylvain decided firmly. Food bloggers were getting pretty gonflés these days. Full of themselves.

  And if there really was a thief—which he very much doubted—then he was the one who should get to catch her.

  Voleuse de Chocolat chez Sylvain Marquis? went up the title on Christophe’s blog only a few hours after he left the chocolaterie.

  Cade, who had a Google Alert set to go off whenever Sylvain Marquis’s name showed up in a new posting on the Web, looked at it and jumped a foot. That was fast.

  She read the post quickly, or as quickly as she could read things in French. Most of it seemed to trade in fantasy. Is a thief stealing Sylvain Marquis’s chocolates? When I was there this morning, Sylvain discovered four boxes missing and a small, feminine, chocolate thumbprint on his papers. Is someone breaking into his laboratoire to steal his chocolates? If so, this woman is my soul mate. I think I may be in love.

  She had left a thumbprint? Well, actually, she had probably left many, just not all visible in chocolate. But her fingerprints weren’t on record anywhere, and it would spoil the fun if she had to wear gloves the whole time. She couldn’t even imagine deadening her sense of touch to that smooth, perfect chocolate.

  She noticed, with almost no guilt, that she had thought would spoil not would have spoiled. Yes, she was going back. If she didn’t get caught.

  The blog post passed on almost immediately to other details of the visit. Sylvain had taught this Le Gourmand blogger, Christophe, how to make chocolate-dipped candied oranges.

  The details made Cade want to grab both the blogger and Sylvain Marquis by the hair and rip it out.

  Those were all the things she wanted to do. Plunge her hand into sacks of sesame by the light of day, lay candied oranges from Spain out on a counter and learn how to dip their brilliant colors into dark chocolate. Be part of it, be welcomed into the secret.

  Instead, she was fumbling around at night trying to figure it all out on her own.

  It really was Sylvain Marquis’s fault she had to steal what she wanted to own. She would have been happy to pay for it. Pay a really high price, too.

  If money wouldn’t buy something, you had to steal it.

  Right?

  So he had no one but himself to blame for not being willing to share.

  Sylvain, who didn’t have a Google Alert on his name but who had been e-mailed a link to the post by Christophe out of courtesy, read the first paragraph with deep annoyance. What did he mean, the thief was his soul mate? What did he mean, he might be in love?

  Talk about presumption. If the thief existed, which was unlikely, then she was his fantasy. Not Christophe’s. He was the one in love with her. Christophe could go try to talk himself into some other chocolatier’s laboratoire for a one-on-one visit, that’s what he could do. Not try to cut in on Sylvain’s mystery.

  The next time Cade checked her e-mail, after a long walk along the Seine and some meditation in Notre-Dame to try to get herself to focus on aspects of Paris other than Sylvain Marquis’s chocolaterie, there were twenty more e-mail alerts from Google. Mostly pingbacks to the first Chocolate Thief post.

  She raised a horrified hand to her mouth. It turned out that this was a really popular idea among food bloggers. It had crossed the language barrier, too. A Taste of Elle had picked it up in English right away, adding lots of exclamation points, and the other English-language food bloggers in Paris and then their comrades in America and England hadn’t been long to follow.

  A Taste of Elle had even drawn a fairly sexy caricature of what the Chocolate Thief would look like, tiptoeing away with a bagful of chocolates in hand. It had some elements of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman suit. Maybe Cade needed to get some black leather pants.

  Another blogger, a Frenchwoman, had named a chocolate concoction she had just been working on the Chocolate Thief. An American, posting at nearly the same time, had a chocolate double
-ganache cupcake called La Voleuse.

  Her remaining fifty e-mails were work questions people were failing to handle in her absence. Cade turned straight back around and went shopping. If Maggie Saunders could go shopping, she could, too.

  “What do you mean, you can’t sell me . . . ?” Still not quite grasping the word for extremely small spy video camera in French, but having managed to convey the idea, Cade held up thumb and forefinger pinched to almost touching, the agreed-upon sign between the French salesman and her for these items.

  What was it with the French and their refusal to sell things? It defeated one of the main points in having plenty of money.

  “C’est illégal,” he said coolly. “We don’t carry those anymore.”

  There was another thing about every time the French wouldn’t sell her something. It was not only that they said no; it was that they seemed to take such a smug satisfaction in the ability to do so.

  “What about things that listen?” She cupped her ears, familiar with the word écouter in French but carried away by the whole sign language thing.

  Maybe Sylvain Marquis muttered his recipes aloud while he was working on them. Like a mad scientist.

  “We have these.” He showed her some listening devices about the size of an iPod Nano.

  She pinched her forefinger and thumb again. “Petit.”

  “Non,” he said smugly. “C’est illégal.”

  Cade wondered, if she called their corporate security for a little equipment, how long it would take for someone to let her father know. Five minutes?

  “Fine,” she said. If you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself. “Do you know where I can get some black leather pants?”

  The salesman stared at her blankly.

  She ended up getting her leather pants at Hermès, just to prove to herself that there was something money could still buy in France. Also, she felt a little odd that Maggie Saunders had spent more time enjoying the Paris fashion scene than she herself had. She wasn’t sure she was an entirely balanced child of wealth and privilege. Was it normal that she bought chocolate instead of clothes?

  She was keying in the code to her building, her shoulders tightening against the thought of all the responsibilities surely waiting for her in her in-box, when Sylvain Marquis stepped outside the back door of his laboratoire and, of course, raised his eyebrows at her.

  He had a real gift with that eyebrow-raising thing. The urge to swing her Hermès bag and knock those eyebrows right back into place was intense. Lucky for him he was across the street.

  Her phone rang, and she turned her back on Sylvain to answer it. “Please tell me this is you,” her grandfather begged her on the phone. “The Chocolate Thief.”

  “Grandpa! Do you really think I would?”

  “Well, I hope so,” he said indignantly. “I think your father is the only white sheep in the family. No idea how it happened. You would think he would be at least brown.”

  “Has Dad seen any of the blogs?”

  “I doubt it. He’s too busy to read blogs, your father. Besides, if he had, you wouldn’t have to ask me the question.”

  That was true. Her father would have been calling her at midnight again. About something other than Devon Candy, for once.

  “Well, don’t point them out to him.”

  “No,” her grandfather promised. Then he added, unreas-suringly, “It’s hard not to gloat, though. Your dad was so determined to raise you right, but I knew one of you girls would turn out to be a chip off the old block of chocolate. Although—not to speak ill of the dead, but between Jaime getting arrested at G8 summits as an annual tradition and you acting like your goal in life was to wear a suit and sit in an office—I was starting to think some bad thoughts about your mother’s gene pool. Tell you what, honey, what do you say to me flying over there and the two of us hitting up one of those Swiss factories, just for the fun of it?”

  “Are you staying here?” Sylvain asked right by her shoulder, and she jumped so violently, he had to catch her to keep her from falling over.

  “I’m on the phone,” she told him severely and turned her shoulder on him. He let go of her so she could do that, much to her regret. She tried to pull the door open, but it stayed locked. She frowned and typed the code again. “Oh, no one, Grandpa, it’s just that Marquis chocolatier I mentioned to you.”

  “Really?” Grandpa Jack sounded delighted. “Is there any way you can make sure I hear what he’s saying? Can you put your phone on speaker so he can hear me? I know some really good cuss words in French.”

  “No. And don’t come flying over here. This is my thing.” If Sylvain hadn’t come nosing over, she might have tried to convince her grandfather she wasn’t really stealing chocolate secrets, but she couldn’t figure out how to do that in front of the person she was stealing them from. Probably just as well. Grandpa was so proud of her.

  A moment of wounded silence came over the phone. “I would be a good partner.”

  “I didn’t say you wouldn’t, Grandpa, but I want to do this by myself. We can go to Switzerland next month.”

  “Switzerland,” Sylvain said by her ear flatly, his mouth turning down. Did he have no sense of personal space, or what? Could he hear what her grandfather was saying?

  She put a little more oomph into the cold-shouldering. Apparently it wasn’t having much of an effect on him. Did he think he could just play with her emotions all morning, turn around and kick her out cold onto the street, force her into a life of crime, and then be on chatty terms with her the next day?

  “What do you mean, next month? Don’t you have to work?” her grandfather demanded. Then he audibly perked up. “Is your father letting you play a little? I always did think it was excessive that you worked so much. Go out shopping or something. It’s not as if you were a boy.”

  Cade sighed and rolled her eyes. “I just bought something pretty at Hermès, Grandpa. Don’t worry about me.” What was wrong with the stupid code panel? Why couldn’t she get the door to open?

  “Who’s Hermès?” her grandfather asked blankly. “I thought we were talking about shopping. You mean the chocolatier?”

  “Are you going to see Pierre Hermé now?” Sylvain sounded very frustrated. The only effect her cold shoulder seemed to have had on him was that now she could feel his breath on the top of her head and not in her ear. “Did he let you tour his laboratoire? You smell a little of lemon and vanilla.”

  Were the scents from his laboratoire marking her like ink stains? “You’re smelling yourself,” she told him curtly and lifted the bag to wave the logo in front of him. “Hermès.”

  Sylvain stared at it blankly, despite the fact that it was one of the top names in couture in his city. He was as bad as her grandfather. And her. Why was her kindred soul such a jerk?

  She tried to type the code one more time and froze. She had been entering the code to his laboratoire. Right in front of him.

  She slid a glance sideways. He was staring at her hand on the code panel.

  He didn’t say anything.

  Maybe he was just staring blankly, not paying any attention to what she was actually typing. She began typing in the correct code, angling her body ostensibly to block it from his view as if he were a suspicious person. That’s right, throw the suspicion back his way. That had to be a good psychological trick.

  “And you didn’t answer my question,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here.” She pushed the door open at last. “When I rented an apartment in Paris, I had no idea you would be such a con.”

  She let the door slam behind her.

  * * *

  Chapter 12

  That night, the scents of his laboratoire lured her everywhere, into everything.

  As she tried the chocolates Sylvain Marquis and his people had made that day, she closed her eyes, trying to pretend she had been there for the making, that she had a right to test them to see if they were worthy of their name. Did the outside
have the right bite to it? Yes, it always did. Was the inside an unctuous surprise that prickled the senses and made them long for more? Yes. It always was.

  In the walk-in where the pistoles were stored, she tasted chocolates from black to white but kept going back to the bitter dark ones, closing her eyes and gleaning from her tongue exactly where this chocolate had traveled, from an island off the coast of Africa or somewhere in the Andes. Had she seen its pods being pounded on a visit to the cacao plantation where it grew? She tried to guess its journey, what had been done to it at Sylvain’s orders to make it into the chocolate it was. The temperatures, the times, the rhythms.

  What would this chocolate taste like coating candied orange slices from Spain?

  She found the candied orange slices from Spain, still moist, and tasted one, her fingers growing sticky and specks of chocolate clinging and blurring against her skin under the residue of the orange. Sylvain had shown Christophe how to coat these in chocolate.

  She imagined Sylvain’s fingers growing all sticky. She sucked slowly on her finger, licking the stickiness off.

  Abruptly, she opened cabinets until she found the components of a small bain-marie.

  A giddy kind of pleasure rose through her as she began to heat the water and pour chocolate pistoles into the pot set above it, a pleasure something like that fizzing Coke bottle her first day here, only more alarming.

  Sylvain Marquis might have refused to allow her a place in his workshop, but she would steal one, right here in the heart of Paris, and make her chocolate in the dark of night.