While she worked, she kept looking up into corners, expecting to find the sorcerer of chocolate waiting there, his eyes gleaming like fires in the dark as he closed the trap on her in his lair.
But he never did.
Sylvain felt his heart kicking into gear as he opened the door to his laboratoire the next morning, the rich scents flooding him. Had she been there, the thief?
He shouldn’t get his hopes up.
His hopes? Was he hoping that outrageously arrogant woman had broken into his workshop and stolen his chocolate?
She had, he saw almost instantly. Thumbprints smudged the marble counter they always left so glossy and clean at the end of the day. He could track her across the room. Here, she had tasted candied orange slices from Spain. Here, she had dipped into all the chocolate pistoles. Here she had . . .
She had helped herself to at least one of every single chocolate they had produced the day before.
He grinned, his heart thumping. She couldn’t get enough of him, could she?
He stopped when he found the components of a bain-marie dripping dry in a sink. Had she been making chocolate in his workshop? Exactly how nervy was this thief?
“So, did she come back?” Christophe asked eagerly just before lunch.
Sylvain, in the act of transferring a thirty-kilo marmite of chocolate to a heat source, considered dropping it onto the man’s toes. He’d done the blogger a favor once, let him visit his laboratoire at his begging, and the man thought they were such buddies that he could come be nosy about Sylvain’s thief?
“She did, didn’t she?” Christophe said, delighted. His chest visibly expanded with joy.
So had Sylvain’s, that morning. He put the giant pot of chocolate down before he could yield to temptation.
“What did she take? Do you know who it is? Do you know how she got in?”
“Somebody is stealing chocolate?” Pascal Guyot appeared at Sylvain’s shoulder. Not a blog reader, Pascal. Sotto voce, he added, “Is it someone who works here, do you think? But we keep that platter in the employee lounge full of them.”
“Oh.” Christophe looked disappointed. “Really? Do you think it’s an inside job?”
“C’est possible,” Sylvain allowed slowly. “One of the assistants, maybe. It was a small thumbprint. That makes more sense than imagining someone would risk breaking and entering for my chocolate.” It did make more sense. If they were dealing with someone behaving sensibly.
His heart kicked into high gear again, and his body tightened as he imagined the thief losing her head for him.
For his chocolates.
Close enough.
“I’ll tell you what,” Christophe said. “You imagine the suspect you want, and I’ll imagine the suspect I want. Just tell me—did she come back last night? You can blink once for oui or twice for non.”
Sylvain blinked once but at the pure effrontery of the man in trying to cajole him into an admission.
“Oh, she did!” Christophe clasped his hands, ravi. “You have made my life, Sylvain Marquis. Merci, merci.” He whirled out.
A few seconds later, he whirled back. “You don’t have Wi-Fi here by any chance?”
Sylvain narrowed his eyes at him, starting to smolder. If the man was going to keep a public journal of his puerile fantasies, he could at least have the grace to make them different fantasies from Sylvain’s.
“No, never mind. I’m sure the café down the street has it.” Christophe whirled out again, exiting through the shop. Sylvain saw him buy a box of chocolates on his way out.
Voleuse de Chocolat, je t’aime, read Christophe’s headline. As I sit here biting slowly through the robe of Sylvain Marquis’s Caraque, a delicate crunch and then silk ganache, I know I have found a kindred soul. You, too, think this is worth risking life and liberty for....
Well, maybe not life, Cade thought uneasily. French police didn’t have a tendency to close in with guns blazing, did they? And as for liberty, maybe she should make another major contribution to the political party in power right now just in case she needed any intervention from the ambassador. This whole French prison thing didn’t sound appealing at all.
The Chocolate Thief Strikes Again flew up in blog titles throughout the Anglophone world. French was no barrier to the food bloggers, who all knew in what language their bread was buttered with 85 percent butterfat. Please, Can I Be a Chocolate Thief? A Taste of Elle wrote, which was just greedy on her part, since she was engaged to chocolatier Simon Casset. Another posted How to Steal Chocolate in Ten Easy Lessons. Number 1: If you’re going to go to jail for it, make sure you don’t settle for less than Sylvain Marquis.
“That’s funny,” Maggie Saunders said, reading over another traveler’s shoulder in a security line that had been stalled for two hours at Charles de Gaulle. “I was just at one of his workshops.”
“Really?” The man turned.
“You know the strangest story?” Maggie said proudly. It was not every day, or even every decade, she got to share a story as juicy as this. Well, her friends’ stories could be pretty juicy, but she felt guilty about sharing those. And they weren’t famous, so no one cared. “You know the Corey family?”
The man’s brow knitted. “The Corey family? The chocolate family?”
“That one.” Maggie nodded enthusiastically. It was always better telling a story about famous people when the listener recognized their names. “One of them, Cade Corey, bribed me to let her take my place in Sylvain Marquis’s workshop. She was spying on him! I probably shouldn’t have let her,” she added guiltily. She touched the platinum D on her wide leather belt to console herself.
The man’s eyebrows shot up to the top of his head. “Really? How much did she bribe you?”
“I kept it under thirty thousand,” Maggie said vaguely. “I think. I didn’t buy any real jewelry,” she added defensively. “And I could have!”
It was impossible for the man’s eyebrows to climb any higher, but they tried. His eyes were gleaming. “Cade Corey paid you thirty thousand dollars so she could slip into a chocolate workshop run by the best chocolatier in Paris, in disguise?”
“She did better than that! She let me use her credit card for a day. I could have spent a lot more, but I had moral qualms.” And she was regretting those qualms already. One ten-carat diamond ring—that wouldn’t have been so bad, right?
“My God, I wish the man had stock I could buy.” The stranger propped his laptop on the top of his suitcase and began typing. “Now, when was this?”
By the time he had all the details, the line had still not advanced by even one person. He pulled out his phone to call someone and spoke into it. “Can I change my flight to take another couple of days in Paris? I mean, officially, as opposed to just standing in this security line that long? Because I think I might have a fun one here.”
“You’re leaving?” Maggie said, disappointed. In a security line like theirs, no one wanted to lose entertainment.
“Would you be willing to share your contact information by any chance?” he asked her.
She pulled back suspiciously. It had been all very well sharing the details of Cade Corey’s story with a complete stranger, but she didn’t want to have some weirdo stalking her.
“I’m sorry, I never introduced myself.” He pulled out a card. “Jack Adams, New York Times. I usually write for the financial section, but I’ve been begging to get into Food.”
“That’s quite a jump,” Maggie said sympathetically.
He grinned. “Yes, but sometimes God smiles on you.”
“That’s what I thought!” Maggie exclaimed in wonder. “Isn’t that something? That means God’s used Cade Corey twice now. I hope she appreciates it.”
That How to Steal Chocolate in Ten Easy Lessons blog post had some good tips, Cade decided. Except for number one: Make sure you steal from Sylvain Marquis. That was just going to make his head even bigger than it already was. How well did he read English?
But number
five, how to avoid a French prison—she might need to pay some attention to that.
Comments were more or less evenly divided between envy of the thief and outrage on Sylvain Marquis’s behalf. “Shouldn’t chocolate be accessible to all?” Cade wrote quickly and hit Submit before she could think better of it. She probably shouldn’t be participating anonymously in debates about herself.
Besides, she didn’t exactly want chocolate to be accessible to all. She wanted the end product to be accessible to most, but she wanted the hidden inner fastnesses to be accessible only to her.
And perhaps one sexy, dark-haired lord of the keep.
“You are my hero,” her grandfather told her over the phone. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to go back twice? You couldn’t steal everything you needed the first time?”
Cade glanced around her. She was trying to combine taking advantage of Paris and combing through the reports on Devon Candy her father wanted her to look at by taking her laptop out to the Seine. The widespread availability of Wi-Fi meant she kept getting distracted by blog posts, though. And her fingers kept stiffening up. It was a little chilly.
From where she sat on cold concrete above the brown water, the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame soared up above her to her left, and bridges arched over the river to either side. “La Vie en Rose” crackled through poor speakers every time an excursion boat sparsely populated with tourists passed. Yellow-brown and burnt-sienna leaves swirled around her feet when a breeze blew, fallen from the plane trees that lined the upper and lower quays. Late autumn in Paris wasn’t a brilliant last burst of color. Plane trees, so beautiful in the summer, didn’t go out with a bang but, rather, leeched themselves into a gray-yellow-brown and dropped their leaves reluctantly. Paris retreated from the joie de vivre of summer into wistfulness, a cold chill, and longing.
“I can’t find his recipes, Grandpa!”
“If he’s smart, he locks them up at night. How are your safecracking skills?”
“A safe? That’d be kind of paranoid,” she said severely.
“Maybe,” he said. “I mean, ours are in a safe within a safe within a safe and written in code, but our chocolate is important. People use it to get by every day. His stuff is just luxurious fluff for people who already have everything else money can buy. Tell me something, though. Have you seen any signs he’s experimented with spinach? Or kale. It’s packed with nutrition, kale.”
“Toute seule, chérie?” a male voice asked, and Cade turned from the Seine-backdropped laptop to stare at him blankly.
Having grown up in a town she owned, she hadn’t been hit on by random strangers all that often. First, very few people were strangers. And second, if they were hitting on her, they had a multibillion-dollar agenda. She and her sister, Jaime, both knew there were very few people they could marry who couldn’t later take them for alimony that would carve a slice out of Corey Chocolate and put it into the hands of a hostile man who had once screwed her into believing he liked her.
It was a nasty bit of knowledge, but that was just the way it was. There were only so many things money could protect you from, and, unfortunately, falling in love with a man who just wanted to use you was not one of them. Quite the reverse, in fact.
In fact, falling in love with a man who just wanted to sexually use her and not her bank account would be romantic as hell by comparison. Just not somebody who looked as slimy as this guy.
An image of Sylvain Marquis flashed through her mind. He didn’t show any consistent interest in using her sexually, the jerk. But it was pretty safe to say he wasn’t interested in using her for money. In fact, she imagined his face if there was ever even any suggestion that he might marry her for money, and she choked on laughter. You—you want to put my name—on you? For money?
The slimy man grinned at her laugh and stepped toward her.
“I’d better go, Grandpa,” she said, because if he heard her trying to defend herself from some random loser on the Seine, he would be on the next flight out to protect her.
Any excuse to start breaking into chocolate factories with her—that was her Grandpa.
She slipped the phone back into her leather satchel, which the man apparently took as further encouragement.
Delighted, he sat down so close to her that his weight pinched her thigh. Cheap cologne and body odor assaulted her, mixed with the smell of lanolin from something glistening in his hair.
She jumped away, closing her laptop as she did so. Words failed her. It was hard to think how to say, “Get the fuck away from me!” in another language when she didn’t have time to look it up in a dictionary. “Get the fuck,” for example. How did you say that? She was fairly sure any attempt would have disastrous unintended meanings.
“Chérie, ne sois pas comme ça.” He came up closer to her, reaching for her shoulders.
She twisted to the other side of him, rather than falling into the Seine. “When he takes me in his arms, he speaks to me so softly,” serenaded speakers from a passing tourist boat. “Quand il me prend dans ses bras, il me parle tout bas. . . . ”
“I’ll take you in my arms,” said the man and in fact tried to do that, grabbing for her waist. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”
Cade slammed her laptop with both hands into his chest and shoved as hard as she could.
Apparently he didn’t expect her to have any strength at all, because he fell back a step. Only there wasn’t any step. His eyes opened wide, his foot sought frantically for purchase in midair, and he grabbed at the laptop for balance.
The laptop jerked from her hands. Water splashed back up from the surface of the river and splattered her in the face as man and computer went under.
Merde. Cade tried to remember exactly when she had last backed up her data.
Not since before she left for Paris. So the past week of cramming Corey work into days she wanted to fill only with Paris had just gone down into the Seine in the hands of a pig.
From behind her on the quays above came loud clapping and cheers. Three clearly Parisian women and a couple of guys stood in the gap between two green bookstalls, pumping fists into the air and giving her the thumbs-up.
She grinned.
The man resurfaced, the current pulling him downstream from her. No laptop was visible.
Not that it would have survived a dousing in the river anyway. The man cursed and coughed, and she gave him the finger and headed upstream to climb back to the upper quays. She arrived at the top of the stairs at the same time as the group that had cheered her. They were all grinning at her. A slim brunette with that sleek Parisian look, put together from black pants, high boots, a gray scarf, and the perfect touch of a silver bracelet, said, “Sérieux, on peut t’offrir un verre?” “Can we buy you a drink?”
Cade glanced back at her assailant, who had finally managed to grab one of those iron rings on the edge of the quay, about a quarter mile down, and was hauling himself out. “I—sure.”
Within half an hour, they had adopted her. All five were students, even though they were close to her age. They seemed so much younger and freer than she felt that envy licked through her.
“You’re here to see Paris?” the brunette, Nicole, said. “We’ll show you the real Paris. Come out with us tonight.”
“No, not tonight,” Marc said. Funny, how he seemed so sophisticated and yet so young to her. “I’ve got a presentation for my Proust class tomorrow.”
A presentation. On some guy who wrote about madeleines. She had to give her father feedback tomorrow on a decision about candy that could affect the entire global economy and directly impact the livelihood of tens of thousands of people. Maybe that was what had happened to her sense of youth.
“Bon, demain,” said the others. “Tomorrow night? D’accord?”
“D’accord,” Cade said, thrilled.
They were befriending her, and they didn’t even know who she was. Maybe it had been a good idea to come to Paris after all.
It was too
bad Marc had that presentation for the next day, though, because that left her with another night free to get into trouble.
* * *
Chapter 13
She could feel him lurking, even as she stepped into the workshop. Feel his eyes gleaming from the shadows.
The sense of him prickled over her skin, tightening it, making it long for a touch, as she moved through his domain. She searched the laboratoire for him, wishing he could see her, wishing he had a security camera set up that he was watching even now.
But wait, that shadow, there . . . no, those were pots and the gleam of copper.
That shadow . . . was an enormous mold in the shape of an egg, maybe five feet tall. Those shadows were a stack of crates from Sri Lanka.
She took a long, deep breath, stretching out her arms to let her chest expand, taking in the scents all around her. The whole world and all that was most magical about it seemed to be held in here, scents and flavors taken from everywhere and distilled into pleasure.
Tonight she wanted to make . . . hot chocolate. Spanish hot chocolate, like they drank in Madrid, or the hot chocolate French nobles had once used as a love potion. Du chocolat chaud. It was cold outside and cold in the laboratoire, where the temperature had been set lower for the nighttime hours.
Her skin kept prickling with excitement as she tasted pistoles to decide which chocolate she wished to use. Odd, that he would let her get away with this three times.
A colder fear seized her, and she scanned the laboratoire again, eyes higher up. Maybe he had installed a security camera. Maybe he was collecting evidence right now to hang her. Maybe the police would be waiting outside.
Was she nuts? She could go to jail. She could cause major damage to her family’s company, in the form of a reactionary stock drop among their subsidiaries. She could lose all the privilege to which she had been so lucky to be born. She could find herself stripped down to nothing but her physical person in a prison cell with no way out.
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