Cade felt miserable. Guilty, rebellious, unsure of how to become herself. Like an adolescent, perhaps, except she hadn’t felt that way as an adolescent. She had fit in perfectly in their world as an adolescent, known exactly what to do to be the best next Corey, and done it. Despite her own desires to sink into a simpler, sweeter world of artisan chocolate, she had assumed her responsibilities with no instant of rebellion, unlike her sister, Jaime, who had pretty much refused them from the get-go and set off to save the world from big, bad capitalists like her sister.
“Are you okay? I worried about you when you didn’t respond to any messages yesterday.”
“I was working,” she said quickly. “I went up to Belgium.”
“Still,” her father said firmly, “you should have answered your messages.”
She was trying to wean her father from needing to hear from her quite that frequently. She felt like Marie Antoinette playing at being a farmer in the Petit Trianon. Please, I don’t want to run the world anymore. Just—can I be something else, for a little while?
“I had to make some calls to make sure you hadn’t gotten arrested for chocolate theft.”
“I—don’t think Sylvain Marquis plans to press charges.” It wasn’t the sex that made her trust him. Far from it. It was the way he had shifted his body to block her from the wind in the gardens.
“Is it working, then?” her grandfather asked. “Are you luring him into the fold? Is he going to sell himself to us?”
Oh, yeah, sure, any millennium now. “No.”
“Just as well, really,” her father said. “I’m not convinced anymore that it’s a good time to start a new line. But if you’re that sure, why are you still there? I could use you back here right now, sweetie.”
“Can’t you ever let her have a vacation?” her grandfather asked him. “What is it with you and making her work all the time? I don’t see why I made us billions just so my granddaughters have to work instead of gallivanting around Paris.”
Mack Corey turned away from the Webcam and stared at his father. “First of all, you made us millions. I made us billions. And second of all, what are you talking about? You made me work 24/7!”
“I was younger and stupid when you were a kid,” the older Corey said impatiently. “And we still only had millions. And the Mars family was getting uppity, and we needed to make sure they didn’t beat us. Plus, you were a boy.”
Cade sighed. It was fairly annoying that her grandfather’s sexism was her best defense.
“And I made sure you had a year to tour Europe, the way my dad did me, I’ll have you know,” her grandfather said. “It’s not my fault it was wasted and you never tried to break into a single chocolaterie the whole time you were there.”
“She had a semester abroad when she was in college! It’s not my fault she wanted to double major and couldn’t find time in her curriculum to stay a year. She travels all the time for Corey. And she’s been in practically every country in the world! Except a few of the ones where we have to hire an army to make sure she doesn’t get kidnapped. It’s so hard to get a reliable army these days.”
Her grandfather folded his arms. “Either that only whetted her appetite, or it isn’t what she is looking for at all, or you need to cut her enough slack now that she can spend one whole day not working while in Paris without your having conniptions. She graduated four years ago. That’s a long time to go without a few hours’ vacation.”
“I didn’t mind that she wasn’t working,” her father said sulkily. It was one of the side benefits of being a member of a closely-knit billionaire family that she got to see the head of one of the Fortune 500 act sulky. He didn’t do that in public. “Although it’s not a good time for that, to be honest. I just wanted to make sure she was all right. It’s not like her not to answer her phone or take care of problems as soon as they come up. She knows I want her opinion on the Firenze brothers.”
“What could have happened to her?” her grandfather scoffed.
“A car accident, kidnapping, food poisoning, getting mugged, tripping and falling on stairs, hitting her head, and not having anyone find her until it was too late, an enraged French chocolatier, or, most likely, the way she’s been behaving, jail.”
Her grandfather studied his son. “Being a father is rough, isn’t it?” he asked sympathetically.
“Yes,” Mack Corey said definitely, completely missing his father’s real meaning. His father punched him in the shoulder to try to make sure he caught it, but his son only glanced at his punched shoulder blankly.
Cade hid a grin, feeling homesickness well up in a strange, split-personality way. Because she really didn’t want to go home.
Cade went to the Louvre. She spent the whole afternoon at the Louvre. She stood staring at giant Assyrian griffins. She wandered among the Italians, trying to remember if any of those artists had gotten syphilis, and if they had, whether staring at their extraordinary art should make her feel better about herself. Maybe she needed to be over in the Musée d’Orsay with van Gogh.
She got a little bit lost among Egyptian sarcophagi, found herself wandering among thousand-year-old foundations underground, and finally came out into the light pouring softly through the inverted pyramid in a great courtyard one level down from the surface. She folded her legs under her on one of the stone benches there and sat, almost Zen style, for at least an hour. The murmur of people moving through the courtyard surrounded her like running water as she soaked in the soft, luminous paleness of the courtyards, the great marble statues that had once stood in gardens.
The guards kept a casually suspicious eye on her, which was kind of funny. No one kept a suspicious eye on her in Corey. Maybe her descent into crime and kamikaze behavior had created an aura for her. If there was one place where you would spot auras, it was in this calm, calm space. Except that anyone who sat here too long would have his aura purified by beauty.
She imagined everyone coming up the escalators out of the museum, into the crisp, cold November courtyard of the palace, surrounded by white auras. Taking on life again, slowly turning back into their old colors.
She was crossing the wood-planked pedestrian bridge, the Pont des Arts, across from the Louvre, when her phone rang.
“Do you ever eat anything besides chocolate?” Sylvain asked. “Where are you? Do you know how inconsistent you are? You break into my chocolaterie, you try to buy it, you bribe people—is it true you paid that woman thirty thousand American dollars for that morning in the workshop?—but when I invite you, you don’t even call back.”
“The thirty thousand dollars wasn’t intentional.” There hadn’t really been any intelligent analysis of possible results when she’d handed a stranger her credit card. “What invitation?”
“I left you a message this morning.”
Really? No messages were required in a hook-up. That was one of the basic rules. Her thumb stroked over the back of her phone. She began to smile. “How did you get this number?”
Evening was falling earlier and earlier as November advanced, and the lights came on all around her as she stood there, looking at the tip of the Île de la Cité, with its bare trees and couples still sitting there, despite the cold and the failing light. The street lamps sprang warmly to life against the winter dusk, and luminescence softly woke around the Louvre and Notre-Dame and the Musée d’Orsay, its great railroad clock glowing faintly green. The wind blew a drizzle across her, nudging her home.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have a home here. She only had a short-term apartment rental from which she could look out at things she wanted.
And Thanksgiving was coming, and Christmas after. Maybe she should be heading toward her real home.
Her eyes creased, her heart troubled, as she got an inkling of another side to her current conflict. Where should she be, as the holidays came round? She had agreed with her father to take no more than a month here. A month, which had seemed an enormous amount of playtime to her when she had first bargained
for it, now seemed very, very short.
“I took a card out of your wallet while you were still asleep,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You stole from me?” She was outraged.
There was a long, incredulous pause. “Are you kidding me?”
“Did you steal anything else?” Her stomach clenched in old, learned sickness. A credit card, for example. If all this nose-dived straight down to her money . . .
“Like what? Ton passeport? So you can’t disappear—with all my secrets?” Had she imagined it, or had that “with all my secrets” been tacked on quickly? The rhythm of the question had barely broken. She had probably imagined it. He didn’t care if she disappeared, just if she stole his secrets when she did it. “Do people who fly in private jets even have to show their passports?”
“Yes, but the immigration stamps are in gold leaf.”
He laughed. “I’ve got something for you. Do you eat anything that doesn’t have sugar in it? I can make dinner.”
Standing there in the drizzle, gazing over brown waters at the winter-bare tip of an island and Notre-Dame, she felt her whole face split into a smile. She tried to keep her voice more neutral, though. “At your apartment?”
“You don’t have anything in your refrigerator worth eating,” he said firmly. In fact, she had a sample box from every important chocolatier in the city—besides him, of course. His had all gone to the homeless man in the gardens. From his tone of voice, she suspected he had opened her refrigerator while he was there and seen all those other chocolatiers’ boxes. “So it will have to be mine.”
* * *
Chapter 20
He met her at the chocolaterie, where the laboratoire had closed but the shop was still open until nine, with a long line out its door.
“Do you think I should pay you a commission?” Sylvain asked wonderingly. “Having you get caught stealing my chocolates is the best thing for business—other than myself, of course—that has ever happened to me.”
She gave him an aggrieved look.
He pressed his lips together in amusement and led her to his apartment, stopping to pick up a baguette at the boulangerie. She watched him enviously. He did that so easily, as if it was as natural to him as breathing to stop in a bakery and pick up a baguette on the way home. Which, of course, it was.
“They just came out of the oven.” He held it out to her to share the pleasure. She pulled off a glove and closed her hand over it, feeling the warmth of the long, thin loaf through the small square of paper the baker had twisted around it.
He broke an end off and handed it to her, crackling and warm. She smiled as he broke off another bite for himself. He smiled back. “Nothing like catching the loaves when they just come out of the oven.”
He lived in the rue piétonne where she had run into him in the restaurant, a couple of blocks over from his chocolaterie and on the far end from the restaurant itself.
The apartment seemed nice. It was as clean and uncluttered as his laboratoire, everything put away in its place. But he obviously wiped down the counters in the laboratoire much more often than it occurred to him to dust the shelves here.
The living room was spacious and during the day must be luminous, with large windows that could be opened inward like great doors and that gave on to wrought-iron railings. A warm-colored rug graced the polished hardwood floor. The couch looked well-loved, as if someone liked to stretch out on it to read a good book or watch the moderately large flat-screen TV. She could see the indentation on the arm on which his head always lay, so that he was facing the windows. Tucked under the table at that end of the couch was a photo album in brown leather, embossed with his initials. It must have been someone’s idea of a gift.
All the doors down the hallway were closed. She picked up the photo album and came back into the kitchen. The kitchen, too, was spacious, or at least spacious for a single person’s apartment in a crowded city. And, of course, it was very well equipped.
Sylvain began pulling things out of the refrigerator—mushrooms, shallots, meat wrapped in paper. From a wine rack tucked under the edge of the counter, he brought out a bottle of wine. He paused when she came to lean against the dark granite counter and watch him. “Tiens.” He handed her a tiny paper bag that looked recently crushed by someone’s back pocket.
“What’s this?”
He looked—awkward. Sylvain, awkward? Half smiling, half-embarrassed, as if not sure how his gift would be received. “Just something I saw while I was out for lunch. It made me think of you.”
She blushed immediately. And opened it cautiously, half expecting velvet handcuffs.
A tiny, hand-knitted beige teddy bear peeked up at her, its eyes stitched by hand with two strands of black thread. It wore a minuscule backpack, into which an even tinier beige teddy bear was tucked. It was a finger puppet. She slipped it onto her finger, smiling as she eased the baby teddy out of the backpack to examine it and slipped it back onto the mommy bear’s back. It was completely and utterly charming, and it made no sense. She wasn’t a child, and their relationship wasn’t childish.
She looked up at him. He was smiling more, less awkward, as if the sight of it on her finger reminded him why he had bought it.
“Why?” she finally asked.
He pulled out a wooden cutting board and a chef’s knife that gleamed sharp enough to shave. “Because I didn’t think you would already have it. And I thought you might need it.”
“Need it?” Was she missing something about this teddy-bear finger puppet?
He nodded. “It accomplishes nothing. It is completely and utterly frivolous and childish. It’s just for the pure fun of it. For pleasure.”
He thought she needed more frivolity after the irresponsible way she had been behaving? She turned and bent her finger, liking the feel of the teddy bear on it. Who wouldn’t like a teddy-bear finger puppet?
Especially one that had no point. There were so few things in her life that had no point.
Or, wait . . . that was its point.
“This may be the most romantic present anyone has ever given me,” she said out loud before she thought.
Black eyebrows shot up. “Vraiment?”
“Vraiment.”
“Dis, donc.” He shook his head, turning back to the counter. “Those other guys will be easy to top, then, won’t they?”
She studied the back of his dark head, the easy set of his broad shoulders, the ease of all of him, all that lean, long body, as he cooked so casually. Did he want to top other men’s romantic gestures? He was doing a great job of it, but . . . was he doing it on purpose? Sex didn’t have to mean romance.
He dampened a cloth and began to rub each mushroom clean. “You mean, no one has ever brought you flowers?”
“Oh . . . flowers. Yes, of course.” She got flowers a lot, actually. They were an unnervingly fake gift. Easy to order over a phone at the most casual opportunity a man could find to increase his acquaintance with her money.
“No one’s ever given you chocolates?”
She laughed. “No. No one has ever given me chocolates.”
He looked sympathetic. “That must have been tough on you. Always wishing someone would give you real chocolates, but no one ever daring because of your family.”
There was maybe a teensy grain of truth in that, but she narrowed her eyes at him nevertheless.
He whipped his knife through the mushrooms in about five seconds and set the knife down long enough to fish in the pocket of the jacket he had draped over a chair. He produced the smallest-sized box from his shop, the kind that held only four thumbnail-sized chocolates, took the lid off, and held it out to her.
In it nestled four plain, square chocolates, completely unadorned. She looked from it to the broad hand holding it, the strong wrist, the straight, dark hairs on that strong forearm. Her gaze skipped up to his eyes, almost exactly the color of the chocolate and smiling just a little at her.
She got distracted by his eyes for a mo
ment, wanting just to look at them in this moment of calm. He didn’t seem to mind the delay, studying her, his hand still patiently stretched toward her.
She pushed her hand through her hair and looked away, focusing on the chocolates. When she bit into one, it was dark, of course, lustrous in flavor, elusively cinnamon-y. Ever since she had told him she liked cinnamon, he kept playing with it.
“What do you think?”
She thought that, yes, as naturally as breathing he topped the romance of every other man she had ever dated or slept with.
How easy was this for him? Was it a formula, his seduction routine? Was she supposed to even care if it was a routine or just enjoy the moment?
His smile faded at her silence. “Non?” He closed the box. “It was just something I was playing around with today. I’m sure it needs more work.”
“No.” She shook her head helplessly. “It doesn’t need more work.” He was perfect exactly as he was. Perfect.
She turned away to the photo album, opening it in self-defense and also in deep curiosity. What would Sylvain’s more personal photos, not the ones that were in magazines, look like?
She felt more than saw the gesture he made toward the album, as if to grab it. He broke that gesture off and turned to the shallots instead. He minced the small shallots so finely and so quickly, she was sure he would lose a finger.
Of course, he didn’t. He tossed them into a pan and made an automatic gesture toward his front, as if to brush his fingers on a chef’s apron, then remembered and switched to his jeans.
It was a little scary how much she loved his fingers. She wanted them to do other things besides drive her crazy. Stroke her hair, play with her fingers, brush a fleck of something off her cheek.
She looked back at the photo album. “Who made this for you?”
“Ma maman,” he said, resigned.
The whole notion of a mother in connection with the man who had walked her up those stairs the night before made her jump, as if the woman might pop out from behind one of those closed doors. “Where does your mother live?”
The Chocolate Thief Page 18