The Chocolate Thief

by Laura Florand

  But he would take that. He didn’t care. He had spent his whole life trying to make his chocolate irresistible; he wasn’t going to complain when it was working on a prize like her.

  The problem was, she didn’t even have to buy a ticket to leave. She could climb straight back onto her private plane the second she decided to move on. And that had to be pretty soon, right? Because she was just here for a visit.

  * * *

  Chapter 21

  Cade woke to daylight and the sounds of Sylvain moving cheerfully around the apartment, singing something under his breath, some French tune she didn’t know. He had a good voice, a nice, rich tenor.

  “I’ll go get some pains au chocolat,” he told her, voice slightly muffled by the comforter in which her ears were buried. She liked it under there. It was cozy and warm and dark and smelled of chocolate and two human bodies, and she halfway wished he would just say “Ciao” and walk out so that she could stay there and not deal with anything.

  Like him and herself, for example. And like her responsibilities in life. If she couldn’t get this gourmet line idea to work, she knew she needed to go home and go back to her real job.

  “Or do you want a tarte aux framboises again?”

  She made a wordless sound that he must have taken however he wanted, because a moment later she heard the apartment door close. She got up and found his shower, determined not to be caught at quite the same disadvantage as the day before. He had a real shower. Enclosed in glass and attached to the wall so she didn’t have to hold it herself. He even had a nice series of jets up and down the side of the stall. She soaked in the warmth and steam blissfully, taking her time.

  She had her face raised to the spray and started when she heard a rap on the glass. Sylvain was holding a thick brown towel and gazing at her wet, naked body with an unexpectedly possessive smile on his face. “You should go ahead and get out,” he told her with a grin. “I’m exhausted. I need a few hours.”

  She flushed, wondering if he thought she was a nymphomaniac.

  Since during his entire acquaintance with her she had felt and acted like a nymphomaniac, odds were high that he did. Being a man, he probably wasn’t complaining, just enjoying the ride.

  Literally, she thought, with a wry twist of embarrassment.

  It was those hands of his. They were so exactly the fantasy she had carried with her ever since seeing that photo on his fabulously artistic Web site of his right hand setting a bit of cocoa nib on a tiny chocolate. They matched so perfectly the tall, sexy, dark-haired, passionate man who lived with all his senses, who was so arrogant and so sure, who mastered her with tastes and textures. She wanted to meet his passion with her passion. She wanted those hands to manipulate her. She couldn’t get enough of them. She couldn’t get enough of him.

  And then, just when she thought pure and passionate sex was an end in itself, and that was fine, and they didn’t need anything else but chocolate . . . then all of a sudden he did something, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t an end in itself, and she did need something else.

  Like now. She dressed in yesterday’s clothes and came out to the kitchen with her hair damp and caught in a ponytail, and no makeup. And he looked at her a long moment, his face going closed and contained in that way he had, as if the sight of her caused him some kind of pain.

  Why? Did it cause him that many qualms to be sleeping with someone from the Corey Chocolate family?

  The scent of fresh baking, butter and yeast, came from the white paper sack and rectangular box that sat on the table. The paper sack held three pains au chocolat, double bars of chocolate peeking generously from each end of their golden flakiness. The rectangular box opened to reveal a selection of three tartes, including a tarte aux framboises. “Just in case,” he told her.

  “What’s this one?” She pointed to an apple-studded yellow tart in the middle, the texture of which seemed almost omelet-like. “Does it have eggs and fruit in it? That’s almost breakfast where I come from.”

  He looked at it and then at her. “Americans are very strange. It’s a tarte normande. Maybe someone in Normandy invented it to make some American soldier happy.” He shrugged.

  “It’s not that similar,” she told him dryly as she took a bite. The base, almost like a mildly sweet quiche, blended perfectly with the apples. It reminded her a little bit of a German apple pancake, but in the context of World War II, maybe it was better not to raise that origin as a possibility. “And it’s probably healthier for me than that pain au chocolat. More protein, some fruit, less fat and sugar.”

  He shrugged again. “I have yogurt in the refrigerator, if you want it. And the rest of those chocolates, if you’re having withdrawal symptoms from going almost eight hours without chocolate. Without my chocolate,” he clarified, with a deliberately smug smirk. “Are you regretting giving it all away yet?”

  Yes. Especially since it would be a real loss of face to go back to his shop and buy more from one of his snooty clerks. And if she couldn’t live without it, and she couldn’t bring herself to lose that face and buy it again, she was going to have to go to him for every piece she wanted.

  And he was going to so completely master her.

  Her eyes dilated, and her mouth watered, and she looked down at her tarte normande quickly.

  “I should go,” he said. She blinked and flinched inside. She tried to detect a tone of regret in his voice but didn’t. “I have a stagiaire coming in today, and I’d like to be there when he is, in case I need to interpret.”

  “What language?” she asked, surprised. Did Sylvain speak another language? A stagiaire was an intern, a trainee—she remembered that word.

  He shook his head. “Dialect. Between worlds. The banlieue he comes from is very different from the sixth arrondissement in Paris.”

  “Then how can you serve as the interpreter?” she asked, confused. She knew vaguely, from his biography, that he had been born in the outskirts of Paris, en banlieue, but the outskirts hadn’t seemed an important distinction from Paris itself at the time.

  “I grew up in the same banlieue,” he said briefly, rising. He clearly didn’t want to expand much on his childhood with her, did he?

  She supposed that was good. He wasn’t trying to use sex as a springboard to intimacy. No effort to insert himself into her life and marry billions, at least.

  It was romantic, but it was also confusing. Her billions had always been there to guarantee that men were interested in her. Without them, she felt as if she had been dropped into a foreign city with no business cards, no phone, no name, just the clothes on her back and her wits to survive on.

  He rinsed the pain au chocolat crumbs off his hands and stopped in front of her where she sat holding her tarte normande. He hesitated, then leaned down and kissed her very quickly, a brush of his lips across hers.

  And left.

  Cade was still sitting there frozen a few minutes later when her phone rang. This time, she recognized the source. “You can come, if you want,” Sylvain said. “I’ll show you how to make something.”

  A smile bloomed across her face. She went to the window to look down and saw him standing in the middle of the pedestrian lane, looking up at the window. She wasn’t sure he could actually see her there, or if the reflection of the light acted as a shield.

  “But I’m showing you, not Corey Chocolate,” he said. “So don’t sell it. And please God, don’t put my name on it if you do.”

  * * *

  Chapter 22

  In the laboratoire, a dust rose as Pascal coated a batch of truffles in finely ground crumbs of caramelized almond, shaking them on a wide, sievelike rack in a gesture exactly as if he was winnowing the harvest. Far enough away that he avoided any risk of contamination from stray crumbs worked a teenager who stood out not only for his youth but because he was the only black person in the room and seemed caught halfway between pride and awkwardness in his work. He was stirring a giant pot of chocolate.

  A woman was applyin
g a three-pronged fork expertly to little rectangular chocolates as they came out of the Sollich enrobeuse, glistening in their newborn chocolate skins. As the fork lifted, it left behind a pretty pattern that Cade recognized instantly as that of the ganache vanille. Another woman was spraying molds from a pistolet, coating each shell with the faintest sheen of chocolat.

  Not far from the teenager, Sylvain himself was using his thumb to flick something that looked like pale green paint off a toothbrush onto a supple sheet of plastic. He picked up another toothbrush and dipped it into a darker green batch of what must actually be colored white chocolate, not paint.

  He glanced up when she came in and gave her a long, searching look, then suddenly smiled. Pascal Guyot also looked up, rolled his eyes, sent Sylvain an ironic, sidelong glance, and focused back on his work, ignoring her. The teenager, who must be the stagiaire, raised his eyebrows right up to his hairline, glanced over at Sylvain, and grinned.

  Then he started to lift his huge pot of melted chocolate confidently but faltered as the weight of it caught him by surprise. Sylvain dropped the toothbrush and caught the cauldron from him easily and carried it over to the enrobeuse, laughing as he poured it into the machine, manipulating the weight without even seeming to notice it.

  “Et les muscles dans tout ça, Malik?” one of the other men called, laughing.

  Malik, as the teenager must be called, looked a little embarrassed and flexed his shoulders self-consciously, as if to try to make sure his biceps were visible through the pastry jacket he wore. “I don’t have time for the gym anymore; I’m always over here!” he protested.

  “Maybe we need to give you more pots to carry to keep you in shape,” the thin man with glasses joked. “Here, try this one.” He handed him a metal bowl the size of an ordinary kitchen-mixer bowl.

  “Or this one, if that’s too heavy,” said the burly man, pulling down a tiny pot that seemed to be too small for any practical purpose in this laboratoire.

  “Okay, okay,” Malik groaned. “I can carry it. I was just surprised.”

  No wonder almost everyone here seemed so lean and in good shape, Cade thought, trying to judge the weight of the original chocolate pot. Over fifty pounds, certainly. Eighty? How many times a day did they move something like that? Probably too many to keep count.

  Sylvain stopped by Cade, his face still alight with humor. Looking up into that laughing face, she felt something run through her like a long, long sigh of brightness. “You can borrow one of my jackets today,” he told her. “You looked as if you were drowning in Bernard’s. And tuck your hair up into this.” He handed her the plain paper cap that everyone but he and Pascal wore. “No one is ever going to find a hair in one of my chocolates.”

  Cade supposed that Bernard was the burly man. But it wasn’t as if Sylvain’s coat was a good fit. She rolled the sleeves up and up, wondering why he hadn’t let her borrow one of the women’s jackets. Maybe he just felt more comfortable lending his own things.

  The fact that she was wearing his jacket made her smile to a puzzling degree. She felt fragile, still, to be standing near him in public after all their wild private sex, but in not quite the same way.

  “What is this for?” she asked him, standing in front of the plastic spattered delicately with two shades of green.

  “I’m experimenting with a new décor for my chocolat, Curiosité, ” he said. “La ganache au basilic,” he added, in case she had eaten her way through multiple boxes of his chocolates without realizing that Curiosité was delicately flavored with basil. Truthfully, she wouldn’t have been able to figure out the flavor if hadn’t been for the glossy little insert explaining each chocolate. Basil, of all things. No wonder he thought her preference for cinnamon was so datée. “Once it hardens, we’ll apply it to the top of the ovals that come out of the enrobeuse. And see whether we like the look.”

  “How many different kinds of ganache do you have?” she asked, because she liked hearing him say the word ganache. Like chocolat, it sounded like the caress of temptation.

  “Twenty-four ganaches au chocolat currently,” he said.

  Ganaches au chocolat. The two words together licked heat up her body, flickering little tongues of flame against her sex, her breasts, the insides of her wrists, the nape of her neck.

  “Nineteen noirs, of different degrees and flavors, and five au lait.”

  “Which one is your favorite?” Say it again, she wanted to beg. Say ganache au chocolat again.

  He shook his head. “I don’t have a favorite. If I didn’t believe they were all the very best, I wouldn’t be selling them.”

  Cade gave a tiny sigh and reminded herself that Corey Bars were the best of their type. The type that got sold by the billions by being within hand’s reach in the checkout line at the grocery store.

  No, it wasn’t just that. The type that built up an affection in people, a coziness, that gave them a sense of security as part of their childhood. The type that got them sitting happily in front of a fireplace, laughing and making s’mores.

  “Which one do you eat the most of?”

  “I don’t actually eat much chocolate for leisure. There is always something I am tasting here. Or occasionally a new chocolatier earns critical attention, and I want to taste what he is doing. There’s so much to test all the time that I don’t think it’s the same pleasure to me as to you to sit down and open a new box of chocolates and think which one I will try first.”

  No, probably not. She always felt she was opening a treasure box after searching the world for it.

  “For me, the delight of discovery is in the beginning, when I first create it and am tasting it as it is finished, deciding if it is perfect as is or needs something different.” He took a fresh sheet of plastic as he spoke, setting it in front of her, and put the toothbrush in her hand, closing his hand over hers to show her how to flick her thumb. Green splattered too thickly on hers. There was a trick to it, getting that flick just right. He rubbed her knuckle with a thumb roughened by years of handling all kinds of equipment, and showed her again.

  “I love that phase. But if anything compares for me to the way you feel when you open a box of chocolates, I suppose it’s to sit down in an excellent restaurant for the first time and look at the menu of all the possibilities of what I can eat that someone else will have imagined and prepared for me.”

  Cade wondered what elegant restaurants in Paris he hadn’t tried yet. Her heart gave a little sparkle of happiness at a fantasy that flitted through her brain of them both sitting down in an elegant restaurant, him scanning the menu intently, savoring each item in his imagination as he tried to decide which to order. She’d bet he did wonders for any elegant clothes he wore. She would take him to any restaurant he cared to name. She would order up a helicopter and fly him down to a three-star restaurant in the south of France, if that was what he wanted. She would . . .

  “I think the chocolate I most want to taste again right now is the bitter one I made for you,” he said reflectively.

  “Did you really make it for me?” He could be like a rock star, making every woman believe he had written his love song for her.

  “Oui, bien sûr,” he said, clearly puzzled she could ask.

  Whether in the raw or refined, Sylvain didn’t seem to have much time for faking things, she thought. He did it real and the best, one hundred percent, or he didn’t do it.

  What did that mean, in regard to her?

  “Have you thought about selling it?” she asked.

  “I hadn’t at the time. But I keep wanting to taste it again. Which means, yes, it could please a certain segment of our public. I could call it L’Amertume.”

  Bitterness.

  “Or Déception.”

  Disappointment?

  He pulled her blotched sheet of plastic away from her and gave her a new one. “Try again. So, what do you think? Should I offer it to the public?”

  “It is oddly compulsive eating,” she allowed. “Even now, I keep t
hinking I would like another bite of one.”

  A flicker across his face—humor, surprise, wariness. Also, was that a slight flush on his cheekbones? He looked at her. “Are we still talking about the chocolate? Or life? Or . . . ?”

  She met his eyes straight on. “Chocolate.” She did not seek any dark, bitter moments in her life. But that last, open-ended “or . . .” made a blush climb to her cheeks. “But once you have it, it stops you. You don’t want more of anything at all. Which in my world is bad marketing, but in your world, who knows? You could probably sell each one for five hundred euros, and people would buy it. And then it wouldn’t matter if you sold more.”

  “Not five hundred euros, but you have a good idea. We’ll sell it in individual wrappers for twice as much as our other chocolates.” In a tiny bag, exactly the same way he had offered it to her, in fact. She wondered how she felt about being an inspiration for this darkest, bitterest, smoothest, richest chocolate.

  Good.

  “I bet it becomes a fashion for a little while,” Sylvain said with satisfaction, once again musing aloud without being conscious of his audience. “Especially as a gift between troubled lovers.”

  Cade looked immediately at her sheet of plastic, as if the word “amant” had brought them onto fragile ground. A bridge of eggshells over a long, plunging gap, maybe, and who knew what was on the other side, because no one ever made it to the other side without breaking through.

  She was Cade Corey of Corey, Maryland. A lot of people depended on her. Even to think about the possibility of another “side” was to create an impossibility. And if something was impossible, you might as well give up on it and go home.

  She flicked her thumb over her toothbrush, and a speck of green chocolate hit her right in the eye.

  Sylvain laughed, low, took her chin, and turned her to him.