“I’m sure I would be flying back and forth all the time,” she said weakly, around what felt like a knife in her heart.
Sylvain’s hands tightened suddenly on the wheel. He glanced sideways.
“Plus, you have to come over here, right? I have to show you the trick of breaking into some of these French chocolateries. If I did stay in Europe, which . . . I’m just talking about options, right now. ”
Sylvain slid another sharp glance at her.
“Europe is full of snobs,” her grandfather said definitely.
Yes, but she liked those snobs. She studied the strong, clean line of Sylvain’s jaw, the thin, sensual mouth, the eyebrows that could be so expressive. In a collage around him, she seemed to see the faces of all the other chocolatiers she had met, and the bakers, and the fromagers. She liked their attitude and belief in individuality and being the best.
“Who would you rather see every day?” Jack Corey asked with a wheedling tone. “A bunch of snobs or your grandfather?”
Cade felt as if her stomach had been stuck between two stones that were now slowly grinding together. “Grandpa, I just . . .” She just what? What part of this did she want to even try to articulate to herself, much less to her grandfather? “I’m just looking at options.”
Sylvain’s mouth flexed hard and grimly.
“Well, look at them in a few years! When I’m gone,” he said bluntly. “What’s your hurry?”
Oh. Those stones grinding her stomach hurt. “Mars,” she mumbled. “Market share.” And if Sylvain . . . if Sylvain what? She glanced at him again. Damn it, she was so goal-oriented sometimes, she didn’t even know how to have a casual affair with a man.
“You know, Cadey, I used to care about Mars. Turned your father into a damned workaholic over Mars. I don’t mean to bore you with the fact that I’m old enough now to be smarter than all of you, because, well—you know that already. I still want to beat Mars. But I’ll put family before market share any day.”
There was a careful silence after he disconnected, and Cade slipped her phone back into her purse.
“You’re thinking of staying in Europe?” Sylvain asked at last. His voice was very neutral.
Would it have killed him to express bright hope and delight? “I’m looking at options.”
His hands flexed around the wheel. His mouth tightened.
She pressed her forehead to the cold window and stared out at the plane trees.
To reach the château, they ducked off the highway down a tiny street between stone houses, Sylvain driving with complete confidence, despite the fact that from her vantage point it looked as if they had an inch to spare between the side mirrors and the stone walls. The street twisted for about two hundred yards, right up to a tall green gate only just wide enough to fit through.
“Apparently the previous owners were afraid to have a wider gate because it made it easy for thieves to bring in a truck and clean them out,” Sylvain said. He parked the van on white gravel by the edge of the courtyard, and they climbed out.
Cade gazed at a beautiful white façade, peeling here and there but over all well maintained, white lace veiling dozens of great windows behind iron railings. “Napoléon III,” Sylvain mentioned. It loomed stately and graceful above the mob of peasants that milled below it.
Gleeful peasants.
Who were suddenly swarming them. Cade ducked at the onslaught of bobbing pitchforks.
“Oup, pardon,” said one pitchfork wielder and planted the prongs in the gravel. She suddenly found herself in an extensive round of bises with more would-be farmers than she had ever met in her life. Some wore overalls and carried straw in their teeth. Some wore great floppy hats and huge sunflowers. Some had colorful suspenders and rain boots. Some, a little abashed, wore jeans and an apologetic baseball cap as the best they could come up with. From the far end of the courtyard, a tall, thin man appeared loaded with hoes and shovels to pass around.
“Seriously, don’t tell them my name,” Cade begged one last time in Sylvain’s ear.
“Maman!” Sylvain exclaimed, ignoring Cade’s comment for the pitiful attempt it was. “Where’s Papa? How was the trip?”
A woman who looked as if the quintessence of elegance had been trapped in overalls three sizes too big for her embraced Sylvain hard, pressing her cheek for a long time against each of his, four times over. “Ça va, mon petit choux?”
“Maman, this is Cade Corey.”
Bastard, Cade thought. She had always known he deserved to be robbed blind.
The woman looked like an older version of Chantal—hair a little shorter, as suited her age, and the blond was probably dyed but perfectly coiffed and elegantly feathered. She was dressed in the thrifty chic Parisian women seemed to do so well, as if elegance had everything to do with taste, and nothing to do with money, although at a guess, Sylvain had given her that Dior scarf which added the perfect touch of color to her outfit. Her makeup was subtle and effective, and glasses helped disguise the laughter and smoke lines around the corners of her eyes. She gave Cade two air kisses, not letting their cheeks touch. “So you’re the thief,” she said flatly.
Sylvain, the complete and utter bastard, was already turning away to clasp some man’s hand, to be kissed by someone else, laughing.
“It’s complicated,” Cade said.
Perfectly plucked eyebrows rose. And waited.
“I had to do something dramatic to catch his attention,” Cade said hurriedly. “He said the chocolate was more important than I was.”
“And was he right?” Marguerite Marquis asked unanswerably.
Cade was still stuck trying to figure out the answer when a bright voice exclaimed by her shoulder: “Bonjour! Are you the Chocolate Thief? I haven’t heard nearly enough about you. Je m’appelle Natalie.”
“My sister,” Sylvain reappeared to explain, as a slim, dark-haired young woman around twenty kissed Cade’s cheeks.
The man who had been distributing hoes and shovels stopped before them. He wore a big floppy hat, from under which peeked perfectly cut, perfectly silvered hair. His huge black rain boots were splattered with mud and straw, old and new, as if they clearly got a lot of use. “You must be Cade Corey. I’m Fréd—Fréderic Delaube. Welcome to our château.” He bent to kiss her cheeks with such perfect, urbane hospitality that Cade relaxed all over. “Would you like a hoe?”
“Tiens.” Sylvain handed Cade a pair of old work gloves. “To complete the look. Have you met Papa yet? Cade, je te présente Hervé, mon père.”
A tall, graying man with plenty of laugh lines around his eyes gave her bises—four bises—that more than made up for his wife’s in enthusiasm. “Trust Sylvain to always find the prettiest women around!” he exclaimed, so warmly that Cade couldn’t help liking him for his attempt to compliment her.
Then she thought that compliment through. How many pretty women did Sylvain routinely show up with at his family parties?
“Merci, Papa,” Sylvain said, looking rather pleased at the praise, oblivious to the fact that she might not care to be one of a plethora of pretty women. “Can you help me carry the sculpture in? Fréd says Thierry will be here in fifteen minutes.”
Oohs and aahs greeted the appearance of Sylvain’s fantastical sculpture, great wings and whimsies of white, dark, and colored chocolate curling and soaring around a small female goat curled up in the center, her legs folded under her, all carved out of chocolate. The crowd of pseudo-peasants gathered around it in a corridor of acclaim, cameras flashing, as Sylvain and Hervé started toward the château.
“So, how much longer are you staying in Paris?” Marguerite asked Cade in the sweetest and friendliest of tones, as the two men disappeared into the house. “You can’t stay away from your business very long, can you? You must be going back any day now.”
It was going to be a long weekend.
While Sylvain and his father were settling the sculpture onto a red-draped table in the center of a nineteenth-century salon, Mar
guerite kindly took her on a little tour of some of the other pieces in the room. Period glass-faced cabinets displayed precious crystal and family photos.
“This is one of my favorites,” Marguerite said, opening the glass to pull it out so Cade could get a better look. “Last New Year’s. We all dressed up as cows—it was à mourir de rire.”
It apparently was, in fact, à mourir de rire, because everyone in the photo was dying laughing. All three cows—Marguerite, Natalie, and Sylvain—plus a fourth person. In this photo, Sylvain was not, as she had imagined, grinning at his sister. He was laughing down at Chantal, who wore not a cow costume but something black and sexy, and who clung to his cow hoof as she laughed up at him.
Cade looked up from the photo to study Sylvain’s mother a moment. Marguerite looked innocently back at her.
“Amazing,” Cade said mildly.
“What is?” Marguerite asked happily.
“How anyone could look so good in a cow costume.” Cade handed the photo back to her and left Marguerite trying to figure out whether she should take the compliment for herself or on behalf of her children.
The goats and farmers were a huge success. Thierry, as short and stout as his partner, Fréd, was tall and lean, was so delighted to find a horde of peasants awaiting him when he drove up that he nearly cried. Cameras flashed from all directions.
“Cade Corey!” Thierry exclaimed when Sylvain introduced them. “Vraiment? Ta voleuse de chocolat, Sylvain? I’m impressed. You’ve finally brought someone interesting.”
It was all Cade could do not to let her shoulders slump. She was starting to feel like a fighter who had taken one too many to the gut. So. It clearly wasn’t uncommon for Sylvain to bring women he was dating to family parties. She was as pretty as the others and maybe a tad more interesting, according to his family, but she wasn’t any kind of special case.
Her feet felt heavy, pulled down by ubiquitous mud, as they tramped through the gracious, soggy gardens to a fenced area that held four little goats and a brand-new goat house with a heart carved in its door.
“So, tell me a little bit more about breaking and entering.” Natalie leaned beside Cade on the fence. “Do you use a rappeling cord?”
“Actually, officially, I haven’t been breaking and entering.”
“What?” She looked disappointed.
“Her lawyers don’t want her to admit to it,” Sylvain explained, reappearing by Cade’s side. “Cade, please don’t tell my sister how to break and enter.”
“I would only do it for a joke, Sylvain,” Natalie said indignantly. “I don’t have time for that kind of thing. I’m always studying. Has he mentioned I’m getting my degree in business?” she asked Cade ever so casually. Sylvain, who seemed to be widely loved amid his family, had already had his attention claimed by another cousin.
“Really?” Cade felt as if she had been parachuted straight back to her comfort zone. Talking to a woman whose son she was dating—that was horribly uncomfortable. People trying to establish their careers via party talk with her—that she understood. “What area interests you particularly?”
“I’m still exploring,” Natalie said cheerfully. “Doing different stages.”
Ah. Cade fed a handful of hay to a little goat with big, mischievous eyes. “Internships, huh?” She—well, Corey Chocolate—had been considered a source of them since she was in middle school.
“And I’ve got some chocolate experience. Sylvain let me do an internship with him when I was in high school. So I combine qualifications in both business and gourmet chocolate.”
“And she’s irrepressible,” Sylvain mentioned dryly, reappearing. “That’s a warning, not a selling point.”
“Excellent.” Cade laughed. “I like that in an intern.”
If there was one thing worse than being a woman’s “option,” it was being grateful for it, Sylvain thought, his hand flexing too hard around the butcher knife, giving an unfamiliar awkwardness to his cutting.
But at least surrounded by family and laughter, he could ignore that for a while. He set Cade to slicing mushrooms beside him, partly because whenever he left her to her own devices, he didn’t know what would happen next. His mother might slip poison into her wine. His sister Natalie might hand her a CV. And there seemed infinite potential for fatal combinations of too much alcohol and too many pitchforks. It was pretty much impossible to get his entire family to behave for a whole weekend.
But mostly, he just liked having her cut mushrooms beside him. He liked being able to let his body graze hers from time to time. He liked the careful concentration with which she cut, as if she was afraid she could get a slice wrong if she didn’t pay attention.
He just liked having her be a part of this warm, happy, boisterous kitchen, as they all helped get the buffet tables filled and the guests fed.
This was the kind of thing he loved. He wouldn’t miss a party with his family for the world. Everyone was in a good mood, everyone was laughing, everyone was pouring out energy in order to give Thierry the best fiftieth birthday they could.
“Yes, you keep an eye on that thief of yours! Don’t let her steal anything!” one of his cousins shouted.
Sylvain laughed, and Cade looked rueful. Unable to help himself, he slipped a hand around the nape of her neck and kissed her, hard. He surfaced from that to find about five people openly analyzing them—including his mother, his father, and his sister. None of them looked in the least abashed. His mother didn’t even have the grace to look away, just continued to study them critically.
He left the kitchen to add a tray of hors d’oeuvres to the great spread set out on the tables in the nineteenth-century salon. When he got back, one of his uncles had taken over his cutting board next to Cade.
“I understand you’re interested in artisan food production. My son wants to become a baker,” his uncle was saying.
“A baker and a chocolatier in the family?” Cade smiled. “How much better does it get?”
“But it’s hard to get the financing to open his shop,” his uncle said delicately. A slight flush rose to his cheeks. Sylvain realized what Tonton Fabien was trying to do for the sake of his son—ask a barely-met billionaire to invest in the twenty-year-old’s future bakery.
He flinched for his uncle.
Cade, however, seemed to take this conversation as a matter of course. “Yes, financing for small businesses is tricky. In France, it’s not that easy to open a business, is it?”
“Something like that would be a great investment for . . . somebody,” Tonton Fabien said gamely. “He’s a good baker. He’s just about finished his apprenticeship.”
“Can I nudge you aside, Tonton?” Sylvain asked easily, reaching an arm between the two for his chef’s knife. “I need to slice these lemons for the salmon. Oh—would you mind checking in the cave to see if they have more crème fraîche? I don’t see any in the refrigerator.”
His uncle left with an expression of relief, and Cade raised an eyebrow at Sylvain.
“Does that kind of thing happen to you a lot at parties?” Sylvain asked, keeping his voice low enough to not embarrass his uncle in front of the rest of the family.
“What kind of thing?”
“Strangers trying to get you to finance their projects?”
“Sure.” She thought about it for a moment. “Just out of curiosity, what do other people get to talk about with strangers at parties?”
“In France, usually food.”
She laughed. “Well, see, I got both at once, then.” She finished cutting her mushrooms and moved around Sylvain to rinse her fingers. Sylvain shifted imperceptibly so that her arms ended up grazing his body. “But he raises a good point,” she mentioned seriously. “Boulangers, fromagers, chocolatiers—maybe artisan food making needs what other artists need—people willing to invest in it to make sure it can continue to flourish. A patron, in a sense.”
“A patron? As in noblesse oblige?”
“A patron of the arts.” Cade
looked a little annoyed.
“No one patronized me,” Sylvain said coolly, deliberately changing the word. “And I didn’t need anyone to, either.”
“Well, of course, you didn’t,” she said impatiently, oblivious to the compliment inherent in that impatience.
He tried to keep his mouth straight and stern, just so no one could see the foolish pride that licked from his toes to the roots of his hair.
But his father, reaching past them for the fleur de sel just as she said it, smiled a little.
“I can’t believe you brought her here,” Marguerite Marquis told Sylvain indignantly later in the evening, having dragged him out on her smoke break. Sylvain didn’t smoke. Around the time most teens started, he was getting into chocolate. His senses of taste and smell were too precious to him. “The woman who stole from you! And I’m supposed to be nice to her?”
Inside, people were still lingering at the buffet, but Natalie was trying to get some speakers hooked up and music going.
“You could try, Maman.” Actually, Cade seemed to be handling his mother’s barely veiled hostility quite comfortably. Did that mean she didn’t care what his mother thought of her, or that she had expected worse?
“I like her,” his father said unexpectedly.
Marguerite gave him an indignant look. “Juste parce qu’elle est jolie. He’s had much prettier girlfriends, don’t you think?”
Maybe technically. But they didn’t blush the same way when he looked at them, and to get what they wanted, they only flirted and looked pretty. They didn’t break into his heart.
“First of all, I like the fact that she seems to think extremely highly of him,” Hervé said calmly.
“Tu penses?” Sylvain sent his father a sharp look, wondering what his father had observed that he hadn’t. He could feel himself starting to blush. Putain. In front of his own parents.
“And I like that she took such a risk for him. Prison, public scandal. What did she tell you, Margo? That she couldn’t get his attention any other way?”
The Chocolate Thief Page 23