The Chocolate Thief

by Laura Florand

  Vraiment? Sylvain felt a jolt of electricity run through his entire body.

  “True,” Marguerite admitted, tilting her head consideringly. “Open crime is certainly a dramatic gesture.” She said that like a Roman empress still hesitating on which way to turn her thumb over a dramatic gesture. “Blunt, though. They don’t teach women how to flirt in her country?”

  “Her way works for me,” Sylvain said cheerfully. “Did she really say she did it to get my attention? Not my chocolate?”

  His mother gave him a disgusted look. “Do you like getting your heart broken?”

  “No,” Sylvain said flatly. “I really, really don’t.”

  “I blame you for this, you know,” Marguerite told Hervé.

  “Moi? I told him at least twenty times to improve the security on his chocolaterie.”

  “Not that. The fact that he’s so naïf about women. You were exactly the same way.”

  “It’s true,” Hervé confided to his son. “I haven’t wanted to tell you this about your mother until you got older, but she was and is . . . difficile.”

  “And I don’t even try,” his mother said proudly. “It comes naturally.”

  “Naïf I may be, but I like your Cade,” Hervé said again.

  His Cade. Sylvain wondered what she would think of the possessive.

  “She knows how to be diplomatic to your mother, she can negotiate international business deals, she went down into a spider-filled cave to help us haul up Champagne a few minutes ago, and she can break in to places. Those are good skill sets. I think the only one of those we already had covered in the family was the ability to haul up Champagne.”

  “I am the one being diplomatic to her,” Marguerite argued, annoyed. “Just in case.”

  Sylvain caught his mother’s eyes, smiling a little. “Just in case what, Maman?”

  Marguerite sniffed, indignant at being pushed. “Just in case she does turn out to be . . . worthwhile.” Offended at having had to admit that she considered that a possibility, she stubbed out her cigarette and strolled away loftily to speak to people less likely to force anything annoying out of her.

  Father and son looked after her. “Do I seem naïf to you?” Hervé finally asked Sylvain indignantly.

  “According to Maman, how would I know?” Sylvain asked dryly.

  “Enfin, bon. I guess I can’t guarantee you won’t get your heart broken, but maybe at least it will be mutual this time. I have to say, a Chocolate Thief seems worth breaking your heart over.”

  Inside, Natalie had gotten the speakers working, and his twenty-year-old sister’s selection of music suddenly blazed out. Sylvain laughed and grabbed Cade’s hand, pulling her onto the dance floor of white marble tile surrounded by delicate, spindle-legged sofas and age-softened brocade chairs pushed back against the walls.

  Natalie had gone all out in her playlist of music from the past fifty years. It boomed through one speaker and crackled erratically through another as they did line dances and tugged up the collars of pretend leather jackets to ham it up to songs from Grease. Sylvain and Cade danced without stop. Cade’s joie de vivre seemed indefatigable. She did a really excellent chicken dance, too.

  At around one, they slipped outside into instant peace and tranquility, feet crunching on white gravel beneath the starry skies.

  Sylvain led Cade down through the gardens that sloped below the château to the Marne below. They slipped out a gate beside a little fairy-tale conical house that might once have been a chapel and found themselves on a muddy path running along the great, wide river.

  “It’s freezing.” He adjusted her scarf to make sure no bare throat appeared. “But I wanted you to see this.”

  Under the light of the full moon, the Marne flowed dark and deceptively slowly, the light shining off its water. A weeping willow trailed bare, fine, winter tresses over the bank beside them. Cade leaned against him as they watched the water.

  Maybe she was seeking contact with him, or maybe she was only seeking warmth in the cold. Maybe her feet hurt. He didn’t ask and didn’t care, because he liked being her warmth, the strength against which she rested.

  His life had felt so different only two weeks before. It had felt like a great life. And now, if or when he had to go back to that life without her in it, it was going to feel like the most miserable, wretched life in the world.

  “I like your family,” she mentioned.

  His eyebrows rose. “Really? Even my mother?”

  “Yes. She doesn’t seem to like me at all,” Cade said wonderingly.

  “And that’s an endearing trait?”

  Cade nodded. “Most mothers like me right away, whether or not their sons would be happy with me.”

  Sylvain gave that considerable thought. “You’re used to being able to buy even mothers?”

  She shrugged.

  “No wonder you keep thinking you can buy Paris.”

  She sighed. “Just a spot in it, really.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t for sale, but he would be her spot in Paris anytime she asked. Surely that was obvious at this point?

  God, he couldn’t take much more of this, the fear that she would leave him. But how could he ask someone he had known less than two weeks to promise to give up her life for him?

  He tightened his arm around her and stared at the water, willing himself to patience. It’s just like tempering chocolate, he told himself. Just like that. You have to take your time. Maybe he could ask her after three weeks. Was that long enough to foster a commitment?

  A thin stream of cloud drifted across the moon, creating a play of light and shadow over the water. He felt a long, long sigh run through Cade’s body, pressed against his.

  She closed her hand around his on her waist. “Seriously, I can’t persuade you to give me your name?”

  For two whole, thick, thudding heartbeats, he thought she meant something else. He almost said yes.

  His lips had parted on it when he remembered what she wanted from him. “You mean, sell you my name for a chocolate line.” He moved away from her abruptly, to the edge of the dark, gilded water. The side against which her warmth had been pressed felt very cold.

  Her eyebrows flexed at the clarification, and at the way his tone of voice had darkened. Maybe she had figured out the other meaning of her question, because her eyes widened. She flushed, sending him a quick, searching glance and clutching strands of willow in her fingers. “Yes.”

  He shoved the hand that had been holding her, the hand she had just touched, into his pocket. “Can’t we just enjoy the moment here? Why does this matter to you so much? You don’t need the money. And you don’t need Europe.”

  Her face emptied. She retreated back behind the bare strands of the weeping willow. In the spring or summer, she would have been veiled by their tiny leaves, but there was no hiding in the winter. “You don’t want me to have Europe.”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Or you.”

  “Cade—” He broke off. “Are you able to keep the business and the personal in this separate?” It occurred to him that he had been born a person and chosen to become a chocolatier when he was in his teens. She had been born a business, and this might very well be her first try at becoming her own person.

  “Do you want me to go home?” she asked, very low, very cool.

  Sometimes open honesty was the only way to go, no matter how risky it was. “Non.”

  She stood there watching him warily, one hand holding those bare strands to the side, like some confused nymph who had been startled awake before spring.

  “You can be part of something without owning it, you know.” He held her eyes. “You can be part of my life without owning it anytime you want.”

  Her eyes widened. She searched his face. Her eyes widened still farther, and her lips parted, as if she were almost afraid.

  Well, merde, what wasn’t there to be afraid of?

  “I don’t understand you,” he sai
d. “Can’t you do anything you want?”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “Just randomly whatever I want? No. Do you realize how many people would suffer the consequences if I just acted according to whim?”

  “I don’t mean any whim at all. I meant, can’t you decide what you want out of life and go after that?” He took a risk: “You seem to have been doing that so far here. Can’t you stay the course?”

  She frowned.

  “In school, we learned that was an American ideal—the pursuit of happiness.” He turned his tongue around the English phrase, with its awkward r and breathy h. “It doesn’t even translate well into French.”

  “It doesn’t sound like an ideal in French; it sounds selfish,” she retorted. “That’s why. People depend on me.”

  “I didn’t say to keep behaving completely irresponsibly.” But she had been doing so. Interesting, given that she was so clearly opposed to letting herself be irresponsible. He reached for her, with an intimate, teasing smile. “Although I don’t mind personally if you break into my business and get your family name splashed all over the place and run the risk of getting arrested.”

  “I’ve probably used up my allotment of irresponsible behavior for the next twenty years with that,” she muttered, visibly depressed.

  Sylvain’s stomach knotted. “Don’t say that. I’m the one who grew up en banlieue, and you’re the one who acts as if you are caught by your circumstances and can’t realize your own dreams. Cade, you don’t seem to want to buy Europe or run Europe. Maybe you’re just playing, but I could swear you love being in my laboratoire, you love sinking your senses into everything. You must be turning half of yourself off when you focus on factories and finances.”

  And it was a half filled with so much joy and passion. If she couldn’t stay in Paris for him, surely she could stay for his chocolate.

  She stared at him for a long moment. Then she looked out across the wide Marne. “My grandfather is eighty-two years old.”

  “Ah.” That, he couldn’t say anything about. He could tell her to pick Paris—pick him—over her life as a damned mass-market producer of merde, but he couldn’t tell her to pick him over someone she loved.

  Even if she let herself one day love him, he couldn’t do that to her. Couldn’t tell her to choose between him and someone she had loved since birth.

  “And—I can do so many things. So many.” She said it as if it was a curse, not a gift. “I can save people. I can change lives. I can affect working conditions in entire countries. Working with chocolate in Paris—I’m not good at it. I’m never going to improve anyone’s life doing it. I just—love it. But it doesn’t do anything for anyone but me.” She sounded, very briefly, exhausted.

  “Have you ever done anything just for you?”

  Her eyebrows flexed together, as if the question puzzled her. He could see her racking her brain to come up with an answer, which was answer enough. “I broke into your chocolaterie,” she finally said.

  “I thought that worked out rather well,” he said with a little grin. “Maybe you should try it for a while. Stop thinking of all you could or should be doing. Just savor what you want to be doing. Surely you’re allowed a couple of years of just living what makes you happy.”

  She rested her head against his shoulder, gazing out at the water, and said nothing.

  After a long time, she tilted her head to look up at him, her hair spilling across her face. “Are you living what makes you happy?”

  He gazed down at her face, pale in the dark, felt the weight of her against him, seeking his warmth. The only thing missing from this moment was the surety that he could keep it.

  “Ah, oui.” He stroked her hair back from her mouth, the way he had wanted to do that very first morning in the bakery. “Je suis très content.”

  * * *

  Chapter 26

  Cade was cursing the handheld spray in her apartment’s bathtub Monday morning, still a little hungover from all the family partying, when her phone started buzzing like mad. At the same time, her laptop turned itself into a carillon service, rippling out chime after chime as multiple messages came in one after the other. The phone had gone to voice mail and immediately started buzzing again by the time she got a towel and reached it, shivering as she got farther from the radiators and the cold air hit her half-dried skin.

  “Total Foods has made a hostile takeover bid for Devon Candy,” her dad said, and all her nerves fired to two hundred percent, adrenaline jerking through her as if she’d just gotten out of her shower to find a raging tiger leaping at her.

  “Merde,” she said. “I’m on my way.”

  She threw items into a carry-on with her phone clipped to her ear, delegating to her assistant in Maryland the job of booking her the first flight out or a private jet, whichever was most efficient. She slipped her teddy-bear finger puppet into her purse. She left most of her things in the apartment and flagged a taxi as she crossed the street to the chocolaterie, her pace long, fast, just short of running.

  “Attendez,” she ordered the taxi driver. “I’ll pay you, don’t worry.”

  Adrenaline had taken over, her mind turning almost its entire focus to this tiger. But she needed to see Sylvain. She needed . . . to take him with her.

  But she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t buy him off an elegant display table, pack him up, and take him home with her. For one thing, if she removed him from his chocolaterie and his city, it would be as if she took an axe and cut off his limbs.

  “You can be part of something without owning it, you know. You can be part of my life without owning it anytime you want.”

  “Get me . . . ten boxes,” she told the nearest clerk as she passed. She knew her world, and she knew what it was going to be like for the next few weeks. They wouldn’t sleep, and they wouldn’t really eat; assistants would bring them food and coffee while they kept going. She had twenty boxes of chocolates from other chocolatiers upstairs in her refrigerator. But she hadn’t thrown any of those into her carry-on. She wanted a little something of Sylvain Marquis with her every day. Or a lot of something, depending on how bad it got, back home without him.

  Under and through all the adrenaline, her stomach was starting to squeeze with anguish.

  They didn’t even . . . where were they, in their relationship? Would he care? Could they call each other and make kissing noises into the phone? They probably couldn’t. Oh, God. Would he even . . . well, where were they, exactly? He had introduced her to his family, but apparently he introduced many women to his family.

  Would he just shrug and move on? There were other women who loved chocolate and sexy men, who could throw themselves at him with the same desperate longing she had. There were two beautiful, supremely classy Parisiennes in his shop right now.

  Cade looked at them with a thin, hard line to her mouth.

  They looked back at her coolly and sniffed.

  You can be part of my life without owning it anytime you want. Was that a statement of liberty—she could see him but better not think he was hers and that he wasn’t seeing anyone else?

  She stopped in the laboratoire, scanning it, unable to find the dark head she was looking for. Her stomach was now in a knot so tight, the struggle in her body between that and adrenaline was starting to make her feel sick and choppy, as if she’d just downed four too many energy drinks.

  “Sylvain n’est pas là,” Pascal said, pausing in the act of setting the pots of a bain-marie together. “He had a meeting with the mayor and some of the other chocolatiers in the city about this idea of his to set up a Journée du Chocolat with schoolkids, an exposure to the different food professions.”

  She looked at her watch. “When—?”

  “Probably not until this afternoon.”

  If there was anything worse than wondering how he would react to her being gone for a few weeks, it was not being able to even see him one last time and at least have an idea. Would he kiss her hard, ask her not to go, or just say, “Ciao”
?

  She went into his office, pulling out one of her personal-info business cards in lieu of notepaper, trying to think what to say. Good God, what in the world was she supposed to put down on paper?

  But she couldn’t call him and interrupt him with the mayor. That wasn’t cool. She wouldn’t want him to do that while she was in a meeting with Devon Candy shareholders.

  “Are you going somewhere?” Pascal asked from the doorway, his eyes very narrow and cool.

  “There’s been a—” How in the world did you say hostile takeover in French? “Ho-steel take-o-veer?” she tried. You never knew with French. Sometimes these English business words worked if you gave them the right pronunciation.

  Pascal looked at her as if she had sprouted two horns and started speaking in Demon. He did not look as if he understood anything whatsoever. On more levels than one.

  She turned her shoulder to him and wrote, Je t’appellerai on the card. I’ll call you. She signed it with her initials, CC. If he didn’t recognize those, she was going to come back for the pure purpose of smacking him.

  She wished she could leave him something, something just as powerful and rich and symbolic as the dark bitter chocolate he had left on her doorknob the other day. But she didn’t have anything.

  She hesitated, her hand clenching around the Corey Bar in her purse. Corey Bars held no value for him. But abruptly she pulled it out and put it under the card. For whatever he would make of that. Probably nothing.

  She turned, her carry-on pivoting with smooth luxury behind her as she went back through the shop.

  “Mademoiselle Co-ree.” The young, elegant clerk who had once snubbed her look distressed. “I don’t know if M. Marquis would want me to let you pay for this.”

  “It’s okay.” Cade handed over a card. “Charge me for ten more and promise to give one of them to the homeless man with the new jacket in the gardens every day until I get back, okay?”