Winter was setting in, and clearly only the best would help get the man through it. That and the wool socks and silk thermal underwear she had picked up for him the other day. She wondered what would convince that man to go to a shelter.
“M. Marquis already asked me to do that, mademoiselle. I can’t charge you for it.”
Had he? A smile brightened her face. When she got back, she would have to talk to him. She had an idea about an awareness-raising Chocolate for the Homeless Day, and if he had time left over from his schoolkids’ day, she’d bet he would be the perfect partner.
When she got back. She was going to just keep telling herself those four words.
She stuffed her boxes into her nearly empty carry-on and climbed into the taxi.
Two hours later, she was back. Shit, shit, shit. How could she have managed to misplace her passport at a time like this? She always carried it with her. Had she forgotten and left it in a different purse? No. Had she slipped it into the pocket of her larger suitcase? No. Where the hell was it?
She looked and looked, everywhere in her apartment she could think of, on the phone with her assistant, telling her, no, she had missed the first flight, to get her another one in two hours. On the phone with her dad and her excited, half-gleeful grandpa, getting all the details of the Total Foods bid and what was going on, as she had been doing in the taxi, she went on looking and looking.
Finally the glimmer of a suspicion touched her. Not really a full suspicion. Just . . . she had looked in every possible and impossible place. Either it had been stolen and she had never noticed and she needed an emergency passport from the embassy, or . . . well, she would just check out one last idea.
She went back to the chocolaterie, barely conscious of the very cold looks everyone in it gave her.
Sylvain was at the marble counter. Pascal might have lied to her about how long he would be gone, or he might have finished with the mayor sooner than expected. Either was possible. But he was here now.
He was just standing there, his palms spread flat on the marble, his head bent, staring down at it. He didn’t seem to be moving or doing anything. He hadn’t even put on his white chef’s jacket and toque and apron, and she had never seen him indifferent to professionalism in his own laboratoire.
A huge surge of relief swept through her, a desire to throw herself into his arms and just hug him as hard as she possibly could.
Then his head lifted, and his eyes met hers.
He was furious.
He was furious in a way that made his outrage over his name on Corey Bars seem like a casual expression of annoyance over a minor matter. Maybe, in perspective, that’s what that outrage had been.
“Did you miss something?” he asked, every word pure and precise, as if fury could be crystallized into some kind of intellectual diamond. Which in French it probably could.
“My . . . passport,” she said. Looking for it here suddenly stopped seeming such a ridiculous idea.
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled it out, and threw it onto the marble. In the motionless laboratoire, the slap of the passport resounded loudly.
“I knew you would do that,” he said, very low, so that it would not carry even in the muffled, unaccustomed quiet of the eavesdropping laboratoire. “I knew you would just hop back onto a plane the instant the mood struck you. At least this way you had to tell me to my face.”
“I was going to call you,” she began but stopped before the surge of fury her words provoked. His other hand lifted from the marble and from it fell, crumpled into nothing, her business card with the same promise.
“Merci,” he said, that final ci in the word slicing like a sword. The curse came after it like a battering ram: “Va te faire foutre.”
“No, you don’t understand.” She came toward him, reaching for his arm.
He pulled it away from her as if she were a plague victim.
Okay, answer to one question: he did care. On the other hand, everything had just gone to hell in a handbasket.
“It’s an emergency. Total Foods has just made a hostile takeover bid for Devon Candy. Do you know what that means?”
He just looked at her, his jaw set. “No.”
Which wasn’t surprising, since she still didn’t know how to say it in French. “We can’t let Total Foods get Devon Candy. We can’t. We’ve got to figure out something.” Even while she was saying it, a part of her brain was turning: They had three billion in cash reserves. The Total Foods bid was 17.6 billion and was probably not their final offer. Financing might come from . . .
“That’s more important to you than—?” Sylvain caught himself, shutting himself up with a slicing gesture of his hand.
She hesitated, trying to think this through, to figure out the implications of what she was saying before she said it. He had stopped himself. But he had gotten halfway into his question before he rethought it, so she knew it was there. “Are you saying that I have to choose? That I can be Cade Corey of Corey Chocolate, or I can be your”—his what?—“here, with you, but I can’t be both?”
His jaw was so hard, the purity of his profile was heartbreaking, like a work of art she had just shattered. “I’m here. You’re going to the US. It’s a big ocean.”
She rubbed her fingers between her eyebrows, running on too much adrenaline for tears, full of only urgency and anguish. “I’ve got to go now. Will you—?”
Will you not go out and pick up one of those pretty Parisiennes in your shop; will you wait for me?
How did you earn the right to ask for that from someone you had known only a few days? Was she insane? What were they? She still wasn’t even entirely sure he didn’t have anything going on with Chantal. So if she couldn’t even know for sure whether they had a monogamous relationship—of less than two weeks’ duration, in which the focus of their relationship had been sexual—then how could she ask him to wait for her?
Her own jaw firmed. “I’m coming back,” she promised, holding his eyes. She might not have the right to ask for anything, but she knew how to make promises for herself. And she knew how to keep them. She had partial control of the destinies of so many more people than Corey’s thirty thousand direct employees, she had stopped counting when she was a child because of the vertigo it could inspire. She knew how to back up her own words.
She stretched both hands toward him. “You do . . . what you decide to do. I don’t have any say over that. But I’m coming back.”
He straightened from the marble and gave an abrupt, scorching look at the motionless laboratoire. “Ça vous dérange?” he asked his employees icily. Do you mind?! A couple of them stirred or otherwise moved halfheartedly, all still focused on them.
He came around the counter, took her arm, and half pulled, half escorted her out to her waiting taxi. Wind rippled his thin cotton shirt. He must have felt the cold, but he didn’t react to it. He looked down at her, with no perceptible softening in the line of that hard jaw.
“Je suis tombé amoureux de toi,” he said, his voice angry, as if he was fighting a wound he had always known was coming. “You do . . . what you decide to do. I don’t have any say over that. But I think I love you.”
Cade stared at him, feeling as if a bomb had gone off in the distance and the wave of it had just hit her, as if she couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, could only feel, stunned. “Is there something going on between you and Chantal?” she asked abruptly.
He stared at her. “No.” As the question sank in, his mouth grew, if possible, even grimmer. “You mean you thought there might be, and you only just now asked?”
She hunched her shoulders in a yes, flushing.
His hand clenched on the roof of the taxi. “Are other people just toys for you to pick up and shake a little bit and then drop on the ground?”
Her mouth dropped open in shock. That wasn’t what she was doing at all. She had just—she had just wanted this so badly, she hadn’t wanted to ask any questions. Hadn’t wanted to let anythin
g—like his responsibilities or hers or whether or not she was setting either of them up for hurt—get in her way. “I just—tried to take what I wanted,” she said in a low voice. Why did it sound really bad when she said it out loud?
That clenched fist slid off the roof of the taxi. “Seriously,” he said, almost conversationally, as if the rage showing in his eyes was too intense to risk letting into his voice, “va te faire foutre.”
He turned and headed back to the shop.
Cade, sinking amid this utter disaster into the taxi, paused halfway, clutching the edge of the door. “Didn’t you?” she cried after him. “Try to take what you wanted?”
Sylvain’s long stride faltered. He turned back and watched as the taxi pulled away.
Cade Corey rode all the way to the airport without thinking about Total Foods or Devon Candy once.
* * *
Chapter 27
She had just handed over her boarding pass when her dad called again. “There’s a new development,” he said. “We’ve been talking with Firenze about a co-buyout of Devon. It’s a good thing you’re in Europe. Your French is going to come in handy, sweetie. Get up to Belgium right now. I want you to talk to the brothers.”
The third day out, Cade and everyone around her were surviving on coffee and, in Cade’s case, Sylvain’s chocolate. She didn’t share. The Firenze brothers offered her pots of their famous chocolate spread and local artisan Belgian chocolate, and her entourage of accountants, lawyers, and assistants, all flown in from Maryland or pulled from Corey Chocolate’s small business center in Brussels, shared Belgian fries indiscriminately. When she flew over to London, everyone at Devon Candy tried to feed her Devon Bars and fish and chips.
She made secretaries bring her fruit and salads and whole grains and for the most part ignored the junk food. Instead, she kept a box of Sylvain’s chocolate with her and just once in a while, whenever she needed to feel a part of him—every fifteen minutes or so—she ate a piece.
Every bite gave her a little burst of sweetness and hope, as if she could figure a way through this. Through this cooperative buyout, through Total Foods, through all her responsibilities and the fact that a part of her thrilled to them, through to what she wanted out of life, through back to him.
But she didn’t know what to say to him. When she pulled her head out of discussions with the Firenze brothers and Devon Candy and looked at her phone, she didn’t know what to call and say or text or e-mail or anything. “Really?” That seemed kind of a chancy start. “Are you sure?” Well, how could he be sure if they had only known each other a few days? Was there such a thing as sure with the words “I think I love you”? Maybe, instead, “What do you mean by that?”
That seemed hard to ask on the phone. And, of course, there was always the possibility that he was still mad at her. He had sent her one word via text message since she’d left, a word she had received on the TGV ride up to Brussels: Oui.
She assumed it was an answer to her last question: Yes, I tried to take what I wanted, too.
It could be a mad oui or a let’s-not-cut-off-all-communication-over-a-fight, olive-branch oui. It was hard to tell over text messaging.
Finally, though, she couldn’t not call him; she was quite sure that would be a very bad mistake. So she tried an intro line a little more awkward but time-honored. “Hi.”
She heard him draw in a breath. “Cade.”
She melted at the way he said her name, the precise French a that seemed to make her name half as long as it was in English. Instantly, she stopped being afraid he was still mad.
She put her feet up on one pillow and sank her head back into another. Her feet ached; her brain felt exhausted. She wanted desperately three separate and mutually exclusive things: to sleep, to go out for a long, long walk to clear her mind, and to just curl up here talking to Sylvain.
“I’m eating one of your chocolates.” The conical one with its sprinkling of cocoa nibs at the flat end, the one he called his nod to the pleasures of a child’s ice cream cone. Except there was nothing childish about it, the nibs instead of peanuts, the thick, dark exterior, yielding to one of his softest, silkiest, most liquid ganaches. She had to eat it carefully, biting into the cone and sucking the insides into her mouth as she did, so that it didn’t melt all over her hands. Exactly like a child with an ice cream cone.
“Ah.” His voice was just a breath, a whisper in her ear. She might have woken him up. It was late. He might be lying in his bed now, naked except for briefs, his shoulders matte and muscled against the white sheets. Had he had his phone lying within reach, hoping she would call? Had he, too, stopped being angry the instant he heard her voice? “Is it good?” he murmured, warmth and sensuality stirring between them, across the distance.
“It’s always good,” she whispered.
A little sound on his end like a smile. “Which one are you eating?”
“The cornette de ganache.”
“Ah.” Just the breath of a murmur. Even over the phone, the sound stroked her skin. She had a feeling he was imagining with complete and utter accuracy every taste and sensation on her tongue. He knew the softness, the sweetness. He knew the gentle sucking of her lips so that the ganache didn’t spill onto her fingers. He knew the imprint of chocolate left on her thumb and the way she had to lick it off.
And he knew that he had put it there.
Good God, he was so sexy. How could he be that sexy over a phone?
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She groaned. “I’m about to fall asleep. Someone is supposed to drag me out of bed in exactly six hours. We have this theory that by the third day everyone needs at least one full REM sleep.”
“So, do you own the world yet? I checked the news, but I didn’t see anything.”
“We can’t let Total Foods get Devon Candy. It’s not exactly a question of owning the world.” More a question of being disowned, really. Maybe they shouldn’t get into this topic right now, over the phone. “And no, we don’t. What are you doing?”
“I was asleep, but just barely. I doubt I’m as tired as you are. But it’s five weeks before Christmas, so we can start producing our Christmas chocolates next week.” Sylvain Marquis did not sell old chocolate in his shop. Certainly not four weeks or even two weeks old. But people would start buying and offering gifts early in December. “And I’ve been working on the Christmas decorations for the shop.”
Five weeks before Christmas. She would probably spend all Thanksgiving Day locked in meetings with Devon and Firenze. How was that for irony?
Her eyes brightened as she tried to imagine what he might concoct out of chocolate for his windows and counters. “Will they be up by the time I get back?”
A little silence. “It depends on how soon you return.”
She rolled over, burying her face in her pillow in lieu of him. She had no idea when she would get back. And she was so wiped out. But his voice in her ear was perfect.
“How do you like the Firenze brothers?” he asked.
“I’m not tempted to break into their laboratoire, if that’s what you’re asking.”
His low laugh made her feel like a cat that had just had a hand run down its back. “That’s what I’m asking. Eat another one of my chocolates, Cade.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and just breathed in the thought, the feel, of him, hundreds of miles away.
A box of his chocolates lay a foot or so from her face on the table by her bed. Through her mind flitted questions like: How often did he fall in love? How often did he fall out of it? When he’d said “think,” his hypothesis was based on what experience of how it felt to love someone? Instead of asking any of them, she opened her eyes and studied the array of glossy brown bites, each one signaling its contents in some subtle difference in marking, and asked, “Which one?”
His voice stroked over her like his callused hand. “Whichever one you want.”
She was tired, so tired, and yet arousal seemed to caress
all through her, as if she could fall asleep on a bed of it. “Whichever one you want me to,” she whispered.
A sound from him as if she had stretched out her hand and grabbed the most sensitive part of him. And as if she hadn’t. As if the phantom nature of that hand was pure torment. “Cade, where are you? Are you in Bruxelles? I could take the train up.”
“London,” she said reluctantly. “I’ll be back in Brussels tomorrow.”
“Night? Tomorrow night?”
Oh, God. She curled around the arousal he was creating in her, the frustrated longing. “I won’t have a second for you. And I’ll probably be exhausted.”
“I can keep myself entertained, Cade. I know people in Bruxelles.” He laughed. “Quite a lot of people, en fait, or have you forgotten that that misguided country thinks it has the best chocolate? It’s only an hour and a half away. I’ll have to see if I can get away from this winter forest I’m creating.” A beat of silence. “Or would you prefer I not?”
“No,” she said. “Oh, no.” But it depended on how the fantasy played out. All their encounters had been pretty heated up until now, and pretty much . . . encounters. She didn’t want him to be disappointed if she did nothing but fall asleep on him, crumpled and stale, at the end of another long day.
He changed the subject. “So, what are you wearing?”
“My clothes,” she admitted regretfully. She had fallen into bed in them. It would have been much better to either be in a sexy something or have the presence of mind to pretend she was.
Sylvain laughed. “Now, that’s an interesting challenge. How to get your clothes off from five hundred kilometers away.”
Heat flushed to her cheeks. And some other places. She wiggled for a second, letting her boots thump to the floor. “I took off my shoes,” she offered.
“Ma chérie.” He sighed. “I like your willingness to cooperate. But I think if you were so tired you hadn’t gotten your shoes off yet, I should probably let you go to sleep.”
“I know but . . . I was looking forward to finding out how you would get everything else off.”
The Chocolate Thief Page 25