“Ah . . .” There was a long silence.
When he spoke again, his voice had lowered, deepened, roughened, a breath tempting her into a dark, warm room with a lock on the door. “Will you promise to do everything I tell you to?”
She turned off the light and sank under the covers. All pitch-black now. Nothing but his voice, the hard feel of the phone against her ear, the softness and weight of the comforter. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Everything?” that dark voice insisted, mastering her as he always did.
Her voice was barely a sound: “Oui.”
* * *
Chapter 28
“Please don’t tell me you are going to take the train up there to be her gigolo for the night,” Chantal said flatly.
Sylvain stared at her. As usual, Chantal looked lovely and classy. Too classy to accuse him of being a gigolo, but they had been friends for long enough that she spoke her mind when she thought she should speak it.
“I don’t think I had thought of it in quite those terms, no.”
They were in one of their favorite lunch spots, a tiny Vietnamese restaurant that one had to find by word of mouth or, rather, intense curiosity, as it didn’t look like anything much from the outside or in: dark red velvet, barely lit. His had been the intense curiosity, back when it first opened, and his and Chantal’s had been the start of the word of mouth that now made it so popular.
One of the quiet owners set saki in front of them, on the house, as she had for years now. The little china cups showed tiny and excruciatingly bad pornographic pictures if looked at through an alcoholic haze. Gender-specific, too; Chantal’s would be of a man.
“Sylvain. Can’t you see you’re doing it again? I thought you had gotten over letting women use you and break your heart.”
He was getting heartily sick of this subject. “You’re sure Cade is using me?” He thought of her breathing the night before on the phone, what it had done to him to have her respond that way to his voice. He thought of her holding his gaze, saying, “I’m coming back.”
“Absolument,” Chantal said firmly.
“You don’t think there’s any possibility she could be a little bit in love with me? Merci, Chantal.” People who knew you in high school never did learn to respect you, did they?
“Of course I think there’s a possibility she’s in love with you,” Chantal said, flushing for no reason Sylvain could figure out. “Who wouldn’t be?”
What? Deep inside, Sylvain started.
“But you can be in love with someone and still use him.”
“You would know,” Sylvain said dryly. She was beautiful, and she had an extensive history of letting assholes use her and then turning around and using nice guys to make her feel better about herself. She had been, in fact, one of those friends he had fantasized about in high school and whom he had successfully seduced once with chocolate when he was sixteen and she was eighteen.
The next morning, she had treated it as a blip in their friendship, kind and rather condescending about it. He had forgiven her because he was crazy about her—wounded, but crazy about her—and she had gone straight on to one of the jerks she’d liked to date so much at that time.
Chantal stiffened. “You know, Sylvain, I am—nearly a decade older now.”
He was fourteen years older, but time flowed a little differently for Chantal, who was resisting hitting thirty.
She touched her fingertips delicately to the back of his hand. “Don’t you think I might have learned to appreciate you?”
Chantal had always had a dog-in-the-manger streak with him, when it came to the women he dated. She was comfortable as a friend whenever he wasn’t dating someone, but she always wanted to grab him back when he was. She needed a nice guy in her life; she just didn’t know how to make a commitment to one. Chantal had had a pretty screwed-up home life back as a teenager. He liked her, and he understood that about her, and so he was able to tolerate some things. But there were limits.
“She knows her mind, though,” he said suddenly.
“What?” Chantal looked wary.
“You’ve got to hand it to her. She may want to use me, but she wants to use me.” And he wanted to use her. Use her and use her, in all kinds of ways. But he also wanted to make her smile. He wanted to let her curl up in the shelter of his body when the wind was cold. He wanted to set her up on his counter and feed her hot chocolate to warm her. “She wanted me or my chocolate from the start, and she went after it, and she never once thought she might want someone else instead.”
“What about Dominique Richard?” Chantal asked defensively. “She told me she liked Dominique Richard better.”
“She was lying. She’s a very cute liar.” She was a very erotic liar, was what she was. It made him want to capture her and . . . mmm, push her up against the wet wall of that shower of his—they hadn’t tried that yet—and make her admit the lie.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Chantal.” Sylvain looked at her and just shook his head. “I’m sure she was lying about Dominique Richard, yes. Very sure. But sure that I won’t get my heart broken, sure this will end well? I think the chances are about one in a hundred.”
“You think that, and yet you’ll go chasing after her?” Chantal demanded furiously.
“Of course.”
The security guard at the Firenze headquarters in Brussels couldn’t get Cade on the phone for permission to bring him up but was too much of a romantic to turn Sylvain away. The romantics in life had to stick up for each other. He finally decided to escort Sylvain to her, keeping a sharp eye on him to make sure he was who he said he was and not some fanatic out to strike a blow against globalization by throwing a bomb.
So Cade had no advance warning of Sylvain’s arrival into her world. He felt his stomach muscles tighten as he approached the doorway, preparing to protect his soft, mushy chamallow insides from a blow.
Cade stood to the side of an oval table, by a window looking down on the old town. Dusk was falling, making the window a dark backdrop to a large, well-lit room. In the center of the table were the remnants of some kind of orange pie, that seemed to have been shared at some point. Cade looked very professional—black pants, boots, a fitted pale blue shirt, hair at the end of a long day having lost wisps from its chignon to frame her face but still remarkably smooth. None of that lip gloss she favored was left on her lips. A black blazer he suspected to be hers hung over a nearby chair. She was talking to one of the Firenzes, gesturing sharply with one hand and looking frustrated and intense, when the movement in the doorway caught her attention, and she glanced his way.
She froze, her lips still parted in whatever she had been saying, her hand stilling mid-gesture.
Then her face lit. The professional, intense energy fragmented under an explosion of happiness. “Sylvain.”
The joy in it took his breath away. She left the group as if they had ceased to exist, her arms lifting up to him as she came toward him in such obvious delight that the security guard stopped trying to block him and let him meet her halfway. The woman who had previously infuriated him and made him deeply wary by her refusal to greet him with even the bises of a casual acquaintance threw her arms around him and kissed him with so much joy, he would think . . . well, he would think all kinds of things.
When he could think again. Right now, he just wanted to kiss her back.
“You came,” she said, when she finally surfaced. And in complete contradiction to every other message she was sending: “You shouldn’t have come. You’ll be bored.”
He gave a low half laugh, incredulous. He would have flown around the world to learn what he had just learned. He would even have done it two weeks before Christmas or Easter, when he could spare not a second from his own work.
“Why did you come?” She reproached his choice even while pressing her body into his as if she could never get close enough.
Because he had a one in a hundred chance, and he wasn’t stupid enoug
h not to take it.
He bent down with a smile to whisper into her ear: “To get your shoes off.” Last night had driven him pretty insane with desire. And he wanted to make sure she was still real. To see a little of what her world was like. And to see her reaction to his walking into her world.
Sa réaction était magnifique.
She was still staring up at him with her eyes sparkling like the damn, giddy Eiffel Tower.
She blushed suddenly. Because she had, in fact, done everything he’d told her to the night before. Sylvain gave her a slow, slow smile, and her blush deepened. He pulled her hard against him, feeling himself grow instantly aroused.
Not a great thing in a room full of her business associates. He pushed her far enough away from him that she was no longer touching him but kept hold of her hips so he wouldn’t lose his human shield before his arousal subsided.
When he was safe for public view, he shook hands with the Firenze brothers, whom he had met before, and with a few other people who suddenly wanted to be introduced. At first that amused him, because he could see why a good corporate ladder-climber would want to meet the person one of the Coreys was publicly kissing. Then, belatedly, alarm penetrated the amusement. It had never occurred to him that a consequence of dating Cade was that he might gain power in her world and have to learn how to use it wisely.
It was a sobering thought. It gave him the tiniest glimpse of how she felt, with all that power, how worried she was about ignoring it and focusing, at least for a while, on what she wanted and not the infinite number of things she could or should be doing with her power. It was a wonder her sense of self wasn’t fragmented to pieces. He remembered again Googling her name, and all the references that came up—business articles or charities, every single one.
She didn’t know how to get out from under all that she could or should do. When he walked out of the meeting to let her finish it, he felt almost as if he was abandoning her to quicksand without even tossing her a rope.
He met a friend of his for a local Belgian beer in a pub on the Place St. Catherine but sat there uneasy the whole time, nagged by that illogical feeling he should go back and rescue her. And knowing she would be outraged if he even tried.
Cade came to join them an hour or so later, much to his relief. At least he could shake off that stupid quicksand image.
At night, cafés and restaurants filled the Place St. Catherine with lights and action, and the Église St. Catherine glowed against the dark sky, beautiful. The chalets for the Christmas market were just starting to be set up but had not yet filled the space. Sylvain and Cade took a slow walk through the square after his friend headed home.
“So is she?” she asked abruptly.
Since in French, “she” could be anything from a place to a person, he scrambled. “Is she what? Who?”
“A girlfriend? Do you sleep with her?” One of her heels wobbled on the uneven cobblestones. He took her arm more firmly to steady her.
“Chantal?” he finally guessed. That was the only other woman Cade had ever seen him with. Enfin. To his knowledge. She might have had some private investigator taking photos of him for the past year, for all he knew.
Her mouth set. He wanted to bend down and sip that stubbornness right off it. She nodded.
“No. A couple of times in high school.”
That mouth set harder. “Why only a couple?”
Because he had been ditched, of course. Now, how to admit that to a woman he wanted to impress? “Well . . .” He tried a cocky grin. “It might surprise you to know that I haven’t always been as cute as I am now.”
It shouldn’t surprise her, thanks to his mom’s photo album, but she had seemed to see his old gawky teenage self through a flattering haze.
They had reached the Grand Place, and Cade stood there in the light of the Brussels Town Hall, her mouth slowly forming a perfect O of disbelief as she deciphered what he meant. “You mean she ditched you?”
Cade was really, really good for his ego.
“I think she was young and stupid.” Sylvain pretended arrogance and mock sorrow for his friend’s error in her ways.
“I think she was young and stupid, too,” Cade said flatly, with no pretense at all. “And I think she realizes how stupid now.”
That . . . might be true. But if their friendship had survived Sylvain’s long-ago crush on Chantal, it could survive Chantal’s current crush on him. Chantal was just lost again and turning to him the way she always did when she was worried about being lost. She would figure out her love life eventually and find the right person. He had an idea, in fact—maybe he could get her together with Christophe le Gourmand and kill two birds with one stone. He frequently fantasized about hitting Christophe over the head with a stone, these days.
“So, no lovers?” Cade checked. A bulldog, Sylvain remembered.
“I wouldn’t say no lovers.”
She looked as if she’d just been slapped. By him.
It made him want to strangle her. He reached out a finger and tapped her a little too hard on the chest. “What do you think you are?”
“No other lovers,” she said impatiently.
“Right now? Is this some kind of French stereotype? That whole idea about our casual infidelity is not true, by the way.”
She heaved an annoyed sigh. “It’s nothing to do with your being French. You must have women throwing themselves at you all the time.”
He grinned. Very good for his ego. “I thought you had figured this out about me, Cade—I only ever put the absolute best into my mouth.”
That both shut her up and made her blush crimson.
He squeezed her hand, satisfied with the effect. “Alors, comment ça va?”
She was silent for a long time. “You know how sometimes you have to work so hard for something, and you don’t even want it, but you have to do it anyway?”
“No,” he said flatly. He worked for what he wanted. He didn’t waste time on what he didn’t.
“Oh.” She was silent again for a while. “Well, that’s how it’s going. I don’t know if we’ll win this one or not. I’m working on an agreement with Firenze, but the problem is, we both want the same parts of Devon Candy and don’t want the same parts. So we might not be able to share this merger. And no matter what we put together, Total Foods will probably up their first bid and beat it. It will be a bidding war, and I don’t know how high we will be able to go. My dad is working on the financing angle.”
“Let’s go back to what you started to say, about working for something you don’t want. That’s more interesting. I want to know how you are doing.”
Cade gave him a puzzled look, as if either French had suddenly failed her or he had started speaking Flemish. Did that happen to her a lot? That when people asked her how she was doing, they meant how the company was doing?
“Because I thought you said . . . you were looking for something different. You didn’t want your life to be this way anymore.” She had wanted her life to be his way. What he had to offer.
She stopped in front of the Maison du roi, or Bread House, as the Flemish preferred to call it, and stood with her head tilted back, gazing at its ornate, symmetric Renaissance front. Laughter and casual conversation drifted around them as groups passed. More Belgians than tourists were crossing the Place at this time of year, most of them friendly and relaxed, post-pub.
She was silent for a long time, before she finally spoke, low and fierce: “If I win this, I can stay here. We’ll need someone to run the merging of the companies, the selling of parts, the new Corey Chocolate in Europe.”
“Cade. Why would you do that? When you don’t want to run Corey Europe. You want desperately to do something else.”
She bit her lip but held his eyes. “Because I could stay here,” she whispered.
“What does it mean to stay here, if you bring with you the world you wanted to escape?”
She clenched and unclenched her fists, kneading her palms with her nails. �
�Sylvain,” she whispered, as if it hurt her. “Why do you think?”
It hit him like a body blow. “For . . . me? You would do what you don’t want for me?”
“It’s a compromise. I stay here. I stay Corey.”
“What about you?”
“What?”
“Don’t misunderstand. I want you here. But where are you in all that? You stay here for me, you stay Corey for your father and Corey Chocolate. What do you do for you?”
“Stay here,” she said low. “With you.”
He drew her into his arms and held her hard, his heart soaring. “Besides that. If you want to be in chocolateries, then you should be doing that.”
She pulled away from him and shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, hunching her shoulders. “I’m good at this kind of thing. And it’s a family company, and I have a lot of responsibility to a lot of people. Maybe I should have chosen my sister’s route and refused any of that responsibility from the start. But now I have it, and . . . I can’t see any other way.”
“Why not? If you can chart five-year plans and how to negotiate a joint counterbid for another multibillion-euro company, it seems as if you should be able to plot out any personal exit strategy you want to. You can’t tell me you don’t have the brains to figure out a solution.”
Cade scrunched her eyebrows together and gave him a long, thoughtful look, as if trying to see herself reflected in his eyes.
Good. As far as he could tell, he had a pretty damned accurate idea of her character and intelligence and passion, and it might do her good to take a second look at herself through him.
He gazed down at her for a long moment as she stood in this beautiful Grand Place, surrounded by guildhalls. Her heeled boots brought her up to his chin instead of his shoulder, but he doubted she wore them because she felt any need for more height. Like the people who had built the halls framing this place, she seemed pretty confident of her right to dominate any situation.
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