Kiss the Bride

by Deirdre Martin

  Her breath came in on a rush. “Reall—I mean, yes, that would be”—Wait, she had to get a spy camera first. She swallowed and firmed her tone. “I should narrow down my top choices before I”—

  His eyes narrowed fractionally. Oh, he didn’t like that, to not automatically be her top choice, did he?

  “—And—and talk to my fiancé about it. But perhaps we could set up an appointment to discuss it? Tomorrow?” If she could sit on her excitement that long. Spy camera, she reminded herself. Don’t waste this opportunity.

  “Bien sûr,” he said evenly. He scrutinized her a second more, and she tried gamely to look credible. “Will your fiancé be joining us?”

  Zut, alors. Now where could she stash a nonexistent fiancé so she could go invade a superstar chocolatier’s privacy? She gave him a smile so bright it nearly bounced off the steel in those eyes of his and blinded her. “Of course!”

  Simon watched the lithe figure disappear down the sidewalk, a spring in her step, bouncing from exuberance. Her ponytail bobbed against the nape of her neck, all that mass of deep russet brown waves contained at one point by an elastic they clearly resisted. A man could slip his thumbs into that elastic and snap it in two. He would feel like the world’s greatest liberator, freeing the rebellious waves so that they spilled out all over his hands in giddy delight.

  And her eyes would widen in a kind of thrilled alarm as his hands cradled her skull and dealt so ruthlessly with her bonds, and her lips would part as he bent his head and kissed her until she would tell him the truth just to get more kisses ...

  The vision was so powerful his thumbs tingled from the texture of her hair, from an elastic snapping. His mouth felt softer, almost bruised.

  Last year, on an endurance race, just when the going was at its grimmest, he had spotted the palm trees of an oasis in the distance. Oddly, the exact same feeling had shot through him when he took in that excited, bright face, that slightly rounded, not-particularly-muscled body.

  A first thrill of exquisite relief and then: determined, focused, and very, very thirsty.

  The warm green of her sundress stood out among the cool, clean lines of the Parisians brushing past her on the sidewalk. One of his hands curled into a fist when those more subdued colors finally blocked her from view. One last little glimpse of green and she disappeared around the corner.

  Don’t be a mirage, he thought.

  Or already taken. Although—there must be any number of ways to dispose of an inconvenient fiancé.

  A fiancé who had been oh-so-conveniently produced. If she hadn’t been spying on him for one of his rivals, why not pull out a regular camera, introduce herself, and take photos openly?

  He crouched, stretched an arm under the nearest parked car, and pulled out her phone. No code protected it. He flipped back through her photos, finding several of his display windows, none inside the shop. His eyebrows flicked together at the next photos, familiar chocolate work, not his own. Had she been visiting Sylvain Marquis, too? Before him? Annoyance hummed at her priorities.

  Those photos, too, were taken at awkward angles, light often reflecting off glass, like someone who hadn’t dared ask to be allowed behind the display cases. That was one shy bride.

  He switched to her address book, but she didn’t have any of his rivals entered in it. Maybe she was spying for herself? Looking to start her own chocolate shop in the United States?

  He flipped to her Recent Calls and found a male name as number one. Merde, alors. David Layne. Well, he hadn’t been forced through years of English classes in school for nothing. He hit the call button.

  “Ellie?” The voice on the other end sounded startled and wary.

  “No, I’m sorry. I found this phone on the street, and I am trying to get it back to its owner. Are you a friend?”

  “No, her brother.”

  Simon grinned and turned to look in the direction of the vanished green sundress. A woman could have a brother and a fiancé. But the next three most recent calls made on her phone had been to “Mom,” another woman, and a company, and that over several days. “If you can tell me how to find her, I can give it back to her.”

  Unfortunately, her brother wasn’t an idiot. “It’s probably better if I get your information and have her contact you.”

  Well, it had been worth a shot. He gave the brother his name and shop address and double-checked her incoming calls for an obsessed fiancé calling her so often she never got a chance to be the one to call him. No, the past four calls, in a twenty-four hour period, had come from “Mom.”

  In his office, he tried Googling “Ellie Layne,” “Ellen Layne,” “Eleanor Layne,” and every spelling of Elizabeth he could think of. Unfortunately, all variants called up plenty of search results, and after he had checked the photos of one Vegas call girl and multiple Facebook sites, he finally gave up.

  No photos gazed back at him with happy green eyes that widened when he looked at her too steadily, or brown hair that practically wiggled with energy, or a bowed lip that curved into an impudently bright grin when she was lying, or skin so transparent that he could see exactly how nervous he made her. He gave up looking, his mind wandering ... over cheekbones with a suggestion of freckles so faint it was like the gold specks on a ripe pear ... tracing the delicate white strap that peeked out under her sundress, following it down to the soft, generous breasts it supported. He would bet anything her bra and panties matched: dainty, white, innocent cotton. Arousal closed one lazy, hard hand around his body and wouldn’t let him go, as he thought about that white cotton.

  He studied her phone, with its screen photo of the Eiffel Tower. Not, for example, of her cheek pressed against some man’s while he stretched the camera out and took a picture of them standing in front of it.

  He smiled a little. Then that smile broke into a narrow grin, restrained, controlled, and infinitely more dangerous for that restraint. He didn’t have a one-track mind for nothing. Control and focus would get you what you wanted every time.

  If her fiancé existed, he was a very lucky man.

  And his luck was about to change.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ellie was so relieved when she got her brother’s e-mail about her phone that she had to sit on herself to keep from running out into the night to a closed shop to find it. Yay! Not only did her phone exist, but the hottest chocolatier in Paris was holding it hostage. If only she could bribe him with sex to get it back, all would be perfect.

  Alas, he would probably just hand it to her politely and hope she would get out of his way as quickly as possible. He was a nice man, to have tracked her down, though, which was a little bit of a surprise. He had looked at her so penetratingly and suspiciously, she hadn’t been sure he liked her very much.

  Speaking of suspicions, she needed to bolster her cover story before she waved it in front of that X-ray vision again. So she spent some time scouring baby name sites until she came up with Cal Kenton for her fiancé’s name. “High Drama!” she posted on Twitter. “More on my secret investigations later! I TELL ALL about Simon Casset!”

  There, that should whet their interest until she got photos and maybe it would draw some extra clicks to her blog. Meanwhile, on that blog, she posted some great shots—taken openly with her real camera—of her apartment view and her adventures finding her feet the first three days in Paris. Bright, fun, full of hope and fear, welcoming her readers into her adventure, letting them live it vicariously. The encouraging comments started coming within minutes after the post. Wishing her all the best, and begging for more of Simon Casset.

  Yeah, them and her both.

  Buoyed, she headed out first thing the next morning for an engagement ring.

  Ouch, did she have sympathy with men after that excursion. Who spent a month’s salary on something so silly? But at the same time, she didn’t want to come across as cheap, or unvalued, when she was waving her hands around talking to Simon Casset about his gâteaux.

  In other words, cubic zir
conium was where it was at. It felt exciting and romantic, in a weird lonely way, to be shopping for her engagement ring in Paris. She finally came up with an elegant, scrolled, antique-looking silver setting and a large but not too large, beveled-set fake diamond for under fifty dollars. It suited her just perfectly, to think that a man had spotted something so old-fashioned and delicate and pretty and thought of her. Guys usually thought she was very strong, which she was, resilient as a damn superball, but it wasn’t as much fun bouncing back from their carelessness as they thought. Ellie never threw superballs across a room. She flinched for them, every single bounce.

  Cal Kenton would treat her as something precious. And if he didn’t waste a couple of months’ Paris rent while he was at it, so much the better. He was a smart guy and knew where her priorities lay, that Cal Kenton. Perfect for her.

  Spy cameras, unfortunately, turned out to be a little bit beyond her budget, and not nearly as stylish as what she had expected from James Bond movies. She tried to imagine fumbling with one of those things while Simon Casset’s blue-gray eyes rested on her, blushed crimson, and hurriedly handed the “button camera” back to the clerk. She might just have to evoke client privilege and get permission to take her photos.

  Leaving the spy equipment shop in Les Halles, she spotted a little boutique selling pay-as-you-go phones and had a sudden inspiration. Buying one for twenty euros, she sent her own phone a text.

  Simon’s marketing firm forwarded him the tweet and the link to the blog first thing in the morning, with an acerbic little comment, since Simon was constantly provoking them by refusing to do photo shoots and otherwise display his private life. Simon raised his eyebrows over the title. TELL ALL about Simon Casset? Like, what, how he worked his butt off and was such an obsessed geek that he thought a millimeter difference in a line of icing on a réligieuse was important? And how he was so completely unable to relax from his perfectionism and have fun that in his leisure time he trained for triathlons? That should keep them on the edge of their seats, all right.

  But seeing himself all sparkly with exclamation points made him smile. He liked seeing himself through her eyes. It took no great leap of intuition to figure out who had stamped exclamation points all around his name. Someone who was petrified with nervousness at being caught sneaking photos of his shop and who was capable of wearing a flower-printed summer green dress through the streets of Paris and making everyone else look coincé and boring.

  A Taste of Elle, she had called her blog. And the taste it offered of her was—sweet and spicy all at once. Not spicy like hot peppers, which, like any palate-respecting French chef, he loathed, but like that little bit of brightness that made the mouth wake up and take notice. She was having fun with her life. Every hyper-controlled muscle in his body relaxed as he read her effervescent account of her move to Paris and looked at the pictures of everything she was excited about: a green door; a very ordinary balcony; someone carrying a baguette; the rooftops she could see from her tiny, still-bare apartment; the arrangement of her croissants and coffee on a tray in a bistro.

  Laughter, self-mockery, trepidation, delight—her stories about her adventures were full of all of it, spread out before the world with generous good humor, pulling her readers in. And were they pulled in. The comments were full of “Good luck!” “We love you! We can’t wait to hear about Paris!” “Who are you going to go see first, Simon Casset or Sylvain Marquis?”

  His eyes narrowed a little over there being a choice, and he clicked back further, to a post in the last days leading up to her move, in which she was ecstatic about all the different chocolatiers-pâtissiers she would be able to visit and taste, and promised to tell her readers all about it. Well, merde, he was only one of a list. But he got three exclamation points, and Sylvain Marquis only got two.

  Ha, take that, Sylvain. Someone can appreciate discipline, focused risk, and quality over a poetic lady’s man who likes to smolder for the camera.

  Further back in her posts, her subjects were mostly New York chocolatiers, pâtissiers, special little cafés and places, but anyone could spot a growing desire to move to Paris, mentioned more and more often to her readers, with little photos of what tempted her or links to posts by bloggers living in Paris.

  What he didn’t see, notably, was any mention of a fiancé. Of course, she didn’t mention her brother or mother either, so it was possible she was maintaining some privacy. Along the side of her blog page was a list of products and books to click on, presumably a source of income, and discreetly along the bottom, some other ads. Occasional references revealed that she also did art for an ad agency. Regularly inserted into posts were photos of her own watercolors, mostly of delicious tartes and cakes and chocolates. When he clicked on a watercolor of one of his own works from last year’s Salon du Chocolat in New York, it had already been sold.

  “Chef?” Nathalie, one of his sous-chefs, said from the door of his office, and he looked up lazily, feeling warm and relaxed and golden, as if he had been called back to the world from a hammock in which he had been lounging in the summer sun. Lean and intense and crisp and cool, like him, Nathalie raised her eyebrows. “Tout va bien?”

  “Hmm?” He blinked and gave himself a shake. He didn’t feel crisp and cool at all. He felt drugged by sunlight, as if he couldn’t make his muscles return to their normal tension.

  “Il est dix heures. Are you—do you have anything in particular you want us to work on today?”

  Ten o’clock? He had been lost in her blog all morning. Not working. He didn’t know he knew how to not work. He leapt up, his muscles tensing, oddly invigorated, as if he was jumping from a sauna into the snow. “Of course. Let me show you.”

  When Ellie Layne’s phone made the burping noise of a text received a half hour later, Simon wiped chocolate off one hand, fished it out of his pocket under his pastry jacket, and checked it with no compunction whatsoever. She was planning to TELL ALL about him, so ... en amour comme à la guerre, petite. All was fair ... “Missed U last night. Why didn’t U call?”

  He grinned. Apparently she thought all was fair, too. Her phone didn’t have any name associated with the number of the person saying he missed her so much.

  Half an hour later it burped again. The same unnamed number. “XOXO. Love U!”

  Maybe she was trying to convince him that her mother was texting her. Or maybe no one had ever sent her romantic texts, not at least since she was a teenager, and she didn’t know what an adult man might actually write? He smiled a little and entered her number into his own phone.

  Just in case he had an opportunity to fix that problem for her.

  Ellie’s heart stopped when she walked into Simon Casset’s laboratoire. The scent of chocolate flooded her, laced playfully with hints of caramelized sugar and butter and almonds, filling her lungs, until she couldn’t think or be anything else but longing for a taste. It rested on her tongue, sank into her hair, settled into her clothes, so that she would have to strip naked to start to free herself of it. So that she would have to stand a long, long time under the shower. If there was a test for chocolate content in the blood, she would lose her license from just one breath of that laboratoire.

  Extending around her with its marble counters and stainless steel and white-coated chefs, that laboratoire might as well have been a Versailles Court backdrop for the center of attraction, the Sun-King there. Not that either his kitchens or he himself were opulent, both all long spare lines with no ounce of extra fat. But the piece he was working on ... his face stern, fine lines from weather and concentration crinkling at the corners of his eyes ... oh, that was enough opulence for anyone.

  It rose and rose, from a tiny chocolate base the shape of a great splitting seed, sweeping out like great swirls of daydreaming, dark chocolate rising higher and higher, twining with white, and then with little spears of colors in spun sugar that must be incredibly delicate. How could he even touch them without shattering them, let alone place them so beautifully in this
sculpture? He had paused and was studying it, little figures lined up on parchment paper on the counter before him, ready, presumably, to grace the unbelievably high and slender structure. Dragonflies? Pixies? Their bodies alternately of white or dark chocolate, their spring-green wings of gossamer spun sugar.

  She got lost in the structure, trying to make out the pixie-dragonflies from the doorway, and when she looked up, he was gazing at her. With those same crinkle lines of concentration. As if he had been studying her underwear for some time.

  She flushed. How did he do that, with just a look? And if he was really seeing her underwear, could he look more lustful about it, and less like a professional radiologist?

  “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Layne,” he said politely. Today he wore a white chef’s jacket over jeans, a blue, white, and red marking on its collar. Un MOF, she thought, with a thrill. She knew what that bleu, blanc, rouge at his collar meant. He was a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, elite among chocolatiers, chosen by his peers in the grueling quadrennial M.O.F. trials, the Olympics of his field. Maybe she should genuflect.

  His eyes flicked behind her. That firm mouth curved just a little. “Your fiancé couldn’t make it?”

  “He broke his leg,” Ellie said promptly. “On the way over here. A moped accident. Poor Cal.” She adopted the most mournful expression she could.

  He gave her an utterly charmed look. “Your fiancé drives a moped?”

  Could people who drove mopeds typically afford him for their weddings? “He was crossing the street. An old lady was driving the moped.”

  “She was probably so busy juggling her baguette,” Simon sympathized solemnly, as if he had seen this kind of tragic accident many times before.

  “Yes!” Ellie had a brief, beautiful vision. Oh lord, she was going to draw a caricature of that for her blog, she had to. “And her beret slipped over her eyes at just the wrong moment.”