She frowned, wanting to argue. But he closed his hand around her wrist and used it to bring the second half of the chocolate to her lips. “That sculpture isn’t of me.”
The rich deep chocolate with its golden undertones melted all over her tongue again and melted every erogenous zone of her body while it was at it: heat spreading out from the nape of her neck, from the insides of her elbows—since when had that become an erogenous zone?—down the delicate insides of her wrists, in her breasts, and of course, of course blooming between her thighs.
She could barely stop herself from grabbing on to him. He seemed such an intense, still center in that melting world.
“I’m not, you know,” he whispered. “Like that. I’m all tension. All steel. All the time. I don’t have any softness but what I make.” He was closing her in entirely now, a hand on either side of her on the counter. He had long arms, a tall lean body, and still the space she had left to maneuver was exquisitely small. His gaze ran over her hair, her eyebrows, her cheeks, down to the curve of her breasts under her little blue top. “Not yet,” he breathed.
She took a hard, involuntary breath, and brought her thumb up only half-consciously to suck the melted chocolate off its pad.
Tension grew all around her, in the long arms under his jacket, the shoulders angled over her, the flat stomach, the strong thighs. If she reached out and touched him, would those muscles be as taut as the air between them? Her fingers itched. As an investigative journalist, maybe she should just check ...
He pushed himself suddenly away from her with a little huff of breath and turned toward the racks of chocolates. One hand curled into the wire shelving, and he stood for a moment with his back to her. A white-coated assistant came up to him. It took him a second before he turned his head and looked at the woman, nodding, responding something. His face slowly regained that severe, disciplined look.
He pulled out his phone and walked away, talking into it for a few minutes. At the end of the conversation, he shook his head and rolled his shoulders, rubbed the nape of his neck, then turned and came back to her. His face was all ascetic, but his eyes watched her. “I’m sorry, that was the wife of one of the pâtissiers I trained under, asking if I can help out. He was supposed to give a workshop this afternoon at LeNôtre, but apparently had an allergic reaction to raw red tuna at breakfast this morning—please don’t ask why anyone would eat sushi for breakfast. He’s the one who invented a chocolate filled with foie gras. Anyway, his wife asked if I could go fill in.” He stood still a moment looking down at her. Was he too controlled to show frustration or just not frustrated?
He might flirt with engaged women all the time. Every time one came in to talk to him about her wedding, in fact.
Good lord, he might not even have been flirting. He was French, right? Didn’t they breathe sex appeal without even thinking about it?
Great. Living in Paris was going to kill her, then. Nobody in bars or at frat parties or even in her old ad agency in New York, where there had been some serious self-marketers, knew how to get to a woman that unconsciously.
“I could show you my sketches,” Ellie heard herself say.
Simon’s face broke into a smile. His head tilted. She felt so special when he looked at her with such focus. Alas, she was pretty sure that was just his normal look. “What an excellent idea. Demain? Do you want to come back tomorrow and show me your thoughts about what you’re looking for?”
She nodded emphatically. One lock of her hair escaped from her ponytail and bobbed into her eyes.
His gaze honed in on that, then tracked over her hair like a heavy, petting hand. “And you can try more chocolates.”
“Really?” she said hungrily, wonderingly. “Would you let me?” Living in Paris might kill her, but it was a good way to die. This master chocolatier feeding her chocolates from his own hand as she slowly lost her mind to heartbroken desire. It seemed suitably French. Didn’t all their films end that way?
Oh crap, he was only offering her chocolates from his hand because she was a potential valuable client. Was she stealing from him?
Instead of all those art courses in college, she probably should have taken one on journalistic ethics.
CHAPTER FOUR
CAUGHT in the act. Simon Casset is HOT! read the next morning’s blog post.
Simon’s hand jerked on his mouse as if it were an electric socket. A geyser of hot, liquid sugar surged through his body. He had to grip the edge of his desk, which was a lousy substitute for soft curves through a thin flower print. Desire hit him in great waves, like being caught wrong as he made it out through the breakers for an ocean swim, and he had to ride it out, let them batter him until he could come up for air.
She thought he was hot? She thought he was HOT!
Help! she told her readers. What’s a girl to do?
She seemed to have no conception of the fact that she left herself naked. That he might read this. Did she think, when she wrote, that she was confessing things to an audience of personal friends? Was that her performance mind-set, the thing that let her blog when otherwise she might retreat into some semblance of privacy? Or did she think the fact that it was in English would hide it from him, somehow? Surely not. She had plenty of comments in French below her posts, proving she knew French audiences read her. She was just all out there, wasn’t she? Oblivious to the obvious, that if she blogged about him, with his full name to pop up on Google Alerts, he would find out about it. And realize who had written it.
Did she think he wouldn’t care? That it wouldn’t turn him into a hungry, prowling wolf?
Even if she assumed he would never see it ... how could she blithely tell her readers she thought he was HOT!
He could only imagine telling one person how hot he found her, and even then only at some very intimate, exposed moments, like ...
He had to swallow on another wave of desire, as he imagined some possible moments. He could imagine ... quite a bit.
How had she even gotten that picture of him? He was bent over a marble counter, picking up a chocolate-sugar pixie, and looking up just at the right moment, with a little crinkle around his eyes, warm, a slight smile that now looked as if it had been for the world entier, but which in reality must have been just for her.
He didn’t know how they did it in America, but here in France it was illegal to publish someone’s photo on the web without permission, and he didn’t give a damn. Il s’en foutait royalement, en fait.
I want her, his whole being said like a small child clamoring for a toy. I want her. All the curves and flowers and life of her.
And I’m going to have her. Today.
While she still thinks I’m hot.
“Monsieur?” asked Lucie. He peered at his front manager from very far away, trying to make her out through that blinding desire-storm. “The mademoiselle is here to see you with her sketches for the wedding.”
Oh yes, I’m going to have her. He fisted a hand, making his personal contract, the one he had made before the M.O.F. concours and his first iron distance triathlon. I promise myself I am.
“Bring her back, Lucie, merci. And could you close the door behind us when you leave?”
He turned the lock, so that when Lucie pulled the door closed, no one else could get to them unless they battered it down.
Ellie’s skin was charged before she even reached his shop, as if he was pulling all her positive electric particles to him and she needed desperately to touch him, to rebalance herself with that first huge ZAP!
The outside of the shop was a brown so dark and assertive it was almost black, like old iron, the name SIMON CASSET stamped above it as if by a merciless press. Inside, the style was so purist, so streamlined, that the contents hit like a miracle. The counters reminded her of his eyes, gray-blue, but such a pale, pale shade of it, that it became the foil for the dark, dark chocolate that contrasted with it, and for the bright, rich fruit colors that lit the dark chocolate as if a Fairy King had passed through t
he Black Forest, bringing life and whimsy racing out of the darkness in his wake, surging into the sky. Sculptures that were impossible fancies claimed the eye, then let it relax to the carpet of small perfect chocolates, to the flowering bed of pastries, that stretched in the display cases at those sculptures’ feet.
She felt—giddy, moving through that shop. Too bright, too beautiful, too hungry. As if it made her into something richer and tried to snare her all at once.
Her heart seized oddly, and she felt sparkly and strange, to see the pixie-dragonfly sculpture. The pixies laughed and played so merrily, she could swear their eyes caught hers in a moment of joyous complicity.
She was so hungry by the time she made it through that shop to the laboratoire beyond it, she might eat the first thing that moved. Her skin prickled all over, the hairs stirring on her body. She would have bought a box of chocolates right then, except ... her tongue curled with longing to be fed them again from his own hand.
Come away, O human child ...
When the girl who walked her back shut the door behind her, closing Ellie and Simon into the office, Ellie couldn’t breathe. Just being French, she reminded herself. Her French teachers in college had told her about this: the French liked to shut doors, it didn’t seem intimate to them; leaving doors open seemed overexposed.
That was ... that was ... all—
Simon Casset smiled at her. Just a tiny smile. An—intimate smile. Energy crackled off him as if he had just come out of a lightning storm. That self-contained control of his must be all that prevented him from releasing thunderbolts with a sudden movement.
The energy in this small office felt ... too much. Seriously, if she couldn’t touch him soon to release that static buildup, her whole body might crackle apart from the force of it.
“Bonjour.” His gaze tracked over her once, a subtle flicker up and down, and again she might have been posing naked. Those blue-gray eyes of his looked a lot darker than usual, some heat blackening the steel. “Your fiancé still couldn’t make it?” he asked gently.
He sure showed a lot of solicitude for her fiancé. What, did it seem that bad to be engaged to her? That he had to take care of the other man? “Hospital. Remember?”
“Still? For a broken leg?”
Damn, it would have helped if she had ever known personally someone with a broken leg. She tried to call up television shows. “Traction. The old lady was heavy. There were multiple fractures.”
“Poor you.” His voice might as well have been a flow of chocolate, caressing her all over.
Why? She wasn’t in traction. “It’s all right. I’m happy to see you without him.”
A flicker of a grin, oddly carnivorous. “An endurance athlete with his leg in traction is going to be impossible to live with. All that energy he can’t expend. You might want to avoid him completely for a couple of months so you won’t end up dumping him for someone more ... self-controlled.”
The most self-controlled person she knew was standing right in front of her. In her mind, he lost all that control and his clothes with it.
She looked down at her sketchbook, that penetrating gaze of his making her feel caught en flagrant délit. Cheater.
Abruptly, she remembered whom she was cheating. Not Cal Kenton but Simon Casset.
She was going to have to pay him for all this, wasn’t she? Take out extravagant credit card debt and somehow manage to pay him for the favors and sculptures for her invented wedding. He was so sincerely offering her his precious time, and she was behaving execrably. She hadn’t realized that about hard-nosed journalism: the price getting what she wanted might cost other people.
God, he must be hideously expensive.
“Your sketches?” he asked, moving around the desk and in quite close behind her to reach for the book.
She swallowed as every hair on her body strained toward him, guilt or no. Her hold loosened involuntarily on the sketchbook, because she had no more muscles. He had all the muscles in the room.
But instead of taking it from her, he reached past her body and opened it, standing looking over her shoulder.
That exhilirated giddy about-to-jump-off-the-edge-of-the-world fear pressed outward from her middle, swelling like a balloon, until there was no more space for her lungs. He looked at the first page. It was of the Statue of Liberty and part of the New York skyline, and under it she had drawn a bright, sad, excited BYE!, decorated with a bow and a tear.
She couldn’t see his face or judge his reaction, just feel the stretch of time as he looked at it, the heat of him not touching her but closing all around her just shy of her skin.
He turned the page. The Eiffel Tower, dazzling with sparkles. She had made the sparkles shoot out lines all over the page, like fireworks.
“It’s ... they’re at the back,” she mumbled, embarrassed. Having him so perfect and controlled so close behind her was leaving her completely vulnerable. It was all she could do not to bend her head, offer the long stretch of her nape, and submit to him.
Well, and she would do that, if she thought he would take the invitation.
And not look at her with appalled embarrassment or cynical amusement and leave her to extricate herself from the humiliating moment. She just so didn’t seem like his type, with all that controlled perfectionism of his. Life was too much fun for her to slow down and be perfect at any part of it. Even her watercolors were charming and quixotic and would never hang in any museum.
“Mmm.” His voice burred softly so close behind her, her skin shivered from it. He turned the next page, taking his time.
He looked through all of them, her sketches of gargoyles, and the doors on all the seventeenth-century buildings, and the displays in bakeries. She stopped protesting as he studied her delighted discovery of his city, because she lost her capacity to protest. Having him so close behind her had slowly stolen so many muscles that she couldn’t even control her mind and tongue to speak.
“Is your fiancé Parisian?” he asked suddenly, in that low voice that rubbed all over her.
He had an awfully funny name for a Frenchman, but—“Oui!” she realized suddenly. That would be perfect. A Parisian who would love her for what she was and sweep her into the heart of his city, but who—might not be quite as lighthearted and fun-focused as she was. She had tried relationships with fun-loving men before, and it had been disastrous. “That’s why I moved here.” He must have gotten the Cal Kenton from a paternal British grandfather.
Simon Casset didn’t say anything, but she felt suddenly, oddly, completely wrapped up in someone else’s happiness. Like a smile was twining all around her. “A Parisian endurance athlete. How perfect. Does he have any other sterling qualities?”
She racked her brain for what she would look for in a man. “He loves to give me really good chocolate.”
“Mmm.” His murmur rumbled deliciously against her.
“And he thinks I’m special.”
“Of course. How not?” The faint note of surprise in his voice rippled through her whole body. That was—a very nice thing to say. These French were such good flirts. He turned another page.
“The pixies.” His voice brushed her with warmth. He had come to the page where she had sketched out his sculpture-in-progress before she painted a watercolor of it for her blog. “It’s done now. Did you see?”
She had. In pride of place in his window display, the pixies with their green wings delicately edged with blue, playing in their world of swirling chocolate. Held up high by it and flying. It had filled her with an inexplicable longing and rightness all at once, as if she had glimpsed, through a telescope, a place where all was right with the world.
His whole body grazed hers. By accident, surely, as he turned the page, for he eased back again immediately. But her mouth went still dryer. She tried to swallow, to find a place for air in her lungs, but she couldn’t.
“That’s beautiful.” It was her first wedding-sculpture sketch. She didn’t really know anything about what choc
olate and sugar could or couldn’t do, but she had thought—summery. Happy. She had closed her eyes and thought of Simon Casset’s styles, all the photos of his works she had seen, and she had drawn swirls and whirls and put in cascades of flowers he could surely make from sugar. “It needs a pixie.” He put one lean finger on a spot just above the flowers. “Or a dragonfly. Being lured in for a taste.”
His voice curled around the nape of her neck and stroked her there. She had it so bad. “Could you—could you do it?” she asked, for something to say, instead of just melting into him.
“Do you want to watch me? See how it’s done?”
She jumped in pure delight, bumping into his body, arched over hers. See how Simon Casset worked? “And—and take pictures and everything? Oh, that would be so perfect.” She turned around in her enthusiasm, feeling an urge to do something physical with it, grab him and kiss him in excitement maybe.
She froze. The effect of her turn, the rubbing of their bodies with her movement, kept washing in waves all through her, like liquid in a glass too quickly spun. She had just almost kissed him.
He didn’t move back. There could be no mistaking the intent in how close he kept himself, his body enclosing hers. He didn’t catch her to steady her when she wobbled back against his desk in thrilled terror.
He closed both hands around the desk on either side of her and locked her in.
The sketchbook provided a tantalizingly flimsy shield between their chests.
Was he hitting on someone else’s fiancée while she was discussing her wedding plans with him? That was just ...
That was so bad.
These Frenchmen. It was true, then, they had no morals and—
And he could look after his own conscience.
She dropped the sketchbook, which got caught between their bodies, a frustrating barrier between breasts and chest. But her hands were already climbing to his shoulders, too impatient to move the sketchbook out of the way. Her fingers flexed into muscle, pulling her body up on tiptoe.
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