The person who strolled out of the way of someone falling off a building so he didn’t get crushed under the body always came out of things just fine.
That fiancé of hers could just keep flirting with that nurse a little while longer.
The wait for her blog post was excruciating. Simon kept checking his phone the whole trip back to his place, after he showered and changed into something that didn’t stink of day-old sweat, and all the way to his shop. By the time he got there, something finally showed up: La vie est belle.
His heart seized with the sweetness of that. For her, too, then? Life is beautiful.
Beyond the title, the post had no words. She had posted the sketch he had gazed at on her easel that morning, as he lay with her curled against him in a bed far too narrow for two, her sketch slowly becoming clearer with the dawn. It was fanciful and full of Paris, half-caricature, half-exuberant joy, with mopeds and baguettes and poodles and the Eiffel Tower dancing everywhere. There was an old lady in a beret with a baguette on a moped in one corner of it, running over a lanky guy with glasses. And in the middle, now, she had added a little caricature figure with brown hair in a ponytail and a green dress on, jumping high with arms and legs spread wide, a big grin on her face.
Her dream of Paris. An alarm bell sounded somewhere deep within him, not the first time, but maybe the other times it had been muffled by desire, easy to ignore. Was he just her French lover? He was making love to her, and he was French, but ... why did it sound so different if he put the terms together, made them an identity?
Putain. He didn’t want to be a French lover.
But that joy in her, in that little caricature flinging her arms out wide ... he did want to be the cause of that.
He found his thumb running against the side of his index finger, as if seeking out a texture that was not there. The paper of the sketch. Her skin. Her hair.
He moved, before he could start clicking refresh over and over to see if she added anything else, before he could send her a text, or call her, or act obsessive. She’s a person. Not an award. A person wielding a fake fiancé like some kind of shield. Pursuit is okay, but not relentless pursuit.
He went back into the heart of his laboratoire and began to create an impossibly delicate chocolate, which he would produce by hand in the hundreds to keep his more obsessive tendencies occupied.
Round. A hazel-green outer shell, blurring golden-brown and green, and so glossy it reflected light. Inside, a rich, warm chocolate ganache, something cozy you couldn’t stand not to linger with. A bottom shell of dark chocolate. And precisely, just off center of the top of the gold-green, pear-speckled dome of it, a tiny off-white flower, with six minute, perfect petals, formed from sugar, and placed by hand, one after the other.
“You know how Dominique Richard likes the simple square ganache, just a print on top?” Nathalie said. “That are so much simpler to produce?”
Simon gave her a cool look, his eyebrows raised.
Nathalie cleared her throat. “I’m glad you’re not him. Of course. Who wants an easy job? Show me again how you managed to get the speckles that faint.”
Half an hour later, Simon was showing his team how to get the effect he wanted. “Just the faintest misting, pass the mold through quickly—no. Start over. It has to be just a hint of an idea of fre—of speckles.”
“Oh,” Ellie said behind him, and every nerve along his spine flashed. He held himself still.
“That’s so beautiful,” she said incredulously, coming up so her arm brushed his. She bent to the marble, trying to see the underside of the tiny flower posed on the small domed chocolate.
Without presuming she had the right to pick it up to get a better look.
He scattered his white-jacketed staff to other posts with a gesture of one hand. “You touched me,” he said dryly, pitching his voice to keep them out of earshot. “I’ll let you touch it. Taste it, too.”
She blushed, her cheek still pressed against the marble counter. “You’re both works of art, true.”
And he blushed. Sérieusement? Well, he supposed he did treat himself like a work of—well, some kind of merciless perfectionism. He hadn’t thought of it as art, not often, only maybe during those euphoric highs you could hit sometimes on the long runs.
She straightened. “What did you mean by ‘catch’ exactly?”
His hand shot out and locked around her wrist. “There. You’re caught.”
She started and stared from him to his hand on her arm. After a second, she tried to twist her wrist and couldn’t budge it a millimeter.
“Don’t bruise yourself. Let me know when you want me to let go.”
She kept looking at his hand and didn’t say anything.
“You’re not wearing your ring,” he mentioned. “I like that in a cheating fiancée.”
Her jaw went out rather sulkily. “I couldn’t find it. We must have knocked it out of the easel in the night somehow.” She sent him a shy, fugitive glance.
“How Freudian. And in that tiny apartment, you can’t find it anywhere?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. It made him want to kiss her. Or strangle her. Or both at once.
“Vas-y, goûte.” He nodded to the green-gold flower chocolates, sublimating.
She was so careful as she closed her hand around one, as if she touched some rare, priceless artifact. He stared at her little fingers, nails bitten to the quick, against that glossy chocolate, and everything in his world suddenly settled into its purpose, its right place.
He waited until her teeth had sunk into it. “I’m calling it ‘Elle.’ ”
And while its chocolate-warm insides melted in her mouth, she stared up at him. Her eyes grew wider and wider until a man could drown in them. Even a man who didn’t drown very easily at all.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears.
Putain. He dropped her wrist and grabbed her shoulders instead. “Ellie. Are you—I’m sorry—did I—” Merde, maybe she had a boyfriend in New York. A recent breakup. Maybe this whole fiancé story was a cover for more fragile emotions than he had first realized. How could he? His imagination didn’t work well enough to think up someone who would not take good care of her if he had the chance.
“Here, come here.” He cast a glance at his laboratoire, his sense of privacy deeply violated to be the subject of his team’s discreet glances—and they all knew it, too, hiding the glances as fast as they could—and drew her into his office.
She dashed a hand across her eyes. “No, I’m sorry. It’s just—I’ve never—it’s like magic. To move to Paris and have you”—she faltered—“and have you. And then to have you make a chocolate named after me. I can’t believe you want me to believe this is real.”
He dropped her shoulders in incredulous exasperation. “Look, Ellie, it’s not a fairy tale to me.”
That sulky set came back to her jaw, and she looked a little wounded.
“The chocolate! Paris! Those are just my daily life. You, now. You popping into this achromatic world, that’s a miracle, yes.”
She frowned suspiciously, so suspicious that she completely failed to appreciate he had just called her a miracle. “What achromatic world?”
His mouth twisted wryly. “I don’t think you can see it. The black and gray and tension, the obsession with perfection. You just filter it out to the rest of the world full of color and joy. That clear glass of water that turns light into a rainbow.”
That made her happy. He could tell. She curled her arms around herself as if hugging the words to her, but smiled at him indulgently. “That’s what you do. Take cool, intense perfectionism and produce something so beautiful it’s like—I don’t know—I want to be in the heart of you where you come up with these things.”
The truth of it hit him so hard he couldn’t get his breath back. He stared at her wordlessly. You are.
He turned away before he could say that out loud, his insides trembling under the outside he kept so cool. “V
iens. I told you you could watch me work.”
CHAPTER NINE
It would have helped if he wasn’t quite so incredible at his work. If you were trying to get your insides to calm down from all the whooshing, it probably wasn’t a good idea to hang around honed perfection, blurring sexual desire and memories of touch with the scents and sights of chocolate melting and being re-formed into something ethereal, of sugar stretching and arching between two competent hands like some Fairy King making a world.
And tossing it over to his Titania with a little smile just for her.
Ellie curled her fingers delicately around the crystalline rose he had just made from a ribbon of sugar for her, whimsically, in the middle of his more complex work. Her breath came in and out. Oh yes, the world was whooshing.
She curled the thumb of her other hand around the base of her ring finger, missing the fake ring like she might miss a worry stone. Something to calm that crazy world.
The rose shattered in her right hand.
Simon looked up from what seemed to be a surreal fairytale treehouse he was making out of chocolate and caught her hand. She stared at the red shards clinging to her palm, feeling horrible.
He laughed, leaned across the counter, and kissed her quickly, regardless of the gazes of his team. Picking the shards off as carefully as if they had been actual glass, he gave her a caressing smile. “It’s very fragile. Didn’t you know?”
“I barely even touched it!” He was deftly manipulating these bits of blown and pulled and spun sugar into gravity-defying art, and she couldn’t even let one rest on her palm? Good God, how controlled was his touch?
Heat suffused her body as she thought of the answer to that question. He lifted her palm to his mouth, cradled it there, and—flicked his tongue out and teased the last bit of red sugar dust off her palm. Over the edge of that palm, he raised one eyebrow at her. “Did you notice that what I hold never gets broken?”
Yes, she had noticed that. In his hands, things just soared.
“How’s that French nurse working out?” Simon asked the next night, after having thoroughly adulterized her in the big bed in his apartment.
Ellie frowned at him. He sure did harp on her fiancé a lot. Was it her, or was he starting to sound quite fond of the man?
If he decided he liked hiding behind a fiancé, too, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Would it be at all plausible if, just when Cal finally healed enough to walk out of the hospital, he tripped trying to get down the stairs into the Métro and had to go right back in?
“Are you sure she’s really French? I would have thought she could move faster than this.”
“Yes, well—he’s in traction.” She defended his country’s honor.
“Exactly. If you can’t seduce a bored man with no chance to get away ...”
A vision flashed through her mind of Simon bored and bound and completely vulnerable to seduction. She only realized she had dimpled when Simon’s thumb gently caressed over the little hollow. He bent and kissed her, long and deeply, as if to reward her for what he could read straight out of her mind.
Her laughter faded before arousal. She lost all focus, except her attention to his mouth, taking hers.
He lifted his head. “Of course, maybe she has,” he said thoughtfully. “He might not be admitting any more to you than you are to him.”
She blinked a moment to try to remember what they were talking about. Oh. She shifted uneasily, her hair stinging her scalp. He eased his forearm up enough to let the captured strands slide free.
She tried to hold his eyes sincerely. Anyone would think that once a man had you naked a few times, all while assuming you were a complete tramp, it would be much easier to face an X-ray gaze.
Instead of which, it was getting harder.
“I’m not usually like this,” she promised him.
He raised his eyebrows in polite query. How did he manage to look still so polite and controlled when their bodies were naked against each other from a recent bout of intense lovemaking, and his mouth still soft and damp from that kiss?
She cleared her throat. “I wouldn’t, you know, umm—” She frowned very severely toward the night outside the window. He began stretching her hair over her naked shoulders strand by strand. “I don’t believe in cheating.”
“That’s all right, we all know about American morals,” he said kindly.
She blinked and then gaped at him indignantly. “American—”
“I saw French Kiss. She didn’t even wait until she was off the plane before she was picking up a French lover.” The longest strands of her hair reached just to the swell of her breasts. He put some effort into his stroking, trying to coax one to unwind enough to reach her nipple, but the hair resisted. He finished the rest of the route without it, curving his hand around her.
Ellie opened her mouth and closed it several times, cycling through multiple unsatisfactory retorts.
“At least you waited a few days,” Simon said approvingly. “You’re not as bad as some.”
As bad as—okay, that—he teased his tongue around her nipple and she lost the protest.
He lifted his head to regard the results of his work with satisfaction. “I mean, it’s not as if you were just going after any Frenchman that moved. You already have one, and he just sounds so perfect for you—a Parisian endurance athlete who gives you great chocolate—so you must see something else in me.”
He leaned over her, his eyes soulful and sincere, his hand stroking the length of her, breast, belly, thigh. “After all, surely,” he breathed, “you’re not sacrificing all sense of shame just for sex.”
CHAPTER TEN
Simon focused on the creamy white chocolate petals he was peeling off paper and curving with the help of the mini-torch he held in one hand, offering tiny bursts of just the right amount of warmth. He was building an impossibly high twining garden of great wildflowers, like some mythical swamp, each blossom to hold a miniature cake at its center.
He remembered, vaguely, the days when working chocolate provoked tension in him. These days, he had won his laurels—Meilleur Ouvrier de France, Champion du Monde, all of that—and he was so used to chocolate doing exactly what he wanted, that he found it an intense, demanding challenge, exactly the way he liked things, but not stressful, not the same way.
In fact, right this second, the fun challenge wasn’t keeping his focus at all.
Ellie was watching him. He never found it hard to keep his focus, no matter the bustle of activity his team made around him as they carried out their own tasks, but the way Ellie watched him ...
Made him feel hot.
Made him hot, also.
So hot that every time that damn camera of hers flashed, he felt vaguely as if he had been posing for porn shots, despite the chef’s jacket.
He glanced at her, losing his focus again. She gazed at him—as if he was posing for a porn shot.
Putain. How the hell could she look at him that way, so that his whole body melted faster than chocolate and then hardened worse than tempered steel, and still pretend she had that putain de fiancé?
The made-up one whose every element corresponded exactly with him.
“He’s not exactly perfect,” she said suddenly, startling him considerably. She had mentioned the day before—after the assignation he had set up with her via erotic text messaging, as if her fiancé might catch her at it if he didn’t—that he looked at her as if he could read her mind. She underestimated how convoluted her mind was, but in any case, he had never once had the impression that she could read his.
“The perfect boyfr—fiancé wouldn’t flirt with anyone else. I wouldn’t have to worry about him cheating.”
Someone certainly liked to pad the ground before she leapt, didn’t she? Some bad falls in her past? “I worry about that, too,” he said, thoughtfully, and ever so casually slipped his arm between her hips and the counter, sliding down to open a stainless steel cabinet and pull a completely unrequired ute
nsil out, just so the whole length of his arm would rub directly over her sex. There was no sense tormenting someone on only one level. “A lot these days, en fait. That I might end up with someone who would cheat on me.”
Her face was a picture of guilty consternation. That would teach her to crouch on the edge of that emotional cliff, looking down at him as if she was afraid she would land in something icky.
“When I’m at my most vulnerable,” he added for good measure.
She opened her mouth and almost started to say something, to tell him, he hoped. But then her eyes widened with fear again, and she caught her lip under her teeth.
Merde.
“Maybe I should stop dating Americans. You’re all just after one thing.” He tried to look virtuous and innocent and a little embittered, which wasn’t that hard. If she thought he was good material for a sexual fling, then he did feel violated.
Worse material for a sexual fling just didn’t exist. Once his mind settled on a track, it could not be derailed.
“What do you mean, stop? Have you ever dated an American before?” she asked jealously.
He hid the grin inside him, a hot little lancing victory at that jealousy. “No, but it’s proving a corrupting influence. American, engaged ... the next thing you know I’ll be sleeping with someone who’s married.”
She frowned instantly. “Who?”
He gave her an astounded look. “You, of course. You weren’t planning on dumping me after the wedding, were you? Ellie.”
She floundered visibly, flabbergasted, and he looked wounded and sorrowful. She closed her hands in fistfuls of her hair and yanked. He placed the wide swooping petals on their tall stem, with perfect controlled grace, hoping that yank had stung.
“There’s probably even a way we could sneak in something on the wedding day itself, since I’ll be bringing the centerpieces. Would you like that?” He put a little evil kinkiness into his tone. “Maybe while you’re wearing your wedding dress, even.”
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