The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  She didn’t feel like Magalie Chaudron, a witch of the Île Saint-Louis, who held the magic of chocolate brews in her hands. She felt like Cinderella at the ball, conscious that her fine dress was really ash-covered rags and intense make-believe, and wanting nothing so much as to slink out before the prince saw her.

  She hated that feeling.

  But she was Magalie Chaudron, whatever she felt like, so, instead, she spoke. Steady. Calm. A little cold, to punish him for that Cinderella effect. “Monsieur Lyonnais?”

  He held out a hand. It took her off guard. She hadn’t expected courtesy. Or contact. Especially when the contact sent little shimmers of warmth along her arm too fast for her own defenses to rally. The shimmers went racing all through her body, and her defenses went chasing lamely after, crying stop, stop, stop in vain.

  “Oui.” His clasp was strong and gentle at once. What, did she seem that small in his world that he felt he had to be gentle with her?

  She looked down at her own hand after his released it. Surely her hand had been enclosed so completely before. Why had she never noticed it? She could still feel the calluses of his palm against her knuckles. The warmth seemed to linger, until her still-chilled left hand curled in jealousy.

  He escorted her back to an office space minuscule in contrast to the spacious laboratoire. Books were piled everywhere, in towers on his desk, on shelves around it—great coffee-table books full of beautiful architectural photos and tiny paperbacks stamped with names like Prévert and Apollinaire. His laptop was pushed to one side, and across the center of the desk was spread what appeared to be a printed manuscript, a pen lying across it and little marks correcting details on the page. Scents from the laboratoire filled the space: strawberry, apricot, hot sugar, butter. Her stomach crawled with hunger, that chocolate witch she had eaten reduced to nothing.

  He turned, staying on the same side of the desk as she was, making the room still smaller. Making her smaller. Even in her four-inch heels, she barely reached his shoulder.

  His broad shoulders. He wasn’t just tall. He was big. Wide shoulders and strong wrists and big square hands. His boxy chef’s jacket hid the rest of him, and she tried to pretend its looseness concealed a potbelly. That was quite a strong, clean jaw for a man with a potbelly, though.

  She suddenly wished he would unbutton his jacket. Just so she could know for sure what was under it. The space was so small, and he was focused on her so very intently.

  She braced her booted heels and held her body proudly. “I’m Magalie Chaudron.”

  He smiled at her. The warmth of that smile turned his eyes azure and seemed to run over her body like a cat’s tongue licking cream. “Enchanté, Mademoiselle Chaudron.”

  He said that as if he really was enchanted.

  “From La Maison des Sorcières,” she said.

  It took him a second, but he did make the connection. “Ah!” Spontaneously, he thrust out his hand and shook hers again. Her right hand flexed involuntarily in delight. Her left hand curled sulkily against her thigh. “So we’re going to be neighbors.”

  His eyes sparkled, quite alive at that thought, and subtly flicked over her body again, just once quickly, before coming quite correctly back to her face. But her whole body felt sensitized. A vague, burning curiosity seemed to linger most insistently in places like her nipples against the silk and, worse, the point of pressure between her sex and the seam of her pants. What did he see when he looked at her?

  “I hope not,” she said flatly, and his warm expression flickered.

  “Pardon?”

  She just could not get that boon-begging past her lips. Instead, she heard herself say, cool and clear, “I think you’re making a mistake in trying to move onto the island.”

  He didn’t change his stance, but something ran through his body, and the whole feel of his strength in that small space changed. The once-warm eyes flicked over her in an entirely different manner: assessing and dismissing an insignificant challenge.

  It made her burn with rage.

  “You do?” he said indifferently.

  Indifference. Dismissal. Wrath crawled up inside her hands, making them itch to fist and pound against his belief in her insignificance. She dug her knuckles into her thighs.

  “I don’t think you realize how well known we are there. People come from all over the city—from all over the world—to our salon de thé. It’s . . . special.” How to make him realize how very special it was if he didn’t see that, feel that, for himself?

  “What a fascinating coincidence,” he said coolly. His head was high, that beautiful, tawny lion’s mane curling against his neck. Arrogance clipped his words and polished them, bringing out his privileged birth. “They do the same for me.”

  Magalie’s knuckles dug harder into her thighs, as she tried to force herself to stay reasonable. “Exactly. That’s why it might be better for all concerned if you sought different territory.”

  There. That sounded nicely neutral, didn’t it? Neither warning him off nor begging him not to come. It was a tricky line to negotiate. She didn’t want to err on the side of humility, that was for damn sure.

  His eyebrows went up. He looked so very aristocratic—His Highness, lord of the jungle. “Are you telling me you don’t think I could succeed down the street from you?”

  She wished. “I think you will be competing for a well-established customer base.”

  The sharp edges of his teeth showed just a little. “I generally do.”

  As in, once they taste me, no one else has a prayer.

  Her eyes narrowed, her anger no longer blunt fists but sharp points that knew exactly where they wanted to stab. “If you think you can move in there and try to put us out of business, I advise you to reconsider.”

  He inhaled with a hiss, as if she had reached out and grabbed him somewhere arousing. “Are you threatening me?” he asked with a little, curling, pleased smile. A smile that said, Oh, good, the tiny mouse was rude. Now I get to eat it for a snack.

  “No,” Magalie tried to lie. She had promised Aunt Aja she wouldn’t threaten. But Aunt Geneviève’s blood would out: “You don’t deserve the warning.”

  His own eyes narrowed, his pupils dilated. He actually caught his lower lip with the edge of his teeth, as if he was tasting her there. “Oh, really?” The last word came out like a hungry little caress. Tiny mouse, how kind of you to offer yourself to my bored palate.

  “My aunts have been there for almost forty years,” she said, anger lashing. “We were there first.”

  He inclined his head. He had very beautiful, sharp, white teeth. They looked as if they could cut through almost anything. “Then how thoughtful of you to come welcome me to the neighborhood.”

  She snapped her own teeth together. It might take her more than two bites to work her way through him, but she could eat him up, too, if she set her mind to it. “You’re not welcome. If you insist on coming into my territory without even a ‘by your leave,’ I’m going to make sure you regret it.”

  He took a step forward. His eyes glittered, sweeping up and down her face and as far as her throat, which suddenly felt overexposed. But she couldn’t bring herself to lower her chin. In the little office, she was well within grabbing distance of those big hands. Something in his eyes made that very clear. “Your territory? Are you telling me I should ask your permission to open a shop there?”

  She took a half step toward him. She would have liked to take a bigger stride, but, given the size of the office, that was all she could do without running into him. “That would have been better manners, certainly. But you would have been denied.”

  He gave his head a hard shake. His gaze flashed back to her throat and then up to her eyes. “You introduced yourself, but maybe I should have done the same. I’m Philippe Lyonnais. ”

  She sneered. She couldn’t help it. The incredible arrogance in the way he said his name couldn’t be taken passively. “What, am I supposed to bow now?”

  Their eyes l
ocked. For a moment, there was nothing else in the room but the war of locked gazes and the sense that if ever either of them lost, it would be . . . delicious. Slowly, carefully, he took a long, long breath and shook his shoulders, resettling his muscles. “Maybe we’re getting off to a bad start.”

  In the present context, that was so hilarious, half a laugh surprised its way right through her sneer.

  His gaze flickered over her face, and a hint of a wry, responding grin appeared on his lips. Abruptly, he cupped her elbow and led her out of the office. A gentleman escorting a lady to her carriage or a bouncer kicking out a drunk? she wondered dryly. His hand turned the supple leather armor of her Perfecto jacket into a wisp of nothingness between their bodies.

  He stopped beside the long marble counter at which he had been working when she came in. The bag that had burst all over him lay there where he had abandoned it. Apparently his employees knew that he took care of his own messes and didn’t expect someone else to do it for him. Near it lay the macarons he had been finishing.

  He loosed her elbow long enough to scoop up one of the warm peach shells and sandwich it over the bottom shell, filled already with apricot ganache, tiny bits of apricot still visible in it. With a quick, casually deft hand, he sprinkled it with a dusting of pistachios chopped so impossibly fine as to seem like pixie dust.

  “May I?” He offered it to her on a flat palm, a treasure to a princess, with a sudden, brilliant, confident grin. His eyes lit with pleasure in his offering, sure it would bring delight.

  Who hadn’t heard of Philippe Lyonnais’s macarons? Food critics, food bloggers, magazines, television hosts . . . they all raved about him constantly. It would probably taste like she had been permitted to spend three bites of her life in heaven. Like the essence of apricot had come down and kissed a shy pistachio, and they had decided to hang out and cuddle.

  If she bit into that in front of him, she would melt into a puddle at his feet.

  And he wouldn’t even notice. If he had a streak of the child in him, he might enjoy the splash around his shoes as he strode through it.

  She looked from its promise of heaven to his warm, intense eyes.

  Did he think he was that good? That all he had to do to make up for stealing three people’s lives was to offer her one of his prize pastries?

  “No, thank you,” she said coldly. Cold, cold, cold. Drawing on all the force and warmth of her blue kitchen, far away on the island, holding its heat close and strong inside her, she gave him its opposite. His rejection from it.

  She was looking straight into his eyes when she spoke. She saw the blink, saw his pupils contract to small points.

  Why, she had found some way to have an effect on him.

  He looked down at the pastry and back at her. “You don’t . . . want it?” He sounded as if he was having to search out words in a new language that had no meaning.

  He couldn’t believe she had done it, could he?

  Refused that, what he was holding in his hand. His life’s work.

  His face went stiff, her chill setting in, the dark blue eyes seeming to pale with the ice. He set the apricot-pistachio macaron very precisely down on the parchment paper from which it had come. His fingers rubbed slowly together, brushing away pistachio fragments.

  If he had been anyone else, she would have felt guilty for bringing that look to his face.

  She held his eyes and smiled. Then she turned her back on what was quite probably the most delicious thing she would ever encounter in her life and walked out.

  And had the satisfaction of hearing her heels click, click, click into absolute silence as she did so.

  Chapter 4

  Philippe had been having a good day until he got cursed by a witch, and he stood there in shock, still unable to adjust.

  He couldn’t believe she had rejected one of his macarons. He had offered it to her fresh from his own hand. Not just his recipe, but made personally by him. And she had refused it.

  His Désir. Apricot kissed by pistachio, with the secret little square of pistachio praline hidden inside, like a G-spot. Well, he didn’t call it le point G in his marketing brochures, but whenever he created, he knew what he was doing: every pastry had to have its orgasm, its culmination of bliss that hit like a complete surprise. That made the eyes of those who bit into it shiver closed with delight.

  The more expressive of his customers started making little moans of pleasure from the very first bite. He loved that.

  He would have liked to take that intense, passionate anger of Magalie Chaudron’s and make her moan with delight. It seemed the least he could do, given that his existence had so infuriated her in the first place.

  She had walked in a challenge. Her leather armor unzipped, showing that silk and slimness underneath, daring him to get his hands on her vulnerable spots. Baiting him with it. Her chin up and her brown eyes so hot and cold all at once. As if she was trying to freeze into a weapon her burning desire to go for him.

  So go for me, he remembered thinking, his chin up, his shoulders back. Go for me, and see what happens.

  But she had only attacked with words. Words didn’t give him an excuse to reach under that leather and grab her waist through that silk to, say, protect himself from assault.

  You could grab a strange woman to protect yourself if she went for your throat. You could find out what that silk over muscle and ribs and softness felt like.

  If he knocked those clicking boots off her, she wouldn’t even come up to his shoulder.

  Mmm. And he could pick her up and . . .

  His mind ran through variation after variation on what he could do as he went back to work, dropping precise amounts of apricot ganache into the shells laid out on the tray. But as he worked, he gazed at the macarons for the first time in a long time with dissatisfaction. He had thought this recipe perfected.

  But she had managed to refuse it.

  “Everything in your power?” Aunt Geneviève said with delight. “You said that? Everything in your power to make him regret it?”

  The three women were working on their new display, which promised to be impressive: the chicken-legged, windowless hut of Baba Yaga, the famous old witch crone from Slavic tales, complete with a palisade of glowing-eyed skulls—one dozen decapitated princes who had dared cross a witch. In the stories, one skull had usually fallen off a fence stake so that a wily prince could sneak in, but Magalie didn’t plan on leaving any opening. Baba Yaga could just move over for the younger generation, a witch who knew how to protect herself properly.

  She had been a little afraid the display might scare the children, but Aja, who had grown up on regular visits to the colorful and sometimes bizarre temples in India, had looked at Magalie blankly, while Geneviève had rubbed her hands gleefully and added still more frightening details. “It’s October,” she’d said. “They’ll have been watching gory films from Hollywood. Might as well show them something really scary.”

  Magalie thought back to her encounter with Philippe Lyonnais. “Something like that. I’m afraid I wasn’t very conciliatory.”

  “I should hope not!” Geneviève said. Over the heat from the gel cap they had near them in the window space, she softened the tip of a chocolate post and attached a skull to it, its eyes gleaming with the bits of candied orange peel Aja had carefully placed. “Conciliatory! To someone who comes tramping into our territory without even asking permission?”

  “I don’t believe someone like him merits either conciliation or threats.” Aunt Aja shook her head firmly. “Both are so bad for you.”

  “It’s true, you gave him a pretty significant warning,” Geneviève said, dissatisfied. “And you can’t say that he deserved it. Unless it was how cute he was, after all? Did you fall for that?”

  She considered her niece worriedly. Magalie knew that this whole susceptibility-to-princes thing concerned her aunt, because she had no real comprehension of such weakness but had seen it lead to the downfall of many a fine woman.

/>   “Don’t worry.” Magalie’s nostrils flared in disdain. “He’s not my type.”

  “You have a type?” Geneviève checked excitedly, distracted. “Could you describe it for me? Tell me what to be on the lookout for?”

  “Humble,” Magalie said firmly.

  Geneviève frowned in bafflement. And no wonder. Even to Magalie, that sounded like a lie. Humble people were unsettling at best. All that lack of backbone. It was just creepy. Like talking to linguine.

  “Were you planning to be on the lookout to catch one for her or to drive him away?” Aja asked dryly of her partner. Today, her golden tunic almost exactly matched the skulls’ gleaming eyes.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a filter,” Geneviève told her spouse. “Especially a filter like me. I sieve tiny. It saves no end of trouble later.”

  Magalie waved at a young boy, one of their habitués, who had dragged his nanny to a stop and was now standing with his nose as close to pressed against the window as strictly enforced manners would allow, thrilled to catch this glimpse of the next display under construction. The nanny, a young Portuguese au pair, looked pretty thrilled, too. Oh, God, she was taking out her camera.

  Magalie gave her a stern look, and the (barely) younger woman tucked the offending item back into her satchel guiltily. It was one thing to take pictures of the finished windows—that, they expected—but it was another to catch Magalie with her butt up in the air as she crouched trying to get three thick candied orange peels to look like a chicken foot.

  “But did you say ‘everything in your power’ or did you say ‘something like that’?” Geneviève asked.

  Magalie sighed. “I think I just said I would make sure he regretted it.”

  Aja and Geneviève exchanged glances. “I liked ‘everything in her power,’ ” Geneviève said wistfully. “It had such a ring to it. Like she finally realized she had power. But at least this way sounds more like a promise than a warning.”

  “Perhaps,” Aja said. “I don’t think we should be dealing in threats at all, but if you’re going to, there’s no point in inserting a try into it. You must admit that some people use the phrase ‘everything in my power’ to limit themselves. Then later they can say it wasn’t in their power.”