The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

No. Not quite. A zebra didn’t shiver with pleasure at the thought of being caught.

  He didn’t carry any box in his hands. The only temptation he brought was himself.

  His gaze went once, hard, over her body, over the boots climbing to mid-thigh and the neckline currently drooping to a plunge at her breasts. That erotically controlled mouth of his tightened at the message in her armor, and his blue eyes blazed with a message of his own. Zebra.

  No, I’m not, she blazed right back at him. Go ahead and try to catch me. I’ve got teeth just as sharp as you.

  He abandoned her abruptly, like prey he could trap anytime, and zeroed in on the friendly, curly-haired man to whom she had been talking. “Christophe,” he said coolly, clearly planning to rend the other man to pieces in order to leave a clear field for himself.

  Christophe, who had just introduced himself to Magalie fifteen minutes earlier, gave Philippe an enthusiastic smile from his corner table and toasted him with a cup full of chocolate. When he brought the cup to his lips, a muscle in Philippe’s jaw spasmed violently. “I should have known you would love this place, too. I’m lucky Cade mentioned it to me.”

  Philippe looked as if he wanted to yank that cup out of the man’s hands and toss the author of the famous food blog Le Gourmand out into the street. Although it didn’t even light on her, the look seemed to stroke Magalie’s whole body, smoothing her in one long touch. So at least she was driving him mad, too, she thought. Oh, God, what he must remember of the way she had melted into him that morning. “I wanted to talk to Magalie.”

  Christophe looked delighted. “Mais, bien sûr!” He pretended to grow absorbed in texts, all while aiming his phone subtly. “Don’t mind me!”

  Philippe’s mouth compressed.

  “En fait, I was about to show Christophe how to make a couple of our recipes,” Magalie said. “He wants to do some entries on us for his blog.”

  Philippe looked from her to Christophe and then beyond her to the tiny kitchen. A muscle ticked in his jaw. He shook his head once, slow and hard. “I don’t think so.”

  Her chin went up. “Pardon?”

  His gaze went to her throat and stayed there. Until it was all she could do not to cover it with her hand. The plunging neckline made her breasts feel, suddenly, very exposed. They tingled with the sensation.

  Abruptly, something changed in his expression. A softening, and an intensifying. He turned so that his shoulder half blocked them from Christophe and shifted forward. Her elbows bumped the display case. She didn’t think she had backed up—surely she hadn’t backed up?—but this space left no room to maneuver. He ducked his head, ostensibly to avoid running into the tip of the moon, but the move brought his face very close to her upturned one. His body seemed to curve around her, enclose her without touching her. The chocolate crescent moon twirled slowly above his head.

  “Magalie,” he said softly and looked at her lips.

  They flamed. Or felt as if they did, as if a flush condensed in them, making them too red, too soft, too full.

  “Magalie.” He touched one hand just grazingly to the wisps of hair allowed to escape from their clasp. The blogger who had broken the Chocolate Thief story was looking right at them. And holding a phone.

  “You need a necklace,” Philippe said.

  “What?”

  His gaze rested on the spot between her breasts to which the neckline plunged when it slipped its lowest, the look so vivid, she felt the imprint of a finger. “Là. Something green. And intriguing. Something that someone keeps wanting to see more of to figure out what it is.”

  Magalie took a deep breath that made his eyes, fixed already on her breasts, dilate rapidly. From somewhere, she managed to call up a smile as bright as a rapier. “Now you’re going to tell me how to make men look at my breasts? What would I have done if you had never barged into my life?”

  Philippe’s jaw clenched, and for a second she thought he was going to bang his head against something. Since the nearest hard thing was her own head, things could get very ugly fast. What were those dinosaurs she had learned about in school, with the skulls made so thick just so they could batter each other with them? Her education had been spotty, back and forth as it was between school systems.

  Philippe straightened so abruptly, he forgot about the moon, and it bonked him on the head and spun away wildly.

  He reached up one hand and caught it, something it would have taken her a stepladder to do. Holding the moon still above their heads with one hand, he suddenly placed the other over her folded arms, right under her breasts, his hand big enough that it comfortably wrapped over both her forearms.

  She was so surprised at the sudden, blatant claiming, even after this morning, that she just froze, her eyes widening enormously, fastened on his face.

  He ran his hand deliberately from that point up one arm, a deep stroke that burned through the silk, tugged the neckline to the side so that it bared her shoulder for his palm, and finally cupped her chin, holding her still for him. His eyes locked with hers. “You are going to give in,” he vowed.

  She was going to give in? Was that how he had seen their kiss? “You’re the one who can’t resist a woman covered in sweat with her hair frizzing all around her face.”

  He had just started to turn toward Christophe, and he checked himself. All his focus came back to her, narrowed and dangerous. She smirked. Touched a nerve, had she?

  He leaned in so close, his breath tickled her ear. “Do you think I spend all day being fanned by slavegirls and having grapes dropped into my mouth? You’re welcome to come visit my laboratoire any time, Magalie. Trust me, I’ve seen sweat before.”

  “It’s exactly what you look for in a woman, in fact,” she sneered.

  The jab failed to hit its mark. His mouth curved, a sensual lift of its corners that licked her whole body from toe to . . . somewhere around her breasts.The flame of it kept going, burning up her chest and over her face.

  “I would be happy to make you sweat, certainly,” he whispered to her.

  And while her body was still clenching desperately around that idea, he stepped away. Easily. As if it was nothing.

  “So, Christophe.” Philippe sat in the chair across from the food blogger, easy and in command. Christophe covered his phone guiltily. “How badly do you want me to show you how to make my Désir?”

  Christophe’s eyes glowed with delighted greed. “You’re thinking about it?”

  “Stay out of that kitchen”—Philippe jerked his head toward the little room with its blue counters, and Magalie’s blood went to instant boil—“and it’s yours.”

  He got up and headed to the door, pausing just in front of her while Christophe scrambled for his things to follow.

  “By the way, Magalie . . .” He cocked his head and gave her a little, smug smile that made her want to do something drastic. Then he leaned so close to her, her heart skipped a beat and started pounding like mad. “I make my caramel hotter than any other chef out there,” he whispered. He held up thumb and forefinger a paper-thin width apart. “This close to burning. I thought you would want to know.”

  Chapter 17

  When Philippe finally finished with Christophe, without strangling him even once, and got back to La Maison des Sorcières, Magalie had fled.

  At least, he liked to think of it in terms of terrified flight, and that she had worried he was going to catch her tail every step of the way. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so confrontational earlier, but she drove him insane, the way she’d put that armor straight back up, blades all out, after this morning on the quay. Just when he thought she was finally yielding.

  Whatever it was she was doing, she wasn’t there. Only Aja, who let him in with a benign look and offered him a cup of tea.

  Oh, God. These women just would not give up on trying to turn him into a toad. He toyed with the cup and went to the kitchen door, to make sure Magalie wasn’t hiding behind the coats. She was small enough. No. It was empty. But he slipped into t
he blue room to discreetly empty his tea into the sink and spotted . . .

  Under those coats—how interesting. A little door, almost entirely hidden.

  Philippe glanced back at Aja, but she was following the previous customer to the sidewalk, her back to the room, the two women speaking softly.

  He pushed the door open, squeezing the coats against the wall. Outside, the cold air hit him with force, as if laughing at him for not taking one of those coats with him. But there was no wind. He stood in a small, cobblestoned courtyard. Ivy climbed up one wall, but otherwise the space was winter-bare. A lion face gazed at him from the opposite wall of the courtyard, the basin under it clogged with dirt and some brown dead plant.

  He looked around but saw only one other door, in the wall to the right.

  It opened into a stairway. Narrow and steep, its walls were plain white, giving no hint of what he might find up there.

  He set his foot on the bottom stair, half-expecting Aja to come calling after him or Geneviève to come barreling down at him. Or Magalie. His body tightened with hunger. Magalie to confront him. Yes.

  But there was no sound, except his own foot hitting the next step, and then the next. He picked up speed, mounting now quickly.

  By the time he reached the seventh floor, his heart was pounding hard, and he didn’t think he could blame the stairs. He took a long breath, staring at the door, his body tight all over. There was no peephole. She wouldn’t know it was him.

  How could she have no peephole in her door? That was crazy. This was Paris.

  And the door hadn’t even been pulled closed properly. He looked down at the knob, the latch not caught, ready to swing open at the first rap of his fist.

  He knocked gently. The door nudged a little open, and he caught the knob to keep from barging in. No answer. “Magalie?”

  Still no answer.

  If she was taking a shower with her door unlocked and half-open, he was going to kill her. “Magalie?” he called, a little more loudly.

  Silence. Maybe something was wrong. Had she tripped or hit her head as she came into the apartment? Had someone broken in—was that why the door was open?

  He shoved it wide. “Magalie?”

  No body on the floor. No signs of anyone, and the place was too small for her to be hiding. So she was all right. She just wasn’t there.

  Relieved of his fear, he could focus on the room, and the white on white hit him like a fairytale. Arousal ran through him like electricity. He had stepped into the sacrosanct heart of her.

  White gauzy drapes streamed over the windows. White walls, not a glaring white but with some tint in it secretly to soften it; his sister would know—blue, maybe. On the wall, a splash of purple—lavender, he realized. A painting of a field of lavender. So that was Provence he had heard bouncing around in her accent, suppressed. There was something else, too, though. A tiny hint of the way Cade Corey talked, except so much more subtle that Magalie couldn’t possibly be American. What was her story? Why did he still know almost nothing about her?

  A white downy comforter covered the narrow bed, pulled over it a little carelessly. The bed was empty. A wry smile kicked his mouth at the thought of what Magalie would have done if she had been in it and woken to find him kneeling beside her, his kiss tingling on her lips. Waking the sleeping beauty in her tower.

  She would love to see him on his knees, he had no doubt. But as for him seeing her vulnerable and kissing her while she was so—judging by that morning and her reaction to it, she would probably hit him.

  For himself, he didn’t fantasize about having her on her knees. But stripped of all her armor, defenseless in his hands . . . yes.

  He crossed to the window, knowing quite well he should go. But he had to see if she could make out his name on his shop from her windows. He pulled aside the filmy drapes. It was like being at the top of the world here. He could see the Seine, over to the left, past the tip of the island. And the towers of Notre-Dame to the right. And far away, a sliver view of the Tour Eiffel. His heart squeezed oddly at the thought of her standing there at night, watching it sparkle.

  And there, yes, not as close or as dominating of her view as he would like, but she could see it: Lyonnais. If she liked, she could stand up here and watch for his arrival every day and cast hexes on him. Maybe that was why his shoulders always prickled when he walked into his shop.

  He turned away and spotted telltale signs on a sheet pan soaking in her sink. She was trying to get off cooked-on egg white.

  Macarons. His lips drew back in fierce delight. Had she been trying to challenge him at his own game? And if so, where were the results?

  He glanced around for her trash. Now he was getting truly down and dirty, and after this he would have to leave before he started going through her underwear drawer.

  Although . . . he had been wanting to know forever what her underwear looked like. Would she by any chance favor black lace, as some of her outfits suggested? Or would it be something airy and white like this room?

  He glanced toward the drawers fitted under her bed. Just check the trash, Philippe. That’s bad enough. He pulled open the door under her kitchen sink. The trash can slid right out, pulled by a chain on the door, and he smiled in feral victory.

  There they were. Flat, dry, grainy, pitiful attempts to imitate him. Clearly not enough to satisfy her craving. Heat licked through him at the thought of her frustrated face as she scraped them off the sheet pan and dumped them into the trash. Had she been wearing her boots while she did it, or did she pad around her apartment barefoot? Did she paint her toes with that same perfect armor she wore on her fingernails, or did they get to be bare, here where no one could see? Had she gone to her window to glare down the street at the word Lyonnais? Had she imagined strangling him? And had she craved him, longing to sink her teeth into what he made? Or just skip to the source and sink her teeth straight into him?

  He heard those heels of hers on the stairs before she got to the door, and he closed the trash away again. That could be his secret weapon, that he knew she was so hungry for him, she was trying to make her own feeble imitation.

  As her footsteps got closer, he leaned casually in the window, for all the world as if he owned the place. He would be damned if he would be caught out like a furtive underwear-sniffer, and, anyway, the stance of ownership would drive her crazy.

  She stopped abruptly in the doorway, staring at him in a first instant of—what was that? Stunned, hungry confusion? Or was he guilty of projection? And then, of course, outrage.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  She carried a couple of elegant bags from a Marais boutique in one hand. He imagined suddenly a scene in which she wasn’t glaring at him for being there, a scene in which she modeled what she had bought and asked his opinion. He didn’t even care if she was modeling a damn tennis shoe. It was the thought of her being happy and relaxed and eager to share. What a hopelessly arousing fantasy. Hopeless because it was as far away as the moon.

  “Invading,” he said.

  The way she looked at him drove him insane. Her chin up, her throat exposed, until it was all he could do not to accept the challenge and lay his teeth against her skin. Feel the thrill of fear and delight run through her body just before she found out exactly what those teeth were going to do. She liked to look at him as if she despised him, but her eyes kept running up and down his body in a way that left him maddened with arousal. He doubted she even realized she was doing it, most of the time. Sometimes he saw her catch herself and try to stop it: the quick, involuntary flick of her gaze down his body and back up, the lashes that so briefly hid her eyes before the brown was forced back to battle his gaze. Or sometimes on the way back up, her gaze would get caught on his mouth and linger there, or run over his shoulders, or rest on his hand. It drove him mad.

  She had control of that gaze right now. She was glaring at him.

  Yes. Look at me. I’m very clearly not what you wanted. You didn�
�t invite me. But I can make you notice me.

  “The door was unlocked,” he said. “And not even properly closed. You leave it that way a lot in the middle of the city?”

  “It’s our building,” Magalie said impatiently. “Aunt Geneviève’s. Who would come in?”

  He raised his eyebrows and opened one hand, flicking his fingers just enough to make sure she looked up and down the body of one person who had gotten in. God, he loved it when she looked him up and down.

  Rather than admit she was in the wrong, she just angled that chin at him more. “If it had been locked, I’m sure you would have just kicked down the door.”

  “Don’t you have a deadbolt?” he asked incredulously. He glanced past her. Bon sang, she didn’t. “Magalie. Are you crazy?”

  “Aunt Geneviève owns the building.”

  He knew that. He had looked up the ownership of all the buildings on the island before he bought here. It was, doubtless, one of the things that allowed the women to operate a small shop in an outrageously expensive area. The property was worth multiple millions. The only question was how they managed to pay the property taxes. Not off a salon de thé with five tables, that was for damn sure.

  “When the shop is closed, the door to the street is locked; the only people who can get inside are the aunts, me, and the tenants on the other floors.”

  Tenants. That explained the property taxes.

  “You’ve never given any delivery person the code to get in through the courtyard entrance?” he asked dryly. They were a business. Half of Paris probably had the code to get in and leave shipments.

  She frowned. “We know our suppliers very well.”

  Bien sûr, and every person who had ever worked as their delivery boy, too.

  “Besides, my aunts would notice if anyone came through,” she said with an insane degree of confidence.

  He felt like strangling her. “Nobody stopped me.”

  She frowned at him as if that was further proof of his infamy.

  “Get a damn deadbolt on your door, Magalie. And use it.”