The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  She curved her hands around the cup, its heat against her palms, and offered it to him.

  His breaths lifted his chest in long, deep movements. He raised his eyes from the chocolate to hers. Keeping his hands at his sides, he made a motion of submission with his chin. “Vas-y,” he murmured. “From your hands.”

  He was right. This was the most erotic thing she had ever done. Not that she had much for comparison. She suspected it might also be the most erotic thing she ever would do. What could match this?

  She started to lift it to his lips, hesitated, then brought it to hers to blow on it a few times, making sure she would not burn him.

  He made a sound, his hands tightening into fists at his sides. His blue eyes in the light looked almost black.

  When she brought it back to his lips, he sat down suddenly at the little table near the window. His eyes as he tilted his head back to accept it clung to hers as if he was willingly drowning.

  She watched the smooth, rich chocolate pass his lips, clinging to the sensual upper bow. He swallowed once. Twice. His eyes closed, and a long, slow sigh left his body, as if he was abandoning all fight.

  He curved his hand around the cup, his fingers caressing its smooth heat and her fingers, and drank again. She stared at the chocolate clinging to his lips. What was going through his body? She had never been able to feel the power of her own chocolate.

  Abruptly he pulled the cup out of her hands and set it on the table, then pulled her down on top of him. She tumbled into him, but because she tried to keep her feet planted firmly on the floor, her body stretched like a bow, her legs straight, her back arching so that her chest pressed against his. He spread his thighs so that her pelvis pressed against his, forced hard by the arch of her spine. “Magalie.” How could her name on his lips sound like ma chérie?

  His fingers skated up her spine through the silk again, arching her helplessly. He brought his mouth to her exposed throat. Not a gazelle, not a gazelle, not a gazelle, she reminded herself as he ripped not her throat but her heart out with a hungry little growl.

  All her will dissolved under the feel of his mouth, his barest graze of teeth, the touch of his tongue, the burr of his jaw, against her skin. Maybe she could be a gazelle, just here, just for tonight. Maybe she could be completely weak. It was so dark, and he was so warm, and despite those great windows, no one could see.

  “What did you wish on me, Magalie?” His voice was as dark as her chocolate, as if it had possessed him. He trailed his lips and rough jaw down toward her breastbone, arching her back over his arm. “Doom? Utter destruction? Complete helplessness at your hands?”

  Was he going to show her how powerless she was, that what she wished on him in vain was what he could so easily do to her?

  “I don’t feel any different.” He pressed her breasts apart with his chin, forcing a little space for himself in her cleavage. The prickles from his jaw ran all through her body, chasing after one another until they settled into her nipples and her sex, dancing and dancing there.

  “It probably doesn’t affect you,” she said bitterly. Bitter as the chocolate she had used on him.

  “Perhaps you wished something that was already true.”

  That he was completely helpless with desire for her?

  She tried to pull her head back enough to get a good look at him, but the arch of her back didn’t leave much room to maneuver. He made a pleased sound at the way the attempt thrust her breasts more prominently against his face. Then he lifted his head, and there was nothing for her mouth to do but meet his.

  She sipped her chocolate off his lips. She opened her mouth over his and tasted it on his tongue. The chocolate that was supposed to render its drinker helpless with desire. He buried his hands in her hair, knocking the clasp free with the thrust of his fingers, and held her head as he took her in.

  And by opening her mouth to take his, she let him in to take hers. His mouth moved over and in hers, slow and thorough, as if he was savoring something delicious. Something he wanted to roll around on his tongue, breathe in deeply, pull back to sip slowly . . .

  He brought his hands to her ribs and lifted her suddenly, settling her across his lap. She kept kissing him through the move, and he kissed her back, as if he could kiss her forever.

  But both his arms didn’t hold her. One left her. Stretched across the table. And came back with his heart in his hand.

  She wrenched her head away, burying her face in his neck. “Can’t we just have sex?” she whispered. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t.” The hand still in her hair tightened, showing his anger. “Do you have to be so strong that you’re stupid?”

  She straightened a little away from him, eyeing that dessert with longing even while her mouth set mulishly. She had promised him the trade. She had come here with the intention of it. What was wrong with her to want to balk now?

  “What do you think you have to lose, Magalie?”

  She gave him an incredulous look. “Me.” As if he didn’t know.

  “Vraiment.” His palm rubbed a wandering path from her hip up her ribs to one tense shoulder blade, where it settled into soothing circles. “Not your pride. Not your anger. Not your strength. You.” His tongue seemed to caress that last word, drawing it out the way one might draw out a slow, savoring spoonful of a luscious dessert.

  If he was eating her in two bites, he was enjoying his meal. She wriggled resentfully.

  “What do you think I have to lose, Magalie?”

  She blinked. Frowned. “Nothing, probably. You said my chocolate didn’t even have any effect on you.”

  He stared at her. The anger in him tensed the muscles in the thighs under her butt, pressed his palm against her shoulder blade, tightened the abs against which her arm was pressed. “Bon sang. Quel imbécile.”

  Was she really? In her witches’ lair, surrounded by clients who couldn’t quite get their lives together, she had always thought that she was the smartest person in the room. Her life was together. Nicely packed up and invincible. Until him.

  “Here.” He brought the macaron so close that the armor of raspberries protecting its insides brushed her mouth with their faint, silky, beaded texture, and the gloss of the macaron shells glided smoothly over her lips.

  She opened her mouth and bit, snatching for it with her teeth like a starved animal snatching food out of the air. But as her teeth broke the fine crust of the macaron shells, her whole body slowed, the energy of the bite dissolved into a dream. The most secret, delicate crunch, the blissful, soft inside of the shell, and then, sinking down, the burst of raspberries, the luscious cream. Sex between two wings of heaven. Bliss and paradise, if the paradise was the kind that featured infinite debauchery.

  An orgasm in one bite. As if hands ran all over her body. But more. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever tasted in her life. Made for her. It was so beautiful that tears stung her eyes, and she opened them to find Philippe’s gaze consuming her face with a feral, starved triumph.

  She stared back at him, from only inches away.

  He rotated the macaron a half inch and proffered it to her lips again.

  She couldn’t describe what it did to her to take another bite under that savage victory. She almost couldn’t not, her ability to resist more of that exquisite pleasure reduced nearly out of existence. And yet she could have. She was strong enough. She could have drawn from somewhere deep that resistance. She chose not to. It was as if she chose to strip herself naked at his snapped fingers and give all power over her body to him.

  It was so erotic that she could barely breathe from it, from the desire to have him take her, then and there, laid across the chair.

  He didn’t. He fed her, holding her eyes. Grazing his palm over her throat as she swallowed him. Watching her shiver and her whole body clutch helplessly as she bit into that secret, intense, tart heart beneath the silk ganache.

  He fed her every last bite. He stroked the r
ose petal over her lips and slipped it inside to lie on her tongue. He brushed the crumbs over her lips and made her lick them off his fingers.

  He had tied his hands to a bed? His power over her was so absolute that it could not have been greater if she had put a slave collar around her naked throat and handed him the chain.

  In fact, her erotic submission was so great that as soon as the thought came to her, she longed for it, to be stripped naked and used for his every desire.

  He dipped the thumb she had just sucked clean into the cup of her still-warm chocolate and slowly, deliberately sucked it himself, still holding her eyes.

  And then he slipped that thumb in through the tight fit of her still-zipped pants, finding her clitoris. With the first brush, she whimpered and writhed, clutching at him. Her eyes closed, but his didn’t. She felt them on her, blazing dark. He pressed his thumb hard, and she came almost in the first second, shattering helplessly, curving her face into his arm and biting at his biceps.

  And he laughed. He laughed in pure, utter triumph. A savage sound, a conquering sound as her body rocked and rocked to its rhythm.

  Chapter 26

  As the shocks to her body faded, Philippe began stripping her. The silk sliding over her hot, damp face grazed her plump, parted lips that did not want that teasing wisp of a touch, that begged to close around something hard and unyielding. To close around him and force him to the same helplessness. He left her bra on but scooped under its lace for her breasts, delicately pinching the nipples so that she cried out, and then pulling them free of the cups, so that they were pressed up but exposed.

  He stripped off her pants, ruthlessly, lifting her up so that she stood with her legs apart before him as he did it, her breasts pouty before his mouth. He liked her black lace panties. He left them on. “God, I wish you had worn your boots,” he breathed, squeezing his hand over her sex like he might squeeze the juice from a lime, and another ripple of aftershock went through her body, his hand coming away from her panties gleaming. “The ones that come up to here.” He closed his hands around her thighs and pressed them farther apart, with that quick, savage lion’s grin at what he saw.

  But she had already come once, and she could feel the balance of power seesawing delicately. Because he hadn’t had any relief. His arousal was desperate and desperately clear. It was possible that he had never in his life needed anything as badly as he right now needed her.

  She was worse than exposed, but she didn’t feel vulnerable.

  She didn’t feel helpless.

  She felt stripped naked, yes. But strong in it. As if that was an absolutely beautiful, perfect way to be. She felt like Lady Godiva might have felt. As if she was a woman who could in fact walk naked through a crowd and never be touched by any look or word because her pride and her sense of self were unassailable.

  She bent over him, with her thighs still braced apart the way he had spread them, with her breasts spilling toward his mouth, and ripped his T-shirt off over his head.

  “Yes,” he breathed, his body flexing with pleasure as the move stretched his arms over his head, so that muscles rippled the length of his torso. Broad shoulders, a tight waist, curls darker than his tawny hair across his chest. “Yes. God. Attack me.”

  But instead of letting her, he surged to his feet, grabbing her and flipping her around as if her body was as easily controllable as a doll’s, curling her hands against the edge of the table.

  A moment ago, his back had been to the window, the chair and his body hiding her. But now, she glanced sideways at the lights in the street, that great expanse of glass.

  “They can’t see us,” he whispered, his penis pressing through his pants against her butt cheeks, as if to find its way to the thong that disappeared between them.

  She was his doll, his puppet; he could do anything to her. She would let him. Over and over, every way he wanted, all night long.

  “You had better hope so,” she said, and she turned, pressing him back to the table instead. She curled his hands around its edge, and they tightened until the knuckles showed white.

  She reached behind her, the movement thrusting her breasts up, and took off her bra, tossing it away. She, too, wished for her boots, the thigh-high ones and nothing else, but thong panties and utter nakedness would have to do.

  She pulled his jeans down over his hips and knelt with the movement. His slave, his very slave. And all the power was completely in her hands.

  Com-plete-ly. Her hands closed over his penis, both at once, and squeezed hard. He made a harsh sound as if he had been shot, and his body jerked.

  She opened her mouth and closed it over him in the same greedy rush with which she had first snatched at his macaron. And in the same way, the first silk-salt feel of him slowed her. She didn’t want to rush this. Her tongue curled around him.

  “Magalie. God. Please. Don’t.”

  Don’t? I’ll do whatever I want to you, she thought. She would have told him so with words, but then she would have had to interrupt the more effective demonstration.

  She took him in, sucking on him greedily, the way his body reacted making her own lower body weep again with hunger. His groaning growls surrounded her, vibrating down over her skin, her naked kneeling body, her bottom taut and bereft of his warmth against the cold air.

  She couldn’t take him all in. Her mouth was too small. But she flicked her tongue hungrily, curiously against his tip and stroked it around his head, the hardness and pulse of him, and brought both hands to grip the base of his shaft, the heel of her palms cupping his testicles.

  “God, God, God,” he groaned, and she loved it; she loved hearing him lose all his intellect, his control, just that long, growling plea for mercy.

  She reduced him to nothing in less than a minute, his body shaking uncontrollably as he came.

  And she threw back her head, naked at his feet with the taste of him on her tongue, and laughed.

  Laughed in pure, glorious, giddy conquest.

  “God.” Philippe’s big body seemed so utterly weak. Slowly, as the room felt colder, he managed to peel himself from the table. He picked her up. Confounding her. She thought she had made him weaker than she was. Too weak to pick her up as if she was nothing.

  He carried her into his bathroom and turned the warm shower on them both, tucking his body against hers under the hot water, and then ignoring his own body thereafter. Pouring soap into his hand, he rubbed it, a warm, clean scent, all over her. Scraping her wet hair gently away from her face, he pulled her head back against his shoulder and let the water, at its gentlest pulse, stream over her face, her closed eyes. She had no strength left, although desire seemed to have grown again in a way that made her malleable.

  The water and the soap and his body were such a blur of sensations, of slumberous longing, that it felt like a continuation of a dream when he turned her and lifted her astride him, sliding into her body. He tucked her face now into his shoulder, so that her hair fell around it, sheltering it from the spray, and the water streamed over the back of her head and down her spine as he took her, in easy, gentle thrusts, so that when she first began to come, she almost didn’t realize she was doing so; the shocks just slipped up on her, seemed part of her, as if she was earthquake territory, and tremors were her constant.

  Gentle and subtle though they were in their approach, they took control of her and would not leave her. Limp and clinging and wet, her arms wrapped around him, the water streaming over her, she came over and over, in long, soft vibrations, while he moved in her, slow, sliding thrusts.

  His arms bulged on either side of her head when he shifted her back against the earth-tone tiles, but even at the end, his thrusts stayed slow, and long, and steady, and just very, very deep as his strength spurted up into her.

  Her body trembled in those faint seismic tremors as he lowered her and drew her back against him again, scooping water and soap against the folds of her sex and washing her most intimately and thoroughly, as if he was exploring n
ow at leisure something that fascinated him.

  He wrapped her in a giant thick towel, for lack of a bathrobe, and picked her up like a child and carried her to his bed.

  Lying in front of her, he laughed softly, wonderingly as he slowly peeled the towel away from her body. Unlike the living area, his bedroom was a cave, its window covered with heavy, pale drapes, the big bed a square, modern take on the canopied beds of centuries ago, so that the padded headboard rose high and formed a ceiling with the two square posts at the foot.

  Philippe pushed their towels onto the floor and pulled the heavy comforter over them, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her back, a hot body against the cold.

  “Magalie,” he whispered just before she fell asleep, tracing a fingertip around her ear as if to draw her attention to an important secret. “Je t’aime.”

  The words glided over her with caressing, warm confidence, so that their speaker could have no idea that they speared her like a fish and left her gasping, out of the water.

  Her eyes flared open, lashes catching against the hairs of his forearm under her head, and she stared into the white night of the comforter while his body grew heavy over hers, asleep.

  Living between two languages, sometimes, with the rarer words, she thought a lot about what they meant. Her mother was the only other person who had said those same two syllables to her, Je t’aime. But her mother’s accent had stretched it and bounced it, a gay little sound, not like Philippe’s crisp, firm prince-of-Paris pronunciation.

  While she was growing up, her mother had said it every day, often many times a day. “Bonne nuit, ma minette, je t’aime,” as she tucked her into the freshly changed sheets smelling of lavender at her grandparents’ house, just arrived off the plane. “Tu es ma petite chérie.” “Oh, ma petite puce, je t’aime,” on the plane from America to France, their father and Magalie’s school friends left behind, as Magalie, cheerful and sweet and six years old, hugged her mother to stop her crying. “Je t’aime, mon bébé. S’il n’y avait pas toi . . .” If it wasn’t for you . . . as she tucked Magalie into her bed in the States after flying back with their father to try again, the sheets smelling of Tide. “Mais, Magalie, nous t’aimons,” the desperate protest when Magalie had fought and won the right to go back to the U.S. by herself at sixteen.