The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  She stood there feeling helpless, exiled. Horrible. Staring at his back. There was the lean, tight lower torso and buttocks of a man who was always on his feet, always in motion, carrying, bending, crouching, always in a tight control that called on all his core muscles constantly. But then there were the larger muscles, particularly noticeable in his shoulders and arms.

  “Why do you go to the gym?” she asked suddenly, hoping just to keep him talking.

  For a second, she thought he wouldn’t answer, but princely manners prevailed. His voice was short, though, cold. “I spend all day in intense concentration. The mindless exertion makes for a good . . . stabilizer.” One shoulder shrugged, rippling those muscles. He added in a slightly more open voice, “It just feels really good.”

  It had never occurred to her what a buildup of tension there must be in his muscles over a day. “You know, you really might like it if I walked all over you,” she murmured, touching a hand to the taut muscles of his upper back. She imagined laying him out flat on his stomach at the end of a long day, curling her toes into his naked back, massaging him with her weight.

  He said nothing. She guessed he would love it but wasn’t going to admit it under the current circumstances.

  She drew her thumbnail down his spine, from his nape all the way to the curve of his butt, just one grazing trace. He flinched, started to arch, and then forced himself to stand stiffly, not allowing himself to flex into the touch. But those large arm muscles tensed, drawing her gaze down the length of them to the tight fists by his naked thighs.

  “No,” he said flatly.

  She went on tiptoe and tried to kiss the nape of his neck, the way he did to her. With him standing so straight and unbending, she had to grab his shoulders and pull herself up. She might need to work on her arm strength, she thought wryly, if she was going to play gymnastics with him. She held herself up there until her arms started to tremble, running her mouth and teeth and cheek over his nape, the way he did to her. She didn’t think she could get quite the same results. Her cheek was too soft. She couldn’t reproduce the completely shattering effect of the scrape of his jaw.

  It seemed to do something, though, because his head bowed to it, his shoulders pulling at her hands with each heavy breath.

  She sank down finally, her arms sliding down toward his waist, her breasts and belly dragging against his back. Such smooth, smooth skin there, compared to the curling hairs across his chest.

  “Your back feels like silk,” she whispered. It was like being let into a secret of him, or of masculinity: calluses on his hands from whisks and weights, hair on his chest and arms and legs and jaw, but his back was as smooth as a baby’s.

  All the muscles in that back were taut. Little shivers ran over his skin.

  “You take more than you give, don’t you?” he said bitterly.

  That hurt. Did he think she was still playing power games, trying to prove she could overcome him with desire? “I think it’s like making love when you’re a virgin,” she said ruefully. “You’re . . . bigger than I’m quite ready for.”

  His stomach muscles contracted under her arms. One of his hands came up and curled around hers.

  She pressed her lips against his back and let him feel her smile. “In more ways than one,” she added mischievously.

  He dropped his hand back to his side. Ouch. Apparently, no joking allowed.

  “You said it before. It takes me a while to warm up to . . . things,” she said.

  She rested her cheek against those taut back muscles, slipping her hands lower around his waist, where she could reach all the way around. “This is perfect,” she murmured. “Being right here.”

  He didn’t answer, very stubborn in his wounded feelings, but his head turned. She couldn’t see it, just felt the muscles shift under her cheek. Well, after a lifetime of making a place for herself, over and over, surely she could reaffirm her own space here. Make him turn to her and welcome her back into it.

  “Isn’t it funny that it would be so perfect? I thought you were coming into my life to tear it all to pieces. Destroy my tower like a spoiled kid knocking down someone else’s blocks, just because you needed a few for your castle.”

  “Where this idea that I’m spoiled comes from—”

  She stroked her hand down to his sex and curled her hand around him to shut him up. He knocked her hand away. Still stubborn, then.

  “And that’s kind of what you did, you know,” she said. “You’re very self—single-minded. You go after what you want, and tough luck for anyone else.”

  He tried to shrug her off and move away. Her arms tightened on him so that his first step pulled her with him. He stopped. His breaths ran deep through his abdomen, pressing against her arms.

  She slipped around him, letting her arms slide, still clasped, until she was leaning now against his chest, his arousal pressing into her belly. “This is perfect, too,” she said wonderingly.

  She knew his head was bent to her because of the breath on her hair.

  “So here I am, torn apart. I really didn’t want to be torn apart. I liked who I was.”

  “You liked your tower,” he murmured, his voice almost an apology. “Do you really think I broke it? I just wanted to make room for me inside.”

  She nodded slowly, unsurely, her cheek sliding against the hairs on his chest. “Well, I could probably repair it. But . . . I like it here.”

  “In the Marais? In Paris? Off your island?”

  She tilted her head back until her eyes could meet his, her face still snuggled against his chest. “Here. Right here.”

  The meaning flared through him, softening him like chocolate against skin. His arms slid around her. “Right here?” She loved the way his voice vibrated in his chest and tickled her ear.

  “I’m really quite strong. I can defend my tower.”

  A puff of breath against her hair. “No kidding.”

  “I can fight you off.”

  “Now that, I wouldn’t be so sure of.”

  “But I think you might deserve me.”

  His arms tightened around her. “Why I am the one who always gets called arrogant in this couple . . .” he complained to the empty room, but without much heat.

  Couple. Her arms flexed around him. “Sometimes I even think you might still be there when you walk out of the room. That you might not be . . . made of sugar.”

  He picked up one of her hands and began to draw it over his muscles, so hard and defined and resilient, stroking her palm over his chest, his biceps. “Now, what gave you a clue about that?”

  She gave a little laugh against his chest, her head tilting down so that her gaze could slide secretly, under the fall of her hair, down his body. He was so aroused. If they could make peace, he would slide into her and . . . “You’re what melts sugar,” she said wryly. “A blowtorch.”

  “No. I’m what controls the blowtorch. You’re just confused because I’m so hot.”

  Her mind did that little flip it sometimes did between the French and English uses of a word. Hot for you, he meant. Deeply sexually excited.

  He gave her that little grin of his. “If only you were a little more like sugar yourself, I could do anything I wanted to you.”

  Her body, hot, crystalline, spun out under his hands, formed however he wanted it... “You do make me feel like sugar sometimes.”

  His penis leaped against her belly at that. His hands slid down to curve around her hips and bottom. He pulled her against him snugly. “Being here is my plan, Magalie. Did you think I told you I loved you as a way to get you out of your tower, and damn the consequences?”

  She hesitated. Not really, but . . . “People do.”

  “That’s probably why I took you to meet my family, too. My four-year-old niece. My pregnant sister. My parents. People like that.”

  She stroked his abdomen. It contracted under her touch. “I don’t say I love you, not for any reason whatsoever. I used to, when I was a kid, with Maman and Dad, to mak
e them feel better. But I stopped when I was a teenager.”

  His fingers tensed against her buttocks, pressing into muscles sore from yesterday’s run. “Is that a warning?”

  “In a way.” She stepped back from him, so that she could look straight into his face. “I do love you. It’s hard for me to say. I’m still trying to figure out how to be myself and give me away, too. I do love you, though. You break my heart.” Broke its shell wide open.

  It was hard. But it felt like casting off an old, outdated carapace, something that had been pinching her far too small. She felt huge. She realized suddenly how he could dominate a room with his presence. He wasn’t holding any of himself in. He controlled his emotions, but they were all out there, fully extended.

  It was hard. But—she liked it. That sense of stretching herself out. It wasn’t quite the same as latching onto him desperately, after all. Not done like this. It was as if the very center of her got even stronger. He had said it himself: it made him feel ten times bigger.

  It was hard. But the look on his face, the way his hands went out to her, made it all worth it.

  Chapter 36

  There were five scarves in the box. Which—she counted back, blushing deeply with each mental tally mark. Right. Five. And all this time, she had thought the scarves were rewards for his orgasms.

  “He doesn’t have any other ideas for gifts?” Aunt Geneviève asked. “Do you look cold to him or something?”

  Aunt Aja stroked a discreet, shushing hand down Geneviève’s forearm. “I think this present was meant to be opened in private.”

  Great. Now her aunts were imagining her being tied up naked and spread-eagled with scarves up there several floors above them. Now she was getting a mental image of herself tied up, and . . . oh, for God’s sake. Magalie bundled up all the scarves quickly and hurried into the courtyard to take them up to her room.

  “Stop sending me scarves, you pervert,” she told Philippe that afternoon in the blue kitchen.

  He caressed the hot cup subtly and brought it to his mouth, gold-tipped dark lashes drifting downward a little as he drank the rich chocolate. “What do you want me to send you instead? A ring?”

  Her eyes flew to his. His lips were curled, his eyes teasing, but under the humor, all that focus was there. And he just waited. Waited to see what she would do with the question.

  She looked down at her hand, her thumb curling over the base of her ring finger as if testing its emptiness. She looked back up at him.

  One of his eyebrows had arched. His focus had grown more intent, the kitchen smaller, all his muscles gathering for a spring.

  She cleared her throat. She was supposed to be saying something repressive right now. She looked back at her bare ring finger again.

  Philippe was starting to smile. Not in humor but in pure, glowing happiness. The lion’s muscles were all bunched now. A breath, and he would leap.

  She stared at him, wanting to save him the jump, wanting to walk right up to him and press herself against him.

  Well, why didn’t she? Hadn’t she already found out that if she stopped letting him make all the moves, she felt much more in control?

  It only took her two steps.

  “This is nice,” she whispered against his chest. “You feel really good. What have you been making today? You smell like lime zest.”

  The chocolate cup clicked on the counter. His arms folded around her. “I will never leave Paris,” he mentioned. “I love it on the Île Saint-Louis. I come from a very happy family where people seem to have normally annoying relationships that last forever. I only ever pulled my sister’s hair once when we were little, and it was because she knocked over this beautiful, three-tiered pièce montée I was making for our father’s birthday. Fine, and I did kidnap her Barbie when we were playing cowboys and Indians and tie it up to an anthill, but anyone would think she would have gotten over that by now.”

  She tilted her head back and kissed him, feeling his response run through his whole body. What had been wrong with her, to let him do all the driving in their relationship so far? Things seemed to seesaw in her as she drew the kiss out, finding at last a sense of center that had him in it.

  His fingers sank into her hair. “Every afternoon, I could come have a tiny cup of chocolate. Or you could come see me,” he coaxed, “and sit on one of my counters, and let me feed little things to you while I work.”

  She kneaded her fingers into his chest muscles happily. This was a very nice place to be.

  “And we could—well, I don’t know if I could ever afford a family-size apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, but you know, it might be that your sense of place is too small. Maybe this whole city is your place. Paris.”

  Hmm. She hesitated. She really, really liked her apartment high above the island. Although le Marais was nice. But . . . She hesitated, the need to never move again clutching at her one more time.

  “You’re thinking about it, right?” Philippe said into her hair.

  She nodded against his chest.

  “That’s all right, then.” He lifted her hands from his chest and kissed the inside of each wrist, the way he liked to do. Then he slipped away just as her Aunt Aja came in from the courtyard.

  At the door, he paused and glanced back. “What did you wish on me this time?”

  To love her forever. She drew her eyebrows together, concentrating on him very hard. As if she could develop magic vision that would show her the chocolate running through his veins, taking over his body, making him hers.

  He smiled. The smile seemed to grow in his whole body, pressing out from it for lack of space, filling the kitchen. “I don’t feel any different.”

  Chapter 37

  Magalie was crossing the Pont Saint-Louis between the cathedral and her island when a young woman who looked like a student grinned at her. That in itself was unusual. People didn’t grin at one another in Paris.

  Magalie hesitated, because the other woman was either crazy or they knew each other. Oh, or maybe she was simply hoping to soften any tight hold Magalie had on her wallet, because the other girl proceeded to open a violin case and leap onto a stand she had lodged against the metal railing, at the high point of the bridge’s arch.

  Her blond hair was caught in a ponytail, her jeans worn at the knees, and she held that violin as if it was part of her body, as if, without it, she would lose her balance and topple into the Seine.

  Magalie took a step toward her. “Do I know you?” she murmured.

  The girl laughed out loud. “You make good chocolate,” she said and brought her bow down on the violin.

  It was like being pierced with a thousand points of light. Heaven touched earth. It was the most beautiful sound Magalie had ever heard in her life.

  Everyone on the bridge stopped. The waiters in the café at the far end of it froze and turned toward her. People stood from their tables to get a better look.

  The other young woman was grinning, brilliant with joy. Her music washed over everyone, some great ode to freedom.

  Magalie stared up at her, her jaw dropped, goosebumps chasing all over her skin. May you love your life and seize it with both hands. It came back to her. Wished long ago, on a young woman who had rubbed the tendons between her fingers while her mother delighted in how much of the world they saw between her performances.

  Performances that had been in New Zealand, Hawaii, Japan, and here in Paris. She knew perfectly well—anybody with an ear who heard that violin knew perfectly well—her mother hadn’t been talking about street performances.

  And now the girl looked suffused with joy and freedom and profound, delighted mischief to be busking here.

  Good God, maybe Magalie needed to be more careful with her chocolate.

  She stood there until the “Ode to Joy” ended, her hands tucked in her back pockets. She had started at first to rub her arms, against the goosebumps there, but that had felt too closed to the world, when this radiant music was washing over her.

&nb
sp; As soon as that bow paused and the young woman flexed her shoulders and lowered the violin for a second, her hat filled up. Magalie reached for her wallet.

  The girl laughed and jumped down. “I don’t really need it, but I suppose it would be better not to access my accounts if I can help it,” she murmured to Magalie. “I told my mother’s people to leave me alone, but I bet they’ll put investigators on me. Still, in your case, I would rather be paid in chocolate.” She winked at Magalie. Without the joy in music-making suffusing her face, her mouth was wide, her nose a little too pointed in proportion, her cheekbones strong, giving her face a not-quite-pretty look, too much of everything.

  Magalie opened and closed her mouth. And opened it again. “Did my chocolate do this?” she whispered.

  The girl—she was really only a year or two younger than Magalie at the most, but she bloomed with life and youth like a daffodil that had at last lifted its head out of the snow—laughed again. “No, I did this,” she said.

  Oh. Magalie felt a mix of both relief and disappointment. She tossed a coin into the hat, and some more prosaic bills on top of it—although she suspected the other woman had a lot more money than she did, in those accounts of hers—and started to head on over the bridge.

  “Although that chocolate of yours is really good,” the violinist said. “I still remember my first sip of it. It makes you just want to seize your life with both hands, to love every drop of it.”

  Magalie stopped and looked back at her over her shoulder.

  The other woman wiped her face, took a long drink of water, stripped down to a white camisole, and leaped back up onto her post to play again.

  Philippe had an entire marble counter to himself, and from the other counters his hardworking chefs and various assistants, interns, and apprentices kept rising up on tiptoe to peer at what he was doing or passing just a little too slowly with that “chaud, chaud, chaud!” pot she or he had to carry through the laboratoire.