The blade looked wickedly sharp. In her currently rattled state, she probably would cut off her fingers if she tried to manipulate it solo. But his hands stayed strong on hers, linking with her fingers to keep them lifted away from the blade. Together, his deftness overpowering her clumsiness, they shaved chocolate off a corner of the dark block. It curled and crumpled and fell to pieces against the cold marble, piling on top of itself.
His arms brushed against hers, his biceps pressing against her shoulder. She could feel his lean, strong body. She could feel him taming himself for her, the speed and energy pent up and kept under control. He did not usually shave off his chocolate carefully, stroke by stroke, she knew. His knife would fly through it, thoughtlessly, as automatic as breathing; his muscles, used to this work, would barely be conscious of its resistance, its hardness under the knife.
He lifted a shaving on one finger and brought it to her lips. “Goûtez,” he said. “Tell me what you taste.”
“Could you show me how to cut the chocolate?” one of the American women asked Pascal hopefully, eyeing them from across the table. “I think I might need some . . . help.”
Pascal Guyot gave Sylvain Marquis a look of deeply tried patience. Sylvain didn’t even notice it, focused on Cade.
The chocolate was melting already on her parted lips. She took it, perforce, her lips closing just barely, just briefly, on his finger.
His lashes lowered to hide some expression.
She tasted . . . She didn’t think she should tell him what she tasted. It went beyond the chocolate, which was bitter, bitter on her tongue but extraordinarily smooth.
A little sigh ran through him. “Let us make something you would like,” he told her, with heat in his eyes and a little, very male curve lingering around his mouth, as if he was playing a game he very much enjoyed.
She was his game, Cade told herself. Was that it?
Was he hers?
“What do you like in your chocolat, mademoiselle?”
He poured white cream into a small pot as he spoke to her and added inverted sugar. He had taken her lesson in a different direction from the rest of the workshop. Pascal was still showing the others how to cut their chocolate and trying to stay patient with the woman who was being particularly helpless and demanding of hands-on instruction.
“Cinnamon,” she said.
“Cannelle?” He gave her a little smile, as if she had charmed him.
Charmed him how? Like a quaint child whose hair he wanted to ruffle?
“Vous aimez la tradition,” he said.
Yes, she supposed she did love tradition. Corey prided itself on being the chocolate of generations of Americans, and it had never once changed its original milk chocolate bar. So that was tradition. And the only way she wanted to break that Corey tradition was by sinking into a realm of chocolate that had been exquisite even before her country was born.
“Then we shall make you something with cinnamon.” He moved away to the shelves where the brown bottles were, grabbing a handful of cinnamon sticks. On his way back to her, he picked up a brick of butter that had been set out to soften. “Say it again in English?”
“Cinnamon,” she repeated helplessly.
Heat leaped in his eyes. “It has a je ne sais quoi to it in English, cinnamon. More mystery, more exotic, than in French.”
“Because it starts with sin,” she tried to say. Only she couldn’t think of sin in French. “Pêche?”
Supple black eyebrows crinkled. “Cinnamon and peaches? With your chocolate? I don’t think . . .”
He paused, clearly unable to reject any combination of flavors out of hand without giving it serious analysis.
“No,” she said. “No peaches. Just cinnamon.”
“Pêches confites, perhaps,” he murmured. Candied peaches. “But I don’t have any on hand, and it’s the wrong season to find them. I could perhaps order some from Nice. There’s a market where you can find them in the autumn.”
And did he do that? she wondered suddenly. Wander through markets, absorbing all the sights and flavors, his mind all the time spinning new spells of chocolate out of what he saw?
It made her want to take him to Morocco, to India, if he had not already been. It made her wish he would take her to Nice, to all the markets that he knew. They could walk through them, hand in hand, showing each other flavors.
What was happening to her head?
It could not possibly be healthy for all her dreams of Paris to be crystallizing around this one person.
He disdained her. And he had been out last night with a beautiful blonde.
“Tenez.” He handed her the cinnamon sticks and nodded to the pot of cream. She dropped them into it, watching white drops splash over the brown of the sticks. “À feu doux.” He caught her eyes just for a second. “One must start à feu doux.”
With a gentle flame.
If this was gentle, she didn’t know whether to crave high heat or be terrified of it.
Terror and craving made a very powerful combination of flavors.
She set the pot on the burner nearest her, her gaze as she moved scanning the room, going over those great burlap sacks whose contents she did not know, those brown bottles, the doors to walk-in storage. Who knew what riches hid behind them? What word would unlock those doors? “Open, cacao”?
She tried to figure out what was a gentle flame according to French temperatures and how to work the controls of the stove. Let’s see, she knew this. If the ideal storage temperature of chocolate was 17 degrees Celsius, then—
Sylvain’s hand reached over hers, brushing it and half enclosing it, and pushed a couple of buttons.
Warmth ran through her. On its heels, wariness finally raised its head, and anger. What an absolute bastard he was. An arrogant absolute bastard. To be so sure of his attractiveness that he could use it to punish her.
That had to be his motivation. Why else would he be doing this?
For a wild instant, she thought about trying to turn the tables on him. Drive him crazy with her attractiveness. But she was wearing a sweatshirt and an enormous pastry chef’s jacket, and she was currently made up like someone in an old silent film. And her magic talisman was a Corey Bar, which made his sorcerer’s lip curl in disdain.
“Is this the same way Dominique Richard does it?” she asked instead in a breathless voice, trying to convey the impression that she was just using him to get nearer the true rock star around this town.
She didn’t need quite that much breathiness to convey that impression, but that brush of his hand made it hard to keep steady.
The hand withdrew a fraction. When she snuck a glance, he looked very annoyed.
“I can’t say I’ve studied the way he pours cream into a pan,” he said dryly. “But it can’t be that different.”
She bet it could. Sylvain had a way of pouring cream into a pan that made her feel like a cat. “No, I meant—all of this.” She waved a hand to encompass the whole workshop and process.
“I don’t know,” Sylvain said, increasingly acerbic. “Maybe you should be stalking him if you would rather know his way of doing things.”
Her lips snapped together, and she flushed at the hit. She was not . . . well, she was indeed stalking Sylvain, but it was obnoxious of him to say it out loud like that. “The restaurant was completely accidental.” Did he think she would make herself that miserable on purpose?
“There are a surprising number of good restaurants in Paris that aren’t in my neighborhood,” he pointed out.
It was hard to carry on a conversation with someone who wouldn’t politely refrain from calling her out on every possible thing that he could. Were all conversations more like fencing matches in Paris, or did she and he just have a special relationship?
“I didn’t realize you lived near here, too.”
He blinked, silenced for a moment. “You don’t know where I live?”
She was sure she had it in her files. She just hadn’t paid attention t
o his home address. “I’ll look it up if that would make you happy.”
Another pause. “You really are focused exclusively on my chocolate, aren’t you?”
Cade gave him a blank look. What did he think?
What did he think? And did he like whatever it was he was thinking? And if so, like it how? With arrogant satisfaction or . . . ?
“I believe I mentioned my interest in your chocolate when we first met,” she said pointedly. “In fact, I believe my assistant might have hinted at something to that effect when she set up our first meeting.”
He made a vague gesture at the mention of their initial, infuriating meeting. “I thought you were just asking to visit the laboratoire while you were in Paris. It seemed a simple courtesy to agree.”
“You do things out of courtesy?” she asked blankly.
Indignation sparked immediately in those chocolate-dark eyes. “I’m being courteous to you right now!”
Was he brushing his finger against her lips as he brought exquisite, bitter chocolate to them out of courtesy? Because if he was, she was going to kill him.
Him and his kind girlfriend.
“I am making you a chocolate,” he said. “I don’t get any more courteous than that.”
Was he really? she thought, utterly seduced and undone. Was he making up a chocolate on the spot, just for her?
“But if you sell it, or put my name on it, or in any way reproduce it in some mass, bastardized version of pseudo-chocolate, I will take my case straight to US courts, where I can sue millions out of you.”
“Or we could skip the suing step and just sign a contract,” Cade suggested. “You would still get millions, and I’m sure it would be less stressful.”
His jaw clenched. He whipped up the butcher knife and shaved a second block of chocolate to bits in so little time, it was like watching The Six Million Dollar Man.
It gave a jolt to her stomach to think exactly how much he had been taming himself to go slowly with her a moment before. It gave a jolt to some other regions, too. This man made her melt all over.
“Exactly how much money would I have to sue out of you to make you regret something?”
Cade gave that some thought. “I think a few million would probably get the company’s attention.” Really, any lawsuit was a potential public relations issue; there was always the risk the media might pick it up and glorify the plaintiff.
“L’attention de la compagnie, je m’en fous,” he said crudely. He flipped the knife to scrape the shavings into another pot and set it over a bain-marie on a burner next to her cream, which was slowly infusing with cinnamon. Steam breathed gently up from the water. “If you do anything to me, I want you to personally regret it.”
Cade could think of at least ten ways he could make her personally regret something right off the bat. But she managed to refrain from passing on a list of her weak spots to him. It was one thing to go kamikaze and quite another to commit suicide to no purpose.
Besides, she had a strong suspicion he was figuring out some of those weak spots on his own. In his pot, the chocolate shavings were melting helplessly over a flame so low, nothing else would even notice it.
The shavings were just like her, probably. He probably wasn’t even trying.
“Am I not supposed to use cinnamon in any Corey products for the rest of my life, or what are you trying to get me to promise?”
He stirred his chocolate and looked aggravated.
Pascal Guyot, passing him to pick up vanilla beans for everyone else’s workshop, gave him an ironic look. Sylvain looked a little embarrassed and focused more intensely on his chocolate. “She told me her name was Maggie Saunders,” Pascal mentioned.
Cade remembered her credit card, and qualms seized her.
“You know what’s strange?” Sylvain said, speaking more to her than to Pascal. “I would have thought a company the size of Corey would have other people to do your corporate espionage.”
They did. And those people were very far removed from the top cadre of family members and executives. “You’ve seen too many movies,” Cade dismissed him. “We’re a very hands-on family, really.”
The hands-on part was true, anyway. Who wanted to keep their hands off chocolate? Who the heck wanted to pay someone else to go learn all the secrets of a top Parisian chocolatier?
Pascal shook his head, with one last dry look at Sylvain, who ignored him, and continued back to the others, distributing vanilla beans as he went.
“I thought this workshop was full six months ago,” Sylvain said. “They usually are. Did you sign up under a fake name before you even made me your offer?”
If he caught her in a lie, she knew darn well he wasn’t going to ignore it to let her save face. But he probably didn’t handle the day-to-day registration process for his workshops himself, right? That would be a waste of chocolate talent. “No, it was an impulse. There must have been a last-minute cancellation.”
She wondered if it would be morally right to slip out and cancel her credit card now. Cade’s assumption of Maggie Saunders’s identity had ended up lasting only five minutes.
But if she slipped out, would she get back in?
Exactly how much was she willing to pay to learn how to infuse cream and melt chocolate, two things she already knew perfectly well how to do? This little tourist workshop was nice. It was sadistically kind of him not to kick her out of it, even. But it did not begin to be the immersion into the world of a Parisian master chocolatier that she wanted.
Sylvain Marquis leaned over her to examine her cream, and all thoughts of her credit card slipped from her mind. He picked up a clean spoon and dipped it into the cream to taste it. His eyes closed a little as he concentrated on the flavor, and she watched him helplessly, longing to know what he tasted.
He opened his eyes and smiled at her, then dipped a fresh spoon into the infusion and proffered a swallow of cream to her lips. “What do you think?”
It tasted sweet and strongly of cinnamon. His mouth would taste of cinnamon. She felt like that cream, slowly infusing with the warmth and taste he desired as he watched.
She tried to produce a coherent comment. “Too much?”
“The chocolate will overpower it quite a bit,” he said. “I haven’t worked much with cinnamon recently, so this is an experiment. Let’s see how it goes.”
“Why haven’t you worked with cinnamon recently?” she asked as he fished the cinnamon sticks out of the cream. It seemed an obvious flavor combination to her.
“C’est très datée.” He dumped her chocolate shavings into the cream.
Cade hid a squirm. Really? Her tastes were dated for this top chocolatier? That explained the smile when he’d mentioned “la tradition.”
“Et maintenant, fouettez.” He put a sturdy whisk into her hand. “Hold it firmly, and whip it hard.” He grinned a little at his own words but didn’t share whatever they made him think of.
Cade, grasping the handle of the whisk and whipping the chocolate and cream into a glossy hue, suspected she could guess.
“Have you ever tempered chocolate by hand, mademoiselle?”
She had a couple of times, in US workshops, rather poorly. But if she said yes, he might not teach her, or, worse, he might let her manage on her own, so she shook her head.
“Bon, d’abord, sur la table. Tenez.” He put her hand on the pot handle. “Pour about a third of it out onto the marble.”
The chocolate spilled over the marble, silky, warm, brown. Its gleam in the light made her think of that gleam in his eyes.
“Et maintenant nous le travaillons.” In one hand he picked up a long metal spatula three or so inches wide, in the other a much wider, shorter spatula, again flat metal. Expertly, he began to scrape, lift, and spill the chocolate between these two blades.
He had been doing that when she first met him. And she had been fantasizing she was the chocolate stretched out on his marble. She stared at it helplessly.
“You see? Now you try
.” He placed the spatulas into her hands, fingers brushing hers again.
She thought she made a reasonable imitation of his gestures, albeit much clumsier.
He laughed. “Encore une fois.” He shifted behind her so that his sleek, muscled body enclosed hers, brushing against the whole length of her back. She felt his breath stirring the hair on the top of her head and lost all thought.
He closed his hands around hers on the spatulas. For a second, as he tried to guide her hands through the gestures, her own automatically sought control, their unblended gestures ungainly.
“Relax,” he murmured into her ear. “Just let me take charge.”
If she relaxed, she was going to so completely lose her muscle strength that he was going to have to pick her up and carry her straight to a bed. Or just stretch her out there on the counter and make everyone else leave.
His body was so warm behind hers. His forearms against hers were so lean and strong and perfect for his task. Across the great marble island from her, one of the Japanese women narrowed her eyes at her in open jealousy.
“Et puis touchez,” he breathed into her ear. “Touch with the back of your hand. You should feel neither warmth nor cool. It should be exactly the same temperature as your skin. It should be . . . exactly matched to you.” He dipped the knuckle of his pinky into the chocolate as she did hers. “Can you tell?”
She was not sure her current body temperature was a reliable indicator for chocolate tempering. She was too hot.
Not Sylvain? Was he still as cool as a cucumber?
“How long did it take you to learn to do that?” the Frenchman who was taking the workshop asked from down the marble counter.
Sylvain turned easily to answer him. It seemed to cost him no effort to wrench himself away from her.
Cade wished they were alone. Not only because she didn’t want to be just another tourist among this group, but because she didn’t think she would let him get away with this if they were alone. She would break, one way or the other, and whether by grabbing him or by dumping a bowl of cream on his head, challenge him to quit toying with her.
The Chocolate Thief Page 7
