“No, but I was inspired. I sketched it yesterday in the gardens.” He held her eyes, so much strength in that steel-blue that she could cling to it, vastly reassured. “Don’t worry, Ellie, no matter what you think, you really can afford it.”
He pulled the cloth off.
The woman sat in the shelter of a great chocolate tree. Violets and ferns of translucent sugar grew around her. She was completely naked, her knees drawn up and her arms around them, so that the most private parts of her body were concealed, her toes pointed as if she was dipping them into something delightful: a stream, or life. She was made of pure white chocolate, no color to her, like a marble sculpture, but the incredible detail of the hair spilling wildly around her face, the bright smile as she looked upward, the curves of her body, made it clear who she was. Made it clear that the sculptor knew her intimately. The quality of the art was incredible, as if Michelangelo were working in a new medium. And—she looked so beautiful. So happy.
A dark chocolate ribbon had been curled once around the body, a spiral, the end of it fluttering past her shoulder as if it had been caught in a breeze. That end was inscribed in gold lettering: Mine. S. C.
Ellie’s mouth dropped open. She stared at the claimed naked body, while her heart thudded until she couldn’t think through its rhythm. That was—so arousing.
Outrageous, she reminded herself as sternly as she could. Completely and utterly outrageous, could not be stood for a minute, and—she glanced at the lock on the door, contemplating attacking him.
Look, was it her fault her outrage seemed to want to express itself sexually?
Simon gave a very mean, self-satisfied smile. “Think he’ll like it?”
She tried to force herself to breathe. To not sexually assault Simon in his own office as an expression of her outrage at being stamped Mine. First of all, he would be horrified—later—at his staff knowing he was having sex in his office. And second of all, she suspected her feminist message might not come across.
“Can I take a picture?” she asked instead, jerking the provocation out in some last-ditch random grab for what had once been her world.
It wiped the smug smile off his face. “Don’t tell me you’re going to—” He broke off.
“To show him. I can’t possibly take this on the Métro to the hospital.”
“Oh, come on.” Simon threw the cloth hard against the wall. “Are you still—” He pressed his lips together. Hard. They straightened out like some steel blade, and she could feel anger mounting in him, an anger that was pressing against all his control, like steam against a lid that had no outlet to siphon it off. Anger like the pressure against a mountain face just before a volcano blew; it had been building a long time, but only now did you suddenly realize the danger.
“If he doesn’t like it, I’ll dump him, as promised.” She could probably keep up the fiction of Cal Kenton’s brief presence in her life indefinitely, right? And never have to tell Simon the truth, that she had actually dumped someone who hadn’t existed?
A vein throbbed in Simon’s temple. He looked—scarily grim.
Ellie felt her insides knot in anguish. She hadn’t realized he was that near the brink, over sharing her. That he might get fed up and break it off, as—as would be his right, really. Cal Kenton was such a ridiculous farce on her end, that maybe she had never quite realized what it would feel like to Simon, believing he was real. “I promise!”
“Ellie.” Simon gripped the edge of his desk, in pure rage and ... despair? “What am I going to do with you? I’m the first to understand why you want to protect—all this.” He made a little gesture that meant ... her. “After all, you must know you’re precious. But, Ellie—I think you’re precious, too. Can’t you trust me a little bit?”
Trust him. Not to drop her. She huddled her arms around herself, kneading. “I think you’ll be really mad.” More mad. Good lord. The room already felt as if steel was trying way too hard to hold in an explosion, disaster imminent for everyone in that steel’s vicinity when it blew.
He leaned forward, poised, tense. “Try me.”
She took a hard breath and closed her eyes tight. She held that breath inside her so long that she had to let it out to get more oxygen, and into its violent expulsion she packed all the words: “I-don’t-have-a-fiancé-never-did-I-was-just-trying-to-find-a-way-in.” There. She had to breathe in again. She peeked at him.
All the tension was collapsing out of his body. He looked almost exhausted from its departure, as if it had been carrying him for a long time.
“I write a food blog,” she said low, hanging her head. “When I came to Paris, I was just so excited, and embarrassed, and then I just ... it felt a lot safer to have the perfect fiancé.”
Her eyes pricked. That was pathetic. She forced her chin up, so she wouldn’t play the pathos card to someone she had been tricking all this time, and met his eyes.
He was smiling at her. He had sunk onto the edge of the desk as if he had no muscles left, and he looked ... utterly relieved.
She frowned a little uncertainly. “Are you—I mean—” She cleared her throat. “You might be a little too self-controlled sometimes. Why don’t you go ahead and yell at me, and then we can talk, and then you can realize I’m really not so bad and get over it?”
His smile grew blinding. He reached for her, and Ellie was so surprised, her hands got stuck under her elbows, and she couldn’t get them untucked fast enough. He caught her by the upper arms and pulled her against him. “Minou, I love you. I especially love the part of you that doesn’t give me the option of not getting over it.”
“Well.” She set her jaw mulishly. He had said he would catch her, no matter what. Sometimes a woman had to hold a man to a promise like that.
He kissed her until her mouth lost its stubborn set, and then he kissed her for a lot longer still, as if he needed to. When he at last lifted his head, he had snapped yet another of her hairbands, and her hair was spilling all over her shoulders. The man had some kind of personal crusade against ponytail holders.
“I want to tell the whole world about you,” she whispered into his mouth, losing her last bit of sense. Idiot, she didn’t have to confess all her flaws, all at once.
“I know,” he breathed. His kisses were growing wilder, like a person who had thought he might starve suddenly given free run at a feast. “I know you do.”
“You don’t—you don’t mind?” He couldn’t realize how many hits she got a day. “When I said the whole world—I wasn’t exaggerating by that much.”
He dragged his hands through her hair, clutching fistfuls of it. “I’m resigned to it. I’ll stand it. Don’t tell them about our sex life, all right? And no naked photos.”
“Of course not!” she said indignantly. Show him naked to all those hungry females? Did he think she was an imbecile? Actually, now that she thought about it, maybe any pictures of him might be ... maybe she should just concentrate on his chocolate. And stress how ugly he was.
He teased her mouth apart with his thumbs at the corners, kissed her some more. “If I get over this, can you get over something on my part?”
Ellie’s mind scrambled wildly for possible crimes. Cheating on her with a French nurse? No, wait, that was his alter ego. Or was Cal Kenton more like his evil nemesis? “Y-es,” she said hesitantly.
“Now, please try to take this as well as I’m taking your news.” He stroked her back, pre-emptive soothing. Started to speak, then paused, reached into a box stamped with his name, silver on black, on his desk, and slipped something into her mouth. The flavor of one of his chocolates burst on her tongue, just where his own tongue had been a second before. “I knew you were lying. From the first. You’re not very good at it.”
She stared at him for a long moment, forced to absorb that news with the most luscious chocolate melting in her mouth, claiming her body. She finally swallowed, and just before she could speak, Simon rubbed his thumb across her upper lip, smiled at the chocolate on its tip, and
sucked it off. That—she had to learn how to manipulate him that well. “God damn it. You really could see through to my underwear, couldn’t you?”
“White cotton, no lace, sexy as hell,” he said promptly. “You really shouldn’t wear that kind of thing in public. Makes a man think all kinds of things. You might try—” He paused and considered. And considered. Against her body, she could feel his arousal growing ever more pronounced. “I’m not sure what you could try, en fait. So far, it’s all looking good.”
“And I am, too, a good liar. It’s just you. No one can lie to you.”
“Well. You can’t, c’est sûr.”
She frowned at him. “I think I’ll be madder about this after it’s had time to sink in.” All the times he had tormented her with mentions of her fiancé ...
“While it’s sinking ...” He brought a little box out of his back pocket. “Before it has time to settle ...”
It was her engagement ring. The one with the antique scrolled setting and the beveled-set diamond, that she had found for $35 in a shop full of fake jewelry in Les Halles, that slightly sordid center of Paris.
“I stole the other one,” he said, falsely apologetic. “You don’t mind if I keep it, do you? This is a copy I had made.” His lips compressed a little, his eyes alive with laughter. “It’s a real diamond now. And I believe the silver won’t turn your finger green anymore. Merde, Ellie, don’t cry.”
He pulled her into his arms again.
But she cried anyway.
He patted her rather helplessly on the back and talked her through it. “We can have a long engagement, so you can come to terms with the toothpaste thing. I even thought—we could maybe have two apartments side by side, with a connecting door like a suite, I’m just throwing this out there, it’s an option if I drive you too crazy to live with me. I’m going to take the crying as a yes, all right?”
He took her hand and slid the ring very, very carefully onto her finger. Ellie, who had almost gotten herself under control, opened her eyes to see his expression as he looked at her hand and started crying again.
“Allez, minou, arrête.” He stroked her hair. “All right, don’t stop, if it makes you—is this happy?”
She nodded, her face sliding in her hair against his chest.
“The ring is all right? I thought ... since it was the ring the perfect man for you had picked.” She snuck a peek at him suspiciously and caught the bitten-down grin. “Endurance athlete and all that ...”
“I just made that endurance athlete thing up off the top of my head!” She began to pull herself together, mopping her eyes and pulling back a little from his chest.
“So it must be true.” He lifted her left hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss into the center of her palm, holding it there against his mouth a moment, his eyes closing. “I might cut back on that, though. Do only half distances, maybe.”
She scrubbed her eyes some more, trying to focus. “Why? Uh—did I hurt you the other night? You know, I did ask if that position wasn’t hard on your thighs, but you wouldn’t listen ...”
He grinned into her hand, then opened his eyes and gazed at her, still holding her hand to his face, so that his voice buzzed against her palm. “I work ten or twelve hours a day, and training for four more doesn’t leave much time to be with you.”
She opened her free hand and closed it uncomfortably on emptiness. She never wanted anyone to give up any dream or ambition for her. Not a dream. But the thought of evening after evening with him out running or swimming or biking or otherwise occupied felt ... scarily bare. “You don’t have to change for me.”
He shook his head, his jaw scraping faintly against her palm. “I’m very self-centered. That might develop into a problem over time. This is for me.” A breath against her palm, a flush. “I can’t get enough of you.”
Now she was the one who blushed. “I’m sure that will calm down eventually—”
He smiled and finally lowered her hand so that he was no longer hiding behind it. “I didn’t mean just sex. Although that’s a very enjoyable facet of it. You light up my life,” he said simply.
Her mouth softened open. Her eyes widened and stung again.
His flush deepened. This man clearly found it easier to express himself in chocolate. But he kept on. “All those sculptures.” He nodded to the photos of award-winning swoops and swirls and color and deliciousness on the wall, made a sweep of his hand that seemed to indicate his whole chocolaterie, or perhaps his whole life. “All that time.” He pulled her tightly against him again. “I was just trying to make you.”
If you enjoyed Laura Florand’s “All’s Fair in Love and Chocolate,” take a taste of The Chocolate Thief, coming this August.
Sylvain Marquis knew what women desired—chocolate. And so he had learned as he grew into adulthood how to master a woman’s desire.
Outside, November had turned the Paris streets cold and gray. But in his laboratoire, he brought his chocolate to the temperature he wanted it, smooth and luxurious. He spread it out across his marble counter. With a deft flick of his hand, he stroked it up and spread it out again, glowing and dark.
In the shop, an elegant blonde whose every movement spoke of wealth and privilege was buying a box of his chocolates, unable to resist biting into one before she left the shop. He could see her through the glass window that allowed visitors a glimpse of the way artisan chocolate was made. He saw her perfect teeth sink into the thumbnail-size chocolate and knew exactly the way the shell yielded with a delicate resistance, the way the ganache inside melted on her tongue, the pleasure that ran through her body.
He smiled a little, bending his head to focus on his chocolate again. He did not see the next woman as she entered his shop.
But as it turned out, she wasn’t about to let him miss her.
The scent of chocolate snuck out onto the rainy street. Boot heels broke their rapid rhythm as passersby, bundled in long black coats, glanced toward the source and hesitated. Some stopped. Some went on. Cade’s momentum carried her inside.
Theobromine wrapped around her like a warm blanket against the chill. Cacao flooded her senses.
She hugged herself. The odor brought her home, belying her own eyes, which told her she couldn’t be farther from the steel vats of the factory, the streams of chocolate ejecting without break in tempo from spouts into molds, and the billions of perfectly identical bars and bold-printed wrappings that had formed her life.
Something, some tension she carried with her, unknit in her shoulder muscles, and the shiver from its release rippled all the way through her body.
Someone had molded chocolate into giant cacao bean halves that graced the display windows and added drama to the corners of the shop. She could imagine the hand that had shaped it—a man’s hand, strong, square, long-fingered, capable of the most delicate precision. She had a photo of that hand as her laptop wallpaper.
On the surface of each bean, he had painted a scene from a different country that produced cacao. And on the surface of the horizontal “beans,” he had placed thumbnail-size chocolates, exactly where he wanted them.
She looked around. Tucked in corners here and there, black brands on shipping crates spoke of distant lands. Real cacao beans spilled from the crates, reminding customers that chocolate was an exotic thing, brought from another world. Cade had seen those lands. The black brands brought their scents and sights back to her mind, the people she had met there, the sounds of machetes on cacao trees, the scent of fermenting cacao husks.
He had scattered cocoa nibs here and there, as a master chef might decorate a plate with a few drops of sauce. He had spilled vanilla beans and cinnamon bark on multiple surfaces, wantonly, a débauche of raw luxury.
Every single element of this décor emphasized the raw, beautiful nature of chocolate and thus the triumph of its ultimate refinement: the minuscule squares, the chocolats worth one hundred fifty dollars a pound, from the hand of Sylvain Marquis.
Sylvain Marquis. Some
said he was the top chocolatier in Paris. He did, too, she thought. She knew he had that confidence. She knew it from that picture of his hand she carried on her laptop.
His boxes were the color of raw wood and tied with shipping string. The name stamped on them—SYLVAIN MARQUIS—dominated them, the color of dark chocolate, the font a bare, bold statement.
Cade breathed in, seeking courage from the scents and sights. Heady excitement gripped her, but also, in strange counterpoint, fear, as if she was about to walk naked onto a stage in front of a hundred people. She shouldn’t feel this way. Chocolate was her business, her heritage. Her dad often joked her veins ran with the stuff. A significant portion of the global economy actually did run off the chocolate her family produced. She could offer Sylvain Marquis incredible opportunity.
And yet she felt so scared to try she could barely swallow.
She kept seeing her family’s most famous bar, milk chocolate wrapped in foil and paper and stamped with her name—33 cents on sale at Walmart. Those 33-cent bars had put more money in her family’s bank accounts than most people could imagine. Certainly more than he could imagine. And yet her soul shriveled at the thought of taking the one in her purse out and displaying it in these surroundings.
“Bonjour,” she said to the nearest clerk, and excitement rushed to her head again, driving out everything else it contained. She’d done it. She’d spoken her first word of French to an actual Parisian, in pursuit of her goal. She had studied Spanish and French off and on for most of her life, so that she could easily communicate when she visited their cacao plantations. For the past year, she had also paid native French speakers to tutor her toward her purpose, an hour a day and homework every night, focusing on the words she had come here today to use—samples, marketing, product lines. And chocolat.
And now, finally, here she was. Speaking. About to put la cerise sur le gâteau of the whole new line she was planning for the company. The cherry on the cake ... maybe they could do something with La Cerise as one of the new line’s products. . .
Kiss the Bride Page 28
