The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 16



She was so pissed off at that sense of being a zebra by the time she got back to her apartment, she couldn’t stop cursing herself for running. How else could she have gotten away? Walked? He would have kept pace. Caught a taxi? At six in the morning? And, anyway, any kind of running was running. She suspected he would have gloated at her zebra retreat no matter how she’d made it.

She was not a damned zebra to his lion. He was a toad to her witch. Or . . . a beast. A toad seemed a little . . . small and scaly. It might be she’d prefer to turn him into something she could sink her hands into.

Of course, the only choice to avoid the zebra role would have been not to retreat at all. But that might have left her . . . what? A zebra rug in front of his fireplace?

She was not a damn zebra.

She finished climbing the stairs, feeling her run-tired muscles all six flights. En route to a shower, she got stopped by the mirror and stood staring at herself.

Her hair had escaped her ponytail, whipped free by the wind. Her face was bare of makeup. She never wore a lot of makeup, anyway, but there was a world of difference between a skillful application of natural-looking improvements and seeing her eyes and mouth and cheeks completely bare, stripped further by the wind. Her face was flushed and sweaty.

She didn’t understand.

He had kissed her when she looked like that?

She turned the water on hot and stepped under it, letting it pour over her endlessly like a substitute for the warmth she had fled.

She finally stepped out only because the heat of the water had faded to tepid and was moving to chilly, and the chill brought her some strength. But rubbing herself dry with her enormous white terry-cloth towel, she shivered again, her skin too sensitive, too hungry for texture and warmth and touch.

After five years of learning how to dress like a Parisian, she pulled out all the stops. Her armor that morning was invincible, designed to bring anyone to his knees while keeping her on her feet. Soft folds of silk fell around her shoulders: a shift one way could have that supple neckline spilling sideways to bare a shoulder, another and the extra cloth slid down between her breasts in a plunging neckline, another still and it drooped behind her, exposing the nape of her neck, a hint of her back. Below the neckline, it grew snugger, kissing the peaks of her breasts, her ribs and waist, and coming down over her hips to her upper thighs. A subtly patterned legging, with a motif up the sides that somehow suggested the old-fashioned line of stockings, disappeared under her top. Large green, fine filigree leaves dangled from her ears. She spent half an hour on her hair, the wisps escaping from her chignon just right.

Over the leggings she pulled on thigh-high boots. She had to make a special quick trip into the Marais to get them. She had been putting off buying them because they were so expensive, and now this year they were really already on their way out of style. But she wanted the leather climbing up her thighs. She wanted that toughness with its vivid, strong message beneath that silk.





When Philippe walked into La Maison des Sorcières, Magalie felt . . . like a zebra.

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.”