The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 20



Philippe was afraid. He had seen Magalie’s face the night before when her aunts found them, and he knew something could go very, very wrong here. She could cast him out farther than he had ever been, so that he didn’t just need lockpicks and temptation and determination to get back in but a compass and very strong rowing arms to cross the vast, cold sea.

He was so afraid that on that busiest day of the year, when demand for his most perfect creations could not be satiated, when men got off work early and waited in line for an hour to find the one thing that would brighten a lady’s heart . . . he delegated all of it. For the first time, in all the years of Valentine’s Days, he had his own heart to worry about.

He focused until all the noise of the kitchen, and even the intern upending an entire tray of freshly finished Couronnes, crushing strawberries, pistachio, cream, and cake on the floor, didn’t distract him. Someone told him later that it had happened.

At the half of a marble counter that he had taken for himself, he whipped aged egg whites. By hand. A little smile played over his mouth at the intensity of the whipping. God knew, he needed something on which to take out his frustrations after last night. That morning’s brutal workout at the gym had not done it.

He dusted in sugar so fine that breathing on it raised a cloud around his hand, like the puff of a magic spell. He added coloring until the meringue was as brilliant red as heart’s blood, knowing that when it cooked, it would pale to a perfect pink, and no one would ever know the intensity of the passion that had gone into it. He rubbed almond meal in his palm, ground so fine it felt silky and warm against his skin, processed it with equal parts confectioners’ sugar, and folded it in.

While the meringue shells baked, he experimented with the ganache that would fill them. It was la Saint- Valentin. And she had indeed turned him into a beast. Maybe he should offer her a rose.

White chocolate and cream, rose syrup, and three drops of attar of roses. No, it needed something more. He prowled his shelves of ingredients, dry and fresh, in and out of his refrigerators. Occasionally he tasted something. He stopped before a case of rambutan, picked up from an Asian market in Belleville. The little red monster-fruit was prickly and hard on the exterior, but for the curious person who braved it, the skin could be split easily enough to reveal the silky, sweet interior, a clean, fresh flavor similar to lychees.

A little smile played around his mouth. If this was indeed the flavor that would match with the roses, how appropriate.

Splitting the skins on rambutan after prickly rambutan gave him immense satisfaction, especially as his fingers gained in deftness, and they fell to him more and more easily, the rubbery little thorns a pleasant defiance against his fingers. Especially as that defiance yielded. Rambutan, roses, cream, white chocolate . . . as the chocolate melted under the hot cream, as he blended the ingredients together into something unctuous and extraordinary, he thought of pale skin and pink secrets, of melting a person and making her body yield everything to his touch.

Let me in.

I will make you notice me.

Not the greatest anger or the greatest will in the world will keep your mouth locked tight against me.

Still it needed something. A heart. He thought of that rose heart hidden in the witch’s dark-chocolate basket in Magalie’s window. A secret in the middle, that last burst of bliss, her body helpless as he held it . . .

As the ganache cooled, he prowled the fillings they had made the day before, until a deep, intense red on one of the shelves of his cold-storage rooms caught his eye. Raspberry gelée. Normally intended to be tucked in tiny heart shapes into one of his dark chocolate macarons, for Valentine’s Day, but he wouldn’t offer Magalie chocolate. Her life was full of chocolate. The gelée was as intense in color, heart’s-blood red, as the meringue had been before it baked to a soft, deceptively gentle pink. One small square, the exact size of his thumb on her pulse, on her breasts, on her mouth, on her . . .

He tucked it inside, nestled in the heart of the creamy pale ganache, hid it under the pink shell.

And stood back, uneasy. It looked so . . . naked. Vulnerable. The pink shells filled with pale cream. He couldn’t do that to her. Maybe he couldn’t do that to himself. What was inside this macaron deserved protection.

He bit into a raspberry from the flat shipped up fresh from his greenhouse grower in Spain. Sweet, tender, so fragile before his teeth, so perfect on his tongue. From those raspberries he made armor around the vulnerable edge of the ganache, nestled between the two shells, hiding it from the world.

He tasted one. Oh, yes, perfect. He glanced up. Despite the insane rush of Valentine’s Day, half his kitchen had crept around him, eyeing the rose and raspberry macarons hungrily.

He held up a hand, and they launched back to their posts like trained tigers before a whip. But they looked over at his counter as they worked. He would be getting acid comments about sub-par pâtisseries in reviews the next day.

He stood looking at the finished product for a long moment.

Then abruptly he left the shop and walked down to the florist, standing in line behind all the other men waiting to buy roses. The florist, arranging and wrapping with ribbons and cellophane in a mad whirl, grinned at him happily when he finally got to the counter. “For Magalie?”

No, he hadn’t been subtle, had he? How could Magalie not know?

“I loved the Valentine’s post.”

What?

“Le Gourmand,” the florist explained.

He would have to find out what Christophe had done and murder him later. He couldn’t spare the concentration now. His focus was entirely dominated by the creation waiting to be finished on his marble counter.

Back in his laboratoire, he pulled the petals carefully from one rosebud. He laid just one of those red petals, so perfect and silky and precise, on the top of the macaron shell, cocked his head a moment, and then pursed his lips and found some glucose syrup. Just one tiny bead of it, like dew, on the petal. And one raspberry, a hint of a crown. Or perhaps, he thought with a flicker of a smile, a hint of a nipple peaking to his touch.

He picked it up very carefully and laid it in a pink box stamped with his name.