The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 24



Magalie sat in her room, high above the island, ensconced in creamy white.The radiator was on high, but she was cold. They were predicting snow.

Outside her window, the night sky was as dark as Paris got, the lights from the city flushing up on the underside of the snow clouds that tantalized it. Would it snow, or wouldn’t it?

Magalie wrapped her bathrobe tighter around herself and curled her toes in her fluffy socks against the comforter and stared at the raspberry-bereft macaron sitting in her lap.

She brought the lid down over it to hide it and studied the name Lyonnais until it seemed branded somewhere inside her. As if he had laid claim to her soul.

She opened the box and gazed at the work of sensual art inside it again. The missing raspberry was like a blasphemy, an accusation of her cowardice. If she hadn’t hesitated so long . . .

The drop of glucose still balanced perfectly on the rose petal, like a tear.

She curved her hands under it, the macaron shell glossy against her palms. I made the shell silk . . . like the silk I rubbed over your skin. She lifted it up to the level of her mouth.

It begged her to eat it. Just one bite.

She kept seeing Philippe’s face. You gave my heart to a dog?

That was just a play on words, of course. He must have named this new creation Coeur, the way he named others Désir or Envie.

It looked so exquisitely beautiful, she couldn’t understand how anyone could have made this for her.

She set it back into its box and got up suddenly, pulling clothes back on, an extra sweater, and snow boots instead of her usual heels because . . . well, it was cold, and they were predicting snow. And she felt . . . humbled. She bundled up in her heaviest coat, because it was a way of cuddling herself even as she ventured out, and went back outside into the evening.

The lights at Lyonnais were all out. Grégory was just locking the door.

Magalie stopped, burying her hands in her pockets. A plastic sack from a shoe store hung from one of her wrists.

Grégory turned away from the door and saw her. He paused, clearly surprised, then came toward her. “Philippe’s gone home.”

Oh. Magalie buried her hands deeper, fisting them so that she scrubbed her knuckles against the bottoms of her pockets. “Where—” Her voice was rough. She cleared it. “Where’s that?”

The address he gave her was in the Marais. Not too far. She could walk it in under ten minutes. But over the bridge and across the water, off her island.

She rubbed her knuckles into her pockets again as Grégory said bon soir, his mouth twisting regretfully, as if he was saying adieu. The street was quiet. On the island, it grew quiet at night. In the Marais, there would be more noise. A lot more noise. It was Friday night, la Saint-Valentin, and couples would be filling the restaurants and bars and walking close together against the cold.

She stood still, there in the middle of her silent street for a while. The cold ate into her, and that teasing promise of snow.

She swallowed, lifted her chin, and set off.





Couples strolled, laughing and romantic, all around her as she stood in front of Philippe’s seventeenth-century building, and for once no part of her felt as if she needed to brace herself a little, keep her chin up. For once, all these other people just made her feel . . . quiet. She thought they were charming, and she wished she was one of them, walking along with her hand tucked in someone else’s. One particular someone else’s.

She took a deep breath and pressed the button by apartment 3B and realized as a brusque “Oui?” came back through the intercom that she should have cleared her throat first. “C’est”—she paused and tried to swallow her hoarseness away. “C’est Magalie.”

She heard a rough indrawn breath. And then a clicking sound as the door released beside her, and she pushed it open.

He met her at the first landing, running down the stairs in a T-shirt and jeans. Barefoot.

He stopped very still when he saw her. “Magalie.”

She gazed back at him mutely.

A couple came out of the apartment on the same landing and nodded at Philippe politely and, by extension, her, although not without discreet glances at his bare feet. The couple was dressed for an evening out. She was reminded of how early it was for a city like Paris. Did she and Philippe both start getting ready for bed so early? Him, well, presumably because the work in most pâtisseries started around 4:30 in the morning. Her . . . because she liked to curl up in her own space.

Philippe hadn’t even remembered to nod back at the couple. He had a way of focusing that shut out everything else, and right now he was focused on her. He held out a hand. “Come up.”

It took her a second to realize that he wasn’t going to lead the way up the stairs.

Of course, he wouldn’t. Her mouth trembled between wryness and understanding. He was a prince. It was bone-deep in him to climb stairs behind the woman when she went up and before her when she went down. In case she fell.

His hand reached again, angled lower, starting to curl around the handles pulling at her wrist. She realized he was offering to carry her sack. She shook her head, climbing the stairs before him, conscious of his presence so close at her back.

From the door of his apartment, one could look straight across the wide-open living space and parquet floor to great windows through which came lights and colors and life on the streets a few floors below. Lamps glowed through curtains and blinds in the windows of the equally old building across the street. The open curtains on Philippe’s own windows made her feel extraordinarily exposed. But no lights were on in the room to show her to those outside. The space was gently illuminated only by the lights in the street.

She crossed to the windows slowly, mostly so as not to look at him yet, conscious of the muted sound of her footsteps on the parquet, quieter still on the opulent carpet in the center of the room. I come in peace, her absence of heels seemed to say.

“Do you want me to draw the curtains?” Philippe asked just behind her shoulder. She did not start. Even though his bare feet had been perfectly soundless, she had felt him behind her every step of the way. The same way, no doubt, that a zebra felt a lion prowling behind it. That so pissed her off, the zebra image. “No one can see in unless we turn on the lights.”

The activity in the streets below promised fun to anyone who ventured out. Just witnessing it made the evening seem exciting. She was not retired in her cozy room, where she had started feeling so lonely.

From his furniture came an impression of elegance and quality, a modern, clean look in muted colors. The thick carpet across which she had walked was a rich gray, for example. It surprised her, with the intense jewel tones and flamboyant structures he used in his work. Did he, too, seek something quieter when he retired into himself? Or was muted simplicity the best foil for his dramatic creations?

She turned to face him, and he stood a foot away, watching her. He did not move back to give her room. But he did not lean forward to make her feel enclosed, the way he had many times before. He waited. A pulse jumped in his throat.

“May I take your coat?” he asked, and her eyes flicked up to his. A second of silence beat between them. If she took off her coat, she was planning on staying. If he offered to take it, he was inviting her to.

“Yes,” she said. And heard the breath he drew.

When he slid her coat off her arms, he did not touch her at all. She could feel him, behind her, not touching her. So graceful and practiced with that coat removal, with his elitist, Sixteenth-Arrondissement education.

She set the sack on his small dining table, in the kitchen area of the large living space, so cleverly divided by furniture from the “living room” area. She had seen an article a week before on his sister’s interior design of his shops; she must have done this place, too, but it was very different. The clean, elegant juxtaposition of age and modernity was exquisite.

From the sack, she drew the Lyonnais box and set it, opened, on the center of the table, so that he could see the rose-heart macaron.

He said nothing. From behind her, she could feel the intensity of his focus. Waiting.

“The poodle only got the raspberry,” she explained, and she had to clear her throat. “I fought her off for the rest.”

Another beat of silence. “And may I ask what about that made you so furious? Other than the fact that it came from me, of course.”

Her face flamed. She set her jaw, trying to force the explanation out. “It was—she only ate the raspberry, one raspberry—and then she, she let the . . . you know that German shepherd that wanders around the end of the quay?”

He made a half-strangled sound. Was that a half-strangled laugh? She gave him a burning look. “The, uh, the unneutered male German shepherd?” he asked. Oh, yes, he was definitely strangling a laugh. His voice trembled with his effort at neutrality.

She rapped her knuckles down hard on the table and said nothing. Her mouth set defiantly.

He burst out laughing, wrapping an arm around his middle and leaning forward to grab the back of a chair with the other. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” he apologized between gusts as she glowered at him. “I’m just—I’m seeing—oh, you must have been so mad.” He said that with pure delight.

She glared at him, imagining him bursting into flames from her look alone. Oh, if only that were possible.

“And all that from just one of my raspberries?” he crowed.

She turned completely around, fists clenched hard. The bones of her fingers kept trying to warn her that it would hurt if she hit His Highness’s jaw, but she could barely resist, nevertheless. “Do you think I am a bitch in heat?”

He stopped laughing, staring at her in shock. “Bon Dieu, Magalie. Of course not.”

The shock was so sincere, the fury in her started to relax.

His lips pressed together. Laughter snuck up past them, like steam escaping from under a pot lid. The lid abruptly abandoned its effort, and he burst out laughing again. “Pardon, pardon,” he apologized helplessly. “I just—I keep seeing—you must have been livid.”

Well, he certainly enjoyed the thought of making her livid, didn’t he?

She pulled the next item out of her sack and set it down with a thump.

Philippe stopped laughing as if she had flipped a switch. Next to his open box now sat a small Ziploc bag of couverture chocolate. Exactly as much as she would need to make a pot of chocolat chaud. In the same bag were zipped one cinnamon stick, nutmeg, and one vanilla bean. She pulled out a glass bottle of milk and set it on the table with a click.

The silence built between them until they could hear every laugh from every happy couple in the street below.

“Très bien,” Philippe said. “A sip for a bite. Go ahead, Magalie. Do your worst.”