The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 26



As the shocks to her body faded, Philippe began stripping her. The silk sliding over her hot, damp face grazed her plump, parted lips that did not want that teasing wisp of a touch, that begged to close around something hard and unyielding. To close around him and force him to the same helplessness. He left her bra on but scooped under its lace for her breasts, delicately pinching the nipples so that she cried out, and then pulling them free of the cups, so that they were pressed up but exposed.

He stripped off her pants, ruthlessly, lifting her up so that she stood with her legs apart before him as he did it, her breasts pouty before his mouth. He liked her black lace panties. He left them on. “God, I wish you had worn your boots,” he breathed, squeezing his hand over her sex like he might squeeze the juice from a lime, and another ripple of aftershock went through her body, his hand coming away from her panties gleaming. “The ones that come up to here.” He closed his hands around her thighs and pressed them farther apart, with that quick, savage lion’s grin at what he saw.

But she had already come once, and she could feel the balance of power seesawing delicately. Because he hadn’t had any relief. His arousal was desperate and desperately clear. It was possible that he had never in his life needed anything as badly as he right now needed her.

She was worse than exposed, but she didn’t feel vulnerable.

She didn’t feel helpless.

She felt stripped naked, yes. But strong in it. As if that was an absolutely beautiful, perfect way to be. She felt like Lady Godiva might have felt. As if she was a woman who could in fact walk naked through a crowd and never be touched by any look or word because her pride and her sense of self were unassailable.

She bent over him, with her thighs still braced apart the way he had spread them, with her breasts spilling toward his mouth, and ripped his T-shirt off over his head.

“Yes,” he breathed, his body flexing with pleasure as the move stretched his arms over his head, so that muscles rippled the length of his torso. Broad shoulders, a tight waist, curls darker than his tawny hair across his chest. “Yes. God. Attack me.”

But instead of letting her, he surged to his feet, grabbing her and flipping her around as if her body was as easily controllable as a doll’s, curling her hands against the edge of the table.

A moment ago, his back had been to the window, the chair and his body hiding her. But now, she glanced sideways at the lights in the street, that great expanse of glass.

“They can’t see us,” he whispered, his penis pressing through his pants against her butt cheeks, as if to find its way to the thong that disappeared between them.

She was his doll, his puppet; he could do anything to her. She would let him. Over and over, every way he wanted, all night long.

“You had better hope so,” she said, and she turned, pressing him back to the table instead. She curled his hands around its edge, and they tightened until the knuckles showed white.

She reached behind her, the movement thrusting her breasts up, and took off her bra, tossing it away. She, too, wished for her boots, the thigh-high ones and nothing else, but thong panties and utter nakedness would have to do.

She pulled his jeans down over his hips and knelt with the movement. His slave, his very slave. And all the power was completely in her hands.

Com-plete-ly. Her hands closed over his penis, both at once, and squeezed hard. He made a harsh sound as if he had been shot, and his body jerked.

She opened her mouth and closed it over him in the same greedy rush with which she had first snatched at his macaron. And in the same way, the first silk-salt feel of him slowed her. She didn’t want to rush this. Her tongue curled around him.

“Magalie. God. Please. Don’t.”

Don’t? I’ll do whatever I want to you, she thought. She would have told him so with words, but then she would have had to interrupt the more effective demonstration.

She took him in, sucking on him greedily, the way his body reacted making her own lower body weep again with hunger. His groaning growls surrounded her, vibrating down over her skin, her naked kneeling body, her bottom taut and bereft of his warmth against the cold air.

She couldn’t take him all in. Her mouth was too small. But she flicked her tongue hungrily, curiously against his tip and stroked it around his head, the hardness and pulse of him, and brought both hands to grip the base of his shaft, the heel of her palms cupping his testicles.

“God, God, God,” he groaned, and she loved it; she loved hearing him lose all his intellect, his control, just that long, growling plea for mercy.

She reduced him to nothing in less than a minute, his body shaking uncontrollably as he came.

And she threw back her head, naked at his feet with the taste of him on her tongue, and laughed.

Laughed in pure, glorious, giddy conquest.





“God.” Philippe’s big body seemed so utterly weak. Slowly, as the room felt colder, he managed to peel himself from the table. He picked her up. Confounding her. She thought she had made him weaker than she was. Too weak to pick her up as if she was nothing.

He carried her into his bathroom and turned the warm shower on them both, tucking his body against hers under the hot water, and then ignoring his own body thereafter. Pouring soap into his hand, he rubbed it, a warm, clean scent, all over her. Scraping her wet hair gently away from her face, he pulled her head back against his shoulder and let the water, at its gentlest pulse, stream over her face, her closed eyes. She had no strength left, although desire seemed to have grown again in a way that made her malleable.

The water and the soap and his body were such a blur of sensations, of slumberous longing, that it felt like a continuation of a dream when he turned her and lifted her astride him, sliding into her body. He tucked her face now into his shoulder, so that her hair fell around it, sheltering it from the spray, and the water streamed over the back of her head and down her spine as he took her, in easy, gentle thrusts, so that when she first began to come, she almost didn’t realize she was doing so; the shocks just slipped up on her, seemed part of her, as if she was earthquake territory, and tremors were her constant.

Gentle and subtle though they were in their approach, they took control of her and would not leave her. Limp and clinging and wet, her arms wrapped around him, the water streaming over her, she came over and over, in long, soft vibrations, while he moved in her, slow, sliding thrusts.

His arms bulged on either side of her head when he shifted her back against the earth-tone tiles, but even at the end, his thrusts stayed slow, and long, and steady, and just very, very deep as his strength spurted up into her.

Her body trembled in those faint seismic tremors as he lowered her and drew her back against him again, scooping water and soap against the folds of her sex and washing her most intimately and thoroughly, as if he was exploring now at leisure something that fascinated him.

He wrapped her in a giant thick towel, for lack of a bathrobe, and picked her up like a child and carried her to his bed.

Lying in front of her, he laughed softly, wonderingly as he slowly peeled the towel away from her body. Unlike the living area, his bedroom was a cave, its window covered with heavy, pale drapes, the big bed a square, modern take on the canopied beds of centuries ago, so that the padded headboard rose high and formed a ceiling with the two square posts at the foot.

Philippe pushed their towels onto the floor and pulled the heavy comforter over them, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her back, a hot body against the cold.

“Magalie,” he whispered just before she fell asleep, tracing a fingertip around her ear as if to draw her attention to an important secret. “Je t’aime.”

The words glided over her with caressing, warm confidence, so that their speaker could have no idea that they speared her like a fish and left her gasping, out of the water.

Her eyes flared open, lashes catching against the hairs of his forearm under her head, and she stared into the white night of the comforter while his body grew heavy over hers, asleep.

Living between two languages, sometimes, with the rarer words, she thought a lot about what they meant. Her mother was the only other person who had said those same two syllables to her, Je t’aime. But her mother’s accent had stretched it and bounced it, a gay little sound, not like Philippe’s crisp, firm prince-of-Paris pronunciation.

While she was growing up, her mother had said it every day, often many times a day. “Bonne nuit, ma minette, je t’aime,” as she tucked her into the freshly changed sheets smelling of lavender at her grandparents’ house, just arrived off the plane. “Tu es ma petite chérie.” “Oh, ma petite puce, je t’aime,” on the plane from America to France, their father and Magalie’s school friends left behind, as Magalie, cheerful and sweet and six years old, hugged her mother to stop her crying. “Je t’aime, mon bébé. S’il n’y avait pas toi . . .” If it wasn’t for you . . . as she tucked Magalie into her bed in the States after flying back with their father to try again, the sheets smelling of Tide. “Mais, Magalie, nous t’aimons,” the desperate protest when Magalie had fought and won the right to go back to the U.S. by herself at sixteen.

In the vain attempt to create a home with a boyfriend who had said, “I love you” primarily because he thought that was what she wanted to hear in order to have sex.

No other person had ever used those exact words to her. Her aunts didn’t say them. Her grandparents called her their chérie, their petite puce, and they clearly did love her, but they never directly said, “Je t’aime.” Her father, like her boyfriend, used English, a steady, often regretful phrase, for wherever Magalie’s mother went, Magalie had gone, too, which meant she had often been pulled from him. “I love you, sweetie.”

Women sometimes said it about someone else, sitting at the tables in La Maison des Sorcières, a heartbroken, “Mais, je l’aime.” And Magalie would roll her eyes and make them some chocolate that would put their heads back on straight.

What Philippe meant, she had no idea. But it made part of her curl warily away, into herself, because whatever he meant, it could only be a way to entice her own emotions out of her, to stretch them from her to him, where they would be ripped like over-tried tendons when . . . when . . . well, she didn’t know when, because she wasn’t planning on moving ever again. But some shift would occur, and with her emotions all out there, caught far away from her, instead of contained and strong within the island of herself, they would be torn to pieces when it did.