The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 28



Philippe was in the witch’s tower, and it was all he could do not to wave a damn sword in victory. He didn’t want her to kick him out of it, though. She didn’t have any visible thorns planted at its base to blind him, but it was a long fall, nevertheless.

He had taken over the tiny space between her little stove and the floor-to-ceiling window that opened inward from the iron railing of a pseudo-balcony front. His body blocked her miniature refrigerator and what there was of her counter space, but that was on purpose. He enjoyed shifting out of her way when she needed to access something and letting her movements brush him. Enjoyed it so much that his sword-waving was getting pretty obvious, now that his coat was off. He kept his stance open, not hiding it from her, wondering what she would do with the knowledge.

She had taken off her caked snowboots at the door, as he had his, but with a slanting glance at him, she had pulled on those thigh-high boots, turning him to molten lava instantly. Now she was stirring that chocolate of hers, and he might as well have been her cauldron, bubbling and melting at every turn of her spoon, thickening and rising and clinging to it, until with one stroke of her finger down the back of the wood, she would see exactly how desperate he was for her.

So he might as well tell her. She seemed to like that.

“You have no idea how hot this makes me.” To be in her most inviolate space, with the snow sliding past her windows, and her stirring just for him the chocolate that was both the very symbol of cozy warmth and the epitome of pure temptation. And those damn boots. He was barefoot, a little sign of vulnerability and also of making himself at home, and she was in those boots she knew he lusted after. He loved it.

Her breasts rose and fell at his words. He smiled a little, looking out at her glimpse of the Eiffel Tower and his name down the street, blurred through the snow. Life was very, very good.

He had a lot of work ahead of him, but, God knew, he loved his work.

He slanted a glance down over her butt and thighs and the long leather of her boots and tried to keep his grin contained to something that wouldn’t entirely tempt fate. Oh, yes, he had never shied from work.

“What are you wishing on me this time?” He was dreaming of running his fingertip from the top of her head down her spine and over that saucy butt to dip under the top of her boots and skirt around her thighs when he realized that he probably could. She might not throw the pot of simmering cream over his head, even.

So he did—from the part in her hair, down around the clasp that held her chignon, back to the line of her spine, down over the nape of her neck, down her back, over the small of her back, over one buttock, and then curling under the edge of leather, following it to her inner thigh.

Her spine flexed under his fingertip, her bottom tightened, and the fine hairs on the nape of her neck rose. Oh, yes, he thought with visceral satisfaction that surged arousal painfully through him. She wanted him. He had that.

He kept his finger tucked in her boot, there at her inner thigh, with malice aforethought, letting the trapped finger wiggle and flex from time to time, his other fingers drifting against that inner thigh, as if he might do something more purposeful with them. But never doing it.

It was so much fun to be cruel. Especially to someone who had just stabbed him, out there on the bridge in the snow.

“Are you wishing me to melt?” he suggested, letting his thumb drift so absently higher on her inner thigh and then tucking it down politely again as if catching an inadvertent stray. Her lips parted when he did it, and she had to pull the lower one in with her teeth. Her bent head tried to indicate a focus on her chocolate.

He never knew he was such a sadist. “Or trying to turn me into a beast?” He pretended his finger was uncomfortably twisted between her leather and legging and that he was trying to wriggle it free. His other fingers grazed randomly with his efforts over whatever was within reach. There was quite a lot of interesting territory that could be “accidentally,” oh, so fleetingly in reach.

“Or maybe just to warm a man up on a cold day?”

She lifted eyes that were utterly dazed, her mouth open for him, her gaze clinging to his own lips.

He gave her inner thigh a little squeeze to thank her for his victory, and suddenly his hand found its way free, and he strolled over to her other window, the one he had to kneel on her narrow bed to look out of. His body pointed out to him that he was not just a sadist but a masochist, but he got a rush of hot joy out of abandoning her, nevertheless.

Look like he’d slapped her when he told her he loved her, would she?

Oh, yes, he was going to have a lot of fun this afternoon.

“Drink it and find out,” she snapped at him. He allowed himself a very mean grin at the snow through her window. Frustrée, Magalie?

He rose from her bed, his knee marking the comforter with a stamp of possession that was a promise of things to come. She was going to let him into that bed. Oh, yes, she was. If he had his way, by the end of it, she would want to tie him up and never let him out.

You cruel bastard, quit torturing us with these images, his body begged.

He came back to sip some of the chocolate. She gave it to him hot, very hot, and he took his time playing with it, blowing on it, finally allowing himself one small sip. That sip shot straight through his body and grabbed a fistful of his heart.

He gave her his most vindictive smile. “I don’t feel any different.”

She thumped her own cup down onto the counter, making no attempt to drink it. He had never seen her drink her own chocolate. It was the kind of thing that could make a man really cautious about poison.

He leaned in and kissed her thoroughly, breaking apart the line her mouth had formed, turning it back into that soft and open and malleable thing and making sure she got a very good taste of her own chocolate off his tongue while he did it.

“Try some of mine, Magalie.” He opened the pastry box he had filled at the shop.

“You didn’t even make those for me.” She sounded sulky, either about her chocolate or his tormenting of her, or maybe a combination. “They were from the display case.”

“Magalie, everything I’ve made for the past four months has been for you.”

The sulk softened out of her mouth. Her eyes rose and clung to his in the way they had multiple times last night and this morning, as if trying to find out the truth behind his façade. What façade? He had never in his dealings with her been remotely subtle.

She looked back at the box, and he knew before she even tried it that she was going to do something to steal her power back, just by the subtle, almost shy curve of her mouth. Slowly, she drew one perfectly manicured fingernail down the length of the choux of the chocolate éclair, just below the glossy chocolate glaze. His whole body seized at this effort to subjugate him.

She lifted the éclair from its paper wrapping, her fingers handling it so carefully, and brought it to her mouth. Her lips parted around it, and he had just a glimpse of white teeth before they closed over the chocolate. She let her lashes fall, her body sigh, a long, little sound of pleasure.

Arousal beat through him, a flood force that caught him up and tossed his body any way it wanted. He reached up and closed a hand through the handle of one of her cabinets, hanging on for dear life.

“Magalie,” he said with thin, lethal warning. “I was going to do this to you anyway, but now you are really going to pay.”