The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 31



At a wild guess, not weak.

Philippe created an immediate rhythm. Strong, confident, not asking for permission. Sometime in the early afternoon, usually within an hour of the tea shop’s opening, he would stop by for ten or fifteen minutes. Then, later, when she and he both quit for the day, he would come back to take her out to a restaurant and take her home again, his or hers.

Geneviève was always glad to see him, as it gave her a chance to blame him for the flood of customers who were making her crabby. “First you move in here and attract everyone’s attention this way, then your friend Sylvain begs me to help him with one of his windows and goes around letting people pick up our business cards, and then that Christophe has to blog about your crush on Magalie’s chocolate. You’re nothing but trouble.”

“It will die down,” Aunt Aja soothed. “Eventually. You know it will.”

“I wish I could take all the blame,” Philippe said, “but really I feel that most of your ability to attract customers is due to you three.”

Geneviève narrowed her eyes at him as if she suspected impudence. Philippe just leaned back against the counter, his presence competing firmly with hers to dominate the overcrowded kitchen, until Magalie felt like the stuffed inside of a sandwich fighting valiantly to prove she was the best part.

“And you.” Geneviève pointed a firm finger at her niece. “No more showing that Christophe our recipes in his kitchen.”

Philippe beamed at her. “Tante Geneviève, I believe we shall deal very well together.”

“So presumptuous,” Aunt Geneviève said of him, resigned, and sailed out to deal with the customers who had just heard her complaining about them. She was trying her best to make sure her complaints were audible, but instead of driving people away, the complaints kept showing up on new food blogs as her “charming idiosyncracies.” Now that Christophe had spoken, with no lesser authorities than Philippe Lyonnais and Sylvain Marquis to back him up, all the food bloggers were following in his wake. There had been some blog called A Taste of Elle that had used so many exclamation points about them, Magalie had double-checked the doses in Aunt Aja’s tea. They didn’t want to give anyone a heart attack.

Magalie hadn’t yet told Tante Geneviève that her behavior was being labeled a “charming idiosyncracy,” because, well . . . things could get ugly.

At her exit, Aunt Aja, too, picked up a tray and left the kitchen, making herself discreet.

“I’m pretty sure Christophe is dating someone new now,” Magalie said. They had come by again the day before and sat there at one of the little tables for a long time, talking, Christophe and the woman named Chantal. She didn’t toss her head nearly as much when she was around him, either, as if he reassured her somehow.

Philippe made a firm noise of approval at Christophe’s dating someone else.

“Also, I think your chefs might be infiltrating the place. I’ve seen Grégory in Claire-Lucy’s toy shop twice, and one of your guys—Olivier?—is definitely flirting with Aimée. Are they good guys?”

“I can’t really claim to keep up with their dating habits, Magalie. You’re the one who has been feeding my team hot chocolate for weeks. They’re probably whatever you made out of them.”

Magalie gave him an exasperated look. Now he was starting to sound like the aunts. As if he really believed her chocolate could change people, instead of pretending to believe it, the way she did.

Philippe smiled a little, shifting easily out of her way when she reached for something. He drank an espresso-size cup of her hot chocolate, watching her as he did it with warm eyes and desire slumbering in them, held in abeyance at that hour of the afternoon.

“What did you wish on me this time?” he murmured, sipping slowly, as if he wanted to savor the chocolate or the moment as long as possible.

That the afternoons like this, him stopping in her kitchen, and the evenings when he came back, could go on forever. She stared at the remaining chocolate in the pot, dissatisfied with her wishing, because wishes could only be for the inside of a person. You couldn’t wish things from time. Besides, that one sounded like a wish she would have to wish on herself, and she wasn’t sure her chocolate worked that way.

She wasn’t even sure her chocolate worked. It was a nice game, but Philippe certainly seemed immune.

“I don’t feel any different,” he said. As he always did. “Unless—did you wish me happiness by any chance?”

Brightness spilled through her. He smiled and kissed her, so that she tasted the chocolate on his lips, and happiness unfurled inside her and tried to reach out and latch its roots into him.

She frowned, wondering if she could turn happiness into a container plant. She had been doing a really good job of it before. Now the stuff was acting like mint, which her herbalist mother had always warned her about when she’d taught Magalie gardening in Provence. No matter what you did, mint eventually escaped and sent its roots all over the place.

“Who’s the lavender from?” Philippe asked suddenly.

She blinked. Had he somehow scented her thought?

“On the wall in your room. In your accent. On your underwear when you first put it on.” A blush sparkled across her cheeks at the memory of the times he had had his nose anywhere near her underwear when she first put it on. “Who did it come from?”

“My mother. You don’t hear Provence as much with Geneviève, because she came to Paris when she was eighteen, but she and my mother grew up in lavender fields near Chamaret.”

He smiled a little, his gaze running over her as if he was seeing a charming vision. “And you? Did you grow up in a lavender field?”

“Sometimes,” she said briskly, beginning to unload the tiny dishwasher of its last set of thimble-size glasses and handle-less cups. “Yes. All the summers.”

His eyes sparkled. “I can see you as a little girl in a field of purple. Can we take—” He caught his lower lip between his teeth abruptly. His eyes flared, as if he had shocked himself.

What? Her head tilted, and she studied him, scenting after something in his expression. What had he wondered? What had made him so wary?

“Could we take a vacation there this summer?” he finished slowly, watching her very cautiously.

That wasn’t what he had been about to say. Her eyebrows flexed together uncertainly. Summer was only a few months away, true. Not that much farther than the warming weather he had mentioned the other day. Still, from winter to summer seemed like an eternity to count on anything. Even though she had just wished for things to go on forever.

She took a deep breath. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to relax and count on the summer. But she felt physically sick when she tried to get it out. Her heartbeat raced, and her palms actually got clammy. “Um, yes,” she said hurriedly, refusing to let her stupid old issues keep her down, but she had to turn around quickly and focus on her chocolate, breathing carefully, trying to calm her stomach. “We can,” she said too loudly and too definitely.

There was a moment’s silence behind her. Then his cup clicked on the counter. He wrapped an arm around her from behind and squeezed her back against him so tightly that her breath huffed out of her and her feet left the floor. “See you this evening.”

He looped something silk-soft around her throat, tugging it just enough to make her feel leashed and a little breathless. “An advance,” he murmured and was gone.

Released from his hold, the softness slipped down her arms over her fingers: a garnet-red scarf.





“So where is your father from?” he asked that evening in her apartment, come to pick her up for dinner, leaning against her little counter watching her consider clothing options. A layer of scarves draped from the hook on the back of her closet door. She was starting not to know where to fit them all.

“America,” Magalie said in a tone that did not invite conversation.

Of course, Philippe ignored that closed door, as he did everything else that tried to keep him out. “You’re American?” he said, astonished. “I never would have g—”

He was saying I never would have guessed, and she could feel the reassurance growing in her with the words, that confirmation that she did, indeed, belong here.

But he broke off, with that intrigued tilt of his head. “So that’s what I heard, that little hint of Cade Corey.”

Cade Corey very clearly did not belong in Paris. Her accent marked her unmistakably as foreign every time she spoke. She only belonged because Sylvain Marquis had accepted her. Magalie folded her arms, dikes in place, protecting her island. Her belonging depended only on herself.

“I’m both,” she said, turning away. “American and French. Dual nationality.” She walked over to her favorite window, the one from which she could just catch a glimpse of the Tour Eiffel when it sparkled.

“What does your father do?” asked His Highness, who thought all doors were there for him to walk through and missed the whole point about locks and keys and shutting him out.

“He’s an apiculturalist.”

“Bees.” Philippe laughed. “Bees and lavender. Bon sang, I can smell them in you. Under all that chocolate.” And then, abruptly, on another note entirely: “That salaud Sylvain. Is that where that new chocolate of his came from? The honey-lavender?”

She hadn’t even known Sylvain had put out a new chocolate. Magalie turned and gave him an incredulous look. Intimacy was clearly not her thing. How he could imagine she was engaging in it with more than one person at once was beyond her. “I think the closest we’ve ever gotten was working on that window of his.”

“That’s close enough,” Philippe said, pissed off. “He’s got a very good sense of smell.”

“He’s also crazy about Cade Corey, you know.”

Philippe made the sound of a man who hadn’t been born in the last rainshower. “He’s moved the date of the wedding. It was supposed to be in March, and now it’s June.”

“That’s because Cade’s sister is in the hospital. He told me about it while we were working on the window. She got hurt pretty badly in the Côte d’Ivoire, near some cacao cooperative. Trust me, no one is going to change Sylvain’s mind about Cade.”

Again that doubtful grunt. “Sylvain knows superior quality when he sees it.”

Her heart gave a funny jump that seemed to spill warmth from it all through her. “Superior to a beautiful billionaire?”

“Clearly.” Philippe sounded startled he had to point it out.

“I think he’s latched onto her,” Magalie said dryly. “I don’t know how they’re going to handle that question of place.”

“That question of place?”

“Well, he obviously has to be here. He’s the best chocolatier in the world.”

Philippe shrugged. “He’s not bad with bonbons.”

Magalie bit back a grin. “And she’s heir to a multinational corporation headquartered in the U.S. Here I always thought my parents had a tough choice between place and person.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, that alert look, the one he had in restaurants when he was trying to identify an elusive taste. “Your parents? Bees and lavender didn’t turn out to be the match made in heaven?”

“Oh, sure. But academic career at Cornell, lavender fields in Provence, back and forth and back and forth, trying to figure out a happiness that allowed them both to be who they wanted to be . . . There’s no way Sylvain and Cade can do that; someone will have to give it all up.”

“Cade,” Philippe said, like someone in the know.

Magalie slumped in relief. “Oh, thank God. If Paris had lost Sylvain to Corey Chocolate, I might have had to kill her.” But she wondered if it hurt Cade at all, to give up her place for Sylvain. Or whether she was just so convinced she owned the whole world, she didn’t care what part of it she was in.

Philippe pressed his lips together. “Have you been eating his chocolates all this time you’ve been snubbing my desserts?”

“I like chocolate.”

He folded his arms. “Magalie. I didn’t want you to make me have to do this, because you’re so sensitive about competition. But if you want chocolate, I can make you chocolate”—he leaned toward her a little, his teeth showing sharp—“that will melt your insides out.”

She lifted her chin at him, feeling those insides melt just at the thought of him trying.

He, of course, went for her throat.

There might be more than one reason he kept buying her so many scarves.