The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 32



Two days later, Philippe brought Magalie one of his boxes. She opened it carefully, her heart racing in anticipation. It was simple. The simplest thing he had ever brought her. A macaron of chocolate, its shell glossy and perfect and freckled prettily with a dusting of darker cocoa that had been baked in. The pieds, the ruffled band around the base of each shell, were, of course, exquisite. She picked it up, mouth watering already, just from the texture against her fingers. The ganache inside the shell was a pale, creamy color, with maybe just a whisper of purple but maybe not.

She looked at him. He was excited, eager to see her reaction. But he didn’t have that go-ahead-and-strip-naked-now look on his face that he did when he handed her some of his creations, either. So he wasn’t convinced she would have an orgasm on her first bite. This was a softer look, intense.

She bit into it, and—his standards for orgasms must be extremely high, because she still felt a mild one. A rush of bliss at the whisper of a crunch and the yield in the chocolate macaron, then the crisp, scented, somehow familiar flavor of the ganache. She opened her eyes again, letting it melt on her tongue. God, he was so good. “Lavender?”

He nodded, his eyes alight with pleasure. But he leaned against her window, his arms crossed. Still waiting.

She took another bite. More lusciousness. How did he manage to be so good? Lavender and chocolate. Her heritage and her present, her and her mother. Another bite, into the middle, and a thin cocoa shell hidden in the ganache yielded to her teeth, and its insides burst onto her tongue, a melting liquid honey caramel.

Oh. Her father was there, too. It was all of her. And it was delicious.

She looked at him, the bright, warm lion leaning against her cold window, so sure that she would love it. Had he spent two days on this? Dreaming up the best way to combine those three flavors in tribute to her?

Her eyes stung. She had to rub them quickly.

He came away from the window at once, scooping her up across his arms like a child, his eyes astonished. He laid her down on her bed and made slow, cuddling love to her, and they missed his dinner reservations.





“How much back and forth are we talking about?” he asked suddenly, later that night, as they headed out to get some falafel in his corner of Paris. There was still a softness between them, a gentleness that seemed to stretch from that earlier lovemaking into the evening. They were crossing the bridge over to l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s other bridges stretching away from them over the dark water in bracelets of illumination, the façade of l’Hôtel glowing in the night. The ice rink had been removed. Spring was coming.

It was funny how, subtly, after five years of bastioning herself on her island, her sense of place was expanding. First the running, then the snow, then walking the streets with Philippe, focused on the two of them and indifferent to anyone else—sometimes she felt as if her soul was unfurling, like great wings that had been caught too long in a cocoon. Or maybe just as long as they’d needed to be to get ready?

“I don’t know. Do you want me to try to count it up?”

“Yes.”

Seriously, he just walked through doors, as if someone was supposed to be leaping to open them for him. How many times did she have to slam one in his nose for him to get the point that her doors were sacred? But she felt so soft. She didn’t feel like struggling to hold this door closed. “I don’t really remember from before I was four or so, but I know I was born in the U.S., and I think Maman tried the first year there, and then my dad pulled all kinds of strings to spend the next year in Provence. I remember kindergarten was in the U.S., and what would have been first grade, l’école primaire, was here. In Chamaret, not Paris. Dad came over for the holidays, spring break, and Cornell lets out in early May, so he spent that summer here. Then Maman steeled herself and tried to go back again but only made it through half the year. I guess it was pretty cold in Ithaca that year. I remember having fun in the snow and then all of a sudden being in the middle of the mistral instead. That was second grade. Then Dad got a fellowship for two years here. That worked out really well; everyone was happy. I misunderstood; I thought we were going to be able to stay.”

Philippe’s hand flexed on hers. But he didn’t say anything.

“I was always misunderstanding things like that.” She shook her head ruefully. “Then back and forth a bit more. Sometimes Maman and I would be here; sometimes she would dig in there again and try to stick it out. We were always in Provence for summers; they worked something out with my school when it was a U.S. one so that I could do May’s schoolwork from a distance. A couple of times they talked about divorce and treated it as a trial separation, but they never did it. And when I was sixteen, he got a Fulbright-Hays for another two years here.”

“He couldn’t just get a permanent job at a university here?”

“He was at Cornell.”

“Yes.” Apparently, he quite understood not asking a man to sell himself short. “And she couldn’t grow lavender there?”

“She tried.” Magalie spread her hands. Or one hand. The other was held in his. “It wasn’t the same at all.”

“No,” he said in a voice that spoke of a few summer vacations in Provence himself. “I can see how that would be.”

They were silent for a few minutes, waiting at the light to cross from the quay to l’Hôtel de Ville.

“The Lyonnais family has been in Paris for over five generations,” he said suddenly.

Well, whoop-di-do for you, she thought in American. “Shall I curtsy or just kiss your feet?”

His lips pressed tightly together, his fingers hardening on her knuckles. “You know, you wouldn’t find me nearly as arrogant if you would quit inventing it in everything I say. I mean that we tend to stay in one place.”

Her boot heels rang for two more steps.

“Forever,” he added. “We are Paris.”

Two more taps of her heels. Lyonnais was a part of Paris, that was true. For five generations, they had been marking the city with their macarons and desserts. They were as integral a part of it as the Eiffel Tower.

“I, for example, am never going to leave Paris, ever. I’m Philippe Lyonnais.”

“And not arrogant at all about it.”

He let out an annoyed breath. “I’m just pointing it out.”

Yes, she was getting an inkling of what he was pointing out. She twisted her head just enough so that she could look up at him without him, maybe, noticing it. They walked that way for several paces before she realized that not only was he perfectly aware she was studying him, and keeping his gaze straight ahead to facilitate it, but that he was subtly guiding her around obstacles on the sidewalk to allow her to keep doing it without interruption.

Princes. She could see why they had driven traditional witches so wild.

“Now that I’ve opened that shop on l’Île Saint-Louis, there will always be a Lyonnais shop on l’Île Saint-Louis. Forever. Or as close to forever as we’ll know. I’ll pass it on to o—my children.”

That still set her back teeth, his claiming of the island. It had been her street before. Hers and her aunts’.

“If they’re interested in it,” Philippe amended. “If they get some perverse, obstreperous blood from their mother’s side that makes them want to thwart me all the time for no reason,” he said broodingly, “and decide to become—become—qui sait?—engineers or something, then I’m sure there will be a niece or nephew who will continue the line.”

As far as she was concerned, any child of Philippe’s would have obstreperous blood. She caught her mind going off on the oddest, most delicious tangent and yanked it back in a desperate grasp, redirecting the subject before her mind could terrify her again that way. “Did you know my aunts don’t really need the income from La Maison des Sorcières?”

He shrugged. She couldn’t get over her knowledge of his body. Sometimes, when he shrugged like that under his coat, the thought of the way his naked shoulders looked as he did it, the easy flex of muscle, would run all through her. “I guessed. I researched the ownership of the buildings before I bought in the street, so I knew your Aunt Geneviève had owned that building for decades. You don’t pay three salaries and the taxes on that kind of thing with five tiny tables and thirty business hours a week, ten months of the year. I always knew financial concerns weren’t your real problem with me.”

“And yet you managed to refrain from any cracks about me being a privileged princess?” While he carried a major business on his shoulders, his name and his skill its entire base, and never stopped moving.

He looked blank. “Everyone knows witches don’t work regular hours. It’s princes who have all the responsibility.” His mouth curved a little at his assumption of the royal title. Probably waiting to see what reaction he could provoke. “Besides, you’re the daughter of a lavender-grower and a professor. Don’t kid yourself. You’re a peasant.”

“You’re the son of a professor and a pastry chef!” she said indignantly. “Didn’t boys used to be apprenticed as pastry chefs if they failed at school?” Although his family of pastry chefs had been making enough money to land them solidly among the Sixteenth Arrondissement set for generations. “Why aren’t you a peasant?”

“Some people are born princes, and some people make themselves one,” he said sublimely and shot her a grin, waiting for her next retort.

She rolled her eyes and refused to give him the satisfaction.

His next slanting glance warned her he was still digging for something. “So it must have been hell on boyfriends.” She stiffened. His eyes narrowed, as if that stiffening was the ring of metal under his shovel. “That back and forth.”

She shrugged. “I tried pretty hard once when I was sixteen. Well, fifteen when I first learned the move was coming; I had a birthday in there before we actually moved.”

He stopped walking, there in the middle of the Place Hôtel de Ville, with the gleaming façade rising up behind him as if it were his royal palace. “Explain ‘tried pretty hard’.”

She shrugged again. What a stupid thing to make her eyes sting. Sometimes she wanted to shake herself. “I thought if I loved someone enough we could . . . stick. That it would make something permanent. That we would . . . belong together.” Her hand slipped away from his arm. She hugged herself reflexively, a gesture that conveyed exactly what she had been trying to do. “I was a complete idiot. I didn’t even want him to use condoms, so I could get pregnant.”

“Good God,” he said involuntarily.

“He was a little smarter.” She made a face at the memory.

Philippe’s eyebrows flicked up. “Not that great?” he asked sympathetically.

She wrinkled her nose. “It kind of hurt.”

“The first time?”

“Just . . . sometimes.” She shrugged. “I guess I take a while to warm up. To—” She shrugged again.

“To people?” he suggested, his mouth wry.

“That’s not exactly what I meant.”

“To places?”

“Were you even listening to what I was talking about?”

“To . . . things?” A grin slipped out. “Shall we say it takes you a while to warm up to . . . things?”

She pressed her lips together.

“So . . . it hurt sometimes. And you never told him to wait longer, change his style, or just get the f*ck off you?” She blinked at the thread of anger in his voice. He studied her for a moment and then closed his hands around her shoulders, in deep approval. “You’ve grown since then.”

Yes, she had. Hugely. Primarily, she didn’t really need people anymore.

Except . . . there was this man right in front of her right this second, holding onto her . . .

She shrugged uncomfortably. His hands caressed over that movement through her coat as if he, too, could see her shoulders flexing naked. “I think it was more a question of forcing things.”

“That’s what it sounded like to me, too.”

“I mean—me trying to force a relationship to work out for the wrong reasons. As if I could fall in love and create a firm place. And a relationship that could last. That couldn’t be—” She made a little jagged motion of her hand, trying to express that fracture that occurred each time her parents went back and forth, the friends she had made whom she didn’t see for a year, and then she was back, but the friendship was all different, interrupted. And just when she got a few threads picked up or a new friendship going, she was gone again. “And him, you know—I mean, he was sweet enough and sincere enough, but probably at heart he was just a seventeen-year-old wanting sex.”

Philippe was silent for a moment. When he started walking again, he laid his arm across her shoulders instead of holding her hand. And when he spoke, it was with wry humor, shifting the load of the subject gently off her. “I wonder if my first girlfriend makes that face when she remembers having sex.”

“That’s pretty hard to imagine,” Magalie said involuntarily. Deep down, in secret, the mention of former girlfriends made a knot of anguish squeeze inside her. Why were they former? What had caused the impermanence? He hadn’t said anything about being in love with her after that first day of snow, and when it snowed in Paris, anything could be true. It would just melt later.

Unaware of that doubt, he grinned, and his arm squeezed her slowly tighter. “Ma chérie, I know you try to humble me, but you’re not as good at it as you might think.”