The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 33



He made her a dessert with armor plates of chocolate mounted around it, like the hide of an armadillo or a dragon. Just at the top, those plates had been deconstructed, so that instead of closing the dessert completely in a carapace, the last few plates climbed upward in what would have been for any other pâtissier an impossible spiral, leaving the soft inside revealed and vulnerable. He called it Le Ventre du Dragon, the Belly of the Dragon, and a few of the critics got the Tolkien reference, still others lauded the tribute to the Chinese New Year, and everyone talked about how it made them drool.

Magalie narrowed her eyes at it, understanding its primary message completely, but she ate it. It did melt her insides out.

Philippe knew because she pretended to exaggerate its effect, attacking him with a laughing growl, pushing him back onto her bed. But when she had him there and aroused just from the push of her hands and his willing fall back onto her comforter, when she was sitting astride him and had ripped his shirt over his head, her laughter died. Her gaze turned very sober. And she stroked her hands all over his chest and shoulders, gently, as if she was touching some precious find. It took all his breath away, turning his body too taut and hard and hungry to leave him air.

When she pushed him back and came down on top of him, she looked like an erotic conqueror, which suited Philippe just fine. But the longer she touched him, the weaker she got. Her bones turned to water under his hands, until she couldn’t hold herself straight off him and was lying on his chest, her lips pressing kisses everywhere. He could see how that would bother someone like Magalie, how malleable she grew while all his muscles engorged, as if he was stealing her strength.

He didn’t think he stole it. Yes, he felt stronger, incredibly strong. But he gave her back all the power he drew from her. Only, he didn’t know how to make her see that, except by what he was already doing.

He had to take over the rhythm with his hands hard on her hips, her body grown too pliant and yielding to maintain anything like the hard drive his own demanded. “Harder,” she whispered into his throat. “I l—”

His whole body jerked, his hands pulling her down on him spasmodically. But she broke off, pressing the words back into her mouth with the kisses she rained down on his throat, on the joint of his shoulder.

Damn it, he knew that was what she had almost said. It couldn’t be anything else. I like it, broken off, didn’t sound like I love you.

With his hands on her body, with his mouth, with a taunting rhythm, he tried to get her to say it, to break down and say it. But she never even started to again.

“You just have no patience,” Aunt Aja told him one day. Him. A man who could work on perfecting grains of sugar for a new pastry all day. “You have to do things so dramatically. You haven’t let her have time to start counting on you. It only takes a few years.”

“They say with really little babies, they cry whenever the mother leaves the room because they don’t understand that she still exists then. It’s something like that, I think,” said Geneviève, who had never had a child of her own but could speak with supreme confidence about it, anyway. “Well, except the reverse. Magalie used to think things kept existing when she left the room and had to learn that most of them didn’t.”





They were walking back across the twin bridges behind Notre-Dame from Océane’s birthday party, the first Sunday in March, when Philippe started probing again. The man was relentless.

Magalie had given Océane a collection of hats: a witch hat, a princess crown, a fairy garland, a firefighter’s helmet, and a beekeeper’s hat. Just making sure she kept the girl’s options open. The firefighter helmet, she admitted, had been a little random, but she hadn’t had much advance notice of the party. It had been a cute party. At least, everyone else there had seemed to find it cute, particularly her own role in it, tucked up against Philippe’s side, being shown off like she was his Meilleur Ouvrier de France medal.

She knew vaguely that she was supposed to be annoyed by that, the whole tucked-up-under-his-arm-like-a-trophy thing, but she kept having trouble pulling it off. After all, the man had firsthand knowledge of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France competition, the Olympic training and intensity of it and what it took to win, so if he showed her off as if she was that valuable, it was hard not to be flattered.

“So I take it the attempt to create a home by getting pregnant at fifteen didn’t work out?” Philippe asked. Winter was loosening its grip, and the day was prematurely springlike, so that he wore the leather jacket she had seen on him so much in the fall, unzipped, and under it a blue cashmere sweater showed through. She had bought the sweater for him the other day and thrust it at him in a way that defied him to make anything out of it.

Of course, he had ignored that signal and made about as much out of it as possible, ending by putting it on her naked body and making love to her in it. He had said he didn’t like shopping and she did, and he wanted to get her trained to associate shopping for him with a great deal of pleasure.

Which meant he was going to get the most annoyingly smug grin on his face when she bought him another one, but what else was she supposed to do when he kept wearing this one every day? Honestly. Anyone would think it was the only sweater he owned.

“I did not get pregnant,” Magalie said, annoyed. No thanks to her. Thank God she was so much stronger now.

“I assume he didn’t turn out to be your home, either.”

She sighed. This was such an embarrassing story. Why had she ever let him drag any part of it out of her? “Well, I did pitch such a fit those first three months back in Provence that my parents agreed to let me fly back to the U.S. for Christmas and stay at a friend’s house. They were even considering making arrangements for me to live there, with that friend, and go to school there the rest of the year.”

His eyebrows flexed together. “That’s a lot of independence to provide a sixteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know enough to use birth control.”

She shrugged. “I was always very self-reliant.” And if she had gotten pregnant at sixteen, she would have done just fine with it, thank you very much.

“Not much choice to be anything else?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He was clearly sitting hard on some opinions.

“Anyway,” she said, speaking quickly, so she could dump this whole story into the trash where it belonged and get it over with. “He already had a new girlfriend, so all my fits turned out to be for a stupid reason, and I flew back after the break. Unfortunately, I had gotten the return ticket for the last possible day of the French vacation period and had to stick it out at the friend’s house until then, but . . . lessons learned and all that.”

Philippe was silent for a long moment. At last, he shook his head wonderingly.

“What?” she said defensively.

“Teenagers are idiots. I think I would have had the sense to wait a couple of months for you, even at that age, but God knows. The whole pregnancy thing probably scared him. And you were clearly much better off. I hope the next guy was a better lover.”

Magalie’s lips parted. Then shut. On a slow, slow smile.

Philippe let go of her hand. “Well,” he said, rough and pissed off. “Apparently so. That’s a much better expression on your face.”

She looked up at his hard-set jaw and scowling blue eyes. Her own eyes snagged on his.

Philippe caught her chin. “Don’t you dare look at me like that while you think of him.”

She coughed. He was getting very much the wrong idea, but at the same time, the truth just couldn’t be a good thing to let him know about her.

He pivoted, grabbed her hand brusquely, and started walking again, his footsteps hard on the stone slabs.

She cleared her throat, angled her chin off toward the flying buttresses of the cathedral, and tried to sound airy. “I don’t mean to go to your head, Philippe, but you are a slightly better lover than a teenage boy.”

Philippe tripped. His foot caught on the edge of a stone, and he stumbled forward, his hand wrenching free of hers. He caught himself against the metal rail of the bridge, all the locks lovers and tourists had attached to it clanging, and twisted, still holding onto it for support, to stare back at her. “Did you just say—” He caught himself and shook his head so hard, it shook his whole body, like a lion coming out of the water. “I must have misunderstood.”

She folded her arms under her breasts and gave him a very stern, superior look. “I’m really very fastidious.” She was, too. She had not wanted any sweating, stupid, grunting man in her space trying to take parts of her. She liked who she was.

And she hadn’t wanted to trust one to make a space for her that would last. To value her the way she longed to be valued.

Philippe released the metal railing and walked back to her. His chest rose and fell visibly in the blue cashmere, and he shook his head again, very slowly this time.

“Wait. You’ve lived in Paris five years, working in the public eye, looking like you do so that a man can hardly keep himself from grabbing you and eating you up on the spot. You spent three of those years also as a university student, around hordes of men in their early twenties who must have been asking to borrow your class notes every damn chance they got. And you’ve never let any of those desperate men through your defenses?”

“I don’t like desperate men.”

“Oops,” Philippe said, so dryly she knew she was missing something.

She waved a hand. “I mean . . . needy. Weak. I don’t like weak men.” Had he just said she made him desperate?

“Those are some walls you’ve got, Magalie.”

She frowned at him. “Why not? I like who I am.”

“I like who you are, too, Magalie. We’re in public, so let’s not go into the details of how much. I’m not asking you to change.”

“Just to give part of myself away.”

“All of yourself. But to me.”

Clearly the fact that it was to him was supposed to make all the difference.

Which, oddly, it did.

“And you get to keep yourself at the same time. That’s the way it works, I think. Kind of like flipping a Tarte Tatin. Or jumping a gorge. If you try to be careful or hold anything back, you end up with one hell of a mess.”

“You would think that,” she said repressively. But it struck a chord, vibrating inside her, knocking things loose. Lady Godiva. She’d bet Lady Godiva did not try to cover herself with her hair once she decided to ride naked through that town. She was too sure of who she was.

He shrugged. “I’m not strapped into a safety harness over here myself, Magalie. But it feels to me as if jumping that gorge to you makes me ten times bigger.”

Ten times bigger than he already was? Good Lord. She looked up at him, the strong chin profiled against the backdrop of the river and Notre-Dame. The trees in the little park behind the cathedral were just starting to hint at buds of green. The wind off the water tousled his mane. That blue sweater she had picked out for him really did do wonderful things for his eyes.

He tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow, possessively, and started walking again. His mouth began to curve smugly, the curve growing and growing, so pleased with himself, she was surprised every other man who walked past him didn’t try to knock him off the bridge, just to wipe that smile off his face.

“So . . . only me?” he said, trying and failing to get his grin under control. “I’m the only one you’ve let through? The rest of them just bounced off those walls of yours?”

“You don’t bounce off much, Philippe.”

“No, I don’t,” he agreed. The next little grin was impossible. “I like to penetrate.”

She hit his arm, though not nearly as hard as she would have liked. “Will you shut up?”

“Did you ever play cowboys and Indians when you were little and always insist on being the Indian chief so you could do the wild, gloating, victory war dance?”

She had been an only child with no cousins, but she didn’t interrupt.

“If we weren’t standing right across from Notre-Dame, in the most civilized city in the world, I think I would be doing one right now.”

“It’s terrible being a sixth-generation Parisian, isn’t it? The constraints of princehood. If you start gloating over me, I’m going to push you right off this bridge.”

“You?” He gave a pffing, dismissive wave of his hand that nearly brought her head down in a bull charge. He was right by the rail. If she hit him hard with all her weight when he was least expecting it . . . “I’m not gloating over you. How many men do you think bounced off those walls of yours? Hundreds? Probably thousands.”

“Philippe, you’re flattering, but I really don’t remember ever having thousands of men trying to flirt with me.”

“You never even noticed.” He threw back his head with such a fierce, triumphant look, she thought he was going to let loose that Indian war whoop right on the spot. “You never even noticed them.”

She gave a heavy sigh. She should never, ever have allowed him to get started on this subject. “You know, if I had ever imagined you in my future, I would have had a few more flings just to take your arrogance down a couple of notches.”

He gave her a quick, hard look. “Bitchy, Magalie. But as I think I told you the first time we met, I’m not afraid of competition.”

Yes, as he had pointed out, he wasn’t the only pastry chef in Paris, but once people tasted him, the others didn’t matter.

His grin came back. “I would still spoil you for any other man.”

“Are you going to pretend wounded innocence again when I tell you how arrogant you are?”

“It’s sad, but Sylvain Marquis is the only person I know who doesn’t confuse honest self-evaluation with arrogance. Go ahead. Make me humble. Tell me why me.” He pressed his lips together. A laugh bubbled through the corners of them. “Is it because of how I . . . penetrate?” He snickered.

He was really very full of himself right now, wasn’t he? “I’m going to have to kill you.”

He stopped walking and stopped laughing all at once, standing under a lamppost just at the start of the second bridge, the one between Notre-Dame and their—her—island. Even in the still-chilly weather, people lingered here, gazing at the cathedral. A tourist wrote in her journal with finger-gloves over her hands, and a group of buskers played jazz. She missed the latest young man with a violin. Violinists tended to head south for the winter, and a new one would pop up sometime in the spring. “Sérieusement. Why me?”

Seriously? Seriously, the honest answer was going to make him impossible to live with.

Live with. Was that becoming an option?

“I don’t know if you remember, but when I first saw you, you were laughing.”

“I remember. You cut across it like a whip.” He touched a hand to his chest, as if he could still feel the sting on his skin. Was that where the sight of her had struck him? Right in the chest?

“I wanted that laugh.”

He liked that. She could see the pleasure in the rise of his chest, in the way the corners of his mouth softened, in the way the blue of his eyes warmed. But he didn’t know quite how to interpret her word want, his eyebrows flickering over it.

She closed one fist low over her abdomen, illustratively. “I lusted after you.”

He made a sound as if he had just taken a soccer ball right in the midsection. Wrapping her up in his arms, he turned her back against the lamppost and kissed her, long and thoroughly, the flying buttresses soaring behind him, and no one on this bridge of dreams did more than even glance at them. The jazz band started playing a love song.

He raised his head at last. The wind that had been blowing his hair off his face now blew it toward her, little tendrils not long enough to reach her cheeks. “So if I had picked you up and put you back against my office door and eaten you up, the way I wanted to do, you would have liked it. And probably kneed me, hit me over the head with my laptop, knocked me unconscious, and never let me get anywhere near you again.”

She remembered the heat in that room. “It’s really very hard to say.”

“Now you’re just being mean, Magalie. I have fantasies about that meeting all the time.”

“It’s hard to imagine me using something as impersonal as a laptop on you. Most of what I wanted to do required my bare hands.”

He rested his forehead on hers. “Some of the fantasies I’ve had about that meeting are so bad. I think if I ever admitted them aloud, every female I know would disown me.”

“Well.” Magalie slipped her hands under his coat around his waist. “Nobody ever said Givenchy boots came cheap.”

He wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her in hard, hard, so that she was enfolded in him and the panels of his coat, shutting out the cool March wind entirely.

When he finally pulled back, he was studying her, his eyes narrowed. “But you still don’t want to admit you love me?”

She stiffened, a shocked recoil back behind her shield, her pupils contracting. His mouth went grim, and he straightened away from her. They walked on without speaking, the détente of a moment before broken.