The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 37



Magalie was crossing the Pont Saint-Louis between the cathedral and her island when a young woman who looked like a student grinned at her. That in itself was unusual. People didn’t grin at one another in Paris.

Magalie hesitated, because the other woman was either crazy or they knew each other. Oh, or maybe she was simply hoping to soften any tight hold Magalie had on her wallet, because the other girl proceeded to open a violin case and leap onto a stand she had lodged against the metal railing, at the high point of the bridge’s arch.

Her blond hair was caught in a ponytail, her jeans worn at the knees, and she held that violin as if it was part of her body, as if, without it, she would lose her balance and topple into the Seine.

Magalie took a step toward her. “Do I know you?” she murmured.

The girl laughed out loud. “You make good chocolate,” she said and brought her bow down on the violin.

It was like being pierced with a thousand points of light. Heaven touched earth. It was the most beautiful sound Magalie had ever heard in her life.

Everyone on the bridge stopped. The waiters in the café at the far end of it froze and turned toward her. People stood from their tables to get a better look.

The other young woman was grinning, brilliant with joy. Her music washed over everyone, some great ode to freedom.

Magalie stared up at her, her jaw dropped, goosebumps chasing all over her skin. May you love your life and seize it with both hands. It came back to her. Wished long ago, on a young woman who had rubbed the tendons between her fingers while her mother delighted in how much of the world they saw between her performances.

Performances that had been in New Zealand, Hawaii, Japan, and here in Paris. She knew perfectly well—anybody with an ear who heard that violin knew perfectly well—her mother hadn’t been talking about street performances.

And now the girl looked suffused with joy and freedom and profound, delighted mischief to be busking here.

Good God, maybe Magalie needed to be more careful with her chocolate.

She stood there until the “Ode to Joy” ended, her hands tucked in her back pockets. She had started at first to rub her arms, against the goosebumps there, but that had felt too closed to the world, when this radiant music was washing over her.

As soon as that bow paused and the young woman flexed her shoulders and lowered the violin for a second, her hat filled up. Magalie reached for her wallet.

The girl laughed and jumped down. “I don’t really need it, but I suppose it would be better not to access my accounts if I can help it,” she murmured to Magalie. “I told my mother’s people to leave me alone, but I bet they’ll put investigators on me. Still, in your case, I would rather be paid in chocolate.” She winked at Magalie. Without the joy in music-making suffusing her face, her mouth was wide, her nose a little too pointed in proportion, her cheekbones strong, giving her face a not-quite-pretty look, too much of everything.

Magalie opened and closed her mouth. And opened it again. “Did my chocolate do this?” she whispered.

The girl—she was really only a year or two younger than Magalie at the most, but she bloomed with life and youth like a daffodil that had at last lifted its head out of the snow—laughed again. “No, I did this,” she said.

Oh. Magalie felt a mix of both relief and disappointment. She tossed a coin into the hat, and some more prosaic bills on top of it—although she suspected the other woman had a lot more money than she did, in those accounts of hers—and started to head on over the bridge.

“Although that chocolate of yours is really good,” the violinist said. “I still remember my first sip of it. It makes you just want to seize your life with both hands, to love every drop of it.”

Magalie stopped and looked back at her over her shoulder.

The other woman wiped her face, took a long drink of water, stripped down to a white camisole, and leaped back up onto her post to play again.





Philippe had an entire marble counter to himself, and from the other counters his hardworking chefs and various assistants, interns, and apprentices kept rising up on tiptoe to peer at what he was doing or passing just a little too slowly with that “chaud, chaud, chaud!” pot she or he had to carry through the laboratoire.

There was an attempt to create a ring out of choux, filled with cream. There was a chocolate and lavender macaron whose center had been cut out, but he didn’t like it, because where was he supposed to put the honey? There was a gorgeous, ring-shaped Paris-Brest, its whipped cream flavored with rose, and the powdered sugar on the top scattered with rose petals, and a pack of raspberries sitting next to it because he couldn’t make up his mind whether scattering those around the rim was a good idea or not. There was a dark, dense chocolate creation he was currently easing free of its ring-shaped mold. He had flour in his hair and a streak of chocolate across his cheek.

And, of course, no one had the presence of mind to lock his sister out, so she came waddling in on him. And stopped. “Philippe, what are you—”

He gave her a harassed look. “I can’t decide which one to give her.”

“Oh, my God!!” Noémie’s voice rose to a shriek he hadn’t heard since their cowboy-and-Indian days. She grabbed her belly as if the baby had just given her a double-kick. “Are you—is this—ooh-la-la! Is it the girl you brought to Océane’s party? Does Maman know? Ooh-la-la-la-la-la-la—where’s my camera?”

She whipped out her phone and took a whole series of pictures of her brother looking growly and rather desperate, ring-shaped pastries strewn all around him.

“Don’t you need to go have a baby or something?” he grumbled.

“Don’t be a bastard, Philippe. She’s not due for another two months. You always look fatter on the second one. Ha. As you’ll find out!” his sister chortled in giddy triumph. “Is it that girl, Magalie? When are you going to tell her? If Maman knows and hasn’t told me—”

Olivier, passing, whispered something into her ear, which was a shame, because it was really hard to find talent like his, and now Philippe was going to have to fire him.

Noémie clamped both hands over her mouth and then back over her belly. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Maman’s been printing up all the blog posts for her scrapbook.”

Olivier, looking past her toward the door, made a sudden movement that sloshed crème anglaise from his pot over both him and Noémie’s belly. Fortunately the crème was no longer hot, but while Olivier was busy cursing and apologizing, Philippe froze, caught by Magalie walking in.

“Bonjour,” she said, looking surprisingly shy, for her. She probably didn’t know how to make a peaceful entrance into his laboratoire. She was so used to storming it.

She walked toward him, and Olivier was too busy dabbing Noémie’s belly for either of them to be useful and body-block her, and the intern over near the door lacked the sense of authority.

Philippe straightened slowly, his hands leaving prints in the powdered sugar on the counter. With nothing left to wear but his pride, he might as well drape that around him as best he could.

He watched her as she took in the counter. For the best pâtissier in the world, it made a pathetic spectacle.

“I’m still working on it,” he ground out. Whatever he came up with would have been perfect when he was done.

She stood still, staring at it. Until she blinked. Then blinked again. Then brought her hand up to her mouth and blinked several times in rapid succession. “All of this is for me?”

Putain, she was crying. With Noémie and Olivier blocking his route to her, he didn’t have much choice but to reach out and pick her up by her shoulders, hauling her across the counter, dragging her sleek black pants in the sugar.

She buried her face in his pastry jacket, which—this was Magalie. Crying into his chest in public.

Beyond her, his sister gave him two thumbs energetically up. Then she pumped one fist into the opposite palm and raised it in victory. Olivier had to dodge back to avoid an elbow. The chef was grinning and trying to look discreetly away, but his head kept turning back to them.

Magalie stood on tiptoe. “I really do love you, you know,” she whispered into his ear.

“Don’t say anything yet,” he interrupted hastily, putting his hand over her mouth. “This isn’t ready. I can do a lot better than this.”

She lifted up a pale brown box with a witch stamped on it and opened it. Inside was a chocolate witch with an orange-peel broomstick. Caught on the broomstick was a man’s wedding band.

Philippe fell back and hit the counter behind him. He scrambled for a grip on it, trying to get the damn counter to stop swaying and become solid marble again like it was supposed to.

The ring was a wide, strong band that looked like two tones of silver but was probably white gold—what did he know about actual metal rings? He had been focusing on saying it the way he did best, with pastries. She had placed her real ring there while molding the witch so that chocolate had hardened over part of it, so that he would have to eat the chocolate off it, even suck the last remnants of it clean, to get the ring.

Brown eyes gazed up at him. “I actually think I might trust you, with me.”

Oh, good God, he was going to cry. In front of his own kitchen.

Dimly, he was aware of cheers and hoots and clapping. And a flash. His sister and her damn camera.

“More or less,” Magalie said. “I’m still going to keep an eye on you.”

He started to laugh a little. Happiness was burbling up in him like a spring, and it had to go somewhere. He was damn well not crying in front of his chefs. “Magalie, I can’t conceive how anyone could not leave you a space.”

“And we live in my apartment until I get sick of sharing such a small space with such an arrogant man and am ready to move.”

One side of his mouth kicked up. “That might not take very long, Magalie.”

“It will be at my pace,” she told him severely.

He took one of her hands from the box and kissed the inside of her wrist. Then kissed the other wrist, nudging the box a little with his chin to find the most vulnerable spot on her skin. His sister’s camera flashed again.

“So does that mean yes?” Magalie asked carefully.

He looked up from her wrists into her wide, watching eyes. “Was there a question?”

From the sidelines, his sister gave him a boo. Magalie narrowed those brown eyes.

“God, yes, Magalie,” he said. “I told you once I would probably give you anything you asked me for. You don’t even have to ask in words.”