The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 6



“Are you expecting someone you haven’t told us about?” Noémie asked, amused and searching at once. If there was any chance Philippe might begin bringing someone to the family Christmas parties, his sister wanted to be the first to start the gossip and speculation.

Philippe glanced down at the place settings and the extra wineglass he held. Noémie twitched the stem from his hand. “How many times do I have to remind you? There are seventeen of us, not eighteen.”

Philippe, Noémie and her husband, his niece Océane, his fathers’ two brothers and their families, and his and Noémie’s godfather, a longstanding friend of the family whose wife had died of lung cancer several years back, were all in the home of Philippe and Noémie’s parents, proud hosts to the event this year.

“Right,” Philippe said, and he counted out eighteen of the silver knives a duchess had given his great-great-great-great grandfather after a particularly successful reception of a king.

Noémie took back the extra knife and gave him another glinting, searching look.

“Seventeen,” she reminded him as he started counting out the multiple sizes of forks they would use.

“I can count to seventeen,” four-year-old Océane announced proudly. “Do you need help, Tonton?”

Philippe laughed and ceded the counting. Noémie made too much out of a man trying to help set a formal table for a large crowd.

But as the family ate, stood and stretched their legs between courses, laughed, and tried to keep the children up until midnight for the presents, Philippe did keep feeling as if there was someone missing.

Maybe it was just the holidays highlighting his singleness. The couples around him were so happy, despite their frequent sparring. His parents surveyed the crowd, exchanging smug parental looks with each other. Nice to know he and Noémie made their parents proud, even if he often drove his father crazy.

His father was of an average height for a man. His Alsatian mother had passed on tall German genes to her children. His tall mother and average-sized father were of an exact height, in fact, something that pleased both of them enormously. His mother only once in a while put on high heels to show off. His father wolf-whistled when she did.

He wondered what they would think of the woman who needed ten-centimeter heels to not quite reach his shoulders. He grinned, imagining bringing that black-haired witch into his tall, tawny family. His whole left arm itched with a sudden and passionate desire to be able to pull her in against his side. Right then. Right there. To stand with her tucked up to him as he chatted with his family.

So that was who was missing. He laughed a little. He never could pick anything easy, could he? She had sent him chocolate merde by return courier in response to his Christmas gift the day before. He had sent her a true treasure box and gotten back dark chocolate made to look like oozing cow patties, with slivers of candied orange peel poking out like undigested hay. It had made him laugh until he had to bend over his desk and clutch its edge in a fit of desperate arousal. Which was very bad luck for him, because he didn’t think the cow shit had been intended as a friendly message.

He hadn’t dared eat the things. God knew what she had put into them. Belladonna, probably. But they still sat there on his desk at work, the most incredible temptation despite the plethora of his extraordinary Christmas desserts in the laboratoire, desserts that should have overwhelmed that whisper of hunger that snuck out from the cow patties and followed him around his kitchens.

“What’s so funny?” his father asked him.

“Oh, just wondering if someone liked the macarons I sent for a Christmas present.” Secretly, in his pocket, his hand curled into a fist as he tried to physically will her to eat them across however many miles. Was she even in Paris today? Taste them. You’ll never recover. Put one into your mouth, and you’ll melt for me every time I look at you.

“Ça dépend,” his father said. “Did you send her some of mine or those new concoctions you’re always trying? Olive oil and banana. Who makes a macaron of l’huile d’olive et banane ?”

Philippe grinned at his father, who was pretending not to eye their two desserts jealously, one made by Philippe, the other by his father. It was a source of both pride and rivalry to the older Lyonnais that Philippe was considered to be the best pâtissier in the world. His father had been considered one of the best before his son swept the field.

Half of Pierre Lyonnais was entirely proud, since he took credit for Philippe’s training, but being in his own son’s shadow made him grumpy sometimes nevertheless. Philippe raised his glass to him. “You taught me how to make the best chocolate macarons out there by the time I was fourteen, Papa,” he said with a grin. “I got bored.”

“Rebelle,” his father said, but with affection.





On Christmas Day, Magalie’s parents kissed under mistletoe. They gave each other special presents they had been dreaming about for months during their separation. They hugged at odd moments. Her mother started talking about flying back to the States with her father for a few months, while the lavender was in its winter slumber.

“Look at my little parisienne,” Stéphanie said of her daughter, eyeing her fashionable city clothes. “Magalie, I’ve always said it. You can make yourself at home anywhere.”

Her father looked wistfully proud. Magalie got a lump in her chest at that look. Wherever her mother went during their daughter’s childhood, Stéphanie had always taken Magalie with her. There had been no question of anything else. But the wrenching apart of Magalie’s relationship with her father, over and over, was something that would probably never heal.

“You’ve always been so bright and strong,” he said.

Geneviève and Aja gazed at her parents for a moment and exchanged a glance with each other. They didn’t say anything, but a little later, Geneviève slipped her a chocolate witch, and Aja handed her a cup of tea. Maybe the two women really did know magic, or maybe the magic was in the gesture itself, but nibbling on the witch’s broomstick and sipping the tea, Magalie did feel stronger.

She had brought the box of macarons with her, struggling against the temptation to serve them as a special treat at the end of the meal. But while her grandfather was uncorking the Sauternes to serve with the foie gras, she slipped out into the middle of their winter-dead lavender field. Its power was in abeyance, its hold on her mother loosened. Anyone would think her ambitious, determined, mild-mannered father was Hades, able to keep her mother in his world for only the four winter months of the year.

The plants’ scent was a mauve, slumbering thing around her in the cold. Bundled in her coat, she opened the box to gaze into it. She had half thought she might sneak one, out here in the night, where no one would know, maybe not even him.

Instead, something wild and raging ran through her at their beauty, at the lavender fields, at her father’s wistful look, and she threw the box to the ground, stomping and stomping on it, like a child in a temper tantrum, until it was nothing but muddy, obliterated card stock and gluey sugar.

It didn’t make her feel nearly as strong as she’d thought it would.

The reverse, almost. It seemed to leave a fissure in her that she could not get to close.





Philippe was pouring a sweet Sauternes for the table, to accompany the foie gras, when he felt sharp-heeled boots shatter his heart and grind the crumbs into the ground.

His hand tightened around the bottle until the knuckles showed white. Noémie looked up from the family’s momentary focus on the baby kicking in her belly. “Are you all right?”

“She didn’t eat them,” he said grimly.

That . . . witch.

Had she just stomped his macarons into the ground?

“Maybe try some classics next time?” his father suggested. “I hear women like chocolate.”

But he threw his arm behind his son’s back and gave his shoulders a squeeze. His father knew what it was like to pour his heart into his work.