The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 7



Magalie and her aunts returned to a freezing Paris to find an invitation to Philippe Lyonnais’s opening.

The bright mood from the Christmas and New Year’s festivities sloughed off Magalie like diseased skin. She just stood there, bleakness invading her. That bastard. He had to rub it in, didn’t he? She had poured all of herself into her chocolate, but their doom was still approaching.

“Are you all right?” Geneviève asked repeatedly over the next week. “How can you act stressed making chocolat chaud and tartes au chocolat? It’s not good for the chocolate. Maybe we’re too busy. Do you want me to tell some of our neighbors to go away? They really don’t need to sit in here every single day.”

“I like that new combination of apricots with a pistachio crust,” Aunt Aja mentioned.

“Don’t you ever worry about the future at all?” Magalie asked, despite herself. She didn’t want to worry them more by talking about the disaster fast approaching, but . . . how did they manage to be so oblivious?

Geneviève tilted her head. “I used to worry about your mother. Comes from being the older sister. But she turned out all right.”

Aja exchanged a look with her.

“Almost all right,” Geneviève amended. “In her own way.”

“I worried before I left home,” Aja said quietly, referring to her emigration to France. “I was about your age. But it turned out all right.”

Worry about Lyonnais! Magalie wanted to shout at them. But if worrying did no good, why inflict it on them?

As the two older women went to the kitchen, Magalie pressed her forehead into the cold glass of their front door, angling to stare down the street at the name Lyonnais. If she could have brought herself to ask him for a favor, could she have saved her aunts? No. How? From the moment he had set his sights on this island, this street, from the moment he had bought the shop, their doom had been sealed.

She straightened from the door and reached into the window display to adjust a great chocolate fir tree that looked in danger of falling. Then she glanced up and nearly jumped out of her skin when she looked straight into Philippe Lyonnais’s blue eyes. He was standing beside a tall woman with silky, gold-brown hair brushed straight and smooth to her shoulders, a woman with a distinct bulge in her belly.

Magalie felt as if she’d been kicked, right in her own womb. Was Philippe Lyonnais married? She had never seen mention of it in all the articles she had read on him, but, unlike the American press, French reporters wouldn’t talk about his vie privée.

No, that was . . . Wait. She was seeing tawny hair and tawny hair, blue eyes and blue eyes, tall and tall.... That was a family resemblance, wasn’t it? Why was she so relieved to find one? Because she might feel some pangs about crushing to his knees the father of a happy family?

Oh, yes, maybe that was it.





“It will be a shame if you crush them out of business,” Philippe’s sister said a little regretfully, as they left the display window of La Maison des Sorcières and headed on toward the end of the island. Philippe wanted desperately to turn around and go straight inside, grab Magalie Chaudron’s shoulders, and squeeze that look of horror off her face, but his sister’s presence stopped him.

Philippe gave her a betrayed glance. “What is it with everyone? Do I act like I go around crushing people?”

“Not on purpose,” his sister said affectionately. The winter wind swept off the river, down the corridor provided by the street, and buffeted them. Noémie had been working on the last touches of his shop’s interior design but complained that the baby was kicking her too hard and she needed to take a walk. “But no one is going to come here when you’re a few doors away.”

Philippe glanced back at the display window, not entirely sure of that. Sometimes he wanted to come here from half a block away. Just slip into a world that wasn’t his but where he kept feeling he should have an entry. Even one he had to force open by jamming the toe of his boot in the door.

“You know you’ll steal all their customers,” his sister said. “You have to admit, it’s a little bit of a shame. That place is like one of the seven wonders of Paris. The hidden one.”

“And I’m the obvious one,” Philippe said. His sister coughed oddly and bit her lip. He glanced at her, but she just set her hand on her pregnant belly, with her teeth solidly in her twitching lower lip, and said nothing. “So that works out perfectly for them, I would think. I draw people here, and more of them will discover this secret in passing.”

“That’s true,” Noémie said thoughtfully. “That might work.”

“I don’t know why they can’t be more grateful, then.” He scowled, thinking of the evil little smile on Magalie’s face as she’d offered him that cup of chocolate. One would think that, at the very least, he wouldn’t have to worry about being poisoned by her. “You know I’ll be bringing in people from all over Paris and a lot farther than that. Not everyone will have the patience to wait in line. They can have my overflow,” he added generously. The witches didn’t really deserve it, the way Magalie kept treating him, but he could hardly set up a barricade between his half of the street and theirs to stop it.

“You could be right about that.” His sister could assess a business situation just as fast and as matter-of-factly as he could. That was what happened when you grew up with such decisions being made routinely over breakfast, breakfasts consisting of pains au chocolat and croissants regularly voted the best in Paris. “You really might be good for their business,” Noémie admitted.

“Of course I’m right,” Philippe said indignantly. Getting respect from one’s own family was like trying to draw blood from a stone. His mother was the only one who could manage to produce some, and then mostly when his father wasn’t around to feel jealous. “You never look at that scrapbook Maman collects on me, do you?”

“You mean the one Maman collects on us?” Noémie asked dryly. “On Lyonnais, and my design of the stores, and all that?”

Philippe tried to look suitably chastened. “The one about my fantastic interior designer, yes. And the brother who helps show off her designs by making world-famous pâtisseries to display in them. Anyway, you know and I know there will be lines down the block. You would think she—they—could appreciate that.”

Ungrateful witch. He glanced back at the shop window, his shoulder blades prickling. “Do you ever get the feeling that someone could turn you into a toad?”

Or a beast. He felt much more like a beast when he got near Magalie Chaudron and her chocolate.

“Me? No. But in your case, we’re not talking about a major transformation.”