The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 8



The day the new Lyonnais shop opened, La Maison des Sorcières didn’t have a single customer. Not even one loyal neighbor. Its emptiness was a huge hole in Magalie’s middle, one she kept trying not to fall into. What if she and her aunts lost this place?

Her heart gave a little thump of relief and gratitude when she saw Madame Fernand step out of her building down the street and head their way, her poodle darting back and forth, right toward the wheels of a slowly passing moped, leash tugged ineffectually by a gloved hand. But Madame Fernand didn’t even pull her fancy hat’s broad brim down to hide her face in shame as she walked right past the tea shop and on toward Philippe’s.

He was probably gloating over how completely he had taken over; there was no one in front of their shop, everyone in front of his. No, who was she kidding? You couldn’t gloat over something you didn’t notice at all.

Before his shop, a party-like crowd gathered, as if heralding the arrival of an emperor. In new clothes, Magalie thought maliciously, trying to imagine Philippe Lyonnais appearing before the hordes supremely oblivious to his nakedness.

“Are you all right?” Aunt Aja asked

Magalie blinked, coming back from a long way away, and realized that she had both forearms braced on the curve of the display case and her head lowered almost to rest on it, as if she was thinking of drowning herself in one of her own tartes just below.

“I . . . yes, I’m . . .” Whoever had come up with the idea of imagining one’s enemies naked to rob them of their power should be shot. Guillotined. Burned at the stake. Something vile, anyway.

Aunt Aja handed her a cup of tea. Magalie took a long breath of it, the scent seeming to spice up her brain and clear out an unnoticed fog in the back of her eyes. She desperately wanted to know what was in it but knew better than to ask. If Aunt Aja gave you tea, you accepted it or refused it, but you didn’t ask questions.

“I can’t believe he sent us an invitation,” Geneviève said grumpily, pulling the heavy card from where it was tucked by their 1920s cash register and tapping it on the display case. “It takes all the fun out of showing up unannounced and cursing him.”

“He might be smart,” Aja mentioned, as if it behooved her to point out the possibility.

Magalie turned away. She couldn’t get that crushed box of Christmas macarons out of her mind. What magical array of flavors might he have sent her? What would the shell of one of his macarons have felt like under her fingers? How might it have yielded to her teeth? Smart. She brought up a hand and rubbed the back of her neck. Yes, Philippe Lyonnais was very smart.

Politic, even. He had probably sent the same box to a hundred different people that Christmas—reliable suppliers, major clients, third cousins.

She looked at her tea again. It took a lot of courage to toss out one of Aja’s teas undrunk. It would be easier to drop a treasure chest back into the sea unopened. At least with the treasure chest, you wouldn’t risk offending Aja. But it took just as much courage to drink it, blind. What if you didn’t want to have the fog at the back of your eyes cleared, for example; what if you wanted to just remain stubbornly blind?

“It wouldn’t have to be a curse,” she said.

Aja smiled at her in quick, surprised approval.

“Oh, ho!” Geneviève said. “So you did think he was cute. Don’t worry. After nearly forty years of working with all those would-be princesses who wander in here, I think I can land you a prince, if you’re sure you want one.”

Magalie narrowed her eyes at her aunt and tapped one booted toe. If she wanted such a “prince,” which she did not, the reason she did not want him was not because she thought he was out of her reach. It might be because she thought he thought she was beneath his reach, which wasn’t quite the same thing. She hadn’t drunk the damn tea yet, so she didn’t have to admit that if she didn’t want to. And if she were, for example, to completely lose her mind and decide she did want a prince, she did not need her sixty-year-old aunt to land him for her.

“We might offer a gift,” she said.

“Ooh.” Geneviève pursed her lips and gave a silent whistle of approval.

Aja, on the other hand, stroked her tunic.

“You would agree that humility is a gift, wouldn’t you, Aunt Aja?” Magalie asked her.

“I’m not the one who has to agree. You are. If you think humility is a gift—the kind you would like given to you—by all means.”

Magalie hesitated.

Geneviève leaned past her, ostensibly to dust off the antique chocolate mold sitting near her on the display case, and whispered loudly into her ear: “Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure that if anyone tried to give humility to you, it wouldn’t take.”

That was true, Magalie thought smugly. Still cradling Aja’s cup of tea in one hand, she went back into the little blue-tiled kitchen. She took another deep breath of the tea and almost took a sip but then hesitated and set it on the counter. She looked at the pot of hot chocolate, currently going to waste for lack of customers.

“You will throw the rest out when you’re done with it, won’t you?” Geneviève called back. “We can’t go randomly inflicting—I mean, gifting—humility on every passing stranger.”

Magalie sometimes wondered if Geneviève genuinely thought Magalie could stir wishes and curses into chocolate. Or if she just liked to believe she believed it, which was not quite the same thing.

Magalie didn’t believe it. That is, if someone asked her if she could do magic, she would scoff. But she didn’t disbelieve it, either. She always made sure to stir in a wish, because whenever she dipped her spoon into the chocolate, it felt as if she could.

For Philippe, she stirred three times. Imagining all that confidence stripped from him. Imagining him looking up, not down, which meant, with his height, he would have to be kneeling at her feet. Her stirring slowed. Imagining his shirt half-ripped from his body, in tatters. Wanting something from her, coming to her in a petition she could carelessly crush.

Her ladle still, she looked down into the warm brown chocolate for a long moment as the vision tried to sneak inside and steal something from her. She took a breath and poured the chocolate into a side-handled chocolatière Geneviève and Aja had picked up just the other day at a marché aux puces. Rounded and carnival-colored, with broad stripes and squiggles, and polka dots up the handle, the pot looked like a Gypsy celebration for a prince. Not too much, she hoped, like something the prince’s Fool might own.

Geneviève clapped her hands together at the sight of it. “Look!” she said gleefully to Aja. “We come bearing gifts.”

“I’m going to give him some tea,” Aja said firmly. She declined to say what was in it.

They were disappointed when Magalie just watched them get ready to leave. “You’re not going to come?”

She shook her head. She didn’t know why Geneviève and Aja could show up at Philippe Lyonnais’s triumph like bad fairies swooping in to spoil the christening, while she was afraid she would be mistaken for a tribute-bearer to his court. But there it was.

She watched them head off, neither one wearing anything more against the cold than Geneviève’s thin cotton caftan and Aja’s cotton kameez and salwar pants, the gaily painted chocolate pot in Geneviève’s hands, a cast-iron teapot in Aja’s, making them vaguely suggestive of Three Queens of the Orient. With one Queen left behind sulking.

Oh, bon sang. It might be the season for the Magi, but he was not the Prince of the World. No matter what he thought himself.

The two aunts were talking as they got farther away, Geneviève in the low voice she mistakenly used whenever she didn’t want to be overheard. When she lowered her voice for secrets, it went bass, acquiring a carrying power that Magalie’s mother claimed had gotten her banned at a very early age from any discussions of Christmas presents. “. . . self-confidence,” Genevieve said in that stage whisper. “Do you think she’s ever going to learn some?”

Magalie’s eyebrows flicked up, and she wondered who they were talking about. It couldn’t possibly be her.

She pricked up her ears, but now Aja was answering, and Aja never said anything you didn’t have to be close to her to hear.

Abruptly Magalie felt abandoned, alone with the scent of her chocolate. As if she needed to jump onto a camel and head after them, pursuing some bright star. The emptiness of their shop lodged a hard knot of anguish in her middle, and she couldn’t understand how Geneviève and Aja didn’t show the strain.

She grabbed Aja’s tea, pressed the cup to her cheek, and almost drank it. Instead she set it down again and pulled on her wool coat. No sorties in thin cotton for her. She had no idea how Aja and Geneviève did it.

She turned their sign to LES SORCIÈRES REVIENNENT DANS CINQ MINUTES, picked up the tea again, and walked not toward Philippe Lyonnais’s gloating success but toward the opposite end of the island, crossing the Boulevard Henri IV, named after the same green king who always saluted her. She passed through the small park, where two brave souls sat on the benches despite the cold, and descended the stairs to the quay and the tip of the island.

Their local clochard’s German shepherd wandered up, sniffing for food, and Magalie gave it a guilty look as she handed an old, battered pot full of chocolate to the dog’s homeless owner. She always forgot to keep things on hand for non-chocolate-eating creatures. The street-dwelling clochard—who sometimes let Magalie call him Gérard and other times insisted he was one of the Notre-Dame gargoyles in disguise, but who always insisted that he was not homeless, he simply preferred to live life out in the open—took the pot with a noise of appreciation. Magalie wondered what the wish for happiness she’d stirred into it could possibly do to help someone in his situation, but then again, it surely couldn’t hurt.

No one else was there, which used to make her uneasy, when Gérard, alias Gargoyle, had started hanging out there, but they had gotten used to each other over the years. Gérard frustrated Geneviève no end, however; she couldn’t get his life straight no matter how hard she went after him, and, generally speaking, Geneviève was to other people’s lives what a heavy, old-fashioned iron was to clothes.

The water flowed winter-brown and high from recent rains, splitting around the point of the island. Bare trees stretched away along the banks, offering little of the soft shelter from the city that they suggested in the summer. The bridges that braceleted the Seine thinned out a little past this point, and the arches of the Pont d’Austerlitz were small in the distance. She could see, farther on, the shining and impractical book-towers of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Naked.

The word flashed back through her like a stab in the back. It had a lion’s arrogant grin on it, and she pictured him surging up in his own nakedness, shoulders broad and powerful, and beyond that . . .

Beyond that, what? His jaw was lean. Oh, what a lean, powerful jaw that was. But the coats and chef jackets she had always seen him in left a lot to the imagination.

So why did her imagination provide a lean waist and a flex of abs and, above all, him glorying in it?

Well, of course, he would glory in his nakedness. That man gloried in everything about himself, didn’t he?

Footsteps sounded on the quay, and Magalie braced instinctively, because even here, on her island, riffraff could occasionally wander in from the rest of Paris to annoy women standing alone. Then Gérard would urinate in very close proximity to the riffraff ’s feet, which was amazingly effective at driving them off, but awkward all around.

But her first glance spotted functional tennis shoes and a bulky jacket, and she relaxed. A tourist. She loved tourists. They usually meant no one any harm and were wrapped up in wonder. What was not to love?

Except . . . this one was carrying a box very clearly stamped Lyonnais. And more specifically, one also marked at each corner with the PL Philippe Lyonnais had added to the logo of his Lyonnais shop.

Magalie contemplated one trailing lace of those tennis shoes. One sudden fall, and those macarons would be crushed. And the German shepherd would be happy. She sighed and bent her head, slipping her gloved hand under her scarf to rub the back of her neck. She probably really did need to drink Aja’s tea. It would be nice to stay the kind of person she could like. Wanting to trip a tourist, for God’s sake.

The river curved two great, protecting arms around the island, shielding it from the hustle of the rest of the city. Holding her untouched tea in one hand, Magalie contemplated the banks across the water. From here, the critical, brisk, sharp-dressed people moving along them were just part of the view. The tourist set his box down on a bench and took some pictures.

Her feet aching in her boots, Magalie eyed again the white pillows that passed for shoes on the tourist’s feet and, just for an errant second, imagined wearing them.

She caught the image back. She wasn’t in Ithaca. People who belonged to this island in the heart of this city never wore running shoes.

But her gaze flicked up to the comfort of the tourist’s outfit, not too unlike the comfort of the clothes she used to steal from her boyfriend back in high school, because she liked to bury herself in them and pretend she could never be dragged out. What would it feel like to put on those baggy sweatpants and the giant sweatshirt?

She gave herself a shake, like a dog flicking off water. No sense going that far.

But the idea teased at her. Tennis shoes. Running shoes. What would it feel like to go running through the city? She had gotten interested in track when she was fourteen. She’d done well that first year at her American high school but then missed all the spring meets when her mother just couldn’t resist another spring in Provence, and the coach hadn’t let her back on the team. She was too small, anyway, to have ever been a star athlete. But she had liked it, there for a while.

Occasionally she saw women running in Paris. Mostly very slowly, very fashionably, chatting with a competitively fashionable friend the whole way. But what would it feel like to really run?

Floating through the city like some seagull, detached from it yet part of it. With no armor, no clicking of boots, no competition. Not giving a damn what others saw when they looked at her.

It was a very odd idea, and maybe it was because of that oddness that it kept hold of her as she headed back to the shop. It curled around the nape of her neck, as if with just a nod of permission it would massage all the tension away.





When she got back to the shop, a couple was standing in front of the display window, the man tall and lean, with overlong black hair and an intense, sensual, poetic face; the vaguely familiar-looking woman slim and considerably shorter, with light brown hair just past her shoulders, in that absolutely straight, silky look that was still fashionable. She was dressed in a way that proved sometimes money was just wasted on people. The woman’s clothes spoke of the highest-end stores on Faubourg Saint-Honoré, but she wore them with a streamlined elegance that just barely escaped being bon chic bon genre. Magalie, with the same money, would have come out of those Faubourg Saint-Honoré shops with flair.

“You’re right,” the man was saying. “This is fantastic.”

Magalie smiled.

“Tu vois.” The woman nudged her elbow gently into his side. “I told you you had to see this.” Her accent was clearly American, but her French was accurate.

A quirk of a sensual mouth as the man glanced down at her, but all he said was, “I don’t see why you made me go to Philippe’s opening on the way. As if he wasn’t full enough of himself without me stopping by.”

“And here I thought it was my presence that would flatter him,” the woman said dryly.

Magalie could see the man’s eyebrows flick up incredulously at this idea—maybe that the woman’s presence could be flattering at all to Philippe, or maybe that anyone’s presence could be more flattering than his own—but he politely smoothed the expression away before the woman glanced up at him. She gave him an ironic look, nevertheless. He smiled at her. She immediately melted, smiling back.

Handsome, arrogant men who manipulated women with a sexy smile were so . . . annoying. Right.That was the word Magalie was looking for. Annoying. Nobody ever managed to do that to her. And there was no reason at all that that thought should make her regretful.

“Besides, he agreed to do our wedding. You know you can’t do it. The least we could do was come to his opening, Sylvain.”

“I might make one little thing for our wedding,” Sylvain said discreetly.

The woman narrowed her eyes. “Sylvain, if you spend the forty-eight hours before our wedding trying to make sure your ‘one little thing’ outshines whatever Philippe brings—”

Magalie drew in a startled breath, her heart speeding up like that of a sixteen-year-old about to throw her panties to a rock star onstage. This was—could this be Sylvain Marquis? The best chocolatier in the world? Oh, God, and he was standing there looking at their display.

Three dangerous-looking witches flew over a forest, on a long journey, each with a gift behind her on her broomstick. The small chocolate chests were slightly open, revealing frankincense of gold-colored candied lemon peel in one, myrrh made from bits of golden and brown raisins chopped fine in another, and real gold leaf in the last. High up was a great chocolate star with eight points, flecked with gold leaf.

They would have to take it down soon. The Fête des Rois had been last week. But the season stretched through January. Magalie and her aunts, for example, were going to another Feast of Kings that weekend, hosted by the friend who had gotten the fève in the galette des rois, or King Cake, at La Maison des Sorcières’s Feast of Kings the week before. Some of the people in the line before Lyonnais were probably buying his galettes, paying a fortune to have a little bite of fame at their own Fête des Rois.

Magalie took a couple of careful breaths and tried to make herself sound adult and confident and not in the least starstruck. “Pardon.” She nodded to Sylvain Marquis and his companion in a friendly, firm fashion as she moved past them to unlock the door.

“Bonjour,” the woman said with a bright smile, and she held out her hand. Confused, Magalie put hers into it and found it shaken confidently. Not just another American, but an American businesswoman, Magalie decided instantly. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I was in here once before, when I was in Paris for some business meetings a few months ago. I’m Cade Corey.”

Magalie searched her face. They had quite a few princesses come by, and she clearly was one, but now that Magalie thought about it . . . way back in the fall . . . a wish for someone to understand her own freedom . . . “Ah!” She smiled. “Did it work?”

Cade Corey tilted her head inquiringly. “Did what work?”

“Ah . . . nothing. Were you wanting some—some chocolate?” She was offering chocolate to Sylvain Marquis? “Or tea, perhaps?” Her tea was a lot safer to drink than Aja’s. Happy people generally did prefer to limit their risks of being shaken up. “Please come in.”

Cade Corey’s gaze flicked around the shop as she preceded Magalie inside, her face lighting with pleasure. Sylvain insisted on holding the door for both of them. Magalie turned at once to see his face as he came in after her, and she blushed a little when she saw his slow smile of enchantment. “This is wonderful.”

She could feel herself turning bright red. Sylvain Marquis. “I’ll just—please sit where you like. I’ll just get out of my coat. May I take yours?”

When she came back from layering the coats on the hook on the courtyard door, Cade was examining the child’s drawings on her menu with great delight, and Sylvain Marquis was standing as close to the display case as he could without pressing into it, studying the shelves full of antique silver molds climbing the wall behind it. He had an avaricious gleam in his eyes.

Cade Corey looked up from her menu. “I don’t remember it being this quiet,” she said frankly. “Is it the Lyonnais opening?” she asked, just as intrusively as if they were good friends and she had the right to know.

Magalie knit her brow, not quite sure what to do with the other woman. Overall, she liked her; she liked that clear, open confidence she gave off. But how were these things Cade Corey’s business?

That Corey name was vaguely familiar, calling to mind awful chocolate bars to which she had occasionally been exposed during the parts of her childhood that were spent in America. What an ironic coincidence that someone with that name should apparently be engaged to marry Sylvain Marquis.

Cade frowned. “I like Philippe, but if he puts this place out of business, I will kill him.”

Magalie clenched her stomach muscles, a second too late to protect herself from the blow. That was bluntness with a vengeance.

Sylvain turned his head from the chocolate molds, his eyebrows going ever so subtly up. “You like Philippe?”

Cade grinned. “Not as much as I like Dominique Richard,” she told him.

Dominique Richard was the name of another top chocolatier in Paris. Sylvain Marquis turned completely away from the molds and narrowed his eyes at his fiancée. She looked rather smug about how annoying she was being.

Before she could tease Sylvain more or, worse, twist more knives in La Maison des Sorcières’ wounds, the door opened and Geneviève blazed in, followed by a very quiet Aja. The cold air swirled around them and disappeared, eaten in one bite by the warmth in the shop.

“Bonjour,” Geneviève told their two clients with warm approval, while Aja smiled at them. “I’m so glad to see someone with taste.”

“It went that well, did it?” Magalie said dryly, rather relieved. If Geneviève and Aja had ended up on best-buddy terms with Philippe Lyonnais, it would have been desperately annoying.

“First of all, we had to force our way in.” Geneviève looked about as dangerous as a woman who was six feet tall and wielding chocolate could. “There were lines, and he seemed to think we should wait in them.”

Sylvain Marquis grinned. “How impolitic of him.”

Geneviève waved a dramatic hand. “I don’t say it was him personally, but it’s certainly his responsibility to better educate his lackeys.”

Aja smoothed her tunic back into clean lines as if it had gotten ruffled. “Everyone on the island was there.”

Magalie’s stomach tightened. “Even Claire-Lucy? Thierry?” Who had saluted her with a rose bouquet when she went off to battle? All those people who had sat at their tables for months, swearing their support?

Aja inclined her head without saying anything.

“However, we did make our way back into his kitchens,” Geneviève continued grandly, “without—need I clarify?—waiting in lines. There, I must say, he seemed rather intrigued to see us. However . . .” She fell silent. Her mouth got as tight as a mountainside just before lava blew its face off.

“He declined our gifts,” Aja said, as evenly as if this was entirely his right and choice and no matter to her. She ran one finger over the length of her black braid, smoothing everything within reach.

Magalie’s right fist clenched. “Your tea?” she forced herself to ask first, courteously, as if that was the most important thing to her.

“He set it aside on the back of the counter, thanked us kindly for thinking of him, and promised to bring the pot back another day.” Aja made a little gesture of her hands: On his head be it. She fixed Magalie with steady black eyes. “If you’re offered a gift, and you refuse it, then you’ve made your choice.”

Magalie tried to look bright-eyed, as if she had drunk her own cup of Aja’s tea instead of throwing it into the Seine. With her luck, the tea had been meant to make her dreamy.

“And my chocolate?” she got out. That she had made with her own hands and all her heart, pouring out her desire to see him begging on his knees.

“Refused outright,” Geneviève said crisply. She held up the carnival pot. “He asked us to take it back to you.”

Magalie gasped as if the chocolate pot contained icy water that Geneviève had just dashed into her face. Such an open rejection. And in front of Sylvain Marquis, too.

“It smells delicious,” the most famous chocolatier in Paris said instantly, although the aroma leaking from the pot was now thin and cold, a ghost of its former self. “I would love to try some.”

Magalie was going to wish every wonderful thing in the world for him and his fiancée, she decided firmly. What a beautiful man. “Not that one,” she said hurriedly, grasping the cold pot from Aunt Geneviève. The idea of Sylvain Marquis begging on his knees in front of her was just . . . wrong. Not at all what she wanted. “I’ll make some fresh. Aunt Geneviève, Aunt Aja, this is Sylvain Marquis.” She tried to sneak the subtlest emphasis in there, because Aunt Geneviève would fail to respect the President. Which was one thing, but failing to respect Sylvain Marquis . . . well, there were limits. “And Cade Corey,” she added, trying her best not to make that name sound like an afterthought.

Cade looked wryly amused.

“I remember you,” Aunt Aja told her. “It seems to have worked.”

Cade squinted just a little. “What worked?” she asked again, a shade more warily.

“Sylvain Marquis,” Magalie heard Geneviève say musingly as she went back into the kitchen to empty the carnival pot of chocolate and start a fresh batch. “I think I’ve seen you on TV. You’re quite handy with chocolate, aren’t you? Did you come to ask for my secrets?”

Pouring milk and a little cream into a pot, Magalie groaned silently and raised her eyes to heaven.

“As a matter of fact . . .” Sylvain said, and Magalie dropped her spoon. Chairs scraped. “I want to talk to you about your window displays.”

By the time Magalie finished the chocolate and came back out, Sylvain and Geneviève were at a small table together, deep into negotiations for Geneviève to help him design a particularly magical window theme, and Cade Corey was looking like someone swelling with smug satisfaction and trying hard not to let it show through her professional demeanor. Completely unoffended by Geneviève’s attitude that he was a young arriviste, Sylvain was wheedling the older woman respectfully, acting for all the world as if she would be doing him an enormous favor.

Cade Corey watched him do this, the love and affection in her face so discreet yet intense that Magalie stood there with the tray of chocolate in her hand, its warmth and wishes for their wonderful life twining all around her, and felt desperately lonely.

The door opened with a forlorn little chime, and she looked up, smiling with delight to see one of their old faithful returning. Madame Fernand came in with a sigh. “Magalie, ma petite chérie, I don’t suppose you would mind keeping track of Sissi long enough for me to try one little bite at that Philippe’s? They won’t let me in with a dog.”