The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 9



Opening day was over. Philippe’s family and employees had all finished toasting him and one another with Champagne. The place was clean and polished, and, as was fitting, he was the very last one there, to linger over the day and contemplate its success.

To linger over the smooth, cool marble and the gleaming glass display cases, the molding and the embossed walls, the palace of pâtisseries. The lines had stretched almost to the tip of the island. He had gone out himself many times to pass out little tidbits of this and that and greet people as they waited, and they had loved it, every second.

But his shoulders prickled with dissatisfaction, a tension right between the blades.

She hadn’t come. She hadn’t come to see the success, to see how many people would wait an hour in the cold just to taste the macarons she had refused. She hadn’t come to see his triumph, to see the worth of what she had rejected.

He had had a plan, to escort her in—no lines for her—to bring her into the inner circle of family and employees in the kitchens, to treat her with every courtesy. To shame her with the very degree of his courtesy in the face of her rudeness, to make her change her mind about him.

But she hadn’t come.

Her aunts had come. Alarmingly.

But other than a minor tussle as they broke in line and waltzed in, they hadn’t done anything to spoil the day. At least, he hadn’t accepted anything from them that would spoil the day.

He didn’t drink tea, and he wasn’t going to start with a beverage brought to him by someone who considered herself a sorcière.

And as for Magalie’s chocolate . . . the scent had twined through all the smells with which his laboratoire was filled, taunting him. His chefs had raised their heads from their work and looked around, hungrily.

He had had to get the stuff out of there, because—because he would be damned if he would pay her the honor of drinking her chocolat when she was treating his own highest refinement of the art of pâtisserie as if it were worthless. Plus, he was pretty convinced she was trying to turn him into a toad.

What could he turn her into?

Pure desire?

He took one of the Désir macarons from the walk-in refrigerator and bit into it uneasily, as he had more times than he could count since that day she had rejected it.

No, still, it was perfection. The little grains of pistachio on his tongue, the delicate crunch of the outside shell, yielding instantly to the melting heaven of the inside of the macaron, and then the thicker, richer apricot ganache, and, last, as you came to the heart of it, that tiny crackling surprise of the hidden salted caramel heart.

Any change would make it less good. He couldn’t let that doubt she had sown in him make him ruin one of his most popular works.

Maybe she needed something different.

He rested his hand on a marble counter in his laboratoire, letting the chill of it focus his mind.

Something even more special. Something that would make those brown eyes stop snapping with anger and widen with stunned desire. Something that would make her mouth soften, helpless around it, unable to compress in disdain.

Something so special that only he, in all the world, was capable of creating it.

She had called him “Your Highness”, in pure contempt.

He smiled suddenly, his hand closing tight and tense, so that his knuckles rubbed against the marble. Maybe he should offer her a crown.