The Chocolate Thief (29 page)

Authors: Laura Florand

BOOK: The Chocolate Thief

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He straightened from the marble and gave an abrupt, scorching look at the motionless laboratoire.
“Ça vous dérange?”
he asked his employees icily.
Do you mind?!
A couple of them stirred or otherwise moved halfheartedly, all still focused on them.

He came around the counter, took her arm, and half pulled, half escorted her out to her waiting taxi. Wind rippled his thin cotton shirt. He must have felt the cold, but he didn’t react to it. He looked down at her, with no perceptible softening in the line of that hard jaw.

“Je suis tombé amoureux de toi,”
he said, his voice angry, as if he was fighting a wound he had always known was coming. “You do . . . what you decide to do. I don’t have any say over that. But I think I love you.”

Cade stared at him, feeling as if a bomb had gone off in the distance and the wave of it had just hit her, as if she couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, could only feel, stunned. “Is there something going on between you and Chantal?” she asked abruptly.

He stared at her. “No.” As the question sank in, his mouth grew, if possible, even grimmer. “You mean you thought there might be, and you only just now asked?”

She hunched her shoulders in a yes, flushing.

His hand clenched on the roof of the taxi. “Are other people just toys for you to pick up and shake a little bit and then drop on the ground?”

Her mouth dropped open in shock. That wasn’t what she was doing
at all
. She had just—she had just wanted this so badly, she hadn’t wanted to ask any questions. Hadn’t wanted to let anything—like his responsibilities or hers or whether or not she was setting either of them up for hurt—get in her way. “I just—tried to take what I wanted,” she said in a low voice. Why did it sound really bad when she said it out loud?

That clenched fist slid off the roof of the taxi. “Seriously,” he said, almost conversationally, as if the rage showing in his eyes was too intense to risk letting into his voice,
“va te faire foutre.”

He turned and headed back to the shop.

Cade, sinking amid this utter disaster into the taxi, paused halfway, clutching the edge of the door. “Didn’t you?” she cried after him. “Try to take what you wanted?”

Sylvain’s long stride faltered. He turned back and watched as the taxi pulled away.

Cade Corey rode all the way to the airport without thinking about Total Foods or Devon Candy once.

Chapter 27

S
he had just handed over her boarding pass when her dad called again. “There’s a new development,” he said. “We’ve been talking with Firenze about a co-buyout of Devon. It’s a good thing you’re in Europe. Your French is going to come in handy, sweetie. Get up to Belgium right now. I want you to talk to the brothers.”

The third day out, Cade and everyone around her were surviving on coffee and, in Cade’s case, Sylvain’s chocolate. She didn’t share. The Firenze brothers offered her pots of their famous chocolate spread and local artisan Belgian chocolate, and her entourage of accountants, lawyers, and assistants, all flown in from Maryland or pulled from Corey Chocolate’s small business center in Brussels, shared Belgian fries indiscriminately. When she flew over to London, everyone at Devon Candy tried to feed her Devon Bars and fish and chips.

She made secretaries bring her fruit and salads and whole grains and for the most part ignored the junk food. Instead, she kept a box of Sylvain’s chocolate with her and just once in a while, whenever she needed to feel a part of him—every fifteen minutes or so—she ate a piece.

Every bite gave her a little burst of sweetness and hope, as if she could figure a way through this. Through this cooperative buyout, through Total Foods, through all her responsibilities and the fact that a part of her thrilled to them, through to what she wanted out of life, through back to him.

But she didn’t know what to
say
to him. When she pulled her head out of discussions with the Firenze brothers and Devon Candy and looked at her phone, she didn’t know what to call and say or text or e-mail or anything. “Really?” That seemed kind of a chancy start. “Are you sure?” Well, how could he be
sure
if they had only known each other a few days? Was there such a thing as
sure
with the words “I think I love you”? Maybe, instead, “What do you mean by that?”

That seemed hard to ask on the phone. And, of course, there was always the possibility that he was still mad at her. He had sent her one word via text message since she’d left, a word she had received on the TGV ride up to Brussels:
Oui.

She assumed it was an answer to her last question:
Yes, I tried to take what I wanted, too.

It could be a mad
oui
or a let’s-not-cut-off-all-communication-over-a-fight, olive-branch
oui.
It was hard to tell over text messaging.

Finally, though, she couldn’t
not
call him; she was quite sure that would be a very bad mistake. So she tried an intro line a little more awkward but time-honored. “Hi.”

She heard him draw in a breath. “Cade.”

She melted at the way he said her name, the precise French
a
that seemed to make her name half as long as it was in English. Instantly, she stopped being afraid he was still mad.

She put her feet up on one pillow and sank her head back into another. Her feet ached; her brain felt exhausted. She wanted desperately three separate and mutually exclusive things: to sleep, to go out for a long, long walk to clear her mind, and to just curl up here talking to Sylvain.

“I’m eating one of your chocolates.” The conical one with its sprinkling of cocoa nibs at the flat end, the one he called his nod to the pleasures of a child’s ice cream cone. Except there was nothing childish about it, the nibs instead of peanuts, the thick, dark exterior, yielding to one of his softest, silkiest, most liquid ganaches. She had to eat it carefully, biting into the cone and sucking the insides into her mouth as she did, so that it didn’t melt all over her hands. Exactly like a child with an ice cream cone.

“Ah.” His voice was just a breath, a whisper in her ear. She might have woken him up. It was late. He might be lying in his bed now, naked except for briefs, his shoulders matte and muscled against the white sheets. Had he had his phone lying within reach, hoping she would call? Had he, too, stopped being angry the instant he heard her voice? “Is it good?” he murmured, warmth and sensuality stirring between them, across the distance.

“It’s always good,” she whispered.

A little sound on his end like a smile. “Which one are you eating?”

“The
cornette de ganache
.”

“Ah.” Just the breath of a murmur. Even over the phone, the sound stroked her skin. She had a feeling he was imagining with complete and utter accuracy every taste and sensation on her tongue. He knew the softness, the sweetness. He knew the gentle sucking of her lips so that the ganache didn’t spill onto her fingers. He knew the imprint of chocolate left on her thumb and the way she had to lick it off.

And he knew that he had put it there.

Good God, he was so sexy. How could he be that sexy over a phone?

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She groaned. “I’m about to fall asleep. Someone is supposed to drag me out of bed in exactly six hours. We have this theory that by the third day everyone needs at least one full REM sleep.”

“So, do you own the world yet? I checked the news, but I didn’t see anything.”

“We can’t let Total Foods get Devon Candy. It’s not exactly a question of owning the world.” More a question of being disowned, really. Maybe they shouldn’t get into this topic right now, over the phone. “And no, we don’t. What are you doing?”

“I was asleep, but just barely. I doubt I’m as tired as you are. But it’s five weeks before Christmas, so we can start producing our Christmas chocolates next week.” Sylvain Marquis did not sell
old
chocolate in his shop. Certainly not four weeks or even two weeks old. But people would start buying and offering gifts early in December. “And I’ve been working on the Christmas decorations for the shop.”

Five weeks before Christmas. She would probably spend all Thanksgiving Day locked in meetings with Devon and Firenze. How was that for irony?

Her eyes brightened as she tried to imagine what he might concoct out of chocolate for his windows and counters. “Will they be up by the time I get back?”

A little silence. “It depends on how soon you return.”

She rolled over, burying her face in her pillow in lieu of him. She had no idea when she would get back. And she was so wiped out. But his voice in her ear was perfect.

“How do you like the Firenze brothers?” he asked.

“I’m not tempted to break into their
laboratoire,
if that’s what you’re asking.”

His low laugh made her feel like a cat that had just had a hand run down its back. “That’s what I’m asking. Eat another one of my chocolates, Cade.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and just breathed in the thought, the feel, of him, hundreds of miles away.

A box of his chocolates lay a foot or so from her face on the table by her bed. Through her mind flitted questions like: How often did he fall in love? How often did he fall out of it? When he’d said “think,” his hypothesis was based on what experience of how it felt to love someone? Instead of asking any of them, she opened her eyes and studied the array of glossy brown bites, each one signaling its contents in some subtle difference in marking, and asked, “Which one?”

His voice stroked over her like his callused hand. “Whichever one you want.”

She was tired, so tired, and yet arousal seemed to caress all through her, as if she could fall asleep on a bed of it. “Whichever one you want me to,” she whispered.

A sound from him as if she had stretched out her hand and grabbed the most sensitive part of him. And as if she hadn’t. As if the phantom nature of that hand was pure torment. “Cade, where are you? Are you in Bruxelles? I could take the train up.”

“London,” she said reluctantly. “I’ll be back in Brussels tomorrow.”

“Night? Tomorrow night?”

Oh, God.
She curled around the arousal he was creating in her, the frustrated longing. “I won’t have a second for you. And I’ll probably be exhausted.”

“I can keep myself entertained, Cade. I know people in Bruxelles.” He laughed. “Quite a lot of people,
en fait,
or have you forgotten that that misguided country thinks
it
has the best chocolate? It’s only an hour and a half away. I’ll have to see if I can get away from this winter forest I’m creating.” A beat of silence. “Or would you prefer I not?”

“No,” she said. “Oh, no.” But it depended on how the fantasy played out. All their encounters had been pretty heated up until now, and pretty much . . . encounters. She didn’t want him to be disappointed if she did nothing but fall asleep on him, crumpled and stale, at the end of another long day.

He changed the subject. “So, what are you wearing?”

“My clothes,” she admitted regretfully. She had fallen into bed in them. It would have been much better to either
be
in a sexy something or have the presence of mind to pretend she was.

Sylvain laughed. “Now, that’s an interesting challenge. How to get your clothes off from five hundred kilometers away.”

Heat flushed to her cheeks. And some other places. She wiggled for a second, letting her boots thump to the floor. “I took off my shoes,” she offered.

“Ma chérie.”
He sighed. “I like your willingness to cooperate. But I think if you were so tired you hadn’t gotten your shoes off yet, I should probably let you go to sleep.”

“I know but . . . I was looking forward to finding out how you would get everything else off.”

“Ah . . .” There was a long silence.

When he spoke again, his voice had lowered, deepened, roughened, a breath tempting her into a dark, warm room with a lock on the door. “Will you promise to do everything I tell you to?”

She turned off the light and sank under the covers. All pitch-black now. Nothing but his voice, the hard feel of the phone against her ear, the softness and weight of the comforter. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Everything?” that dark voice insisted, mastering her as he always did.

Her voice was barely a sound:
“Oui.”

Chapter 28

“P
lease don’t tell me you are going to take the train up there to be her gigolo for the night,” Chantal said flatly.

Sylvain stared at her. As usual, Chantal looked lovely and classy. Too classy to accuse him of being a gigolo, but they had been friends for long enough that she spoke her mind when she thought she should speak it.

“I don’t think I had thought of it in quite those terms, no.”

They were in one of their favorite lunch spots, a tiny Vietnamese restaurant that one had to find by word of mouth or, rather, intense curiosity, as it didn’t look like anything much from the outside or in: dark red velvet, barely lit. His had been the intense curiosity, back when it first opened, and his and Chantal’s had been the start of the word of mouth that now made it so popular.

One of the quiet owners set
saki
in front of them, on the house, as she had for years now. The little china cups showed tiny and excruciatingly bad pornographic pictures if looked at through an alcoholic haze. Gender-specific, too; Chantal’s would be of a man.

“Sylvain. Can’t you see you’re doing it again? I thought you had gotten over letting women use you and break your heart.”

He was getting heartily sick of this subject. “You’re sure Cade is using me?” He thought of her breathing the night before on the phone, what it had done to him to have her respond that way to his voice. He thought of her holding his gaze, saying,
“I’m coming back.
”

“Absolument,”
Chantal said firmly.

“You don’t think there’s any possibility she could be a little bit in love with me?
Merci,
Chantal.” People who knew you in high school never did learn to respect you, did they?

“
Of course
I think there’s a possibility she’s in love with you,” Chantal said, flushing for no reason Sylvain could figure out. “Who wouldn’t be?”

What?
Deep inside, Sylvain started.

“But you can be in love with someone and still use him.”

“You would know,” Sylvain said dryly. She was beautiful, and she had an extensive history of letting assholes use her and then turning around and using nice guys to make her feel better about herself. She had been, in fact, one of those friends he had fantasized about in high school and whom he had successfully seduced once with chocolate when he was sixteen and she was eighteen.

The next morning, she had treated it as a blip in their friendship, kind and rather condescending about it. He had forgiven her because he was crazy about her—wounded, but crazy about her—and she had gone straight on to one of the jerks she’d liked to date so much at that time.

Chantal stiffened. “You know, Sylvain, I am—nearly a decade older now.”

He was fourteen years older, but time flowed a little differently for Chantal, who was resisting hitting thirty.

She touched her fingertips delicately to the back of his hand. “Don’t you think I might have learned to appreciate you?”

Chantal had always had a dog-in-the-manger streak with him, when it came to the women he dated. She was comfortable as a friend whenever he wasn’t dating someone, but she always wanted to grab him back when he was. She needed a nice guy in her life; she just didn’t know how to make a commitment to one. Chantal had had a pretty screwed-up home life back as a teenager. He liked her, and he understood that about her, and so he was able to tolerate some things. But there were limits.

“She knows her mind, though,” he said suddenly.

“What?” Chantal looked wary.

“You’ve got to hand it to her. She may want to use me, but she wants to use
me.
” And he wanted to use her. Use her and use her, in all kinds of ways. But he also wanted to make her smile. He wanted to let her curl up in the shelter of his body when the wind was cold. He wanted to set her up on his counter and feed her hot chocolate to warm her. “She wanted me or my chocolate from the start, and she went after it, and she never once thought she might want someone else instead.”

“What about Dominique Richard?” Chantal asked defensively. “She told me she liked Dominique Richard better.”

“She was lying. She’s a very cute liar.” She was a very erotic liar, was what she was. It made him want to capture her and . . . mmm, push her up against the wet wall of that shower of his—they hadn’t tried that yet—and make her admit the lie.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Chantal.” Sylvain looked at her and just shook his head. “I’m sure she was lying about Dominique Richard, yes. Very sure. But sure that I won’t get my heart broken, sure this will end well? I think the chances are about one in a hundred.”

“You think that, and yet you’ll go chasing after her?” Chantal demanded furiously.

“Of course.”

The security guard at the Firenze headquarters in Brussels couldn’t get Cade on the phone for permission to bring him up but was too much of a romantic to turn Sylvain away. The romantics in life had to stick up for each other. He finally decided to escort Sylvain to her, keeping a sharp eye on him to make sure he was who he said he was and not some fanatic out to strike a blow against globalization by throwing a bomb.

So Cade had no advance warning of Sylvain’s arrival into her world. He felt his stomach muscles tighten as he approached the doorway, preparing to protect his soft, mushy
chamallow
insides from a blow.

Cade stood to the side of an oval table, by a window looking down on the old town. Dusk was falling, making the window a dark backdrop to a large, well-lit room. In the center of the table were the remnants of some kind of orange pie, that seemed to have been shared at some point. Cade looked very professional—black pants, boots, a fitted pale blue shirt, hair at the end of a long day having lost wisps from its chignon to frame her face but still remarkably smooth. None of that lip gloss she favored was left on her lips. A black blazer he suspected to be hers hung over a nearby chair. She was talking to one of the Firenzes, gesturing sharply with one hand and looking frustrated and intense, when the movement in the doorway caught her attention, and she glanced his way.

She froze, her lips still parted in whatever she had been saying, her hand stilling mid-gesture.

Then her face lit. The professional, intense energy fragmented under an explosion of happiness. “Sylvain.”

The joy in it took his breath away. She left the group as if they had ceased to exist, her arms lifting up to him as she came toward him in such obvious delight that the security guard stopped trying to block him and let him meet her halfway. The woman who had previously infuriated him and made him deeply wary by her refusal to greet him with even the
bises
of a casual acquaintance threw her arms around him and kissed him with so much joy, he would think . . . well, he would think all kinds of things.

When he could think again. Right now, he just wanted to kiss her back.

“You came,” she said, when she finally surfaced. And in complete contradiction to every other message she was sending: “You shouldn’t have come. You’ll be bored.”

He gave a low half laugh, incredulous. He would have flown around the world to learn what he had just learned. He would even have done it two weeks before Christmas or Easter, when he could spare not a second from his own work.

“Why did you come?” She reproached his choice even while pressing her body into his as if she could never get close enough.

Because he had a one in a hundred chance, and he wasn’t stupid enough not to take it.

He bent down with a smile to whisper into her ear: “To get your shoes off.” Last night had driven him pretty insane with desire. And he wanted to make sure she was still real. To see a little of what her world was like. And to see her reaction to his walking into her world.

Sa réaction était magnifique.

She was still staring up at him with her eyes sparkling like the damn, giddy Eiffel Tower.

She blushed suddenly. Because she had, in fact, done everything he’d told her to the night before. Sylvain gave her a slow, slow smile, and her blush deepened. He pulled her hard against him, feeling himself grow instantly aroused.

Not a great thing in a room full of her business associates. He pushed her far enough away from him that she was no longer touching him but kept hold of her hips so he wouldn’t lose his human shield before his arousal subsided.

When he was safe for public view, he shook hands with the Firenze brothers, whom he had met before, and with a few other people who suddenly wanted to be introduced. At first that amused him, because he could see why a good corporate ladder-climber would want to meet the person one of the Coreys was publicly kissing. Then, belatedly, alarm penetrated the amusement. It had never occurred to him that a consequence of dating Cade was that he might gain power in her world and have to learn how to use it wisely.

It was a sobering thought. It gave him the tiniest glimpse of how she felt, with all that power, how worried she was about ignoring it and focusing, at least for a while, on what
she
wanted and not the infinite number of things she could or should be doing with her power. It was a wonder her sense of self wasn’t fragmented to pieces. He remembered again Googling her name, and all the references that came up—business articles or charities, every single one.

She didn’t know how to get out from under all that she could or should do. When he walked out of the meeting to let her finish it, he felt almost as if he was abandoning her to quicksand without even tossing her a rope.

He met a friend of his for a local Belgian beer in a pub on the Place St. Catherine but sat there uneasy the whole time, nagged by that illogical feeling he should go back and rescue her. And knowing she would be outraged if he even tried.

Cade came to join them an hour or so later, much to his relief. At least he could shake off that stupid quicksand image.

At night, cafés and restaurants filled the Place St. Catherine with lights and action, and the Église St. Catherine glowed against the dark sky, beautiful. The chalets for the Christmas market were just starting to be set up but had not yet filled the space. Sylvain and Cade took a slow walk through the square after his friend headed home.

“So is she?” she asked abruptly.

Since in French, “she” could be anything from a place to a person, he scrambled. “Is she what? Who?”

“A girlfriend? Do you sleep with her?” One of her heels wobbled on the uneven cobblestones. He took her arm more firmly to steady her.

“Chantal?” he finally guessed. That was the only other woman Cade had ever seen him with.
Enfin
. To his knowledge. She might have had some private investigator taking photos of him for the past year, for all he knew.

Her mouth set. He wanted to bend down and sip that stubbornness right off it. She nodded.

“No. A couple of times in high school.”

That mouth set harder. “Why only a couple?”

Because he had been ditched, of course. Now, how to admit that to a woman he wanted to impress? “Well . . .” He tried a cocky grin. “It might surprise you to know that I haven’t always been as cute as I am now.”

It shouldn’t surprise her, thanks to his mom’s photo album, but she had seemed to see his old gawky teenage self through a flattering haze.

They had reached the Grand Place, and Cade stood there in the light of the Brussels Town Hall, her mouth slowly forming a perfect
O
of disbelief as she deciphered what he meant. “You mean she ditched
you
?”

Cade was really, really good for his ego.

“I think she was young and stupid.” Sylvain pretended arrogance and mock sorrow for his friend’s error in her ways.

“I think she was young and stupid, too,” Cade said flatly, with no pretense at all. “And I think she realizes
how
stupid now.”

That . . . might be true. But if their friendship had survived Sylvain’s long-ago crush on Chantal, it could survive Chantal’s current crush on him. Chantal was just lost again and turning to him the way she always did when she was worried about being lost. She would figure out her love life eventually and find the right person. He had an idea, in fact—maybe he could get her together with Christophe le Gourmand and kill two birds with one stone. He frequently fantasized about hitting Christophe over the head with a stone, these days.

“So, no lovers?” Cade checked. A bulldog, Sylvain remembered.

“I wouldn’t say
no
lovers.”

She looked as if she’d just been slapped. By him.

It made him want to strangle her. He reached out a finger and tapped her a little too hard on the chest. “What do you think you are?”

“No
other
lovers,” she said impatiently.

“
Right now?
Is this some kind of French stereotype? That whole idea about our casual infidelity is
not
true, by the way.”