Chapter 20
H
e met her at the
chocolaterie,
where the
laboratoire
had closed but the shop was still open until nine, with a long line out its door.
“Do you think I should pay you a commission?” Sylvain asked wonderingly. “Having you get caught stealing my chocolates is the best thing for business—other than myself, of course—that has ever happened to me.”
She gave him an aggrieved look.
He pressed his lips together in amusement and led her to his apartment, stopping to pick up a baguette at the
boulangerie
. She watched him enviously. He did that so easily, as if it was as natural to him as breathing to stop in a bakery and pick up a baguette on the way home. Which, of course, it was.
“They just came out of the oven.” He held it out to her to share the pleasure. She pulled off a glove and closed her hand over it, feeling the warmth of the long, thin loaf through the small square of paper the baker had twisted around it.
He broke an end off and handed it to her, crackling and warm. She smiled as he broke off another bite for himself. He smiled back. “Nothing like catching the loaves when they just come out of the oven.”
He lived in the
rue piétonne
where she had run into him in the restaurant, a couple of blocks over from his
chocolaterie
and on the far end from the restaurant itself.
The apartment seemed nice. It was as clean and uncluttered as his
laboratoire,
everything put away in its place. But he obviously wiped down the counters in the
laboratoire
much more often than it occurred to him to dust the shelves here.
The living room was spacious and during the day must be luminous, with large windows that could be opened inward like great doors and that gave on to wrought-iron railings. A warm-colored rug graced the polished hardwood floor. The couch looked well-loved, as if someone liked to stretch out on it to read a good book or watch the moderately large flat-screen TV. She could see the indentation on the arm on which his head always lay, so that he was facing the windows. Tucked under the table at that end of the couch was a photo album in brown leather, embossed with his initials. It must have been someone’s idea of a gift.
All the doors down the hallway were closed. She picked up the photo album and came back into the kitchen. The kitchen, too, was spacious, or at least spacious for a single person’s apartment in a crowded city. And, of course, it was very well equipped.
Sylvain began pulling things out of the refrigerator—mushrooms, shallots, meat wrapped in paper. From a wine rack tucked under the edge of the counter, he brought out a bottle of wine. He paused when she came to lean against the dark granite counter and watch him.
“Tiens.”
He handed her a tiny paper bag that looked recently crushed by someone’s back pocket.
“What’s this?”
He looked—awkward. Sylvain, awkward? Half smiling, half-embarrassed, as if not sure how his gift would be received. “Just something I saw while I was out for lunch. It made me think of you.”
She blushed immediately. And opened it cautiously, half expecting velvet handcuffs.
A tiny, hand-knitted beige teddy bear peeked up at her, its eyes stitched by hand with two strands of black thread. It wore a minuscule backpack, into which an even tinier beige teddy bear was tucked. It was a finger puppet. She slipped it onto her finger, smiling as she eased the baby teddy out of the backpack to examine it and slipped it back onto the mommy bear’s back. It was completely and utterly charming, and it made no sense. She wasn’t a child, and their relationship wasn’t childish.
She looked up at him. He was smiling more, less awkward, as if the sight of it on her finger reminded him why he had bought it.
“Why?” she finally asked.
He pulled out a wooden cutting board and a chef’s knife that gleamed sharp enough to shave. “Because I didn’t think you would already have it. And I thought you might need it.”
“Need it?” Was she missing something about this teddy-bear finger puppet?
He nodded. “It accomplishes nothing. It is completely and utterly frivolous and childish. It’s just for the pure fun of it. For pleasure.”
He thought she needed more frivolity after the irresponsible way she had been behaving? She turned and bent her finger, liking the feel of the teddy bear on it. Who wouldn’t like a teddy-bear finger puppet?
Especially one that had no point. There were so few things in her life that had no point.
Or, wait . . . that
was
its point.
“This may be the most romantic present anyone has ever given me,” she said out loud before she thought.
Black eyebrows shot up.
“Vraiment?”
“Vraiment.”
“Dis, donc.”
He shook his head, turning back to the counter. “Those other guys will be easy to top, then, won’t they?”
She studied the back of his dark head, the easy set of his broad shoulders, the ease of all of him, all that lean, long body, as he cooked so casually. Did he want to top other men’s romantic gestures? He was doing a great job of it, but . . . was he doing it on purpose? Sex didn’t have to mean romance.
He dampened a cloth and began to rub each mushroom clean. “You mean, no one has ever brought you flowers?”
“Oh . . . flowers. Yes, of course.” She got flowers a lot, actually. They were an unnervingly fake gift. Easy to order over a phone at the most casual opportunity a man could find to increase his acquaintance with her money.
“No one’s ever given you chocolates?”
She laughed. “No. No one has ever given me chocolates.”
He looked sympathetic. “That must have been tough on you. Always wishing someone would give you real chocolates, but no one ever daring because of your family.”
There was maybe a teensy grain of truth in that, but she narrowed her eyes at him nevertheless.
He whipped his knife through the mushrooms in about five seconds and set the knife down long enough to fish in the pocket of the jacket he had draped over a chair. He produced the smallest-sized box from his shop, the kind that held only four thumbnail-sized chocolates, took the lid off, and held it out to her.
In it nestled four plain, square chocolates, completely unadorned. She looked from it to the broad hand holding it, the strong wrist, the straight, dark hairs on that strong forearm. Her gaze skipped up to his eyes, almost exactly the color of the chocolate and smiling just a little at her.
She got distracted by his eyes for a moment, wanting just to look at them in this moment of calm. He didn’t seem to mind the delay, studying her, his hand still patiently stretched toward her.
She pushed her hand through her hair and looked away, focusing on the chocolates. When she bit into one, it was dark, of course, lustrous in flavor, elusively cinnamon-y. Ever since she had told him she liked cinnamon, he kept playing with it.
“What do you think?”
She thought that, yes, as naturally as breathing he topped the romance of every other man she had ever dated or slept with.
How easy was this for him? Was it a formula, his seduction routine? Was she supposed to even care if it was a routine or just enjoy the moment?
His smile faded at her silence.
“Non?”
He closed the box. “It was just something I was playing around with today. I’m sure it needs more work.”
“No.” She shook her head helplessly. “It doesn’t need more work.” He was perfect exactly as he was. Perfect.
She turned away to the photo album, opening it in self-defense and also in deep curiosity. What would Sylvain’s more personal photos, not the ones that were in magazines, look like?
She felt more than saw the gesture he made toward the album, as if to grab it. He broke that gesture off and turned to the shallots instead. He minced the small shallots so finely and so quickly, she was sure he would lose a finger.
Of course, he didn’t. He tossed them into a pan and made an automatic gesture toward his front, as if to brush his fingers on a chef’s apron, then remembered and switched to his jeans.
It was a little scary how much she loved his fingers. She wanted them to do other things besides drive her crazy. Stroke her hair, play with
her
fingers, brush a fleck of something off her cheek.
She looked back at the photo album. “Who made this for you?”
“Ma maman,”
he said, resigned.
The whole notion of a mother in connection with the man who had walked her up those stairs the night before made her jump, as if the woman might pop out from behind one of those closed doors. “Where does your mother live?”
“She and my father moved to Provence a few years ago when they retired.”
Cade’s shoulders relaxed. She flipped through the pages, smiling a little at baby photos and missing teeth, and one of a boy about five, with his face covered in chocolate, which his mother had marked
Ça s’annonce bien
in shiny silver pen. The album seemed to have been designed as a trajectory of his life. He had been a well-loved child, she thought.
She studied a photo of him as a teenager. He wasn’t one of those teenagers who blossomed early. As a seventeen-year-old, he looked lanky and awkward, his hair falling into his eyes—she slid a glance at the chin-length smooth locks he still preferred and had to smile. He had a better stylist these days, that was all. He was still that same boy who had preferred the romance or sensuality of slightly overlong hair. In the photo, he had spotty skin and eyes that seemed too big for his face, and, over all, the form was there, if you knew to look, but he clearly hadn’t hit his peak during his high school years. He looked shy and self-conscious in front of the camera.
He looked shy and self-conscious right now, to see her looking at what that camera had caught. His hand flexed, and his fingers stretched out toward the corner of the album and then quickly folded back into his palm, as if he had to restrain himself from snatching it away from her. She grinned up at him, and he hunched up one shoulder and turned away, focusing on his cooking.
“You ate too much chocolate when you were a teenager, too, did you?” she laughed.
“Chocolate is not bad for your skin,” he retorted, more annoyed than the lightness of her joke deserved. “That’s a myth.”
“I know. We funded the study.” She flipped to the next page. His mother had taken one of him in what must have been their kitchen—a cramped space with stained linoleum counters—making a total mess with chocolate. In the photo, his face was bent over his work with the same intensity he still showed in his
chocolaterie
. The angle of his head was even the same, and that clean line of his jaw.
“You were cute as a teenager.” Like a nerd, but obsessed with cooking instead of math or computers. She would bet some other shy girl in his class had had a killer crush on him, and he had never realized it. “I would have flirted with you.”
His mouth set. “No, you would not have.”
“I might.” She grinned again, wondering why this moment kept failing to be as light and cozy as she thought it should be. “I’ve always had a weakness for men who can work wonders with chocolate.”
That was true. Just the memory of him, all lovely and distant and intense, focused on some magical cauldron of chocolate, was enough to make her hormones jump alive, make her want to taste it, taste him. He was pretty darn cute even right now without chocolate involved, just focused on his red-wine reduction. Or he would be cute if he would stop frowning. She had never been particularly turned on by frowns.
“Yes, I can tell,” he said dryly.
Now, what did that mean? It didn’t have a good feeling to it, whatever it meant. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever dated a man who knew more about chocolate than I do,” she said, to turn this conversation down a safer path—one where they could fight.
He raised an eyebrow and glanced sideways at her, finally allowing her enough attention that she could catch his eyes with a little grin.
“And I’m not sure I am now, either.” She wasn’t sure she was dating him, for one thing.
He turned.
“Pardon?”
She set her elbows back on the countertop and just grinned at him.
“You think you know more about chocolate than
I
do?”
She probably knew more about some aspects of it. But she craved
his
knowledge—the mastery of the magic and mystery and intensity of chocolate. And . . . she craved him. “Well. I know how to sell it,” she said impudently instead of admitting that.
“You know how to sell it for—how much are people willing to pay for that—?” He made a gesture toward her purse on the table that was similar to the way someone might gesture toward a mousetrap that held a dead mouse to be disposed of.
Thirty-three cents at Walmart. “A dollar,” she said. In movie theaters it sold for a dollar. Or in machines in airports.