He shook his head, as if people would never cease to amaze him. “
Américains.
So. You know how to sell it to Americans for a dollar. Do you know how to sell it to Parisians for a hundred euros a kilo?”
Or nearly $4.00 an ounce. At that rate, her Corey Bars would sell for over $12.00 each. “Three dollars a bar is what I’m thinking,” she said. “Enough to let people know it’s special, but not enough that they can’t afford it.”
He looked ill. It wasn’t all that pleasant to make a man want to throw up while he was cooking you dinner. “With my name on it,” he muttered.
“Dans les supermarchés.”
He gave his wine reduction an incredulous look, as if suddenly wondering how he could possibly have ended up making dinner for someone like her.
“Why not? Would it kill you to be accessible to the masses?”
By the revolted expression on his face, it just might. “You’re a chocolate anarchist!”
She grinned, delighted at the term. She would have to tell her grandfather, just to see his matching grin. Jack Corey would love to be called a chocolate anarchist.
Sylvain raised a reproachful eyebrow at her delight, but as he plated the steaks, he had a smile on his face.
Who wouldn’t be smiling? The scents of seared steaks, red wine, and shallots filled the apartment. Inside was light and warmth; outside in the dark, fine rain fell, glistening on the windows. Now that he had gotten her out of that photo album—a sweet gift on his mother’s part, but he needed to remember to keep it and its adolescent photos of him well out of sight of beautiful female guests—Sylvain felt supremely happy.
He couldn’t really ask for much better than this out of life. To be cooking good food for a beautiful woman who turned incandescent with passion in his hands, to be inside and warm with her on the kind of cold, wet night that would really discourage her from getting all funny about something and leaving. To know that she so intensely loved his chocolate that he held an irresistible lure for her in the palm of his hand if she did decide to get upset. To be arguing with her and making her laugh.
They could eat, drink, laugh, fight, curl up on the couch, read a book, fall asleep. They could wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night with a smile. He would like that. He was so worn out after the intensity of the past twenty-four hours that he might really just fall asleep.
Then again, if she did curl up on the couch with him, all trusting and cozy and her body nestled against his, he might not.
It didn’t matter, either way. There could only be one bad way for the evening to end, and that was for it to end. Anything else was just fine by him.
He poured her a glass of wine as they sat down at the table, to encourage everything to be fine by her, too.
“Did you like the s’more?” she asked suddenly.
“The what?”
Suh-more?
“The
s’more
.” She tried to demonstrate it with her hands. “The thing with the—the—thing and chocolate and wafers I left you the other night.”
The—the—thing must be the half-burned
chamallow
concoction.
The Thing
was probably a good name for it.
“Why?” he asked warily. Had it really been poisoned? Was she wondering why he hadn’t died? Or was she testing him to see if aliens had snatched the real Sylvain Marquis and put an impostor in his place? She couldn’t possibly think that
he
would have liked that thing.
“It’s one of these fun things everyone does when they’re kids in the US. Did you like it?”
Good God.
There was a spark of hopefulness in her eyes. Sylvain wondered how to say it had tasted like
merde
diplomatically and got bogged down in the search for words.
Her spark faded.
Merde,
he had to spit something out. “It was . . . ah . . . I can see why children might like it.” Not
his
someday children, of course. He hoped to teach them better taste.
Her face fell. He kicked himself. “The wafers weren’t right. I couldn’t find
gram crackers,
” she said, or something like that. “And it’s really not good cold. You have to eat it when the marshmallow is all hot and sticky and the chocolate is all melting.”
Sylvain struggled to keep the pain out of his expression.
“I’ll show you how to make it sometime,” she decided positively. There were times when it could be a real problem that no defeat ever kept her down for long. “You’ll see. It’s fun.”
He liked her having future plans for them. And if he was careful, he might be able to distract her from the sticky-marshmallow aspect of that plan indefinitely. She seemed to be vulnerable to sexual distraction. He grinned a little.
She brightened up again at the grin, misunderstanding. “Is that a working fireplace? I could show you after supper.”
“Fake flames.” He tried to make relief sound like regret. “You’re not allowed to have real fires in Paris. People cheat sometimes, but this chimney is blocked up.”
She looked disappointed again. And then, true to form, she bounced right back up. “You have”—she broke off and made some gestures again as she tried to replace a missing word with a visual—“things to heat fondue pots, right?”
Maybe.
Sylvain tried to duck the question. “I don’t have
chamallows
or cookies.” Or Corey Bars, for God’s sake, but she was bound to have at least one in her purse. She always did, didn’t she?
She looked toward the wet, dark window and hesitated. Sylvain started to relax. Then she squared her shoulders. “We could run out and get some. The
épicerie
is just down the street.”
She was like a combination of a pit bull and a
Culbuto,
a Weebles toy. She went down and came right back up. She set her teeth into something she wanted and never let go.
Not that he was complaining. She had set her teeth into the idea of getting his chocolate, and here he was, taking every advantage he could of it. That resilient determination of hers was erotic. It was exciting. It made him want to kiss her and see if that might distract her enough to save him from eating sticky marshmallows, cookies, and Corey Bars mashed together.
“Next time,” he said, and her blue eyes flickered. He felt a chill of fear. Despite her earlier use of “sometime,” “next time” apparently wasn’t a foregone conclusion.
He would have to work on that. He still had plenty of chocolate lures to use on someone as obsessed as she was.
She took a bite of her steak and closed her eyes for a moment in almost exactly the same expression he had seen on her face for those
ravioles du Royan
.
He smiled in fierce, sexual satisfaction.
“This is delicious.”
He tried to look modest, but he’d been told it wasn’t one of his strengths. “It’s nothing.
Un petit truc
.”
“And the wine is perfect.” She twisted the bottle to look at the label, a very rudimentary one, probably designed by the teenage nephew of some friend of the
vigneron
. “Where did you get it?”
“When I visit my parents, we go around to different tiny vineyards in the area. I’ll”—He caught himself, cold with alarm. He had nearly said, “I’ll show you sometime,” but if they couldn’t even confidently refer to “next time,” he could make a disastrous error in assuming out loud that months from now they might be making trips south to see his parents. She helped run a company that earned over thirty billion dollars a year. Right now, this was just a vacation for her. “
Non, attends,
I think that one came from Jacques.”
She queried with a blue look. He loved those blue eyes of hers. Every straight look from them made his skin tighten, his muscles try to override his mind and just reach out and grab her.
“This little man who knocks on my door every fall and talks me into ordering cases from small vineyards he represents.”
Her lips split into a smile again, and he felt quite pleased with himself, although he had no idea what he had just said to make her look so happy. “A man comes around and sells you wine from little, unknown vineyards? Really?”
It seemed pretty normal to him. Especially since Jacques knew what a sucker he was. Sylvain,
la bonne poire.
It was too bad this apartment didn’t come with a bigger
cave
. Last year, Jacques had talked him into ordering so much, he had had to stock cases in his bedroom. He had ended up giving a couple dozen bottles out to everyone at the
chocolaterie
for Christmas so he could get his space back.
Something rode up through the happiness in her expression, changing it to something so wistful and full of longing, he wished it were for him. For one thing, if it were for him, he would have left his seat and his meal and satisfied her right then and there. God, to be longed for so intensely . . .
“What do you think would market Corey Bars to Europeans effectively?” she asked suddenly.
What?
Was
that
what she was longing for? Did her mind just have a business track that was running all the time?
Probably,
now that he thought about it. His mind had a chocolate track that was running all the time. “Nothing, I hope,” he said baldly.
She narrowed her eyes and went visibly chilly. “I’ll bet Europeans would go for a premium-chocolate line with your name on it.”
“If they want something with my name on it, they know just where to get it.”
She flexed a frustrated fist. “I hate for Mars to win the market in Europe. Or Total Foods.” She grimaced. “And I know Dad does, too.”
He took a big bite of his steak as the best way of preventing himself from giving his opinion on Corey and Total Foods battling it out for the tastes of his fellow countrymen. “We might as well sell the country to McDonald’s and be done with it,” he muttered.
Damn, not big enough.
“Do you want to bring in processed cheese while you’re at it?”
She pressed her perfect teeth together and glared at him. “I’ll ask Christophe. I’ll bet he would have some ideas.”
Sylvain stiffened. “You know, if you want to blame someone besides yourself for becoming known as the infamous Chocolate Thief, it’s Christophe who gossiped about other people’s private lives”—
and fantasies
—“on a blog.”
“I know, but he’s a nice guy. He’s fun.”
Sylvain simmered.
“And he’s smart, and he understands Europeans, and he might help me if I ask him.”
“While I won’t,” Sylvain said crisply. He fantasized about picking up Christophe and shaking him like a wet dog. No, better—giving him a box of poisoned chocolates, then watching the betrayed look on his face as he keeled over. Preferably writhing in a slow, painful death. That, at least, would be a proper vengeance. “Christophe is a pushover. I’ve got standards.”
“Maybe I
should
just buy somebody out,” Cade said, as if thinking out loud. “That’s what Dad thinks. Valrhona, maybe. That might be more efficient.”
“More efficient at what?” Sylvain demanded. He knew he should keep his mouth shut, but even to have her slim, passionate intensity in his hands, he couldn’t sell his soul and his country’s with it. “Reducing everything that’s good about this country to that?” He gestured at her purse and the Corey Bar it surely held.
She frowned. For a second, he didn’t know whether she was going to get mad or get even. Then she bent her head and rubbed her crinkled forehead. She looked tired and exceptionally grave. Fragility again.
But he couldn’t help her. He could not, would not, help her figure out how to take over the French market for chocolate, nor to mass-produce some bastardized version of his art and soul back home.
“Why do you need it, anyway? Don’t you have enough money?”
She made a gesture with one hand and didn’t answer. The grave look hadn’t diminished. She just didn’t want to talk to him about her reasons.
Women
always
had something else going on in their heads. Couldn’t she simply enjoy the evening? He sighed. “Do you want me to run out and get some marshmallows and
biscuits
?”
Her face brightened. The distraction had worked. He felt as if he’d used his own palate as the sacrificial bait, though. “Do you want me to show you how to make s’mores?”
“Sure,” he lied. He was
such
a pear. He liked that happy look so much better than that grave, tired look, though.
And that was how Sylvain Marquis, widely held to be the best chocolatier in Paris and therefore in the world, found himself making s’mores with marshmallows, Lu butter cookies, and cheap supermarket chocolate he wouldn’t feed to a three-year-old child.
God, it sure did make her happy, though. They sat on the floor in front of the fireplace into which she had placed a Sterno can—because she insisted s’mores had to be made on the floor. She was like some excited kid, proudly showing off a crayon drawing of a crooked smiley face to da Vinci.