Chapter 23
“A
re you ready to finish your vacation?” Mack Corey asked hopefully.
“Dad! I’ve been working most of the time!” At least half the time. “You call that a
vacation
?”
She had just spent the afternoon visiting Chacun son goût, a medium-sized, family-run, French producer of chocolate bars with a reputation for quality. The kind of place her father had recommended they buy out, rather than pursue the Sylvain Marquis premium-chocolate line. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it might provide an excuse to spend more time in France.
She wondered what Sylvain would say to her thinking about buying out an entire company just for a personal excuse to stay with a lover in Paris.
He was the lover in question, and it would still probably put his back up right to the skies. Her father wouldn’t be too happy about it, either, come to that.
It was, admittedly, deeply irresponsible and self-absorbed behavior. Exactly the kind of thing you might expect of a spoiled billionaire brat.
“Well, you know.” Over the Webcam transmission, a hand waved choppily. “Finish visiting Paris and Parisian chocolatiers, and come home. It will be Thanksgiving soon. We miss you.”
Thanksgiving was a nice time in the Corey family. Cozy. Full of laughter. It had been a big deal for them, ever since her mother’s and grandmother’s deaths, to keep those holiday traditions warm and alive. She drew through her fingers the twine that had once tied a bitter chocolate gift. Slowly she wrapped it around her pinky, then unwrapped it. “Dad, don’t you think we really have to do something in Europe? Mars is winning the entire market share here.”
Mack Corey frowned. “Europeans are so stuck-up, that’s why. I can’t believe they would go for some chocolate-brushed candy bar instead of real, solid chocolate.”
“They don’t like our real, solid chocolate. I think we need to either hit them on the fun front, the way Mars does, or go for a solid chocolate that’s more sophisticated and closer to their idea of what chocolate should be.” She took a quick, deep breath and clutched the twine in her fist. “Maybe that’s something I should take on.”
A long silence ensued. Long enough for her to hope the Webcam transmission had frozen but also to know it hadn’t. “What do you mean, ‘take on’? What do you want to ‘take on,’ exactly?”
Another breath. “Europe.”
He stared at her. “I thought you were over there trying to find a new chocolate line to bring back
here
!”
“Yes, but . . . maybe this is more important. We do need to introduce a strong premium chocolate in the US. But it will cost us a fortune to grab any shelf space in Europe against Mars and Total Foods if we don’t act soon. If it does work in Europe, we could try introducing it in the US, too, to recapture that growing sophisticated-chocolate-consumer demographic.”
“I need you
here
! Your sister is wandering around in the Côte d’Ivoire on a moped again, for God’s sake. Who is going to take over this company when I retire?”
Her. Of course, her. That was always understood. She would do a great job of it.
The twine felt damp in her fist. She did not want to go back to her wide, straight road at Corey. She wanted to run off down some twisty path in the woods and see what she found.
“You’re fifty, Dad. I’ll have plenty of time to catch up. Running Europe would be excellent training.”
Running Europe.
She saw Sylvain’s face at that phrase, his eyes glittering in passionate dispute.
She didn’t
want
to run Europe, to fight for shelf space, to visit factories. She wanted to sink her hands into sacks of pistachios and wander markets looking for exotic products. She wanted to visit
laboratoires
and learn their magic. She wanted to build more of what Sylvain had created—beautiful, rich, magical chocolatiers. She did not want to drive them out of business with her superior financial firepower.
There was another long, grim silence. “Look, when you get back here, we’ll talk about it. We’ll get our market research teams on the idea. Don’t forget, we’re still keeping an eye on Devon Candy. That would change things considerably in Europe.”
It would make their role in Europe exactly what it was in the US—mass producers of baseline chocolate. Of course, she could probably make an argument for staying here if they had Devon Candy.
“I’m not coming back just yet,” Cade hedged.
“Sure, take another week. Dad’s right: you need to play a little. Plus, I’m sure you’re learning a lot about our options. All that groundwork will help if we decide to do anything a few years from now.”
“A few years from now?”
Her life suddenly loomed before her like some dark abyss, no Sylvain in it for an indefinite future. Her stomach leaped up into her throat as if she’d been thrown off a cliff into that abyss and was flailing against the fall.
“Depends what we do with Devon Candy, don’t you think? Take another week, as I said. Let’s talk about it when you get back home for Thanksgiving.”
Two more weeks.
Cade felt so sick when she finished the call that she had to leave her apartment to flee the feeling. She walked through the Sixth, trying to feel her way without thinking.
Thinking wasn’t working for her. When she thought about things, her father was right.
People brushed past her indifferently as she stopped to gaze at a shop window full of old toys, or to breathe in the scents pouring out of a bakery. Nobody talked much about the scents of Paradise, but if she were designing Heaven, bakeries and
chocolateries
would both contribute. The sewer odor of a
fromagerie
swept over her in contrast, and, trying not to breathe too much, she went in among all the great wheels of cheese and slabs of butter from which the man there carved slices off for her. She watched the
fromager
’s face as he told her stories about each cheese and talked her into trying different ones, watched his humor, belief, and passion in his work.
When she got back to her apartment building, Sylvain was just leaving his
laboratoire,
his head tilted back as he looked up at the window of her apartment.
She liked the way his body, when he saw her, seemed to change.
She stopped a foot or two in front of him, still not sure what their greeting was supposed to be.
Bises
on both cheeks? A kiss on the mouth? She opted for thrusting her hands into her pockets and keeping an awkward distance.
His mouth took on that pressed, thin look only the French could do so well.
“You know what I would like to do? I would like to go for a walk,” Cade said assertively, so that it didn’t come out as if she was
asking
him. She was just stating her preference, that was all. He could join her or not; it was a free country. Well, it was France, but they seemed to think they were a free country, too. She wasn’t
asking
him to go for a walk with her—that was the important part.
She wasn’t exposing herself that way, putting down shields so that a cool, distant look could batter her fragile insides. He gave one sharp, astonished movement that braked right at the end, as if he wished he hadn’t made it quite so sharp and astonished. His dark eyes studied her intently, as if he were chocolate and she was, say, maggoty cheese, and he was wondering what the two could possibly mean when put together.
She felt the flush rising, sneaking up from under her scarf and over her face. Her insides shriveled in the hope that, if they shrank enough, they could disown her entirely, squeeze into that small elevator, and go hide upstairs in her apartment while her outside went around doing things like this that made them regret they had ever been born.
“Tu veux faire une promenade?”
he repeated, as if checking her use of his language for possible errors. Those dark eyes continued to study her as if they wanted to melt her down into something he could figure out, but otherwise that inherently controlled, contained face of his gave nothing away. Certainly gave away no sense of sudden overwhelming pleasure at her proposal. “With me?” he checked.
She would just go by herself. Or maybe she would just go up to her apartment and hide. Except it was right over his workshop. Maybe she would curl into a huddled ball in her private jet back to America. Maybe that would be the next best step.
“You want to do something with me besides—?” He broke off. With his hand at belly level, he made a tiny finger-gesture between her and him, between his
chocolaterie
and then upward toward her apartment. Then that same hand turned palm up, open, in blank confusion.
And here she had thought their dinner the night before had shifted their relationship from pure sex to something, maybe, a little more emotional.
Apparently cooking for her was just another way to get sex.
Now that flush of hers felt as red as her scarf, and something even worse created pressure against her eyes: tears. She was always crying in this stupid country. She never cried back home.
“Forget it,” she said in English because she couldn’t remember how to in French, and she turned on her heel to her door, fisting her hands in her coat pockets.
He caught the sleeve of her coat, yanking her to a stop. “I would like that,” he said carefully in English.
She blinked rapidly, setting her jaw against those stupid, wounded tears. His accent and his use of her language totally undid her.
He wormed his hand into her coat pocket until he managed to close it around her gloved one and pull it out, holding her hand in his, two pairs of gloves between their skin. The last time their hands had linked, it had been when he stretched her arm above her head and pinned it to the mattress. With a strangely scared shock, she realized this was the first time they had ever really held hands. “It’s a good afternoon for a walk,” he said.
That depended. It was cold and gray, with a wind chilling the skin, and with a hint of snow in the air that would probably turn out to be just cold rain. It was a good afternoon for walking hand in hand, nestling something warm and special between two people, knowing that you could go home and curl up with that someone, that you were not alone as winter set in.
Did they know that? Did they know they were not alone as winter set in?
They walked down streets that seemed barely dried from the past night’s rain. They passed shops filled with things it might be hard to even imagine anywhere else. One store window showed old wooden stamps for embossing one’s own butter, churned from one’s own cow. Another held the finest linens, embroidered by hand in purple and filled with lavender. Another store displayed vanilla. Nothing but vanilla beans, from Tahiti, Madagascar, Martinique.
Dusk was falling by the time they reached the river. It was cold, but they were dressed warmly. Sylvain turned their steps left along the upper quays, crossing over the Pont Neuf. The green statue of the equestrian Henry IV rose above them. From below came the sound of a boat chugging, ready to depart with its half load of Paris visitors for a nighttime trip on the Seine.
Cade just looked at things. She had been here only ten days. Every second of evening falling on Paris was a wonder to her.
The lowering light touched the two cones of the medieval Conciergerie, turning them rose and then dark, as if they slipped into a fairy tale. Boats passed, sending shimmers over the night-black water. The occasional skater flew past them, his or her skates making a slick, slicing sound on the pavement. Cafés started to fill as people got off work and stopped to warm up and meet friends. Soft illumination showed off the Louvre, one of the glories of Paris, to all who passed.
The Eiffel Tower gleamed down on the city, sending its searchlight out like a beacon. All at once, it started to fizz. Cade’s hand tightened on Sylvain’s. “It’s sparkling!”
She stopped and leaned against the concrete wall of the quay, watching it. She had only managed to catch that famous hourly ten minutes of sparkling twice before.
He leaned beside her without speaking. When she glanced up at him, her face lit with happiness, he was looking down at her, not the tower. He was smiling a little, but his eyes looked wary, very dark and guarded.
Why?
Maybe he would have just preferred they go straight to the sex and skip the walk.
The Eiffel Tower finished sparkling, and people who had stopped to watch it started moving again. Most hadn’t stopped, going about their affairs with that fast, tight Parisian stride. Down the sidewalk from them, a man stood up from a bench, trying to hassle a woman passing in black coat and boots.
Sylvain straightened, but the woman never broke her brisk stride or even looked at the man, and the man shrugged and turned, searching for another possibility.
“I pushed someone into the Seine the other day,” Cade confessed with embarrassed satisfaction.
Sylvain gave a startled crack of laughter.
“Vraiment?”
“He tried to sit on my lap! And grab my—” She gestured at her chest.