“In France, usually food.”
She laughed. “Well, see, I got both at once, then.” She finished cutting her mushrooms and moved around Sylvain to rinse her fingers. Sylvain shifted imperceptibly so that her arms ended up grazing his body. “But he raises a good point,” she mentioned seriously. “
Boulangers, fromagers,
chocolatiers—maybe artisan food making needs what other artists need—people willing to invest in it to make sure it can continue to flourish. A patron, in a sense.”
“A
patron
? As in
noblesse oblige
?”
“A patron of the arts.” Cade looked a little annoyed.
“No one patronized me,” Sylvain said coolly, deliberately changing the word. “And I didn’t need anyone to, either.”
“Well, of course,
you
didn’t,” she said impatiently, oblivious to the compliment inherent in that impatience.
He tried to keep his mouth straight and stern, just so no one could see the foolish pride that licked from his toes to the roots of his hair.
But his father, reaching past them for the
fleur de sel
just as she said it, smiled a little.
“I can’t believe you brought her here,” Marguerite Marquis told Sylvain indignantly later in the evening, having dragged him out on her smoke break. Sylvain didn’t smoke. Around the time most teens started, he was getting into chocolate. His senses of taste and smell were too precious to him. “The woman who stole from you! And I’m supposed to be nice to her?”
Inside, people were still lingering at the buffet, but Natalie was trying to get some speakers hooked up and music going.
“You could try,
Maman
.” Actually, Cade seemed to be handling his mother’s barely veiled hostility quite comfortably. Did that mean she didn’t care what his mother thought of her, or that she had expected worse?
“I like her,” his father said unexpectedly.
Marguerite gave him an indignant look. “
Juste parce qu’elle est jolie
. He’s had much prettier girlfriends, don’t you think?”
Maybe technically. But they didn’t blush the same way when he looked at them, and to get what they wanted, they only flirted and looked pretty. They didn’t break into his heart.
“First of all, I like the fact that she seems to think extremely highly of him,” Hervé said calmly.
“Tu penses?”
Sylvain sent his father a sharp look, wondering what his father had observed that he hadn’t. He could feel himself starting to blush.
Putain.
In front of his own parents.
“And I like that she took such a risk for him. Prison, public scandal. What did she tell you, Margo? That she couldn’t get his attention any other way?”
Vraiment?
Sylvain felt a jolt of electricity run through his entire body.
“True,” Marguerite admitted, tilting her head consideringly. “Open crime is certainly a dramatic gesture.” She said that like a Roman empress still hesitating on which way to turn her thumb over a dramatic gesture. “Blunt, though. They don’t teach women how to flirt in her country?”
“Her way works for me,” Sylvain said cheerfully. “Did she really say she did it to get my
attention
? Not my chocolate?”
His mother gave him a disgusted look. “Do you
like
getting your heart broken?”
“No,” Sylvain said flatly. “I really, really don’t.”
“I blame you for this, you know,” Marguerite told Hervé.
“
Moi?
I told him at least twenty times to improve the security on his
chocolaterie
.”
“Not that. The fact that he’s so
naïf
about women. You were exactly the same way.”
“It’s true,” Hervé confided to his son. “I haven’t wanted to tell you this about your mother until you got older, but she was and is . . .
difficile
.”
“And I don’t even try,” his mother said proudly. “It comes naturally.”
“
Naïf
I may be, but I like your Cade,” Hervé said again.
His
Cade. Sylvain wondered what she would think of the possessive.
“She knows how to be diplomatic to your mother, she can negotiate international business deals, she went down into a spider-filled
cave
to help us haul up Champagne a few minutes ago, and she can break in to places. Those are good skill sets. I think the only one of those we already had covered in the family was the ability to haul up Champagne.”
“
I
am the one being diplomatic
to her,
” Marguerite argued, annoyed. “Just in case.”
Sylvain caught his mother’s eyes, smiling a little. “Just in case what,
Maman
?”
Marguerite sniffed, indignant at being pushed. “Just in case she does turn out to be . . . worthwhile.” Offended at having had to admit that she considered that a possibility, she stubbed out her cigarette and strolled away loftily to speak to people less likely to force anything annoying out of her.
Father and son looked after her. “Do I seem
naïf
to you?” Hervé finally asked Sylvain indignantly.
“According to
Maman,
how would I know?” Sylvain asked dryly.
“
Enfin, bon
. I guess I can’t guarantee you won’t get your heart broken, but maybe at least it will be mutual this time. I have to say, a Chocolate Thief seems worth breaking your heart over.”
Inside, Natalie had gotten the speakers working, and his twenty-year-old sister’s selection of music suddenly blazed out. Sylvain laughed and grabbed Cade’s hand, pulling her onto the dance floor of white marble tile surrounded by delicate, spindle-legged sofas and age-softened brocade chairs pushed back against the walls.
Natalie had gone all out in her playlist of music from the past fifty years. It boomed through one speaker and crackled erratically through another as they did line dances and tugged up the collars of pretend leather jackets to ham it up to songs from
Grease
. Sylvain and Cade danced without stop. Cade’s
joie de vivre
seemed indefatigable. She did a really excellent chicken dance, too.
At around one, they slipped outside into instant peace and tranquility, feet crunching on white gravel beneath the starry skies.
Sylvain led Cade down through the gardens that sloped below the
château
to the Marne below. They slipped out a gate beside a little fairy-tale conical house that might once have been a chapel and found themselves on a muddy path running along the great, wide river.
“It’s freezing.” He adjusted her scarf to make sure no bare throat appeared. “But I wanted you to see this.”
Under the light of the full moon, the Marne flowed dark and deceptively slowly, the light shining off its water. A weeping willow trailed bare, fine, winter tresses over the bank beside them. Cade leaned against him as they watched the water.
Maybe she was seeking contact with him, or maybe she was only seeking warmth in the cold. Maybe her feet hurt. He didn’t ask and didn’t care, because he liked being her warmth, the strength against which she rested.
His life had felt so different only two weeks before. It had felt like a great life. And now, if or when he had to go back to that life without her in it, it was going to feel like the most miserable, wretched life in the world.
“I like your family,” she mentioned.
His eyebrows rose. “Really? Even my mother?”
“Yes. She doesn’t seem to like me at all,” Cade said wonderingly.
“And that’s an endearing trait?”
Cade nodded. “Most mothers like me right away, whether or not their sons would be happy with me.”
Sylvain gave that considerable thought. “You’re used to being able to buy even
mothers
?”
She shrugged.
“No wonder you keep thinking you can buy Paris.”
She sighed. “Just a spot in it, really.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t for sale, but he would be her spot in Paris anytime she asked. Surely that was obvious at this point?
God, he couldn’t take much more of this, the fear that she would leave him. But how could he ask someone he had known less than two weeks to promise to give up her life for him?
He tightened his arm around her and stared at the water, willing himself to patience.
It’s just like tempering chocolate,
he told himself.
Just like that. You have to take your time.
Maybe he could ask her after
three
weeks. Was that long enough to foster a commitment?
A thin stream of cloud drifted across the moon, creating a play of light and shadow over the water. He felt a long, long sigh run through Cade’s body, pressed against his.
She closed her hand around his on her waist. “Seriously, I can’t persuade you to give me your name?”
For two whole, thick, thudding heartbeats, he thought she meant something else. He almost said yes.
His lips had parted on it when he remembered what she wanted from him. “You mean, sell you my name for a chocolate line.” He moved away from her abruptly, to the edge of the dark, gilded water. The side against which her warmth had been pressed felt very cold.
Her eyebrows flexed at the clarification, and at the way his tone of voice had darkened. Maybe she had figured out the other meaning of her question, because her eyes widened. She flushed, sending him a quick, searching glance and clutching strands of willow in her fingers. “Yes.”
He shoved the hand that had been holding her, the hand she had just touched, into his pocket. “Can’t we just enjoy the moment here? Why does this matter to you so much? You don’t need the money. And you don’t need Europe.”
Her face emptied. She retreated back behind the bare strands of the weeping willow. In the spring or summer, she would have been veiled by their tiny leaves, but there was no hiding in the winter. “You don’t want me to have Europe.”
“You know I don’t.”
“Or you.”
“Cade—” He broke off. “Are you
able
to keep the business and the personal in this separate?” It occurred to him that he had been born a person and chosen to become a chocolatier when he was in his teens. She had been born a business, and this might very well be her first try at becoming her own person.
“Do you want me to go home?” she asked, very low, very cool.
Sometimes open honesty was the only way to go, no matter how risky it was.
“Non.”
She stood there watching him warily, one hand holding those bare strands to the side, like some confused nymph who had been startled awake before spring.
“You can be part of something without owning it, you know.” He held her eyes. “You can be part of my life without owning it anytime you want.”
Her eyes widened. She searched his face. Her eyes widened still farther, and her lips parted, as if she were almost afraid.
Well,
merde,
what wasn’t there to be afraid of?
“I don’t understand you,” he said. “Can’t you do anything you want?”
Her eyebrows drew together. “Just randomly
whatever I want
? No. Do you realize how many people would suffer the consequences if I just acted according to whim?”
“I don’t mean any whim at all. I meant, can’t you decide what you want out of life and go after that?” He took a risk: “You seem to have been doing that so far here. Can’t you stay the course?”
She frowned.
“In school, we learned that was an American ideal—the
pursuit of happiness.
” He turned his tongue around the English phrase, with its awkward
r
and breathy
h
. “It doesn’t even translate well into French.”
“It doesn’t sound like an ideal in French; it sounds selfish,” she retorted. “That’s why. People depend on me.”
“I didn’t say to keep behaving completely irresponsibly.” But she had been doing so. Interesting, given that she was so clearly opposed to letting herself be irresponsible. He reached for her, with an intimate, teasing smile. “Although I don’t mind personally if you break into
my
business and get your family name splashed all over the place and run the risk of getting arrested.”
“I’ve probably used up my allotment of irresponsible behavior for the next twenty years with that,” she muttered, visibly depressed.
Sylvain’s stomach knotted. “Don’t say that. I’m the one who grew up
en banlieue,
and you’re the one who acts as if you are caught by your circumstances and can’t realize your own dreams. Cade, you don’t seem to
want
to buy Europe or run Europe. Maybe you’re just playing, but I could swear you love being in my
laboratoire,
you love sinking your senses into everything. You must be turning half of yourself off when you focus on factories and finances.”