She heaved an annoyed sigh. “It’s nothing to do with your being French. You must have women throwing themselves at you all the time.”
He grinned. Very good for his ego. “I thought you had figured this out about me, Cade—I only ever put the absolute best into my mouth.”
That both shut her up and made her blush crimson.
He squeezed her hand, satisfied with the effect.
“Alors, comment ça va?”
She was silent for a long time. “You know how sometimes you have to work so hard for something, and you don’t even want it, but you have to do it anyway?”
“No,” he said flatly. He worked for what he wanted. He didn’t waste time on what he didn’t.
“Oh.” She was silent again for a while. “Well, that’s how it’s going. I don’t know if we’ll win this one or not. I’m working on an agreement with Firenze, but the problem is, we both want the same parts of Devon Candy and don’t want the same parts. So we might not be able to share this merger. And no matter what we put together, Total Foods will probably up their first bid and beat it. It will be a bidding war, and I don’t know how high we will be able to go. My dad is working on the financing angle.”
“Let’s go back to what you started to say, about working for something you don’t want. That’s more interesting. I want to know how
you
are doing.”
Cade gave him a puzzled look, as if either French had suddenly failed her or he had started speaking Flemish. Did that happen to her a lot? That when people asked her how she was doing, they meant how the company was doing?
“Because I thought you said . . . you were looking for something different. You didn’t want your life to be this way anymore.” She had wanted her life to be his way. What he had to offer.
She stopped in front of the
Maison du roi,
or Bread House, as the Flemish preferred to call it, and stood with her head tilted back, gazing at its ornate, symmetric Renaissance front. Laughter and casual conversation drifted around them as groups passed. More Belgians than tourists were crossing the Place at this time of year, most of them friendly and relaxed, post-pub.
She was silent for a long time, before she finally spoke, low and fierce: “If I win this, I can stay here. We’ll need someone to run the merging of the companies, the selling of parts, the new Corey Chocolate in Europe.”
“Cade. Why would you do that? When you don’t want to run Corey Europe. You want desperately to do something else.”
She bit her lip but held his eyes. “Because I could stay here,” she whispered.
“What does it mean to stay here, if you bring with you the world you wanted to escape?”
She clenched and unclenched her fists, kneading her palms with her nails. “Sylvain,” she whispered, as if it hurt her. “Why do you think?”
It hit him like a body blow. “For . . . me? You would do what you don’t want for me?”
“It’s a compromise. I stay here. I stay Corey.”
“What about you?”
“What?”
“Don’t misunderstand. I want you here. But where are you in all that? You stay here for me, you stay Corey for your father and Corey Chocolate. What do you do for you?”
“Stay here,” she said low. “With you.”
He drew her into his arms and held her hard, his heart soaring. “Besides that. If you want to be in
chocolateries,
then you should be doing that.”
She pulled away from him and shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, hunching her shoulders. “I’m good at this kind of thing. And it’s a family company, and I have a lot of responsibility to a lot of people. Maybe I should have chosen my sister’s route and refused any of that responsibility from the start. But now I have it, and . . . I can’t see any other way.”
“Why not? If you can chart five-year plans and how to negotiate a joint counterbid for another multibillion-euro company, it seems as if you should be able to plot out any personal exit strategy you want to. You can’t tell me you don’t have the brains to figure out a solution.”
Cade scrunched her eyebrows together and gave him a long, thoughtful look, as if trying to see herself reflected in his eyes.
Good.
As far as he could tell, he had a pretty damned accurate idea of her character and intelligence and passion, and it might do her good to take a second look at herself through him.
He gazed down at her for a long moment as she stood in this beautiful Grand Place, surrounded by guildhalls. Her heeled boots brought her up to his chin instead of his shoulder, but he doubted she wore them because she felt any need for more height. Like the people who had built the halls framing this place, she seemed pretty confident of her right to dominate any situation.
She could probably dominate in jeans, but she made sure to dress well for business. Perhaps it was an expression of her own pride. Perhaps it was a little bit like his insistence on wearing professional attire even in his own
laboratoire,
even when he would rather come slouching in after a late night.
Besides, she did like to look good, he thought with a smile, remembering some of her sexier outfits. She liked clothes.
One of these days she would probably get around to hitting the designers on Faubourg St-Honoré, like most wealthy women did. It charmed him how incidental clothes shopping was in her priorities, well below the important things like chocolate. But one day she would do it, and he was looking forward to seeing what she came home with.
He fisted a hand in his coat pocket, schooling himself to caution with that vision, because it involved her coming in through his apartment door with her arms laden with frivolity, dumping it onto his living room floor, showing the purchases off to him. The home she came to, in other words, was his.
The problem was that whenever he imagined her doing something in the future, he wanted to be somehow part of it—whether he heard about it at the end of the day or was with her when she did it. In his favorite view of the future, she was there with him.
In his view of what he wanted from the world, there were an infinity of moments that were beautiful, as this one was beautiful, with the light from the town hall gilding her jawline and shining off her hair in the cold northern night that made him want to pull her in and warm them both.
“And you know what else?” she said, her voice wobbling just a second, as if it was the last straw. “It’s Thanksgiving. And the Firenze brothers don’t even know what a damn pumpkin pie is.”
“Thanks-gi-ving. That’s a big day for you, right? The only day of the year Americans eat a real meal, or something like that?”
“Sylvain. You’re not helping.” But she sounded as if he was helping, a certain frustrated humor steadying the wobble.
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Where’s your hotel?”
“I’m going to fall asleep as soon as I hit the bed,” she warned him ruefully.
“A vulnerable victim. That’s what I like.”
She was indeed luxuriously sleepy, smiling and pliant, as if every touch of his hand stroked the last bit of tension out of her and with it all her energy. She was almost his own doll, but more human, warmer, yielding with soft sounds to every touch.
That, too, was erotic. When she came, it was as if the waves of her orgasm rocked her to sleep. By the time he came, only a few seconds later, he thought she might already be asleep, receiving him in her dreams.
He eased onto his side, still inside her, propped on one elbow watching her, one hand lightly caressing her back and bottom.
Her body felt small against his, fragile, although he knew she wasn’t, very soft, very, very fine. Her straight brown hair, free now of its chignon, slid and caressed her skin and his with his every breath. In that moment, she was all his, but she was already slipping away from him, her dreams taking her to places of which he had no idea.
She had once asked him if he had ever tried to reach a woman’s heart. He supposed that, like his final smooth chocolates, it was good she couldn’t see the effort behind it.
Chapter 29
Three weeks later ...
I
n the windows of S
YLVAIN
M
ARQUIS
, Chocolatier, grew great rustic fir trees of chocolate, branches rough-hewn as if chiseled from a solid block, dusted with white. The suggested primitiveness of the way in which they had been carved, the depth of field, the quantity, and the lighting made them dramatic, mysterious, as if the viewer hovered on the edge of some vast, ancient, snow-hushed forest. It was beautiful, alluring, and just slightly dangerous, like a snow-filled night; it made one long to step forward and get lost among those trees. Tucked in the forest was a cabin, the chocolate shaped into something old, worn, a little lopsided, a shape at its peak that might have been a star. It could have been a place for
le Père Noël
to stop, or a subtle nod to a starlit stable, or it could have been just a cabin in the woods on a snowy evening. Despite its primitive appearance, the detail, when one looked closely, was exquisitely fine—a candle, a bird’s footprint on the windowsill.
And everywhere, everywhere, were signs of passage, signs that could mean gift or theft. Someone had left a footprint in the powdered sugar “snow.” A chocolate nut had rolled from a hollow in a tree, as if someone had snuck into a squirrel’s nest for his stash. Sleigh marks traced the rooftop of the cabin hidden in the trees. In extraordinary miniature, on the table in that cabin, lay a box of Sylvain Marquis’s chocolates—the tiny box itself made from tinted white chocolate. Its lid was open and one chocolate missing.
The eye looked and looked through the scene for the person or the creature who had passed, whose trace had been left. But she or he was nowhere in it, only a mystery.
Cade stood a long time in front of that window, one hand loosely clasping the handle of her carry-on. It had been a tough week. A tough month. They had failed. Total Foods had beaten their bid, and they had lost Devon Candy.
Lost Europe. Lost her right to it.
Out of excuses, she had had a very long talk with her father, who was still grappling with the additional loss she had dumped on him.
She had not seen Sylvain for any of that week. The demands of the Christmas chocolate season on him, and the Devon Candy bid on her, had made trips from Paris to Brussels scattered and difficult to manage. She always knew when Sylvain woke up, because he texted her first thing every morning, something funny or sexy or just
tu me manques
(
miss you
), and he called last thing at night or she called him. She hadn’t, though, told him she was coming back to Paris tonight. She hadn’t really done anything or talked to anyone but her father and family since the Devon Candy failure crystallized.
She needed the scents and tastes of Sylvain’s
chocolaterie
around her.
She broke into the
laboratoire
with the copied key that Sylvain had never asked back from her and the code he had never changed. Inside the
laboratoire,
the scents made all the hair on the nape of her neck prickle and a shiver of release run through her, like the first touch of heat when coming in from the cold. She stood still for a moment, her eyes closed, just breathing.
Then she walked through the empty
laboratoire
and into the shop, studying the display windows from behind. The signs of passing could be seen from this side, too. Inside the shop, she was immersed in the winter forest; customers would be touched by something magic that was gone now, that they could not find. In the display cases, “her” chocolate was on sale, the dark bitter one he had offered at her doorstep.
He had called it
Amour
.
Oh.
She felt the name like a blow against her solar plexus, driving out breath. Dark, rich, bitter, melting-smooth love.
In his office, his laptop was closed and the desk cleared, everything neatly filed. But a Corey Bar lay in front of the laptop, where it might be if it was the last thing fingered before the person sitting at the desk got up.
She reached out to run her fingers over the wrapping, tracing the letters of her name.
“So, you’re back,” a voice from behind her said.
Cade felt the hair shiver on her arms and the nape of her neck. The way it always did when the sorcerer surprised her in the dark. “You know I couldn’t stay away.”
He came up behind her, until her body was trapped between his and the desk. The nape of her neck felt very exposed. “I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I’m looking for a new apprentice.”
Sorcerer’s apprentice.
His voice, rich and dark as the night and his art, made it sound as if she was bartering for body and soul. The scent of his chocolate was everywhere, flooding into his office from the
laboratoire
.
“Are you in need of a . . .
maître
?” Very deliberately, he drew pauses and shadows around that last word. Very deliberately, he did not say
maître chocolatier.
Only
maître.
Her body arched involuntarily. Her head fell back to touch his chest. He took her hips, refusing to allow her whole weight back against him.
“
Tu es cruel,
Sylvain,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
“I know,” he said. “I can’t help myself.” He wrapped her hair around his hand and pulled her head back farther, arching her body from him like a bow. A bow to his arrow. His other hand ran up the body he had thus stretched to it, from between her thighs to cup her breast. “Come let me be cruel to you.”
Fire bloomed everywhere under the stroke of his hand. “Oh, God,” she whispered, barely audible. “I love it when you’re merciless to me.”
“And I love having you
à mon merci,
” he whispered into her ear. Still holding her head bent with his hand in her hair, he pulled her hips back, arching the bow of her still further. He used the pressure of his hand between her legs to force her
fesses
against his sex. His breath was barely a sound against her earlobe. “Because I am at yours.”
She was trembling with desire. The disaster of their loss to Total Foods, her last conversation with her father before she came back to Paris—all that was pushed far away, fleeing from the deep shadows and the brightness of this moment. “Shouldn’t an apprentice have to please the master?” she whispered.
His hips jerked and pushed hard against her bottom, his palm holding her prisoner by his pressure against her sex. She shivered all over. “You do,” he said, low, guttural. “Already.”
She twisted away from him and pushed him back against his desk.
He gripped the edge of it, watching her, his eyes a black burning.
She reached for his jeans.
His hands tightened on the edge of the desk. “Cade. Don’t do this to me. Do you know how long a real apprenticeship
lasts
? Don’t play with the idea unless you’re planning on staying at least that long.”
“I’ll do what I want to you.” She freed him from his jeans. His head tilted back until she could see all the strong muscles of his throat. “You do to me.”
He closed his eyes. “Cade.
Ne me touche pas. Bordel
. Cade.
Arrête.
” But he did not grab her and stop her. “If you can’t promise you’re going to stay, let go
now. Putain.
” His hips thrust helplessly. It was so strange to see every muscle in his body taut, to know exactly how much stronger he was than she, and yet to feel so much power.
“You’re not used to it,” she said wonderingly. Were other women insane?
He made a sound. It couldn’t really be understood as a whole word.
“You’re not used to having someone seduce
you
.”
“More subtly,” he managed hoarsely. “A lot more subtly. More like—pouty lips subtly.
Are you really going to stay
?”
“I can do pouty lips,” Cade said, sinking to her knees.
“Ah, putain.”
Sylvain’s breathing was so labored. He was so helpless to her. She was giddy with her sense of power.
“I
know
I love you,” she said and tasted him.
“Ca—ade.”
“Do you want me to stay?” It was a trick question, to ask it right at that moment, she knew.
He gripped her shoulders so hard, those strong fingers hurt her, finally holding her back. His eyes were open again, blazing far hotter than chocolate ever could. “Cade. Every dream I have has you in my apartment, has you in my
laboratoire,
has you with my babies, has me making supper for us on a cold night, has us laughing, and dancing, and . . . together. Every chocolate I’ve made since I met you, I’ve made for you. I’ve seen your gaze on my hands while I did it; I’ve thought of the way it would melt on your tongue.
Don’t—you—toy—with—me.
I can’t take it.”
She stared up at him, no longer giddy with her own power but helpless in wonder at it. “Really? You want that, too?”
He gave a sudden, exultant laugh and pulled her up his body with one easy surge of strength. “You can even have my name,” he said into her mouth, between kisses, wrapping her legs around him, wrenching at her clothes. “But please don’t put it on Corey Bars.”
“Oh!” Even at that second, as he pushed her jeans off her, Cade was distracted by a sudden, beautiful idea. “
Cade Marquis
bars!”
He drove into her hard, vengeance for the idea mixed with desire.
“Non,”
he said hoarsely and firmly.
“Mon Dieu, qu’est-ce que je t’aime.”
“Moi, aussi.”
She wrapped her arms around the lean, taut muscles of his back.
“Moi, aussi.”