“Oh, I don’t know,” Cade said pleasantly, trying for a perfect little contemptuous put-down.
Which was a very hard thing to do in someone else’s language,
she later tried to console herself. “I paid nearly a thousand dollars for a bite of you just yesterday.”
Chantal’s eyebrows went up. They even did that perfectly.
Sylvain’s lips formed that beautiful French
O
again. Then they split into a grin.
Oh, God.
What had she just said? Please let the earth open up and swallow her.
It took Sylvain a full minute before he managed to get that grin calmed down into something more urbane, a silky, gorgeously self-satisfied gloating. “Why, so you did.”
She couldn’t even stammer out something about “a bite of
your chocolates
” to correct the impression her words had left. She and he both knew that when she took a bite of his chocolates, she really
was
taking a bite of him.
She strove for a disdainful moue instead, wishing she had practiced that expression in the mirror when she was working on her French
u.
One needed a lot more than language skills to get by in France. “A bit overpriced, don’t you think? But I suppose you can always fool some people into thinking anything is good if you charge enough.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. He fulminated.
“Sylvain is
the best
chocolatier in Paris,” Chantal said coldly.
“Do you think so?” Cade raised her eyebrows. “Have you tried anything of Dominique Richard’s?”
The glare Sylvain sent her could have made her burst into flame. She really couldn’t shake that sorcerer impression of him, and right now the sorcerer looked like the kind that fed impertinent people to demons.
“Non,”
Chantal said loyally.
Cade shrugged and opened a palm, making her point without a word.
Sylvain looked as if feeding her to demons might not be enough of a punishment. He might want to kill her with his own two hands.
“I’m satisfied with Sylvain.” Chantal smirked, catching his eye and winking at him.
Damn it.
Depression out of all proportion to the comment settled on Cade. What a horrible, nauseating evening.
She refocused on her gloriously exquisite
raviole du Royan à la crème au basilic
and poked at it with her fork.
After a moment, she inevitably glanced sideways, to find Sylvain watching her again. His gaze was thoughtful, his anger visibly down at least three notches.
It occurred to her that she had been blushing so constantly since she met him that he might just assume she had naturally red skin. It was possible, right?
The waiter brought his basil cream ravioli, and he refocused on Chantal a bit, exchanging pleasantries for a few minutes before offering her a perfunctory
Bon appétit
. But when he took his first bite, his eyes closed a little in pleasure, too, if a bit more familiar and expected than Cade’s.
When he opened them again, he looked straight at her.
Cade, who had finally gotten the butterflies suppressed enough to take another bite, got caught with her fork still at her lips, flushing again all through her. The taste on their tongues right at that moment was exactly the same.
Their eyes held. Was that a touch of color on Sylvain’s cheeks?
Chantal sighed, looking subdued for a moment, then tossed her head in a sexy,
tant pis pour toi
way that made the perfectly feathered ends of her hair shiver and catch the light. She stretched out a little hand to close over Sylvain’s, one of those beautiful, masculine hands that knew exactly how to manipulate . . . probably far too many things. And she tugged it, just a little.
He looked back at her, and she held his eyes, half smile, half query. He flushed suddenly and shifted his body to angle away from Cade.
Cade, too, shifted to angle her body back toward the window and tried to eat more of her ravioli. For something that had a thousand calories a bite, she would have preferred it to taste a little less like sawdust. Also, her throat felt horribly exposed every time she swallowed, as if everyone in the restaurant was focused on what an ungainly gesture swallowing was.
Well, not everyone, really. Just one person. And his elegant date who swallowed so beautifully, it was practically a sexual act.
It should have helped when another couple came in and took the table between hers and Marquis’s. At least she could pretend that was what stopped him from pestering her, and not the tug of Chantal’s hand.
Having the other couple between them now did mean that her every glance away from the window didn’t land on him or Chantal. It meant that his every stray glance away from his date or dinner didn’t land on her. The shield provided by the couple’s bodies should have helped save some part of the evening.
Except that she was still the only person there who wasn’t half of a couple. And one of those couples was
his
. The next hour might very well have been the longest in her life, stretched to infinity by her desire to be doing anything but eating alone in Paris two tables away from those two.
The waiter gave her second course, duck in a honey-apricot sauce, still three quarters-f, a look of deep concern when he unwillingly removed it from the table. “No dessert?
Mais, madame, vous avez le prix fix.
”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll pay for it.” The waiter looked offended that she should have mentioned money openly, even though she couldn’t figure out why else he cared that she had changed her mind about dessert. “I’m just not hungry enough.”
“Do you want a—what do you call it—a
doggy bag
?” Sylvain asked from his table, smirking at the possibility of seeing her do something he clearly considered revolting.
“Personally, I’ve always thought the ‘doggy bag’ would be a good thing to have here,” Chantal said, being kind again, which really was just the very last straw of this miserable evening. “I can never finish the whole meal, either, and the dessert always looks so good.”
The waiter gave Chantal an indignant look at the suggestion and made no attempt to pull out any foam boxes.
“I’m fine,” Cade said, falling back on the cool, courteous tone she used whenever she had to meet with Mars company executives right after a particularly successful bit of marketing on their part.
“Mais merci.”
Always pretend they really meant it nicely; that way they could doubt the success of their attacks.
She beckoned the waiter closer to her with a small smile. His eyebrows rose, but he bent, and then bent still farther when she beckoned again.
When he straightened, he was quite openly, but playfully, disappointed. “
Vous êtes cruelle, madame
. When a beautiful woman dining alone wants to whisper in my ear, you can’t blame me for getting my hopes up.”
Beyond him, Sylvain was frowning.
Cade laughed, rather pleased at one of her first encounters with casual Parisian charm. “Well . . . maybe I’ll come back for that dessert one day.”
The waiter laughed, winked, and gave a tiny bow.
Sylvain turned back to Chantal. His frown lingered.
Cade signed the credit slip and left, adding a generous, American-sized tip. It was probably a stupid whim, but, having seen for herself how annoying the other couple’s kindness was, she could only hope that when Marquis discovered she had paid for their meal, he would feel as galled and condescended to as she had.
She hoped he brooded over it, that muscle in his jaw ticking and his stress rising, the whole rest of the evening.
Although Chantal would probably prove a pretty good stress reliever.
Damn it.
Chapter 6
“T
here you go again,” Chantal said as soon as the door had Tclosed behind Cade.
Sylvain watched Cade head down the street, her chin up, a slim, small figure with a long stride. Her heels took the cobblestones as if they were no obstacle, her tailored black coat hiding her body all the way down to the tops of her boots. The problem with fall and winter was that he always saw women’s coats as Christmas wrapping paper. He wanted to take Cade Corey somewhere warm where he could push that coat off and see what Papa Noël had left him underneath.
Papa Noël had a nasty habit of leaving him coal, though.
“What do you mean?” he asked, irritated already by what he suspected Chantal meant.
He didn’t want to admit how much of his irritation came from the fact that Cade Corey had left so early. What was wrong with her? Didn’t she know how to eat? The waiter hadn’t even brought his and Chantal’s main course yet, and the whole evening suddenly looked flat.
Another idea snuck through him: had he made her that self-conscious?
He smiled a little, rubbing his fingers over the smooth wood of the table.
“Falling for some glamorous, rich woman who is just going to use you,” Chantal said reproachfully.
“No, I am not,” he said, deeply annoyed. Act like an idiot in high school—and, okay, through half his twenties—and your old friends never let you forget it.
Chantal gave her head her characteristic toss, a move she had started affecting way back in high school and had practiced until it became part of her.
He thought of Cade Corey again, with her unconscious arrogance and sudden blushes. He didn’t think she had a head-toss in her. That chin led too straightly. Even when she was flushing, she tended to look at him straight on.
She did flush—a lot.
His mouth curved again, his thumb rubbing this time over the slender stem of his wineglass.
Guiltily, he realized he wanted to ditch one of his closest friends so he could linger in thoughts of exactly why Cade Corey flushed so much and ways he could make her flush even more.
“Then what, exactly, are you doing?” Chantal asked dryly, forcing her way into his attention.
“I’m
trying
to have dinner with a friend. Do we have to talk about Cade Corey? It’s bad enough that she’s following me everywhere I go.”
It flattered the hell out of him that she was following him everywhere he went. That chin indicated a woman who knew what she wanted. A woman who
really knew
what she wanted. Talk about erotic.
Unfortunately, what she wanted was his name on her mass-market chocolate. But he couldn’t help wondering if there was any way he could shift her focus a little and make
him
what she wanted. He had honed serious skills in luring women with chocolate.
“Bon.”
Chantal tossed her head again. “We won’t talk about her.”
“No. Let’s not ruin a good evening.” He rapped his knuckles against the table a couple of times. “Do you know what she did?” he exploded. “She walked into my shop straight off a jet from America and tried to buy me. Buy
my name,
Sylvain Marquis, to put on
Corey Bars.
Can you believe that?”
Chantal’s mouth dropped open. “
C’est vrai?
But, Sylvain, you would make a fortune.”
He made a hard motion with one hand, as if he could chop Cade Corey’s head off with it. “
Sylvain Marquis?
On
Corey
Bars?”
“True,” Chantal admitted. “That would be . . . pretty humiliating.” She was silent for a moment. “You could go retire in Tahiti if you wanted, though.”
Sylvain stared at her. He and Chantal had been friends since high school. That is, he had had a crush on her, and she had used him occasionally in high school, and eventually that had developed into real friendship. It had never occurred to him that Chantal didn’t even know who he was. “You can’t make good chocolate in Tahiti. Too hot and too humid, and who is going to eat chocolate made in Tahiti, anyway?” He was the best chocolatier in
Paris
. Being the best chocolatier anywhere else seemed a sad and pitiful thing.
“Bon, bon.”
Chantal held up a hand. “I get it. My apologies for mentioning the advantages. I know you can’t let her buy you.”
“Thank you,” he said, partially reassured. Maybe a fifteen-year friendship had led to some mutual understanding, after all.
“Don’t let her
use
you, either,” Chantal said with emphasis.
Sylvain gritted his teeth. “I won’t. Didn’t we say we weren’t going to talk about her?”
“You did say that,” Chantal said very dryly.
He flushed. And managed not to talk about Cade Corey the whole rest of the evening, right up until he didn’t get the bill.
“She did what?” he asked Grégory, the waiter, ominously.
“Paid for your dinners,” Grégory said, amused.
“And you
let
her?”
Grégory looked taken aback. “What’s wrong with her paying for your dinner?”
“Everything.” Sylvain pushed back from the table.
The waiter shrugged. “I thought it was kind of cute.
She
was cute.” He touched his ear as if he could still feel Cade’s breath tickling it when she whispered to him.
“Son petit accent . . . ”
Sylvain caught himself just short of a snarl. He had the privilege of having this excellent restaurant five doors down from his apartment building. The last thing he needed to do was tackle the waiter and get banned from the place because of some spoiled billionaire.
Who wanted to buy him.
Who had just bought his meal with a little flick of her pen. Like she was tipping her shoe-shiner.
His jaw ground so hard, he could feel the muscles protesting.
“Remind
me
never to buy you dinner again,” Chantal murmured, impressed by his reaction.
He forced the words between his teeth: “It’s not the same thing at all.”
Chantal looked away. “That’s what I was afraid of,” she said, oddly.
The gray, dim streets of Paris hesitated at dawn. Poetic and tentative, they clung to the night even as they were drawn inexorably out of it. Here someone left a doorway and forged, head bent, into the cold new day, aiming for the warm light of the bakery spilling out from under its burgundy awning. There a car engine started.
Still the streets hesitated, as people clung to warm covers or warm showers or made a cup of coffee. It was all starting over, another intense Paris day. Were they ready for it?
Standing at her window, gazing at the dawn, Cade resisted the urge to check e-mail and hide in her responsibilities back home. She pulled her robe tightly around her, eyeing the windows across the street for signs of life. All up and down the street, lights were coming on, but sporadically, not as many or as simultaneously as they had the morning before.
It was Sunday, she realized. All the chocolatiers would be closed.
She would have no chance today of finding a way to fulfill her dream, but also no chance to fail at it over and over again.
She spun away from the window, delighted. She felt as if she had woken up and discovered that Santa had stopped by a month early and left her presents everywhere: she could go to the Louvre, skip stones on the Canal St-Martin, have bread at Poilâne, go see Mariage Frères. Just to browse and buy tea. No purchase of the entire business necessary. No pursuit of a dream and risk of its failure required.
She skipped the claustrophobic elevator and took the stairs, suddenly happy with her lot in life again.
In the street outside her building, a car the size of a shoebox nipped by, far too fast for a lane so short and so narrow. Sunday morning it might be, but the steering wheel of a car clearly acted like coffee on Parisian drivers. A gangly young man crouched, tightening in-line skates on his feet, unsmiling, focused on his own world. An older man, maybe someone with a family, came out of the bakery with a white paper bag in one hand and a white box dangling by its string from a finger of the other. He was smiling, slightly, at nothing, at Paris and a Sunday morning, as he headed around the corner. Cade imagined the family waiting for him, the man depositing the treasure of Sunday-morning pastries before the children in casual satisfaction.
A group of six women and one man milled awkwardly in front of Sylvain Marquis’s store, some of them talking excitedly, others acting like people who didn’t know one another very well. Three of the women were Japanese and formed their own tight, elegant group. Two others were clearly American.
“I don’t think he opens today,” Cade told them. The last person who needed to find groupies waiting all day for him was Sylvain Marquis.
“Oh, we’re here for the workshop,” a sixty-something American woman answered proudly. In a purple pantsuit and plastered with makeup, she looked as excited and pleased with herself as could be.
“The workshop?” Was Sylvain Marquis teaching the secrets of his artistry?
“We’re going to learn how to make Sylvain Marquis chocolate,” the woman explained excitedly.
“Really.” Cade barely hesitated. “Um—could I ask you something in private?” She gestured to move them a little out of earshot of the others.
“Why?” the woman asked, immediately wary. “Are you going to attack me?”
Cade looked at her blankly and then down at her own elegant and expensive coat, boots, gloves. “Do I
look
as if I’m about to attack you?”
“Well—no,” the other woman admitted. “But this is Paris. Muggers probably dress better here.”
“No, I just—how much money would you want to give up your place in this workshop and let me pretend to be you?”
“None!” the other woman said, offended. “I’ve been looking forward to this for months! I planned my whole trip to Paris around it!”
“Two thousand dollars.” Cade tried to blow aside all reservations with the first extravagant figure.
“Are you kidding?” The other woman looked outraged. “It costs more than that to take the class!”
His workshops cost more than $2000? Cade raised her eyebrows at the seventeenth-century stone walls that stood between her and that workshop, impressed and annoyed both at once. “Five thousand dollars.”
“I said no!”
What was it with people refusing to let her buy them these days? “
And
I’ll pay for you to stay in Paris another two weeks in a beautiful apartment and take cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu.”
The woman hesitated. Finally Cade was striking a chord. Then the older woman frowned suspiciously. “Why? Why do you want my place so badly?”
Fine.
Someone was going to arrive to open the doors to the workshop at any minute. Cade turned back to the others waiting there. The Japanese women were hopeless; from the way they were dressed, money wasn’t going to buy a darn thing from them. Besides, Cade didn’t speak Japanese. She focused on the Americans and French: “Does anyone want to earn five thousand dollars?”
Everyone stared at her blankly. She repeated it in French.
“What is that worth in euros?” the Frenchman asked. “Fifty
centimes
?”
Was it against the law to be helpful in France or something? Cade gave him an aggravated look.
“Now, wait a minute,” the woman in purple interrupted. “I didn’t say I was turning you down. But I’ll take the two extra weeks in Paris and the course at the Cordon Bleu in cash, if you don’t mind. What does that come to? Ten thousand dollars or so?”
Cade was never going to be able to put this on her expense account. “Fine,” she said. At least this way she would know his secrets.
Know his secrets
. . . The words whispered through her, tantalizing her on more levels than she had suspected. The secrets of that dark sorcerer, in his workshop full of magic.
Trade
secrets, she clarified to herself. Secrets of the chocolate craft. That was what she was after. He could keep his other kind of secrets, the jerk.
“Um . . . I might have to write you a check,” she told the woman.
The woman gave a snort and turned back to the others.
“I’m good for it,” Cade said desperately. She didn’t have time to renegotiate with anyone else. And with intense impatience, she didn’t want to wait for the next workshop, whenever that was. It could be months from now.
The purple-pantsuit lady gave her a disgusted look.
“No, really,” Cade said. She pulled out her ever-present talisman Corey Bar, a business card, and her US driver’s license, holding them out in her open palms. “Look.”
The woman glanced, annoyed and puzzled, at the Corey Bar, then at the business card. Her gaze slowed, and she gave the card a thorough read, then looked from the license to Cade’s face and back. Cade wished she hadn’t looked quite so much like a drug trafficker in that license photo, but money couldn’t buy everything.