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Authors: Laura Florand

BOOK: The Chocolate Thief
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And it was a half filled with so much joy and passion. If she couldn’t stay in Paris for him, surely she could stay for his chocolate.
She stared at him for a long moment. Then she looked out across the wide Marne. “My grandfather is eighty-two years old.”
“Ah.” That, he couldn’t say anything about. He could tell her to pick Paris—
pick him
—over her life as a damned mass-market producer of
merde,
but he couldn’t tell her to pick him over someone she loved.
Even if she let herself one day love
him,
he couldn’t do that to her. Couldn’t tell her to choose between him and someone she had loved since birth.
“And—I can do so many things.
So many
.” She said it as if it was a curse, not a gift. “I can save people. I can change lives. I can affect working conditions in entire countries. Working with chocolate in Paris—I’m not good at it. I’m never going to improve anyone’s life doing it. I just—love it. But it doesn’t do anything for anyone but me.” She sounded, very briefly, exhausted.
“Have you ever done anything just for you?”
Her eyebrows flexed together, as if the question puzzled her. He could see her racking her brain to come up with an answer, which was answer enough. “I broke into your
chocolaterie,
” she finally said.
“
I
thought that worked out rather well,” he said with a little grin. “Maybe you should try it for a while. Stop thinking of all you could or should be doing. Just savor what you want to be doing. Surely you’re allowed a couple of years of just living what makes you happy.”
She rested her head against his shoulder, gazing out at the water, and said nothing.
After a long time, she tilted her head to look up at him, her hair spilling across her face. “Are you living what makes you happy?”
He gazed down at her face, pale in the dark, felt the weight of her against him, seeking his warmth. The only thing missing from this moment was the surety that he could keep it.
“Ah, oui.”
He stroked her hair back from her mouth, the way he had wanted to do that very first morning in the bakery.
“Je suis très content.”
Chapter 26
C
ade was cursing the handheld spray in her apartment’s bathtub Monday morning, still a little hungover from all the family partying, when her phone started buzzing like mad. At the same time, her laptop turned itself into a carillon service, rippling out chime after chime as multiple messages came in one after the other. The phone had gone to voice mail and immediately started buzzing again by the time she got a towel and reached it, shivering as she got farther from the radiators and the cold air hit her half-dried skin.
“Total Foods has made a hostile takeover bid for Devon Candy,” her dad said, and all her nerves fired to two hundred percent, adrenaline jerking through her as if she’d just gotten out of her shower to find a raging tiger leaping at her.
“Merde,”
she said. “I’m on my way.”
 
She threw items into a carry-on with her phone clipped to her ear, delegating to her assistant in Maryland the job of booking her the first flight out or a private jet, whichever was most efficient. She slipped her teddy-bear finger puppet into her purse. She left most of her things in the apartment and flagged a taxi as she crossed the street to the
chocolaterie,
her pace long, fast, just short of running.
“Attendez,”
she ordered the taxi driver. “I’ll pay you, don’t worry.”
Adrenaline had taken over, her mind turning almost its entire focus to this tiger. But she needed to see Sylvain. She needed . . . to take him with her.
But she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t buy him off an elegant display table, pack him up, and take him home with her. For one thing, if she removed him from his
chocolaterie
and his city, it would be as if she took an axe and cut off his limbs.
“You can be part of something without owning it, you know. You can be part of my life without owning it anytime you want.”
“Get me . . . ten boxes,” she told the nearest clerk as she passed. She knew her world, and she knew what it was going to be like for the next few weeks. They wouldn’t sleep, and they wouldn’t really eat; assistants would bring them food and coffee while they kept going. She had twenty boxes of chocolates from other chocolatiers upstairs in her refrigerator. But she hadn’t thrown any of those into her carry-on. She wanted a little something of Sylvain Marquis with her every day. Or a lot of something, depending on how bad it got, back home without him.
Under and through all the adrenaline, her stomach was starting to squeeze with anguish.
They didn’t even . . . where were they, in their relationship? Would he care? Could they call each other and make kissing noises into the phone? They probably couldn’t.
Oh, God.
Would he even . . . well, where
were
they, exactly? He had introduced her to his family, but apparently he introduced many women to his family.
Would he just shrug and move on? There were other women who loved chocolate and sexy men, who could throw themselves at him with the same desperate longing she had. There were two beautiful, supremely classy
Parisiennes
in his shop right now.
Cade looked at them with a thin, hard line to her mouth.
They looked back at her coolly and sniffed.
You can be part of my life without owning it anytime you want.
Was that a statement of liberty—she could see him but better not think he was hers and that he wasn’t seeing anyone else?
She stopped in the
laboratoire,
scanning it, unable to find the dark head she was looking for. Her stomach was now in a knot so tight, the struggle in her body between that and adrenaline was starting to make her feel sick and choppy, as if she’d just downed four too many energy drinks.
“Sylvain n’est pas là,”
Pascal said, pausing in the act of setting the pots of a bain-marie together. “He had a meeting with the mayor and some of the other chocolatiers in the city about this idea of his to set up a
Journée du Chocolat
with schoolkids, an exposure to the different food professions.”
She looked at her watch. “When—?”
“Probably not until this afternoon.”
If there was anything worse than wondering how he would react to her being gone for a few weeks, it was not being able to even see him one last time and at least have an idea. Would he kiss her hard, ask her not to go, or just say, “Ciao”?
She went into his office, pulling out one of her personal-info business cards in lieu of notepaper, trying to think what to say. Good God, what in the world was she supposed to put down on paper?
But she couldn’t call him and interrupt him with the mayor. That wasn’t cool. She wouldn’t want him to do that while she was in a meeting with Devon Candy shareholders.
“Are you going somewhere?” Pascal asked from the doorway, his eyes very narrow and cool.
“There’s been a—” How in the world did you say
hostile takeover
in French? “Ho-steel take-o-veer?” she tried. You never knew with French. Sometimes these English business words worked if you gave them the right pronunciation.
Pascal looked at her as if she had sprouted two horns and started speaking in Demon. He did not look as if he understood anything whatsoever. On more levels than one.
She turned her shoulder to him and wrote,
Je t’appellerai
on the card.
I’ll call you.
She signed it with her initials,
CC.
If he didn’t recognize those, she was going to come back for the pure purpose of smacking him.
She wished she could leave him something, something just as powerful and rich and symbolic as the dark bitter chocolate he had left on her doorknob the other day. But she didn’t have anything.
She hesitated, her hand clenching around the Corey Bar in her purse. Corey Bars held no value for him. But abruptly she pulled it out and put it under the card. For whatever he would make of that. Probably nothing.
She turned, her carry-on pivoting with smooth luxury behind her as she went back through the shop.
“Mademoiselle Co-ree.” The young, elegant clerk who had once snubbed her look distressed. “I don’t know if M. Marquis would want me to let you pay for this.”
“It’s okay.” Cade handed over a card. “Charge me for ten more and promise to give one of them to the homeless man with the new jacket in the gardens every day until I get back, okay?”
Winter was setting in, and clearly only the best would help get the man through it. That and the wool socks and silk thermal underwear she had picked up for him the other day. She wondered what would convince that man to go to a shelter.
“M. Marquis already asked me to do that,
mademoiselle
. I can’t charge you for it.”
Had he? A smile brightened her face. When she got back, she would have to talk to him. She had an idea about an awareness-raising Chocolate for the Homeless Day, and if he had time left over from his schoolkids’ day, she’d bet he would be the perfect partner.
When she got back.
She was going to just keep telling herself those four words.
She stuffed her boxes into her nearly empty carry-on and climbed into the taxi.
 
Two hours later, she was back.
Shit, shit, shit.
How could she have managed to misplace her passport at a time like this? She always carried it with her. Had she forgotten and left it in a different purse? No. Had she slipped it into the pocket of her larger suitcase? No. Where the hell was it?
She looked and looked, everywhere in her apartment she could think of, on the phone with her assistant, telling her, no, she had missed the first flight, to get her another one in two hours. On the phone with her dad and her excited, half-gleeful grandpa, getting all the details of the Total Foods bid and what was going on, as she had been doing in the taxi, she went on looking and looking.
Finally the glimmer of a suspicion touched her. Not really a full suspicion. Just . . . she had looked in every possible and impossible place. Either it had been stolen and she had never noticed and she needed an emergency passport from the embassy, or . . . well, she would just check out one last idea.
She went back to the
chocolaterie,
barely conscious of the very cold looks everyone in it gave her.
Sylvain was at the marble counter. Pascal might have lied to her about how long he would be gone, or he might have finished with the mayor sooner than expected. Either was possible. But he was here now.
He was just standing there, his palms spread flat on the marble, his head bent, staring down at it. He didn’t seem to be moving or doing anything. He hadn’t even put on his white chef’s jacket and toque and apron, and she had never seen him indifferent to professionalism in his own
laboratoire.
A huge surge of relief swept through her, a desire to throw herself into his arms and just hug him as hard as she possibly could.
Then his head lifted, and his eyes met hers.
He was furious.
He was furious in a way that made his outrage over his name on Corey Bars seem like a casual expression of annoyance over a minor matter. Maybe, in perspective, that’s what that outrage had been.
“Did you miss something?” he asked, every word pure and precise, as if fury could be crystallized into some kind of intellectual diamond. Which in French it probably could.
“My . . . passport,” she said. Looking for it here suddenly stopped seeming such a ridiculous idea.
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled it out, and threw it onto the marble. In the motionless
laboratoire,
the slap of the passport resounded loudly.
“I knew you would do that,” he said, very low, so that it would not carry even in the muffled, unaccustomed quiet of the eavesdropping
laboratoire
. “I knew you would just hop back onto a plane the instant the mood struck you. At least this way you had to tell me to my face.”
“I was going to call you,” she began but stopped before the surge of fury her words provoked. His other hand lifted from the marble and from it fell, crumpled into nothing, her business card with the same promise.
“Merci,”
he said, that final
ci
in the word slicing like a sword. The curse came after it like a battering ram:
“Va te faire foutre.”
“No, you don’t understand.” She came toward him, reaching for his arm.
He pulled it away from her as if she were a plague victim.
Okay, answer to one question: he did care. On the other hand, everything had just gone to hell in a handbasket.
“It’s an emergency. Total Foods has just made a hostile takeover bid for Devon Candy. Do you know what that means?”
He just looked at her, his jaw set. “No.”
Which wasn’t surprising, since she still didn’t know how to say it in French. “We can’t let Total Foods get Devon Candy. We can’t. We’ve got to figure out something.” Even while she was saying it, a part of her brain was turning: They had three billion in cash reserves. The Total Foods bid was 17.6 billion and was probably not their final offer. Financing might come from . . .
“That’s more important to you than—?” Sylvain caught himself, shutting himself up with a slicing gesture of his hand.
She hesitated, trying to think this through, to figure out the implications of what she was saying before she said it. He had stopped himself. But he had gotten halfway into his question before he rethought it, so she knew it was there. “Are you saying that I have to choose? That I can be Cade Corey of Corey Chocolate, or I can be your”—his what?—“here, with you, but I can’t be both?”
His jaw was so hard, the purity of his profile was heartbreaking, like a work of art she had just shattered. “I’m here. You’re going to the US. It’s a big ocean.”
She rubbed her fingers between her eyebrows, running on too much adrenaline for tears, full of only urgency and anguish. “I’ve got to go
now
. Will you—?”
Will you not go out and pick up one of those pretty
Parisiennes
in your shop; will you wait for me?
How did you earn the right to ask for that from someone you had known only a few days? Was she insane? What were they? She still wasn’t even entirely sure he didn’t have anything going on with Chantal. So if she couldn’t even know for sure whether they had a monogamous relationship—of less than two weeks’ duration, in which the focus of their relationship had been sexual—then how could she ask him to wait for her?
Her own jaw firmed. “I’m coming back,” she promised, holding his eyes. She might not have the right to ask for anything, but she knew how to make promises for herself. And she knew how to keep them. She had partial control of the destinies of so many more people than Corey’s thirty thousand direct employees, she had stopped counting when she was a child because of the vertigo it could inspire. She knew how to back up her own words.
She stretched both hands toward him. “You do . . . what you decide to do. I don’t have any say over that. But I’m coming back.”

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