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Authors: Laura Florand

BOOK: The Chocolate Thief
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But he kept to his word, not touching her. She stumbled forward.
They were halfway up the second flight now, and three more flights to go.
He rewarded her. His hands stroked and teased up her inner thighs again, promising to touch her sex but then retreating, stroking up again closer, retreating again.
She made a little sound that was no words, just begging, and stopped.
He took a step downward again, breaking all contact.
Again, a little sound from her, wordless pleading. She forced herself forward, craving the reward and loathing the punishment.
His hand came all the way up to the crotch of her tights this time and played with her for a full five steps, pressing and rubbing the lips of her sex through tights and panties, telling her what a good girl she had been.
“Sssy . . .” She thought she started to say his name. She just couldn’t get her mouth to function for anything as coherent as a word.
As if to reward her for the effort, he began to ease her tights and panties down, an inch per step. She learned the rhythm quickly, that for each step she took, a little more of her skin was bared under her skirt. And his fingers, his beautiful, deft, masterful fingers that could take the raw elements of the earth and turn them into something wonderful, brushed against that skin.
They were halfway up the fourth flight of stairs, one more flight to go, when his fingers finally slipped around to her naked, madly damp sex. He made a low, approving sound when she clenched around his hand so frantically, and the sound itself made her clench again.
She was almost insane, on the edge of coming at that point. When his thumb pressed hard against her clitoris, she bit into the arm of her jacket and began to shake. As a last cruel torture, he tried to pull his thumb back as he realized, to make her wait still longer, but she grabbed his hand and forced it back against her, wave after wave engulfing her.
She came uncontrollably, body shattering in a dark, narrow staircase, his palm against her clitoris, his other arm holding her up as she fell against it, her own arm stuffed against her mouth to keep in her cries.
He held her until she finished coming, pulling her in tightly against him.
Then he picked her up, holding her in his arms as he took the last stairs swiftly. She fumbled, limp, mindless, for her key. He took it from her and opened the door, not fumbling at all. The apartment was small. It took him no time to find the bed. He dropped her onto it and fell onto her, one thumb driving her helplessly into waves of pleasure again as he took her, hard and fast.
He came almost immediately, hard, wrapping his arm under her shoulders and pulling her into him as he did so. His arm flexed around her until, just for a second, she could not breathe as his climax shook him.
He held her, held her tight, his faced buried in her hair, as his body slowly relaxed.
They both fell asleep together, Sylvain with one hand curled gently on her waist.
It was still dark when they woke. Sylvain made a low, pleased sound, as if drifting up from a dream to realize it was true. He stroked her clothes off, all of them, left her naked among her sheets, completely naked to him for the first time. So she did the same to him. She couldn’t help it. His long, naked body was so beautiful. Stroking her hands over his bare skin and finding nothing, anywhere, to impede her, was such sensual pleasure.
He stroked one hand leisurely up her body, starting at the foot from which he had just removed the tights, all the way up the naked length of her, over her hip, her ribs, her arm, which he stretched above her head, linking his fingers with hers to imprison her hand. Light from the city came clearly through her windows. His eyes seemed to glitter in it.
“You can do anything to me you want to,” she whispered.
“I will,” he promised.
Chapter 19
W
hen she woke in the morning, her bed smelled of chocolate. It smelled, in fact, of home, of Corey, where the very air smelled of chocolate, always. She came out of sleep smiling a little, nuzzling at the smell, whose source eluded her.
Bright daylight burned through the room. That disoriented her and combined with the achiness of her body to make her wonder if she had been ill. She never slept late. Not even when she was traveling.
By degrees, she became aware that she was very, very far from home, naked and completely exposed on her bed, under a thin sheet. And sticky. And the night . . .
She blushed all over, from head to feet, and fought against opening her eyes but finally had to.
Despite all the training of her hook-up period in college, she expected to see Sylvain standing there. She expected to have to face him, naked and crimson.
But the small apartment was mercilessly, brightly empty in the late-morning sun.
And outside her apartment door, the stairs were creaking as someone descended away from her. The sound that had awoken her had been her closing door.
“Cade,” Mack Corey said reproachfully. Over his shoulder, her grandfather studied her. With gleaming eyes, knowing her grandfather, but it was hard to tell via Webcam.
Cade felt miserable. Guilty, rebellious, unsure of how to become herself. Like an adolescent, perhaps, except she hadn’t felt that way as an adolescent. She had fit in perfectly in their world as an adolescent, known exactly what to do to be the best next Corey, and done it. Despite her own desires to sink into a simpler, sweeter world of artisan chocolate, she had assumed her responsibilities with no instant of rebellion, unlike her sister, Jaime, who had pretty much refused them from the get-go and set off to save the world from big, bad capitalists like her sister.
“Are you okay? I worried about you when you didn’t respond to any messages yesterday.”
“I was working,” she said quickly. “I went up to Belgium.”
“Still,” her father said firmly, “you should have answered your messages.”
She was trying to wean her father from needing to hear from her quite that frequently. She felt like Marie Antoinette playing at being a farmer in the Petit Trianon.
Please, I don’t want to run the world anymore. Just—can I be something else, for a little while?
“I had to make some calls to make sure you hadn’t gotten arrested for chocolate theft.”
“I—don’t think Sylvain Marquis plans to press charges.” It wasn’t the sex that made her trust him. Far from it. It was the way he had shifted his body to block her from the wind in the gardens.
“Is it working, then?” her grandfather asked. “Are you luring him into the fold? Is he going to sell himself to us?”
Oh, yeah, sure, any millennium now.
“No.”
“Just as well, really,” her father said. “I’m not convinced anymore that it’s a good time to start a new line. But if
you’re
that sure, why are you still there? I could use you back here right now, sweetie.”
“Can’t you ever let her have a vacation?” her grandfather asked him. “What is it with you and making her work all the time? I don’t see why I made us billions just so my granddaughters have to work instead of gallivanting around Paris.”
Mack Corey turned away from the Webcam and stared at his father. “First of all, you made us millions. I made us billions. And second of all, what are you talking about? You made
me
work 24/7!”
“I was younger and stupid when you were a kid,” the older Corey said impatiently. “And we still only had millions. And the Mars family was getting uppity, and we needed to make sure they didn’t beat us. Plus, you were a boy.”
Cade sighed. It was fairly annoying that her grandfather’s sexism was her best defense.
“
And
I made sure you had a year to tour Europe, the way my dad did me, I’ll have you know,” her grandfather said. “It’s not my fault it was wasted and you never tried to break into a single
chocolaterie
the whole time you were there.”
“She had a semester abroad when she was in college! It’s not
my
fault she wanted to double major and couldn’t find time in her curriculum to stay a year. She travels all the time for Corey. And she’s been in practically every country in the world! Except a few of the ones where we have to hire an army to make sure she doesn’t get kidnapped. It’s so hard to get a reliable army these days.”
Her grandfather folded his arms. “Either that only whetted her appetite, or it isn’t what she is looking for at all,
or
you need to cut her enough slack now that she can spend one whole day not working while in Paris without your having conniptions. She graduated four years ago. That’s a long time to go without a few hours’ vacation.”
“I didn’t mind that she wasn’t working,” her father said sulkily. It was one of the side benefits of being a member of a closely-knit billionaire family that she got to see the head of one of the Fortune 500 act sulky. He didn’t do that in public. “Although it’s not a good time for that, to be honest. I just wanted to make sure she was all right. It’s not like her not to answer her phone or take care of problems as soon as they come up. She knows I want her opinion on the Firenze brothers.”
“What could have happened to her?” her grandfather scoffed.
“A car accident, kidnapping, food poisoning, getting mugged, tripping and falling on stairs, hitting her head, and not having anyone find her until it was too late, an enraged French chocolatier, or, most likely, the way she’s been behaving, jail.”
Her grandfather studied his son. “Being a father is rough, isn’t it?” he asked sympathetically.
“Yes,” Mack Corey said definitely, completely missing his father’s real meaning. His father punched him in the shoulder to try to make sure he caught it, but his son only glanced at his punched shoulder blankly.
Cade hid a grin, feeling homesickness well up in a strange, split-personality way. Because she really didn’t want to go home.
 
Cade went to the Louvre. She spent the whole afternoon at the Louvre. She stood staring at giant Assyrian griffins. She wandered among the Italians, trying to remember if any of those artists had gotten syphilis, and if they had, whether staring at their extraordinary art should make her feel better about herself. Maybe she needed to be over in the Musée d’Orsay with van Gogh.
She got a little bit lost among Egyptian sarcophagi, found herself wandering among thousand-year-old foundations underground, and finally came out into the light pouring softly through the inverted pyramid in a great courtyard one level down from the surface. She folded her legs under her on one of the stone benches there and sat, almost Zen style, for at least an hour. The murmur of people moving through the courtyard surrounded her like running water as she soaked in the soft, luminous paleness of the courtyards, the great marble statues that had once stood in gardens.
The guards kept a casually suspicious eye on her, which was kind of funny. No one kept a suspicious eye on her in Corey. Maybe her descent into crime and kamikaze behavior had created an aura for her. If there was one place where you would spot auras, it was in this calm, calm space. Except that anyone who sat here too long would have his aura purified by beauty.
She imagined everyone coming up the escalators out of the museum, into the crisp, cold November courtyard of the palace, surrounded by white auras. Taking on life again, slowly turning back into their old colors.
She was crossing the wood-planked pedestrian bridge, the Pont des Arts, across from the Louvre, when her phone rang.
“Do you ever eat anything besides chocolate?” Sylvain asked. “Where are you? Do you know how inconsistent you are? You break into my
chocolaterie,
you try to buy it, you bribe people—is it true you paid that woman thirty thousand American dollars for that morning in the workshop?—but when I invite you, you don’t even call back.”
“The thirty thousand dollars wasn’t intentional.” There hadn’t really been any intelligent analysis of possible results when she’d handed a stranger her credit card. “What invitation?”
“I left you a message this morning.”
Really?
No messages were required in a hook-up. That was one of the basic rules. Her thumb stroked over the back of her phone. She began to smile. “How did you get this number?”
Evening was falling earlier and earlier as November advanced, and the lights came on all around her as she stood there, looking at the tip of the Île de la Cité, with its bare trees and couples still sitting there, despite the cold and the failing light. The street lamps sprang warmly to life against the winter dusk, and luminescence softly woke around the Louvre and Notre-Dame and the Musée d’Orsay, its great railroad clock glowing faintly green. The wind blew a drizzle across her, nudging her home.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have a home here. She only had a short-term apartment rental from which she could look out at things she wanted.
And Thanksgiving was coming, and Christmas after. Maybe she should be heading toward her real home.
Her eyes creased, her heart troubled, as she got an inkling of another side to her current conflict. Where should she be, as the holidays came round? She had agreed with her father to take no more than a month here. A month, which had seemed an enormous amount of playtime to her when she had first bargained for it, now seemed very, very short.
“I took a card out of your wallet while you were still asleep,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You stole from me?” She was outraged.
There was a long, incredulous pause. “Are you
kidding
me?”
“Did you steal anything else?” Her stomach clenched in old, learned sickness. A credit card, for example. If all this nose-dived straight down to her money . . .
“Like what?
Ton passeport
? So you can’t disappear—with all my secrets?” Had she imagined it, or had that “with all my secrets” been tacked on quickly? The rhythm of the question had barely broken. She had probably imagined it. He didn’t care if she disappeared, just if she stole his secrets when she did it. “Do people who fly in private jets even have to show their passports?”
“Yes, but the immigration stamps are in gold leaf.”
He laughed. “I’ve got something for you. Do you eat anything that doesn’t have sugar in it? I can make dinner.”
Standing there in the drizzle, gazing over brown waters at the winter-bare tip of an island and Notre-Dame, she felt her whole face split into a smile. She tried to keep her voice more neutral, though. “At your apartment?”
“You don’t have anything in your refrigerator worth eating,” he said firmly. In fact, she had a sample box from every important chocolatier in the city—besides him, of course. His had all gone to the homeless man in the gardens. From his tone of voice, she suspected he had opened her refrigerator while he was there and seen all those other chocolatiers’ boxes. “So it will have to be mine.”

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