The Chocolate Kiss Page 2

  She spoke the word macarons lovingly, the way any Parisian would. Bearing no resemblance to the chewy, coconut-filled American macaroon, the heavenly sandwiches of air and lusciousness that were the Parisian macaron were the test of a pastry chef’s quality. And, according to all reports, Philippe Lyonnais did them better than anyone else in the world.

  “The one who stopped by here the other week?” Aunt Geneviève continued.

  What?

  “Weren’t you around when he came in, Magalie?” she asked. “He seemed a bit rude to me, acting as if he didn’t have time for us. And he certainly takes up a lot of room in a place,” she added, not entirely with disapproval but not with any intention of yielding her own space, either. “Still, he’s quite cute. If he can improve his manners, you might like him.”

  She gazed at her niece speculatively. Geneviève had originally been confused to learn that Magalie leaned toward the opposite sex in her preferences, since her vision of taking on her niece as apprentice hadn’t included any male accoutrements, but she had long since resigned herself to it. Perhaps all the more readily because Magalie didn’t accessorize herself with males very often.

  “Mmm.” Aunt Aja made a long sound that meant she foresaw trouble where Aunt Geneviève saw fun. “There was a lot of lion in him. And he is a prince,” she warned Aunt Geneviève apologetically, hating to have to point it out.

  “Oh.” Geneviève looked disgruntled.

  Magalie gave her a sardonic glance. In the whole history of the known world, there had been no mention of a romantic attachment between a prince and a witch. Lots of battles, yes, lots of arrogant royals reduced to toads, but not much love lost.

  Which had suited Geneviève just fine for herself. But, given her niece’s insistence on the male gender for her romantic attachments, it galled her that any member of that group—even a prince—might consider himself above Magalie.

  “Philippe Lyonnais, the most famous pastry chef in the world, is opening another branch of Lyonnais right down the street from us.” Magalie tried spelling it out in small words to see if that helped.

  Geneviève started to frown.“You know, that is kind of nervy,” she told Aja. “He could have more respect for our territory. I wouldn’t go open a salon de thé right next to him.”

  Why . . . yes, Magalie thought. That was a nice way of thinking of things. “But I don’t think it took him nerve,” realism forced her to admit aloud. “I don’t think it took him any more nerve than walking on a bug he didn’t see.”

  Aja smoothed her long burnt-sienna tunic over her salwar pants. Her eyebrows crinkled. “Why didn’t he see us?”

  Aunt Geneviève finally had the right focus, though. She stared at Magalie in gathering outrage. “You don’t think it took him nerve to open a shop within our territory? You don’t think it took him courage? You think he just did it without even noticing us?”

  Magalie nodded. “I think he probably reviewed all the other shops on the island and his market base and decided there was no threat to him here.”

  Geneviève’s mouth snapped closed, and within the bubble of her complete silence, Magalie could almost see her aunt’s head explode.

  Aunt Aja traced the embroidery on her tunic soothingly. “I would not, of course, threaten anyone,” she said. “I mean him no harm. However, it’s perhaps better for a prince to learn young that looking before one steps is basic self-preservation.”

  Geneviève laughed in a way that put Boris Karloff to shame. “I won’t ‘threaten’ him, either. He doesn’t deserve the warning.”

  Magalie took a hard breath. Neither woman seemed to have noticed that the reason he’d treated them like a bug was because he could. He could steal their entire market base simply by opening up shop. He wouldn’t have to compete with them. With five generations of pastry chefs behind him, he had been up against his own family heritage and every other pastry chef in Paris since he was born, competing with the whole world, and he had bested all of them. “I’ll go talk to him.”

  It might as well be her. At least she had enough understanding of what was happening to be pissed off at the right thing.

  Both her aunts frowned at her. “Why would you want to warn him? I hope you aren’t going soft, Magalie,” Geneviève said. “It’s not because he’s cute, is it? I can’t see any good come from letting a man—especially a prince—take advantage of you just because he’s cute.”

  “And no threats, either, Magalie,” Aunt Aja said gently. “Remember karma: the fruit you harvest grows from the seeds you plant.”

  Aunt Geneviève snorted. “If anyone tries to boomerang a threat back at Magalie, I’m sure we can make him regret it.” Aunt Geneviève believed in karma about like she believed in bullets: they might exist for other people, but they would most certainly bounce off her.

  Aja gave her a reproachful look.

  “Enfin, Magalie can make him regret it,” Geneviève disavowed quickly. “I’ll just . . . help.”

  Claire-Lucy clapped her soft hands together. “Can I watch?”

  Chapter 3

  Magalie was combing her hair in her white-on-white room high above the ground the next morning when a crow banged his head on her window. It shook itself on the sill, glared at her accusingly through the pane, and flew off to complain to a gargoyle on the next island over. As if she didn’t already know what kind of day it was going to be without that. She’d have to face those gargoyles when she crossed the bridges into the rest of Paris, too.

  She drew ethereal, streaming yards of gauzy white across her windows to avoid encountering any further crows and went to dress. The dawn she had been watching was never more than the faintest blush of yellow-pink on the horizon in Paris, anyway. It was one of the things about the city that made her wistful for her former home. In the South of France, morning coming up over a dew-strewn field of lavender could fill your heart with enough beauty to last through any kind of day at all. But Provence was her mother’s place, and too scarred for Magalie. She had needed her own place and thus had come to this tiny island in the Seine.

  She put on stylishly straight black pants that caressed her butt and hugged her thighs but showed a crisp, clean line around her ankles. She put on a teal flowing silk top because she knew the importance of a soft detail amid the black armor she was donning. She slid into her sleek, short black leather Perfecto jacket, which fit her torso and arms almost as closely as a knit top. She drew on ankle boots that had a subtle “rocker” suggestion in their pattern of black-on-black and their four-inch narrow but slightly chunky heels, a broader power base than her stilettos could provide.

  She started to braid her hair to put it in a chignon but took one glance into the mirror and undid it. The look smacked of romanticism. Going into the city proper with a streak of romance showing was like going into battle with a gap in her armor right over her belly. She redid her hair without the braid, then deconstructed the chignon enough to make her look casually sophisticated instead of overly concerned with her appearance. She always enjoyed the irony of carefully pulling out wisps here or there to make her hair look careless—but in a perfect way.

  On her way out, she stole one small chocolate witch from the shop to tide her over.

  Down the cobblestones of the Île Saint-Louis, she walked with familiar confidence, no heels wobbling on the uneven pavement, ducking once or twice onto the narrow sidewalk to make room for the rare car to pass down the street—that of a wealthy islander on his way to work or a shop owner who lived off the island coming in. Thierry, the island’s florist, was setting bouquets out in front of his door. He waved roses at her like a maiden might a silk handkerchief at a departing warrior and promised her his most beautiful bouquet on her return.

  As she left the island, a violinist standing tall at the center of the bridge serenaded her, and she dropped some euros into the young man’s hat for good luck. Both of the places she had come from had been so much smaller than Paris. Even after five years, part of her always felt, w
hen she left the island, that she was making a sortie onto a battlefield where her weapons might not be entirely sufficient.

  She passed the flying buttresses of the cathedral and crossed the great plaza in front of it, keeping well away from Notre-Dame’s gargoyles. It was just the sort of morning when they might drop something on her head.

  Pigeons skittered around her ankles as she walked but kept enough distance to show some respect. Her boots and her walk were still worth that much here, at least; no birds had the nerve to expect bread crumbs from her. On a low stone wall in the plaza, the pigeon woman sat with her arms extended, covered with the birds, while people in tennis shoes took pictures and dropped inappropriate forms of currency into her hat. Magalie nodded respectfully to her. The woman sat quietly in a place of enormous power and let birds collect on her arms through all the flashing of cameras. It never paid to be rude to someone like that.

  Magalie held onto her uniqueness as long as she could as she crossed the Île de la Cité, the sister island, despite the increasing presence of cars and foot traffic. She exchanged a last firm look with the green king on his horse in the middle of the great stone bridge at the end of the island, then turned left and headed across more water into the city.

  The ring of her boot heels started getting lost in the ring of other boot heels before she had even finished crossing the bridge. Trees rustling with late-autumn leaves extended along the river, forming the border between Paris and what she liked to think of as its heart, the islands in the middle of the Seine. She left the oldest bridge in the city, passing into the trees’ dappled shadows, and then cut away from the river and its islands to the busy Boulevard Saint-Germain. She wanted to huddle into her jacket, but she didn’t. She let it hang open, unzipped, as was proper fashion, and kept her chin up and her stride a long, powerful rhythm of heels against concrete.

  Yet, despite her best efforts, the farther she got from the island, the more she felt diminished. Far from her power base, she became just another Parisian woman trying so hard to be the sleekest, the sharpest, to let her boot heels ring the crispest, but growing lost among the millions who did it as well or better, who had more money for higher fashion or longer legs, who had no idea she could make a chocolat chaud you would sell your soul for. Really. The aunts had a signed deed for a famous actor’s soul behind the 1920s cash register among the chocolate molds, as a souvenir of a sorcière’s power.

  Around her, people moved briskly, harried out of bed by time and driven by it into work in the middle of a tense week, walking itself an aggression. Occasionally a tourist disturbed the flow, eager and bright-eyed and out early in the morning to soak up the city, with journals and cameras in tow. Unlike the tourists, Magalie did not stand out. Not in any way.

  In her bathroom mirror, she had looked exquisite, perfect, exactly the effect she had wanted to produce. On the island, rose bouquets had saluted her in affection and respect. But here—here she was just another pair of boot heels ringing on the sidewalk.

  By the time she got to Philippe Lyonnais’s Saint-Germain shop, she was only a twenty-four-year-old woman with limited funds to indulge her taste for fashion, in a big, tense, polished, sexy city.

  But he—his power was everywhere. His family name was on the Champs-Élysées, the rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré, here on Saint-Germain—all the power centers of this city. While she and her aunts kept enticing in secret from the heart of Paris, he stamped his supremacy down over the whole damn city and let people fawn over him. His coat of arms was the gilt lettering on his shop window. The exquisite nineteenth-century lines of his storefront reflected the glories of his family history. He came from a long line of rulers of Parisian tastebuds.

  His shop door proclaimed that he didn’t open until ten. She frowned at it—and was surprised when it slid open and let her into an empty shop. That was the kind of thing that happened when Geneviève frowned at things.

  The interior was breathtaking. Panels of glossy wood and frescos were carved with the twining rosebuds that had been part of the Lyonnais décor since the first shop opened a century and a half ago. Lions’ heads growled in the molding at each corner of the ceiling. Green marble pillars climbed above the gleaming glass display cases whose contents were more tempting than those of any king’s treasure room and held more colors and richness than a chest of jewels. The tables and chairs seemed to come from a time when women wore sumptuous gowns of twenty yards of silk and men bowed over their hands.

  Her skin itched. She wanted to turn around and leave. The presence of even one clerk might have helped, someone who could try to snub her and thus get her pride up. But the opulent perfection was empty.

  Something congealed in her stomach, thick and treacly and sickening, as she realized her folly. Here, off her island, she was small and powerless. Glamorous, famous Philippe Lyonnais would look at her incredulously. He would dismiss her out of hand. Her territory was a small cave of a salon de thé on a small island. His rule extended over the whole city, and his influence stretched throughout the world.

  She settled her shoulders firmly back and down and opened the door at the back of the salon. And she stepped into an alien world.

  It was the first time she had ever been in a professional pastry kitchen or laboratoire. The quantity of metal struck her: the faces of cabinets and refrigerators under marble counters. Metal cooling racks. Great steel mixing machines. Shelves upon shelves, full of plastic boxes on top of boxes labeled with their contents. White-clad men and a few women bustled amid white tile walls and floors, bending intently over huge metal trays. One woman traced a circle stencil over and over onto a piece of parchment paper fitted into a huge metal sheet pan. Beside her, a man squeezed perfectly matching dollops of meringue out in row after row on similarly marked parchment paper. Another woman shifted macaron shells from a tray to a rack on a counter filled with racks.

  Multiple colors filled that metal background: rich green macaron shells, peach ones, a garnet red. Someone squeezed ganache from a pastry bag into the upturned shells. A gangly teenager scooped out avocados with deft competence, piling the empty skins in a little tower.

  Jokes and intense concentration seemed to intermingle, and someone passed with a great steaming pot, calling “Chaud, chaud, chaud!”

  A big man with a wide lion’s grin laughed suddenly, his mane flung back, his hands completely covered with some apricot-colored cream. A pastry bag had burst.

  His laughter expanded into the whole room, his energy embracing everyone and everything in it. And that bell in her shop rang again, pure and clear, piercing her through the heart—which hurt like hell—and holding her there, impaled for somebody else’s pleasure.

  Philippe Lyonnais. She might not have placed him in their shop, but here in his, she recognized him right away.

  Even if she had never seen his face in a hundred magazine articles and television interviews, she still would have recognized the ruler of this jungle.

  She stared at him, feeling small and stubborn in her silk and leather. Defiant. Dieu, he had hundreds of macarons spread out here, every single one perfect. She had tried once to make macarons, spent hours in would-be perfectionism, and thrown the resulting flat, dry things into the trash. And she had no idea what would be done with those avocados. But she longed suddenly, intensely to try whatever it was they went into.

  Her skills were rough-hewn, primitive. She could make luscious hot chocolate. But surely everyone could, if they bothered. It wasn’t hard. Pure Valrhona chocolate, milk, and cream, or sometimes water, a hint of spice . . . and that slow smile that grew in her while she stirred it . . . Not difficult at all.

  It galled her to come, a humble petitioner, into such a prince’s palace. She didn’t have that pathetic role in her to play.

  Was she to beg a boon from him? Big, vivid lord of all he surveyed. With his deep laugh like a lion’s purr, filling the room with its vibrations. The hair on her arms rose to that vibration. That couldn’t be good.

&nb
sp; Again she wanted to zip her jacket, close the leather over the thin silk of her belted tunic, protect her vulnerable spots. But again, the gesture, the choice of self-defense over fashion, would have been an admission of her own vulnerability, and she raised her chin and refused it.

  He saw her at that lift of her chin. Caught in mid-laughter, his blue eyes sparkled merrily as they met hers. His eyebrows went up, and he grabbed a towel to wipe off the apricot cream. His gaze ran over her once and then focused back on her face—and focused intently. Alive. She recognized the look. She had met males who thought to pursue her before. Quite a lot since she had moved to Paris, in fact. It didn’t seem to mean much more than that she wasn’t hideous and was of a nubile age.

  He shifted, and anyone else who had even thought about asking her business faded away. They went back to their tasks, enticing her palate to follow them on a taste quest. Were those gold rounds to become caramel macarons, or mango, or . . . ?

  “May I help you?” By asking the question, Philippe Lyonnais established his ownership of this world, his right to allow her to pass or to drive her out. Or to let her in and then close his forces around her, never letting her get away.

  She had left her territory far behind. He didn’t even realize it existed. He would ride his big white stallion right over her hedges and into her garden and never even notice that he had killed her favorite black hen.

  Of course he would not help her. Fury at him, and at herself, washed through her, that she was here humiliating herself for nothing. Before him. The vivid life of him, filling this great, bustling space. The discipline and intensity that drew praise from all four corners of the world. She had thought the magazine shoots exaggerated his sex appeal, the way photo shoots did, with makeup and lighting and poses.

  All those photos had been nothing in comparison to the real thing. Pale, posed, static images. Never once had a single photo caught him laughing.