The Chocolate Thief Page 4

  He didn’t look thrilled with the fact that she was dining alone, either, but maybe that was her own self-consciousness. He was kind enough to give her the window table for two, where she could sit watching the street.

  She swallowed. She rarely ate alone in public. Meals on the road were usually packed with people and work. But surely she had the self-confidence for this. Even in Paris.

  It just felt so horribly, awkwardly lonely. She smiled brightly at the waiter, who looked alarmed. She bent her head and focused on the menu he brought.

  A couple in their early fifties came in and sat at a nearby table, speaking English all the while.

  Great. In her attempts to embrace Paris on her own, had she come straight to a tourist spot?

  She ordered the full prix fixe, three courses, determined not to shrink into a quick dinner and a flight back to the semi-safety of her little apartment. She was here to enjoy Paris. All three courses of it.

  She played with the silverware as she waited for her wine, thought longingly of her BlackBerry, and resolutely pulled out the little leather-bound journal she had bought specifically for her trip to Paris.

  A couple came in, the man tall and dark. Her heart froze even before she had lifted her head to get a better look. The waiter greeted Sylvain Marquis with friendly familiarity, he said something back, and the finger-sized, perfectly coiffed blonde with him laughed.

  Cade closed her eyes against fate.

  How could this be happening to her? How incredibly hideous that he should come in with his perfect little date to the very restaurant where she was sitting out her lonely meal.

  He turned away from the waiter and stilled. She opened her eyes to stare at him defiantly.

  “Do you have spies on me?” Sylvain Marquis asked incredulously.

  “That would be a waste of company resources,” she said icily. Really, who did he think he was? The, uh . . . one of the acknowledged best chocolatiers in the world? Talking to a part-owner of one of the biggest mass producers of chocolate on the planet?

  It was, admittedly, eccentric of her not to have spies on him at this point, or bodyguards and lawyers and assistants on her.

  “Spies?” the little blonde asked with a laugh.

  Sylvain Marquis made a dismissive gesture. “Ce n’est pas important.”

  Cade burned.

  “The mezzanine?” the waiter asked him. Apparently that rule about waiting until the downstairs filled up before seating the upstairs only applied to people with an American accent.

  “Non,” Sylvain said, ignoring the blonde’s disappointed look. “Downstairs is fine.”

  There were only the five tables downstairs, and two of them were already taken. The waiter seated Sylvain and his friend two tiny tables away from her. Cade pressed the point of her silver pen into her journal until it broke through the paper, as she longed to shrivel into an old, dried mushroom that could be lost on the floor.

  At least now she knew she had picked a good restaurant, she thought bitterly. She would bet Sylvain Marquis only put delicious things into his mouth.

  Probably he thought that blonde was delicious. Her pen drove through another layer of paper.

  The air around her seemed to hold scents just from the chocolatier’s passing—cacao and cinnamon, citrus and vanilla. Of course. He would be imbued with those scents at the end of the day. It was possible he might never be able to completely wash them out of his clothes and off his skin.

  She closed her eyes against a vision of water sluicing off his skin, failing to wash away the chocolate essence of him.

  Cacao was so oddly reassuring to her, as if the very scent of it made all right with her world, returned her to her comfort zone. But she didn’t need that vision of his naked skin to tell her that any sense of a comfort zone where he was concerned was completely false.

  She bent her head, trying desperately to think of something to write in her journal, to make herself look busy and indifferent to his presence. And not lonely. She found herself writing Paris over and over just so her pen would be moving. Her name. The name of the restaurant. Syl—She slammed the leather cover closed.

  She tapped it, not knowing what to do with herself. And finally opened it again. Being very careful to keep it half-closed so that he couldn’t glimpse a thing.

  “What are you writing?” Sylvain Marquis asked from his table only three feet away. “Memories of Paris? Chantal, have I introduced you? This is Cade Corey. She’s in the chocolate field,” he added, with a tone of great kindness, as if he was saying the custodian at a lab was in microbiology.

  “Corey?” Chantal said. “Do you make those—?” Belatedly, she apparently realized her face was curling into a sneer, for she quickly smoothed it out. “How nice. Have you come to France to learn more about chocolate?”

  Cade wondered what would happen if she hauled off and decked both of them. Surely it wouldn’t be the first time an American in Paris had been provoked to violence by French “politeness,” as her grandfather had called it. She had come to France to learn more about chocolate, but it didn’t sound at all the same when she said it.

  And who was Chantal, anyway? She noticed his Marquis-ness hadn’t introduced her. Maybe she was so much a part of his life, he assumed everyone already knew.

  Cade was never leaving her apartment without her BlackBerry again. At least she could have whipped it out and looked . . . probably even more pathetic. As if, even sitting in the middle of Paris, she had no other aspect to her life than Corey Chocolate.

  Exactly what she was trying to make not true.

  “Don’t you know anyone in Paris?” Sylvain asked.

  Cade turned her head and stared at him. Was it her imagination, or had he sounded a touch concerned? Was he about to include her in his party out of social pity?

  Chantal looked worried about that, too.

  “I know people,” Cade said. At least, quite a few people here would like to know her. That list of her father’s.

  Sylvain looked doubtful. Cade had just made up her mind to stand up and walk out—pretend she had only stopped for a glass of wine—when the waiter appeared with a small white dish of ravioli swimming in a bath of basil cream and pine nuts. It smelled like heaven—and looked like the door locking her in to a long prison of an evening. She felt a little sick to her stomach.

  She should have stayed in her room feeling sorry for herself. She should have dined on top of the Eiffel Tower.

  (A sudden vision of herself dining on top of the Eiffel Tower with Sylvain Marquis flashed through her mind, just quickly enough for her to catch a glimpse of city lights, of dark sky and stars, of dark hair and a hand proffering her a taste of something delicious. She shoved the image out of her head.)

  She should have taken advantage of Sylvain’s night out to break into his workshop and learn all his secrets.

  Now, there was an idea. Her grandfather would be proud. He would be so proud, the secret would probably burst out of his lips and right into her father’s ears. Her father had a really funny attitude about corporate espionage. He thought it should be done discreetly, by people who couldn’t be linked back to the Corey family.

  “Then why are you eating by yourself?” Sylvain asked.

  She glared at him. From buying his secrets with millions to becoming his act of social charity was a pretty brutal step down. Of course, maybe he wasn’t concerned so much as trying to humiliate her.

  “Because I don’t really like people,” she lied coldly.

  There, that should shut anyone up and turn his attention back to his date. She wondered what it was like to date a man who could do what he did with chocolate and who had eyes as dark as . . .

  “Vraiment?” Sylvain said, intrigued. “Do you just see them as dollars and euros, or how does that work?”

  A second before she slapped her credit card onto the table and called for the waiter, Cade realized what a victory it would be for him to drive her out of the restaurant. The same way he had dr
iven her out of his laboratoire. With just a few contemptuous words and a supremely disdainful look.

  She took a slow breath, focused on her ravioli in its cream sauce so faintly tinted with green, and cut into it with her fork.

  “Bon appétit,” Chantal said kindly.

  Seriously, Cade hated her. She would take spite a hundred times over kindness from that beautiful Parisian blonde sitting across from an equally gorgeous sorcerer of chocolate.

  The raviole bloomed in her mouth: just the right amount of basil, salt, and melted butter, pine nuts, cream, perfect fresh pasta with something inside she wasn’t quite sure of. All condensed into one thousand calories a bite.

  She realized she had closed her eyes as she savored the pasta square, and she opened them to find Sylvain Marquis smiling a little as he watched her. As if he knew that moment, that first bite of this dish, and was enjoying it vicariously through her.

  Enjoying the taste in her mouth.

  She found herself blushing, a strange fever that spread through her mercilessly. She could feel it mounting to her cheeks, growing visible, and she could not for the pride of her get it to stop.

  The smile slowly faded off Sylvain Marquis’s mouth as he gazed at her. The waiter came up to their table, and Chantal answered whatever he asked, but Sylvain didn’t even seem to hear him.

  “Sylvain?” Chantal said. His name sounded so perfectly pronounced by her delicate French lips. The ain was so correct, like the breath of a whine.

  He didn’t respond.

  Chantal glanced from him to Cade, and she didn’t look very pleased at all. Cade turned her head to stare out the window.

  “Sylvain,” Chantal said again.

  “Hmm?” Sylvain’s voice sounded distracted.

  “Tu as choisi, mon cher?”

  “Pardon. Oui. Les ravioles,” he told the waiter.

  Heat roiled through her again.

  This was pathetic and ridiculous, she told herself. Could she fake a seizure so she could get out of this restaurant?

  No, a seizure would make her look bad. A heart attack? An allergic reaction to basil? That might explain the flushing. Maybe she could fake getting something in her eye and disappear to a bathroom, climb out its window, and never return to her table. She searched surreptitiously for signs of a bathroom but couldn’t find one on the ground floor. Meaning it was either belowground or upstairs. She was pretty sure she couldn’t carve a tunnel before someone came to look for her, but she wondered how much toilet paper it would take to make a rope.

  For some reason, climbing out of a bathroom window on a rope of toilet paper seemed like a less humiliating plan than just paying her bill now and walking out.

  “You aren’t going to eat it?” Sylvain asked her incredulously.

  Couldn’t the man just talk to his date? Turn his back on her? Leave her alone?

  “I’m not very hungry,” she said. She had been when she’d ordered her three-course meal just before he walked in, but now she felt as if she were trying to get her food down past a horde of butterflies.

  Sylvain’s lips formed one of those tight, beautiful French Os but without a sound. He looked at her plate and then at her mouth. One eyebrow lifted a little in question, and he looked into her eyes again.

  Just exactly what did he think he was figuring out about her? What questions were those eyes asking that were making warmth start to lurk in their depths?

  “I ate too much chocolate today,” she explained quickly, without thinking.

  Sylvain looked smug.

  “I was at Dominique Richard’s,” she added sweetly.

  This was such a good hit that Chantal’s lips parted, and she brought up a perfectly manicured hand to cover them. Cade’s hands were perfectly manicured, too, but she didn’t know how to make them cover her mouth so sexily. Did French women practice in front of a mirror, or what?

  Sylvain’s own lips thinned, and anyone would have thought she had reached out and smacked him. “And did he sell himself?” he asked disdainfully.

  Caught between a lie and having to admit defeat to him, Cade remembered abruptly that she was part-owner of a multinational corporation. “I can’t discuss contract negotiations,” she said, with the same gentle coolness she had used in business meetings a thousand times before.

  He didn’t like that at all. He turned abruptly back to his date at last, but he was visibly simmering.

  “Oh, have you been trying to buy Sylvain?” Chantal asked playfully, clearly trying to break the tension and recapture his attention and her enjoyable evening. “How much do you cost, chéri?”

  Sylvain lanced Cade a glance like lightning. “I’m not for sale.”

  “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 th
at 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-full, 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.”