Authors: Laura Florand

The Chocolate Thief (26 page)

BOOK: The Chocolate Thief

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“Apparently the previous owners were afraid to have a wider gate because it made it easy for thieves to bring in a truck and clean them out,” Sylvain said. He parked the van on white gravel by the edge of the courtyard, and they climbed out.

Cade gazed at a beautiful white façade, peeling here and there but over all well maintained, white lace veiling dozens of great windows behind iron railings. “Napoléon III,” Sylvain mentioned. It loomed stately and graceful above the mob of peasants that milled below it.

Gleeful peasants.

Who were suddenly swarming them. Cade ducked at the onslaught of bobbing pitchforks.

“Oup, pardon,”
said one pitchfork wielder and planted the prongs in the gravel. She suddenly found herself in an extensive round of
bises
with more would-be farmers than she had ever met in her life. Some wore overalls and carried straw in their teeth. Some wore great floppy hats and huge sunflowers. Some had colorful suspenders and rain boots. Some, a little abashed, wore jeans and an apologetic baseball cap as the best they could come up with. From the far end of the courtyard, a tall, thin man appeared loaded with hoes and shovels to pass around.

“Seriously, don’t tell them my name,” Cade begged one last time in Sylvain’s ear.

“Maman!”
Sylvain exclaimed, ignoring Cade’s comment for the pitiful attempt it was. “Where’s Papa? How was the trip?”

A woman who looked as if the quintessence of elegance had been trapped in overalls three sizes too big for her embraced Sylvain hard, pressing her cheek for a long time against each of his, four times over.
“Ça va, mon petit choux?”

“
Maman,
this is Cade Corey.”

Bastard,
Cade thought. She had always known he deserved to be robbed blind.

The woman looked like an older version of Chantal—hair a little shorter, as suited her age, and the blond was probably dyed but perfectly coiffed and elegantly feathered. She was dressed in the thrifty chic Parisian women seemed to do so well, as if elegance had everything to do with taste, and nothing to do with money, although at a guess, Sylvain had given her that Dior scarf which added the perfect touch of color to her outfit. Her makeup was subtle and effective, and glasses helped disguise the laughter and smoke lines around the corners of her eyes. She gave Cade two air kisses, not letting their cheeks touch. “So you’re the thief,” she said flatly.

Sylvain,
the complete and utter bastard,
was already turning away to clasp some man’s hand, to be kissed by someone else, laughing.

“It’s complicated,” Cade said.

Perfectly plucked eyebrows rose. And waited.

“I had to do something dramatic to catch his attention,” Cade said hurriedly. “He said the chocolate was more important than I was.”

“And was he right?” Marguerite Marquis asked unanswerably.

Cade was still stuck trying to figure out the answer when a bright voice exclaimed by her shoulder: “
Bonjour!
Are you the Chocolate Thief? I haven’t heard nearly enough about you.
Je m’appelle Natalie
.”

“My sister,” Sylvain reappeared to explain, as a slim, dark-haired young woman around twenty kissed Cade’s cheeks.

The man who had been distributing hoes and shovels stopped before them. He wore a big floppy hat, from under which peeked perfectly cut, perfectly silvered hair. His huge black rain boots were splattered with mud and straw, old and new, as if they clearly got a lot of use. “You must be Cade Corey. I’m Fréd—Fréderic Delaube. Welcome to our
château
.” He bent to kiss her cheeks with such perfect, urbane hospitality that Cade relaxed all over. “Would you like a hoe?”

“Tiens.”
Sylvain handed Cade a pair of old work gloves. “To complete the look. Have you met Papa yet? Cade,
je te présente Hervé, mon père.
”

A tall, graying man with plenty of laugh lines around his eyes gave her
bises
—four
bises—
that more than made up for his wife’s in enthusiasm. “Trust Sylvain to always find the prettiest women around!” he exclaimed, so warmly that Cade couldn’t help liking him for his attempt to compliment her.

Then she thought that compliment through. How many pretty women did Sylvain routinely show up with at his family parties?

“
Merci,
Papa,” Sylvain said, looking rather pleased at the praise, oblivious to the fact that she might not care to be one of a plethora of pretty women. “Can you help me carry the sculpture in? Fréd says Thierry will be here in fifteen minutes.”

Oohs
and
aahs
greeted the appearance of Sylvain’s fantastical sculpture, great wings and whimsies of white, dark, and colored chocolate curling and soaring around a small female goat curled up in the center, her legs folded under her, all carved out of chocolate. The crowd of pseudo-peasants gathered around it in a corridor of acclaim, cameras flashing, as Sylvain and Hervé started toward the
château
.

“So, how much longer are you staying in Paris?” Marguerite asked Cade in the sweetest and friendliest of tones, as the two men disappeared into the house. “You can’t stay away from your business very long, can you? You must be going back any day now.”

It was going to be a long weekend.

While Sylvain and his father were settling the sculpture onto a red-draped table in the center of a nineteenth-century salon, Marguerite kindly took her on a little tour of some of the other pieces in the room. Period glass-faced cabinets displayed precious crystal and family photos.

“This is one of my favorites,” Marguerite said, opening the glass to pull it out so Cade could get a better look. “Last New Year’s. We all dressed up as cows—it was
à mourir de rire
.”

It apparently was, in fact,
à mourir de rire,
because everyone in the photo was dying laughing. All three cows—Marguerite, Natalie, and Sylvain—plus a fourth person. In this photo, Sylvain was not, as she had imagined, grinning at his sister. He was laughing down at Chantal, who wore not a cow costume but something black and sexy, and who clung to his cow hoof as she laughed up at him.

Cade looked up from the photo to study Sylvain’s mother a moment. Marguerite looked innocently back at her.

“Amazing,” Cade said mildly.

“What is?” Marguerite asked happily.

“How anyone could look so good in a cow costume.” Cade handed the photo back to her and left Marguerite trying to figure out whether she should take the compliment for herself or on behalf of her children.

The goats and farmers were a huge success. Thierry, as short and stout as his partner, Fréd, was tall and lean, was so delighted to find a horde of peasants awaiting him when he drove up that he nearly cried. Cameras flashed from all directions.

“Cade Corey!” Thierry exclaimed when Sylvain introduced them. “
Vraiment? Ta voleuse de chocolat, Sylvain?
I’m impressed. You’ve finally brought someone interesting.”

It was all Cade could do not to let her shoulders slump. She was starting to feel like a fighter who had taken one too many to the gut. So. It clearly wasn’t uncommon for Sylvain to bring women he was dating to family parties. She was as pretty as the others and maybe a tad more interesting, according to his family, but she wasn’t any kind of special case.

Her feet felt heavy, pulled down by ubiquitous mud, as they tramped through the gracious, soggy gardens to a fenced area that held four little goats and a brand-new goat house with a heart carved in its door.

“So, tell me a little bit more about breaking and entering.” Natalie leaned beside Cade on the fence. “Do you use a rappeling cord?”

“Actually, officially, I haven’t been breaking and entering.”

“What?” She looked disappointed.

“Her lawyers don’t want her to admit to it,” Sylvain explained, reappearing by Cade’s side. “Cade, please don’t tell my sister how to break and enter.”

“I would only do it for a joke, Sylvain,” Natalie said indignantly. “I don’t have time for that kind of thing. I’m always studying. Has he mentioned I’m getting my degree in business?” she asked Cade ever so casually. Sylvain, who seemed to be widely loved amid his family, had already had his attention claimed by another cousin.

“Really?” Cade felt as if she had been parachuted straight back to her comfort zone. Talking to a woman whose son she was dating—that was horribly uncomfortable. People trying to establish their careers via party talk with her—that she understood. “What area interests you particularly?”

“I’m still exploring,” Natalie said cheerfully. “Doing different
stages
.”

Ah.
Cade fed a handful of hay to a little goat with big, mischievous eyes. “Internships, huh?” She—well, Corey Chocolate—had been considered a source of them since she was in middle school.

“And I’ve got some chocolate experience. Sylvain let me do an internship with him when I was in high school. So I combine qualifications in both business and gourmet chocolate.”

“And she’s irrepressible,” Sylvain mentioned dryly, reappearing. “That’s a warning, not a selling point.”

“Excellent.” Cade laughed. “I like that in an intern.”

If there was one thing worse than being a woman’s “option,” it was being grateful for it, Sylvain thought, his hand flexing too hard around the butcher knife, giving an unfamiliar awkwardness to his cutting.

But at least surrounded by family and laughter, he could ignore that for a while. He set Cade to slicing mushrooms beside him, partly because whenever he left her to her own devices, he didn’t know what would happen next. His mother might slip poison into her wine. His sister Natalie might hand her a CV. And there seemed infinite potential for fatal combinations of too much alcohol and too many pitchforks. It was pretty much impossible to get his entire family to behave for a whole weekend.

But mostly, he just liked having her cut mushrooms beside him. He liked being able to let his body graze hers from time to time. He liked the careful concentration with which she cut, as if she was afraid she could get a slice wrong if she didn’t pay attention.

He just liked having her be a part of this warm, happy, boisterous kitchen, as they all helped get the buffet tables filled and the guests fed.

This was the kind of thing he loved. He wouldn’t miss a party with his family for the world. Everyone was in a good mood, everyone was laughing, everyone was pouring out energy in order to give Thierry the best fiftieth birthday they could.

“Yes, you keep an eye on that thief of yours! Don’t let her steal anything!” one of his cousins shouted.

Sylvain laughed, and Cade looked rueful. Unable to help himself, he slipped a hand around the nape of her neck and kissed her, hard. He surfaced from that to find about five people openly analyzing them—including his mother, his father, and his sister. None of them looked in the least abashed. His mother didn’t even have the grace to look away, just continued to study them critically.

He left the kitchen to add a tray of hors d’oeuvres to the great spread set out on the tables in the nineteenth-century salon. When he got back, one of his uncles had taken over his cutting board next to Cade.

“I understand you’re interested in artisan food production. My son wants to become a baker,” his uncle was saying.

“A baker
and
a chocolatier in the family?” Cade smiled. “How much better does it get?”

“But it’s hard to get the financing to open his shop,” his uncle said delicately. A slight flush rose to his cheeks. Sylvain realized what Tonton Fabien was trying to do for the sake of his son—ask a barely-met billionaire to invest in the twenty-year-old’s future bakery.

He flinched for his uncle.

Cade, however, seemed to take this conversation as a matter of course. “Yes, financing for small businesses is tricky. In France, it’s not that easy to open a business, is it?”

“Something like that would be a great investment for . . . somebody,” Tonton Fabien said gamely. “He’s a good baker. He’s just about finished his apprenticeship.”

“Can I nudge you aside,
Tonton
?” Sylvain asked easily, reaching an arm between the two for his chef’s knife. “I need to slice these lemons for the salmon. Oh—would you mind checking in the
cave
to see if they have more
crème fraîche
? I don’t see any in the refrigerator.”

His uncle left with an expression of relief, and Cade raised an eyebrow at Sylvain.

“Does that kind of thing happen to you a lot at parties?” Sylvain asked, keeping his voice low enough to not embarrass his uncle in front of the rest of the family.

“What kind of thing?”

“Strangers trying to get you to finance their projects?”

“Sure.” She thought about it for a moment. “Just out of curiosity, what do other people get to talk about with strangers at parties?”

BOOK: The Chocolate Thief

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