Free The Chocolate Thief by Laura Florand Page A

driving him crazy. And here, in his domain, he knew he had something she wanted.
    Pascal began speaking again, telling the students to look at the blocks of different types of chocolate they had just taken back to their stations.
    Sylvain picked up the darkest, the purest. Crumbs clung to it from when it had been hacked from a larger block.
    He smiled, looking down at it in his hand. The finest crumbs were already starting to melt against his skin.
    He had something she desperately wanted. His chocolate. Now he wanted to see if he could use that to make her desperately want him.

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    Chapter 8
    C ade thought if her heart beat any faster or more blood rushed to her cheeks, she might pass out. To cool herself down, she drew up an image of Chantal, la Parisienne parfaite, and tried to mentally paste it to the inside of her forehead.
    “This is one of my favorite moments,” Sylvain murmured to her, his voice a brush of sound, too low to interfere with Pascal’s lesson, too low for anyone but her. “The chocolate is untouched, virgin.” Chocolat, he said. Not that clumsy, cute English word chok-lat but a caress, a mystery, sho-co-la. “I choose it. It is beautiful as it is, perfect; anyone could eat it forever. Yet I bring something else to it, blend it with another flavor that makes people encounter it in a new way, a richer way.”
    His voice burred over her skin. All the fine hairs on her arms rose to that voice and to the words that seemed to talk about more than chocolate. Made her want to be his chocolate.
    “I pour it into another form worthy of it, something as beautiful as its essence, so that just looking at it fills people with desire.”
    She realized her lips had parted, her breath had grown shallow. She kept her lashes lowered, her gaze focused on that dark block in his hand. On his strong, square palms, on the long, adept fingers.
    “Tenez.” He handed it to her.
    She did everything she could to take it without touching him, but he shifted his hand at the last second, and his fingers brushed hers. She sank her teeth into the inside of her lower lip.
    “We have here criollo —do you know it?”
    “I probably produced it,” Cade told him in a clipped voice. It was arrogant to say “I” and not “we,” but he was provoking. Did she know one of the four major types of cacao? True, they didn’t really use it in Corey Bars—too expensive for their market—but she knew what it was.
    “No,” he said definitely. “No, part of this came from a small grower in Venezuela. I liked their crop this year, épicé et voluptueux. ”
    Spicy, voluptuous. Oh, God. Why were even those words dissolving her?
    “The rest came from Madagascar, and perhaps some of that may have been from one of your plantations.” His brow knitted. “It’s strange that a company capable of encouraging such a quality primary production could end up with . . . what you end up with.”
    Cade thought of the poor, maligned Corey Bar in her purse hanging in the entryway. Millions of people were biting into a Corey Bar right this minute, and it was making all of them very happy. Only one or two people were biting into one of his chocolates, she reminded herself. And they almost certainly had at least six-figure incomes. They could find other things to make them happy.
    “In what percentages did you combine them?” she asked. “What kind of conch did you use, and how long and how hard?”
    His lips curved in a very male smile that took her technical question in a completely different direction.
    She tried to ignore that, but she could feel all her erogenous zones flushing with heat. “How much cocoa butter did you add?”
    He laughed and shook his head. “You might be able to flirt that information out of Dominique Richard, but I think I can hold out a little longer.”
    Her skin burned. Had that been yet another contemptuous dismissal? This time implying that her flirting was not effective?
    Why was he accusing her of flirting? She