The Chocolate Touch by Laura Florand

looked back toward her apartment building, only a few doors away.
    He had promised her dinner, hadn’t he? Not fast-food sex.
    And just because she looked as if he could lower his mouth back to hers and nibble her lips and turn her body entirely limp and take her straight upstairs didn’t mean he . . . he shouldn’t . . . he—
    “We had better keep walking.” He straightened so roughly she stumbled, and he cursed himself. He never could wash those six years of brute hacking out of him, could he? He closed his hand around hers again, more tentatively.
    She didn’t say anything at all, but she curled her fingers around the edge of his palm—all she could reach from the inside of his hold.
     
    She wasn’t wearing a jacket, he realized when he shrugged off his own at the bistro. He grinned with heady anticipation. It was going to get cooler by the time they left the restaurant, and he would be able to give her his leather jacket, wrapping her up in his warmth for all the walk back to her apartment.
    “Do you like it?” He smiled down at her, enjoying deeply the fact that he could now use tu with her, as they waited at the bottom of the steps for the waiter to arrange a space for two in the crowded little place, its room set just a few steps down from the street. He had brought her to one of his favorite bistros, on the edge between the Marais and the République area. The kind of place where you could get a good steak, fresh cut frites, and lather it with sauce Roquefort, all of which he was planning on talking her into ordering. Were the bones on her wrists just starting to soften a little, after ten days of his salon ?
    Her smile warmed him all through. “C’est parfait,” she said shyly. She had grown very shy since that kiss.
    That shyness put him in power, and he felt corrupted by that power already, inclined to lure her into his clutches and keep her there forever. Surely it wasn’t a very smart thing for her to do, to let him have the power here.
    Any woman who let a man have power over her was a complete fool, but when he was the man in question . . .
    Well. She wasn’t here for very long, he reminded himself. He could surely manage to be a decent person for as long as she was in the city.
    “What are you doing in Paris?” he asked, holding her hands across the table because he didn’t want to lose the privilege in case she recovered some shred of sense, and sliding his fingers under the close knit of the cuff of her sleeves to stroke against the inside of her wrists. He wasn’t really trying to manipulate her, he just couldn’t stop himself. He loved the feel of her skin, he loved that access, he loved the way her eyes grew dazed and dreamy.
    But his question made her pull her focus back in, her eyes clearing and growing distant. “I have family here.”
    It hit him like a slap that there was some lie there. Here he was, her melted marshmallow, and she could keep herself together enough to lie to him. He had thought he had the power? “But you’re not staying with them?”
    Like, whose apartment did he need to direct them back to, in order to have her all to himself?
    She shook her head. “I like to have my own space.”
    Great. That unshared, private space of hers was not very far from this restaurant at all.
    “What family do you have here?”
    “My—sister,” she said reluctantly, watching him, for what he didn’t know. “My father and grandfather, sometimes. My family has always liked Paris. My mother used to get us all to come here sometimes when we were little. It’s where she and my father had their honeymoon.”
    He smiled. He didn’t have many privileges of birth, but he did at least have that one: he was born in a city that made women’s hearts mushy and romantic just by whispering its name.
    Well, he hadn’t been born quite in it. Even with that privilege, he was on the outskirts, the muddy hem of the elegant gown. But he had claimed Paris fully now. “Is that why you speak