The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat)

by Florand, Laura

  “Yeah, you should get some more experience under your belt,” Martin said. Only nineteen, and yet he knew far more about the culinary world than she did, and handled it all fifty times better, too. “Work under somebody like Luc a couple more years and then make them beg for you in California. In fact” – his eyes brightened – “why don’t you marry me so I can get a visa? In two years, I mean, when we both have enough experience. And then we could go open this restaurant in California – or Vegas? I hear Vegas eats French chefs up – and we could–”

  “A couple should never run a restaurant together,” Hervé interrupted firmly. “Everyone knows that. Somebody would end up knifing somebody.”

  “Seriously, stay in Paris for a while, Sarah,” Grégory said. “So you have a chance to get good.”

  Patrick’s face had gone exceptionally blank. Weirdly so, even for him. Yeah, he’d feel bad having to tell her in front of all the guys that there was no way in hell the Leucé would hire her on for real after her internship was over.

  “I want to open a shop,” Sarah said defiantly. Around the table, faces shifted, into something knowing and patronizing. “I want to do cakes and have my own little place.”

  A couple of the men exchanged glances and shrugged. From their expressions, anyone would think they were giant, battered football players dealing with some woman crying because she broke a nail.

  Hervé opened his hands. “See?” he challenged the table at large. And to Sarah: “And have we done one damn sexist thing to you?”

  “No.” They could be pretty rough and crude, and that included some jokes about her, but those jokes weren’t directed at her more than at any other member of the team. She’d kind of thought – okay, hoped – that Patrick had been sexually harassing her at one point, but that was just her delusions. He was like that with everybody. He harassed Chef Leroi. Just to make the imperturbable Luc Leroi smile. And if he was a little more gentle and protective and flirtatious with her, it was because she was small and female and he was French and couldn’t quite help himself. It went bone deep in him, that was all. He didn’t mean anything by it.

  “See?” Hervé knocked his knuckles against the table. “You choose not to stick it out. And then the President makes some damn speech about the first female MOF and how we need to open up the workplace, and the media goes on about how top kitchens are such male-dominated places, like we’re the ones keeping you out.”

  Sarah set her jaw and glared at him. “I have the right to want what I want. I’m not turning myself into something else just so I can proudly represent my whole sex.”

  She was tired of turning herself into something else just so she could proudly represent – her family, her mother, immigrants. The whole point of this radical career change and move to Paris was to follow her dreams.

  Be her.

  Damn, she was so crappy at being her. It made her want to slide under the table, let her head drop against Patrick’s knees there beside her, and just not get up again for days.

  So she stood up. All the men frowned at her, except for Patrick, who was still staring at his beer blankly, as if his mind had shut this whole conversation out some time ago and let him brood about more important things. “California,” Hervé muttered in disgust, and Grégory and Noë both shook their heads. Martin looked more as if he was daydreaming of California beach girls. “You can do better.”

  Really? Did they really think she could do well?

  A little kernel of warmth, of belief, lodged in her, all unsuspecting. Like she’d swallowed something the wrong way and it wouldn’t quite go away. Afraid to give it time to dissolve under whatever they said next, she gave a wave of her hand and headed toward the exit, pulling on her coat and hunching her shoulders as she pushed out into the cold.

  The door opened again behind her before she’d gotten three steps down the sidewalk, quiet and emptying as the night waned on. It used to scare her to walk home at this hour, but she’d gotten used to it. Now, except for the pulse of fear whenever she crossed paths with a strange man on an otherwise empty street, she kind of liked the walk. It eased her down from the day.

  “Let’s not risk you missing the last Métro, Sarah.” Patrick caught her arm as he reached her, taking possession of her without even thinking about it, having acquired that right through five months of bossing her in the kitchens. “We’ll get you a taxi.”

  “I usually walk.”

  “Do you really?” Something hard happened to his mouth, so astonishing and unbelievable on his face and gone so quickly that she must have imagined it. “By yourself at one in the morning.”

  She folded her arms. “Taxis are expensive.” I’m the lowly intern, remember? I can’t even afford my apartment, and it’s so tiny I can barely take two steps in it.

  “It’s on me.” He stopped at the corner, still holding her arm, and lifted a hand.

  “I’ll get it,” she said, annoyed, as one pulled to a stop. Damn it, I’m not a puppy. I can take care of myself. I can do that much at least. I went to Caltech, you know.

  None of her Caltech accomplishments had any meaning here, though, did they? She had chosen to forge this brand new path for herself.

  Patrick pulled open the rear door and handed a bill over the seat to the driver, as if she hadn’t spoken. Then he took her by the waist and pushed her in, exactly as he pushed her out of the way of pots of hot caramel. She glared at him. He looked down at her a long moment, holding the door. “Why your own little shop, Sarah?”

  She hugged herself. “I like to have my own space. Where it’s only me who decides if I get things right enough.” Trust me, my own standards are merciless. Or, at least, I always thought so before.

  “What do you want to do there?”

  She blinked, and the dream of it flashed behind her eyelids, dazzling her. “Sugar work,” she breathed, all the tension relaxing out of her. “And cakes and pastries and everything wonderful. I’ll make such fancy, beautiful decorations out of sugar that the kids who get those cakes for their birthdays, the women who have them at their weddings, will think they’ve been lifted straight out of this world into a fairytale.”

  He stared at her as if she’d fallen off the moon, and she flushed. What clumsy, failed sugar work was he envisioning? How hard was he fighting to control a wince? “Sugar work?” he said. “But – that hurts.”

  “It hurts you, too,” she said, lifting her chin and holding his eyes. “And you still do it.”

  He opened his mouth and closed it. Lifting his bare hand, he glanced from his broad, callused palm to her gloved one, hesitated – and then quickly dropped his hand back to the door as if he hadn’t been going to say a word. What was the matter – couldn’t he conceive of her handling the same brutal level of work he could? Damn macho French kitchens.

  And the worst of it was – so far, she didn’t seem to be handling the work. And she couldn’t blame that on any other person in that kitchen but her.

  “Why California?” Patrick asked.

  Her fingers dug into her arms through her coat. “Because my family’s there.” Although that both made her homesick and made her something else, too. Fearful of losing that center she found, when she finally got something right in the kitchens and knew it, of losing that center she found walking home late at night through the Paris streets.

  “You’re attached to them?” Why did he sound so puzzled by that? He was the one who had attached so completely to his chef and the team they had created that he still hadn’t managed to leave them, even after winning his MOF collar.

  She nodded. Sometimes too attached. As if she couldn’t move or be. When she had stepped off that plane for the second time in Paris and set off for Culinaire, she had felt so big she could barely breathe. How did you take breaths that huge?

  He frowned and leaned forward a little. For a weird second, she thought he was going to slide into the taxi after her, and her heart shocked. Her whole body shocked, right down to the clenching of her toes and t
he muscles between her thighs. He couldn’t get into the taxi with her. Everybody in the bar would be talking about it if he did, would know what had happened, and – if Patrick decided he was in the mood for a little sex to relax his evening – they would be right.

  Even though she hated him. Even though he had just gotten in a fight over another woman.

  But he glanced at the bar and pulled back, that easy grin flicking to life. “Bonne nuit, Sarabelle.” He winked at her. “Don’t worry if you sleep late dreaming of me. I’ll cover for you.”

  He closed the door and turned around to stroll back into the bar.

  She did dream of him, of course. It woke her up early, driving her out of bed in her need to go hate him again.

  Chapter 6

  “What, are you still here?” Patrick asked Luc the next morning as he stopped in front of the corkboard in the kitchens. Seven thirty, shit. If they kept this up, he and Luc were going to be beating the bakers in.

  Everything beautiful comes from control, that corkboard proclaimed to him. Luc’s favorite saying. Whistling softly to himself, Patrick pulled out a web printout and pinned it to the corkboard along with all the other photos he was collecting of Luc and Summer encounters, encounters that were making certain paparazzi fortunes. The new one was a photo of Luc and Patrick fighting, Patrick grinning, Luc looking utterly savage, and behind them, thanks to Photoshop, a looming, gorgeous image of Summer Corey’s face.

  Thanks to a little overindulgence in beers and bets after Sarah left the bar last night, Patrick now had quite a bit of money riding on how long it would take him to make Luc crack and rip the growing collection of Summer-Luc photos down.

  “I’m going to have to talk to Summer.” Patrick shook his head. “She can’t get a man’s hopes up by firing you like that and then just fail to follow through. I have my own menu for this place all drafted out.”

  “You could just poison me,” Luc said dryly. “Simplify matters.”

  Patrick made a show of serious thought and then shook his head. “No, it’s much more fun sleeping my way to the top,” he decided firmly. “I mean, have you looked at our hotel owner lately? Or are you too stiff-necked to turn your head that far?”

  Luc turned his head and gave him that look that made Sarah touch her neck as if she had to make sure her head was still on her shoulders. Patrick’s neck, on the other hand, had resisted slicing looks from Luc so many times they made him laugh. Better his neck for those looks than hers.

  Movement out of the corner of his eye, and he knew who it was before he even turned his head. Apparently his recommendation to dream of him hadn’t worked. Again. “Sarabelle!” he exclaimed happily. “Couldn’t sleep for missing me again? You know you’re not due in for another hour.”

  She went past him to the whiteboard list of the day’s tasks, ignoring him as determinedly as she could, which was really starting to get to him. Why was she doing that, damn it? She used to hang on his every word. And flush just a little bit sometimes, too. An excruciating thing to do to him, that flush, but its absence tormented him even worse.

  Thirty-five days. Anybody could handle thirty-five days, right?

  “I trust you ate breakfast, however,” Patrick said to her back, letting firmness slip into his voice, watching the way the hairs on the nape of her neck rose when he did.

  So that still worked.

  She didn’t answer – answer enough.

  “Sarah.” He deepened his voice. And there it was, her teensy shiver. It made a man think that if he said Sarah like that, in that same commanding voice, Sarah, part your legs, she would just lie back on the nearest marble counter and do it.

  His breath let out through his teeth. “Go get started on the pomegranates, Sarah,” he ordered instead, and went to the station by Luc.

  Where, for God’s sake, the man was working on another version of his heart. His damn heart! Just out there, all gold and melty in a fragile cage of chocolate where everybody could see it. And this man was supposed to be his role model? What the fuck?

  As if all the Phénix desserts, with their dark flames and passionate, glowing embers, hadn’t been bad enough. Apparently Luc hadn’t hit people hard enough on the head with how vulnerable and passionate his insides were, under that iron exterior, when he made that Phénix, so he had sunk his hands even deeper inside him this time and ripped out the actual heart, turning it into some fragile, gold-covered, melt-in-a-second mousse thing for the whole world to see.

  For the whole world to eat up with a fork, which he somehow found safer and easier than just flirting with the woman he liked, for God’s sake.

  Patrick loved Luc, but sometimes the man gave him the cold shudders. Kind of like loving a big brother who repeatedly jumped out of planes with no parachute.

  Just because you loved someone who liked to commit suicide didn’t mean you had to do it, too, he reminded himself firmly. They weren’t in some kind of freaking pact. As usual, given the absence of a single sane role model in his entire life, he was just going to have to figure out on his own what to do.

  He made a little layering of soft, sweet cheese and peaches as he kept eyeing Luc’s experiments sideways – just warming his hands up really, and because somebody had to keep their intern alive, and chaining her up and force-feeding her seemed a little blunt.

  He made a chiffonade of mint to slip between the slices of peaches, then drizzled it with a dark thread of balsamic reduction and then patterned that with a peach coulis, and then – a curve of mint, just there, perfect. Proteins and vitamins, all in one tempting package. Was it tempting enough? He looked at a tray of sugar arcs and curls Sarah had made the day before. He had always hated it when she worked with sugar – sugar hurt – but Luc had put her on it, and she did need to master it. Their whole damn lives hurt. They were chefs. So he hadn’t saved her from it. He’d barely managed to stop himself.

  And now he learned it was her favorite thing. Sugar work, she had breathed, her whole face lighting up. A fairytale.

  So he added one golden arc of sugar that turned the whole little breakfast into some leaping, merry, hopeful thing and shoved it absently in front of Sarah, just as she cut another pomegranate open.

  “It needs work.” He yawned. “But what do you think of the flavors? Should I have gone with basil instead of mint? Or a little of both? I need some feedback.”

  Red stained Sarah’s fingers and spattered her face in blood-red freckles and, oh, God, this was a tough one: Would he rather leave the freckle stains there and pretend she was the girl next door in his next round or two of fantasies, or did he want to go ahead and sip them all off right away?

  She gave him that straight, dark, incomprehensible look of hers and wiped a hand under one tilted eye, leaving a streak of pomegranate warrior paint across a delicate cheekbone. Don’t wipe it off, you bastard. That’s crossing the line. She can wipe off her own damn cheeks without you showing her how to do it.

  Still without speaking to him, she finally set down her pomegranate, picked up the little silver spoon he had angled for her, and dug into it. He leaned back against the next counter over and curled his hands around the edge of it as she slipped that spoon into her mouth, and his own tongue touched the back of his teeth, and he just rode it out, rode it, rode it, while she swallowed, while her head tilted as she thought about the flavors, while her mouth softened as if she liked them. Just rode it, his fingers pressing into the underside of the marble, until finally the tide of arousal relented and he could breathe again.

  “I like it,” she said…reluctantly. The reluctance made him a little frantic. Why was she growing more and more reluctant with him over time? She didn’t resist him – she always did what he told her, and God, but did he have fantasies about that. But she shut him out. More and more and more.

  Her eyes didn’t follow him after he slipped a yogurt onto her tray in the cafeteria, and her face didn’t relax when he teased her, and when he joked with the waiters or the other chefs and got every s
ingle one of them laughing uproariously, he didn’t catch her eyes sparkling as she tried to stay concentrated on her work. Ever since that damn fight with Luc, it had gotten so bad that he was starting to doubt he even existed. Maybe he was some kind of ghost, trying to get the attention of the living.

  Maybe he’d killed himself in her eyes when he got in a fight with her superhero, Luc. It had done Luc a world of good, and he himself had enjoyed the hell out of it, but he was starting to wonder if he had made a very big mistake.

  She hadn’t even touched his beer last night, damn it. It was absurd how sick to his stomach that had made him. It was part of the reason he’d had too much to drink after she left. When he’d gotten back, that beer had just sat there coldly, and he’d had to drink it to warm it up.

  “But not orgasmic?” he said lightly. Luc lifted his head and gave Patrick a narrow look.

  So I like getting her to say “orgasm,” all right? I like the way it crawls all over my skin for the rest of the day and drives me out of my freaking mind. Fuck you, Luc. It’s not like you’re sane.

  And I’m not harassing her, really. If she told me to stop, I’d…change my technique.

  “It’s…sweeter and more solid than an orgasm,” she said slowly and with a perfect seriousness that just laid its calm, firm hand over his sexual teasing and crushed it out of the moment. If he showed her how to adjust her technique, if he fed her, if he took her wrist and guided her, she yielded to everything.

  And yet somehow, she never let him get away with anything. It was an extremely poor reflection on him, given their relative positions of power, that he kept trying to get away with things anyway. Patrick, you fucking bastard. Putain d’enculé, va.

  “I like it,” she repeated.

  “Hmm.” He looked at the little breakfast, not sure what he thought about that. Probably you shouldn’t always try to fit an orgasm into every breakfast. Be kind of like drinking champagne every single morning. Still…