The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat)

by Florand, Laura

  He grinned at her, and she jerked past him without speaking, tightening her hold on her little leather backpack.

  He fell into step beside her. She was walking fast for someone her size, but his legs were far longer, as was his experience in top kitchens, where fast took on a whole new meaning. He kept pace with her easily.

  “I’m sorry if I've been making life difficult for you,” he said. “Let me take you out for a drink.” Don't turn me down, don’t turn me down. “I worked my way up the same way you’re doing now, you know. I might have some tips about how to handle the pressure.”

  He had been doing it most of his life, and yet it still astonished him sometimes how easily he could hide his ruthless core, gloss it with lazy friendliness.

  “It’s midnight,” she said crisply. “A little late for a drink, don’t you think?” As if she didn’t go out with the guys at least twice a week. She watched him, those dark, slightly tilted eyes of hers wary, alert.

  “So? Are you going to get any sleep if you go home right now? A drink and an hour relaxing in a bar will do you good, you’ll see. And you can get it all off your chest about why you hate me so much, away from work, no consequences tomorrow, I promise.” No consequences tomorrow? You bastard. “It will clear the air.”

  Don't turn me down, don't turn me down, don't…

  “I’m already going for a drink with the guys,” she said as the door opened again and Hervé and Noë spilled out. “Sorry.”

  An invisible hand placed flat on his heart and shoved hard. He straightened away, with a quick grin. “Oh, good, then, they already asked you. So are we heading to the Aussie tonight?” he asked the other men, falling into step.

  ***

  “Some people never learn.” Hervé grinned as Patrick slouched in the chair between him and Sarah. “Can you just not resist flirting with every woman who walks into the kitchens? Or are you trying to get Luc to hit you again?”

  “I’m in a cycle of abuse,” Patrick agreed mournfully, pouring a beer into Sarah’s glass while he tried to recall when he had been flirting. He couldn’t get his mind to go past that moment when Sarah had said, I hate you. It just cycled in his head, over and over, the look in her eyes, the catch in his body.

  Hervé snorted. “You don’t even remember what I’m talking about, do you? Flirtation comes to you so automatically?”

  Well, yes. How else was he supposed to keep people fooled about what he really wanted, unless he flirted indiscriminately? Plus someone had to crack their head chef out of his absorption in his work and make sure Luc didn’t lose the woman he was so crazy about just because he was an idiot. “I try to spread myself around,” Patrick said modestly, stroking his own arm as if it was a precious treasure. “Share.”

  The guys laughed. Sarah twisted her beer and then gave it a little push away from her.

  Shit, he was getting this juggling act wrong. “Besides, Luc is annoying,” he said lightly. “Any excuse.” A little flick of a sidelong glance at Sarah, but she wasn’t eating the nuts, and she wasn’t drinking the beer, and she wasn’t looking at him.

  Because she hated him, oui.

  He wanted to pick up that hatred like a mass of burning-hot sugar and mold its stubborn resistance in his hands. He didn’t give a shit how much his hands blistered in the process; he could turn that hatred into what he wanted. He could.

  Anything he wanted.

  “You’re trying to get him to fire you, aren’t you?” Hervé said wisely. “That way you won’t have to make the decision yourself.”

  “Exactly.” Patrick tapped a definite finger on the table. “Particularly if I can get him to do it before Valentine’s Day. Because the way his sanity is deteriorating, I’m going to be stuck making up the Valentine’s menu otherwise, and I am not doing that heart shit.”

  Grégory grinned at him. “Make this giant bouquet of matching hearts out of chocolate, one for every woman who passes the table. That would suit you.”

  That sounded like a pretty damn risky thing to do with his heart – give it out to every woman who wanted to mess with it. You had to be careful about whose hands you handed the things that mattered. You had to make sure the person didn’t know she had something that mattered to you, in case. In case she used it against you.

  Oh, fuck, but what if, just for example, she was a direct, serious, careful person and you could trust her with what mattered, but only if you let her know it was important enough to deserve her care? He could hardly expect her to respect the very thing he treated like trash, now could he?

  Shit, how had that juggling act he was used to managing with ease grown so delicate and fragile and complicated?

  “You could make illusions,” Sarah murmured to the tabletop, brushing her fingers across its scarred wood as if her fingers were imagining the texture of those illusions. “Some kind of translucent sugar heart, maybe. That tricked people, luring them off the real heart that was hidden somewhere else.” She pulled out that little turquoise and silver notebook of hers and started to note something in it, one side bent up so he couldn’t see.

  Patrick stared down at her. Damn it, quit sinking those pretty nails into my middle and hauling out what you find there for your inspection.

  Oh, but God, don’t stop.

  She looked up at him and flushed, shutting her notebook abruptly and stuffing it back into her backpack. After a couple more minutes of not looking at him, she glanced at her watch, then excused herself and headed toward the toilettes. Taking her backpack with her so a man couldn’t even think about stealing a peek in that journal.

  He glanced at his own watch. “You guys are going to miss the last Métro again if you don’t hurry.”

  Martin checked his phone and groaned. “And you kept us up until three last night.”

  A shifting around the table as all the men thought about another late night and missing the Métro and either walking home or finding a taxi. Hervé tossed off the last swallow of his beer. “I guess I’ll call it a night.”

  “Ouais, ouais, I’ll come,” said Martin, on the same Métro line as Hervé.

  “We need to wait for Sarah.” Noë glanced at his watch, grimacing a little. If they waited for her, they might not make it. It was one thing to catch a taxi after a long, fun evening that made it worth it, but no one wanted to miss the Métro just for fifteen minutes longer in a bar when everyone else was heading home. People who worked in the Leucé kitchens earned more than the average restaurant staff, but that hardly made the lower-ranking chefs rich.

  “I’ll make sure she gets home,” Patrick said. Noë lifted his gaze from his watch and held Patrick’s eyes suddenly. Patrick frowned at him. “I’ll get her a taxi or something.”

  Noë held his eyes a second longer and then seemed to give him the benefit of the doubt – people were so stupid about that – because he nodded and put on his coat.

  Train people to follow your every command in top kitchens for years, and they were amazingly open to suggestion, Patrick thought.

  It made for a nice, safe way to get what he wanted.

  Chapter 9

  When Sarah got back from the restroom, she blinked, confused, from the empty table to Patrick at the bar, pocketing his wallet.

  “Everyone decided to call it a night.” He gave her a lazy grin, her coat, and her little backpack.

  Some part of her sank in disappointment that he didn’t put the coat on for her. Damn it, she was so pathetic. “My drinks.” She knew what he would say, but she still fumbled stubbornly in her backpack for her wallet, coat bunching awkwardly under one arm.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Patrick caught the coat back before it slipped to the floor, picked up her wrist as if her whole arm belonged to him, and slipped it into one of the sleeves. Then he removed her other hand from her pack, zipped the pack back up, and slipped that arm through the sleeve. He took her over exactly as if they were still in the kitchens and he had the right to direct her body any way he wanted to. It was ten times m
ore intimate than if he had just held her coat for her to put her arms in it. “Consider it my small apology for making you hate me so much. Where do you live, Sarabelle?”

  He didn’t even know? Had he ever even bothered to look at her CV?

  A pinch grew between her eyebrows as she looked up at him. Sometimes her whole forehead hurt at night, and she lay in bed massaging it the way she massaged her own hands, wishing she could relax. “The Ninth,” she said finally.

  “Well, that’s convenient,” Patrick said without specifying why. “Would you rather walk or shall I get us a taxi?”

  Her lips parted. He might as well have just slipped his hand between her thighs and picked her up by her crotch, his easy assumption hit her so hard. He quirked his eyebrows at her as he buttoned her jacket over her breasts with those deft, controlling fingers.

  “I – I usually walk,” she said. “If it’s too late to catch the Métro.”

  “Yes, you mentioned that habit last night.” Something hard happened to his mouth, so astonishing and unbelievable on his face and gone so quickly that she must have imagined it. “Not that I want to criticize your taste for being in the streets by yourself at one in the morning, Sarah, but why don’t I walk with you tonight?” He fished her gloves out of her coat pocket, picked up her left hand, and slipped the first glove over her fingers.

  She got her act together enough to jerk her right glove out of his hold and put it on herself. “We’re not in the kitchens,” she told him dryly.

  “I know.” He beamed at her as he held the door open for them to step out into the cold night. Lights gleamed off the dark, wet pavement. “Isn’t it refreshing?”

  She hated him so damn much. It was as if those clever fingers were playing tickles straight over her sex every second she was near him. That grin of his, the thought of walking down this beautiful late-night avenue with him, of not walking home alone through the most romantic streets in the world again, made her chest tighten until the longing pressed into her nipples and hurt. “About the taxi for us,” she made herself say firmly.

  “Oh, let’s walk!” He grinned at her. “It’s stopped raining. It’s at least one degree above freezing.” He threw out both arms as they came out onto the Champs, taking in the huge, sweeping avenue, from the glowing, triumphant Arc above them to the lodestone promise of the Obélisque on the far end at the Place de la Concorde. “The night is ours.”

  “I’m not inviting you back to my apartment,” Sarah said, stiff and clumsy.

  Car lights shifted across the paving stones in soft, golden ribbons and caught his eyes so that they gleamed like falling angels. “Sarabelle,” he said reproachfully. “Did it ever occur to you I might live in the Ninth myself?”

  Her heart plummeted out of her body, shame sizzling her, scorching her skin until she wanted to curl away from her failure. Fury flared up, at him, at herself. As if getting everything just right, perfect was somewhere dancing within her reach, if only she knew how to do it. If only he would quit drawing it elusively away from her, like a ribbon to a cat.

  He grinned. “And I would hardly force you to issue anything so blunt and awkward as an openly stated invitation. How ungallant.”

  Her head whipped back up, her eyebrows slamming together.

  He laughed softly. “Sarabelle. Don’t worry so much. Have I ever done anything to suggest I would hurt you?”

  Every damn second of the sixteen-hour days.

  “Sarabelle.” Patrick laughed, stretched out a hand, and pinched the crease between her brows with those fingers that always moved so much faster than someone so laid-back humanly could. “Don’t worry so much. You’re safe with me.”

  ***

  It depended on how you defined safe, Patrick thought, keeping his hands tucked lazily in his jacket pockets as they strolled down the avenue because the need to lay his arm across her shoulders as they walked would have made his arm muscles spasm, if he allowed his muscles to do that kind of thing – instead of which, it was all pulling to the one thing he couldn’t control, his groin, until it fucking hurt.

  If safe meant having her slender little body ravaged until she couldn’t even look at him without creaming her pants, then she was safe. If safe meant that she would have to spend brutal fifteen- and sixteen-hour days knowing that the man giving her direction had touched every single centimeter of her moon-pale skin, that the hands directing hers on how to lay a spiral of sugar correctly had slid deep into her sex and fucked her with fingers alone, while she panted and cried and seized around him, then she was safe. If safe meant that when he stepped behind her to reach for something in a cupboard above her, her head bowed and her nape prickled with the memory of his teeth and jaw running down her spine until she was one moaning mass of desire for him, then she was safe. If safe meant he got to spread her thighs on his bed and hold them down while he finally found out what she fucking tasted like and her hands dug in his hair and she sobbed his name and lost it to him, if safe meant he – oh, fuck – even got her to taste him. If safe meant that for the rest of her life, her panties got wet and all that tension relaxed out of her muscles just when she heard his voice, then she was safe.

  He was a fucking asshole. He could not believe even he could be such an enfoiré. But the thought of not carrying through with his despicability, of not bringing this night to fruition, made him want to rip his own skin to pieces. He could not stand this anymore. The non-stop maddening desire for her, the fantasies that ran all over his skin with their goddamn rat claws until he was ready to beat himself to knock them off.

  “So,” he said. “Hate?”

  It was terrible, the erotic, eager heat he felt at the word hatred. God, how far had he fallen?

  Sarah looked away. As she always did with him now. And, of course, it just drew his attention to the graceful line of her throat and jaw. “It was just the stress of the moment. I apologize.”

  He didn’t like that. Don’t disown that moment. Assume it. Give it to me. “No apology necessary, Sarabelle. I’m sure I deserve it.”

  Merde, did he ever. The excuses he’d come up with to lean in close to her. The fantasies he had had.

  “I’m just wondering if there’s anything I can do to…make it better,” he said. “Make things easier on you.”

  He was wondering that. He really was. He spent every minute of the day trying to make those days survivable, for everyone in the kitchens, but extra especially for her. Which made it that much uglier a realization about himself that what he was about to do would, in fact, make everything about her days that much harder.

  But I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t. I can’t.

  “Don’t make too much of it,” she said dismissively.

  Are you kidding me? I want to make everything out of it. I want to make that hatred into something so erotic and gorgeous you’ll dream of it every night. You’ll put it in that little notebook of yours, instead of cakes or recipes or whatever it is that you won’t let me see.

  “It’s just the job,” she said flatly, trying to shut him out. “It’s more stressful than I expected.”

  Yes, he had figured that out. He was so used to the intensity of his job, he hadn’t quite grasped the effect it would have on someone introverted and quiet until he saw the weight start to just slide off Sarah’s already slim body and the circles grow under her eyes.

  “So how did you end up in pâtisserie?” he asked, because conversation was the closest he could come to reaching out and linking his hand with hers, or resting his hand on the nape of her neck, or draping his arm around her shoulders. It made his palm itch not to do those things, on this dark, glistening night. But she would most certainly find it easy to say no to such openly romantic claims of her body. “Didn’t you study engineering?”

  “I did.” She frowned and sighed a little, gazing down the long stretch of winter-bare trees, and stopped talking.

  So much for his ability to charm whatever he wanted out of people. The fifteen-year-old in him woke up
and drew nervous claws down the blackboard of his soul.

  If only he could drape his arm around her shoulders and pull her in close by his side. He was sure that would help. So sure, he had to curl his fingernails into his palms and scratch at that frantic itch to touch.

  They passed a club, and two men in leather pants wolf-whistled him, which was another thing that might not have happened if he had been able to drape his arm around her shoulders possessively. He frowned at her dark head briefly, as if it was her fault when he knew it was his own.

  He could have talked to her, after all. He could have laid himself out there. He could have said, Sarah, I know I’m your boss, but I’m really attracted to you. What would you prefer I do about that?

  But then she might have said, Nothing.

  She glanced up as the initial whistles directed more attention his way and a few more aggressive calls started up in the line, the laughter in her eyes surprising him. He so rarely saw that laughter that it wrenched him into freefall immediately. He opened a rueful hand. “I could probably get you in, if you’ve been dying to see inside it. You would owe me big for how harassed I would get while you were dancing, though.” She would owe him…oh, at least another laugh.

  Damn, given how much he harassed her, maybe he deserved to spend a night in that club and get a taste of his own medicine. I’m a hell of lot more subtle than they are, though, he tried to excuse himself. She doesn’t know I’m harassing her. I hope.

  On the other hand, their harassment might be blunter, but they don’t have any power over my dreams, so if I tell them to go fuck off, nobody can fire me or destroy my one chance at my passion in life.

  Yeah, putain d’enculé about summed him up. A real bastard.

  “Could you really?” She glanced back at the long line before the famous club, intrigued.

  “Are you sure you really want to?” He grimaced. “It will be packed and loud and very, very wild.” Plus he would need a circle of at least six or seven other women to keep his ass protected from all the groping. Not to mention, they were going to be packed in there like sardines, and if half a dozen people were going to press up against his body, call him shallow, but he would rather they were hot women. That at least sounded like a nice fantasy. What the hell had he even pointed out this place for? He would rather have her squeezed to him, all by herself, out of sight of anyone else.