The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat)

by Florand, Laura

  Sarah narrowed her eyes just a little. She had gone to Caltech, damn it. What was she not figuring out?

  “So you don’t have any trouble working with him?” Luc Leroi asked finally.

  God, yes. “Of course not.”

  “You’re sure? You want me to ask around, find some other chef who can take over your internship?”

  Her heart began to beat sick and thick in her chest. “Are you trying to get rid of me? I know I’m not doing–” She stopped, wanting to beg I’m trying my best, but no one here cared about trying. Only about doing.

  “You’re doing well,” Luc said unexpectedly.

  Her gaze jerked to his, the statement so completely out of character her whole world must be going insane. He gave his shoulders a minute movement, his lips twisting wryly. “Tell Patrick I said so.”

  What?

  “But if you need to get away from here, well, you won’t be the first person.”

  Sickness rose up until it was all she could do to hold it in. Not the first, not the last. How many interns had done exactly the same stupid thing she had done, last night?

  “The restaurant business is hard on people,” Chef Leroi said, and her sickness sloshed, confused. Hadn’t he meant she wouldn’t be the first intern to fall for Patrick? The first intern they had to shift gently on after Patrick had carelessly hooked up with her? “A lot of would-be chefs end up preferring shops, something smaller.”

  She checked Chef Leroi’s face for that disdain the guys had shown in the bar, toward those who chose shops instead of restaurants, but of course that forged-in-chaos face of his stayed perfectly neutral.

  “Where are you going next?” he asked. “You’ve only got a little over a month left. Are you staying in Paris or going back to California?”

  For some reason, her stomach gripped her again at that decision, as if two paths still lay before her and one of them headed toward a drastic plunge. “My family is in California.”

  Chef Leroi grimaced oddly and stared down at his right hand for a long moment. But he finally said, “I know some people in California. Let me know if you want me to call anyone.”

  “What would you tell them, about why you sent me?” she mumbled, shamed. “That I wasn’t up to your kitchens so you’re sending me on?”

  Again that black eyebrow rose, just a tad. “I would tell them that you were one of the best interns I had had in some time, but that my second had a desperate crush on you, and I thought the situation could get awkward.”

  Sarah stared at him. She couldn’t even figure out how to wrap her mind around what he had just said.

  “If I had to say anything.” Luc shrugged. “As I said, most people find restaurant pastry kitchens too intense and prefer to shift to shops. It’s an easier life. Interns from my kitchens quite commonly seek work elsewhere afterward. And get it. Everyone knows what it means to come out of my kitchens.”

  She was one of the best?

  A desperate crush?

  Which one of those was he inventing to make her life easier?

  But – she could very well credit Patrick with inventing things to make her life easier. He did it all the time, pretended she was cute, winked at her, poured that humor and charm out around him so generously to get everyone through the day.

  But Luc Leroi didn’t make people’s lives easier. Ever. Every single insanely intricate, gorgeous idea that popped into his head could have been conceived in the pure purpose of challenging people still further beyond what anyone could possibly be capable of.

  This entire conversation he was having with her, about whether she should work here because of a crush one of her supervisors had on her, left him wide open for a sexual harassment suit, even in France.

  So what was going on that she was missing?

  ***

  Patrick’s workshop kept him out through the end of her official shift. She wanted to stay on to help with the night’s big event and prove that nothing had changed, but Chef Leroi was adamant about sending her home.

  She caught the Métro for once, hoping its rush-hour bustle would crowd everything out of her brain. But her brain kept wanting to come back to things, pick them apart.

  A crush.

  You’re so-so-so-so pretty.

  Professional. With you.

  You thought he was just amusing himself, is that it?

  In her apartment, she went through her evening rituals – peppermint tea, shower, fixing her nails, all those little things that built this space back up around her, making this time and this place her refuge. But when she climbed into bed, at only six in the evening, the first thing she saw was his T-shirt, forgotten half under her pillow. She picked it up and stared at it. Had he worked all day naked under his chef’s gear? Or, knowing Patrick, he probably kept a stack of fresh T-shirts in his locker, for all the mornings he rolled straight out of some woman’s bed to come in to work, leaving stray items of clothing behind.

  Her fingers curled tight into the knit. And then, instead of throwing it away from her, she lifted it to her face despite herself and breathed in his scent. And then she flopped onto her bed, T-shirt in one hand, and went to sleep, at six in the evening.

  She slept straight through until six in the morning. Twelve hours. No stress. No tension. Her hands didn’t even hurt. In fact, when she woke, she felt incredibly good.

  Except about the fact that her face was snuggled into Patrick’s T-shirt.

  That, admittedly, was crappy.

  She buried her face in her pillow, shoving his shirt under it, and encountered a little foil packet. Oh, God.

  She jumped up to throw it in the trash can under her tiny kitchenette stove and checked at the sight of the three other ripped-open foil packets lying on top of the trash.

  One of the packets had been wasted, she reminded her flushing self. He had actually only used two of them, because…well, you didn’t need a fresh condom for every female orgasm. Why couldn’t she have been at least half as good at him as he had been at her?

  Still, even through a writhing need to hide her face – and not in his T-shirt – a tiny thing ticked in her brain, an awareness of an oddity. Patrick had just been taking advantage of a convenient confluence of events to get thoroughly laid, right? And doing an extra-good job of it because Patrick didn’t really do a bad job at anything. It had probably seemed a pretty average job of it, to him.

  But…she supposed it might be Basic Optimism 101 for Guys to always stuff a condom in your pocket when you got dressed every morning. It was possible. God knew, with Patrick, it was probably insane pessimism not to. But…several? He always stuffed four condoms in his back pocket just in case? Didn’t that get…bulky?

  It didn’t make sense. It made her feel as if she had strayed into the labyrinth of somebody else’s mind.

  As a pathetic self-defense against this second, brutal day after, she put on her sexiest underwear and made her eyes and lips up carefully, and fixed her hair and even put on her dangly pearl earrings, the ones she had given herself as a prize when she got her first engineering job. All those things the chef’s jacket would overwhelm with its giant whiteness as soon as she got into the kitchens, so that she just became a marshmallow again.

  Then she headed out into the foggy morning, a pinch already tightening between her eyebrows, still wondering about those condoms. And that desperate crush. And the expression on Patrick’s face when she said she wanted him to act like they were colleagues.

  Chapter 14

  Patrick lounged outside Sarah’s apartment building, so early in the morning it was still dark, his stomach knotted. The fog came down and settled cold fingers around his hair, wrapping its heaviness around the streetlamps that shone stubbornly through it. He hadn’t seen her since lunch the day before, when she hadn’t eaten a thing he put on her tray.

  When he got back after his workshop, he had found her gone, and by the time Patrick himself got off, it was well after midnight, and what kind of man sent a text at one in the m
orning checking to see if the intern who worked under him might be awake and willing to let him in?

  She didn’t want anyone to know. He should respect that. He hadn’t respected much of anything else.

  The door opened and he turned, his face lighting before he could stop it. She had twisted that jet-black hair of hers up on the back of her head, in a beautifully perfect chignon that made her look so small and elegant, exposing the graceful line of her throat, drawing attention to the tilt of her dark brown eyes, the serious, full mouth. She had lipstick on, something glossy that added a shimmer of red. And there was some pale gleaming stuff over her eyelids.

  “Bonjour, Sarabelle.” He smiled at her, his whole heart bursting with delight, took her hand as if he was going to kiss it, and as her eyes widened and fixed on his face, just glided his cheek right by her knuckles and pressed that kiss straight and deep on her mouth.

  Mmm. How had he never noticed that freshly brushed teeth could taste so damn good? “I missed you,” he said hotly, into her mouth, sliding his arm around her and pressing her into his body. He found pretty much everyone easy to manipulate, when it was a question of getting what he wanted, but her…manipulating her slender, strong body, that serious, shy intensity of her, so easily, that was more pleasure than he knew what to do with in a public street. He felt as if he had been given a great gift.

  Which was odd, since she wasn’t a gift. She was something he had tricked and twisted and gone all out for to get, using his humor as a decoy for his ruthless will to get what he wanted. He had stolen, she had not given.

  Sarah’s hands rose to his shoulders, and for just one painful second, he felt her start to push him away. But he angled his mouth, and her fingers curled over him instead. Such strong, patient, perfectionist fingers. He loved them.

  When he lifted his head, the fog didn’t feel so cold anymore. In fact, he kind of liked it. Wrapping them up, intimate lovers, turning the streetlamps into romantic poetry. “You look beautiful.” He shaped her face with his hands, not quite able to believe he finally had the right to kiss her under a streetlamp on a foggy winter morning.

  Well, except he didn’t have the right. He was just taking. And hoping he could keep her unsettled enough that she would never coalesce her response to him into a No.

  “I like these.” He touched her pearl earrings, giving her a compliment to process instead of the word no. He could buy her delicate, dangly earrings, he realized, on a rush of possessive joy. They worked in the heart of the most luxurious part of Paris. He could walk out during his break that same afternoon and buy her something precious and expensive that would caress the lobes of her ears and brush the upper limit of her jaw and make him smile every time he saw it, knowing it was from him. I will buy you jewels so you know that everything beautiful comes from me.

  Everything beautiful besides you.

  Her mouth softened. Her eyes searched his face, wonderingly, with all kinds of questions she was too careful to ask aloud.

  Good. There were all kinds of questions he was too careful to answer. “I got us something.” He handed her his phone, setting them walking toward the hotel. A half-hour walk, he figured they had time. He didn’t want another Métro ride, not on this beautiful veiled morning. Yesterday’s had not been his favorite moment of the week.

  Sarah looked at the email: Tiens, les voilà. You promise, right? You’ve got a table for me next Friday at eight? Under it was the call number for two tickets to Swan Lake at the Opéra Garnier for that evening, and the email signature of the director of the theater.

  “They were sold out,” Patrick said. “I had to bargain.”

  Sarah looked back up at him. Would he ever be able to read her expression? Her eyes were so dark and searching, and the streetlamps just seemed to fill them with stars. Not a major talker, his Sarabelle. Even though he knew her brain was going and going all the time, coming up with all these thoughts she didn’t share. He wanted her to share them so badly, and he was a little afraid of what they might actually be. Especially where he was concerned.

  “If you need a pretty dress, why don’t we go to one of the boutiques, Dior, whatever you like, during the break this afternoon, and I’ll get you something.” Everything that’s beautiful comes from me. He smiled.

  And then saw Sarah’s expression. “Are you worried I won’t get it right, if you let me take care of dressing myself on my own?” she asked stiffly.

  His own eyebrows slanted together in puzzlement. “I want to see what you choose, when you’re going somewhere special. I don’t care so much what your style is, Sarah, I just…want to see it. But I thought – I mean, I remember what I earned when I was an apprentice. The rent on your apartment here probably uses up all of it. I assume you didn’t bring your whole wardrobe here when you moved, plus you said you weren’t used to going to the ballet, so I thought if you needed a new dress, I might–” He broke off as her eyes started to glitter.

  “What is this, Pretty Woman?”

  He had never watched Pretty Woman, because it sounded like the kind of film someone would chain him up and torture him with in hell, but he knew the gist of it, and he might as well have just slammed into a wall. “Like a prostitute?”

  “I can clothe myself, Patrick.” Her chin was up, her voice flat. “You don’t own me.”

  It wasn’t a wall, it was a boulder that shifted under him, that plunged down the hill and took him and an avalanche of gravel with it. “I–”

  “Why did you have four condoms in your pocket?” she interrupted harshly.

  Damn it, they should have taken the Métro. You couldn’t have these kinds of conversations in the Métro. And was there anything at all perverse about him, that he loved the way her tongue struggled with all the R’s in that blunt word préservatifs? “Just in case I messed one up?”

  “Why did you have any at all!”

  “Well, you know a man can’t go around without protection, Sarah, that would be irresponsi–”

  “Patrick. Were you planning to sleep with an intern?”

  Shit, he should not have fallen so hard for a woman who had gone to Caltech. She was going to figure him out. And he almost craved it. He gave her a lazy smile. “Now, Sarabelle, you know I’ve been in love with you for months. You can’t blame a man for cracking eventually.”

  “I can, actually,” she said coolly. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

  “You could have said no, Sarah.” A sudden, horrifying idea: “Did you think you had to sleep with me?”

  She bent her head and flushed such a deep crimson he wanted to take the words back. He didn’t want to put her in as painful a spot as the one in which she was putting him. “No,” she said, muffled. “No, you’re too…nice. I know you would never make my life miserable just because I turned you down.”

  Of course he wouldn’t. Making someone in your power miserable was a pathetic tactic for getting what you wanted. Not to mention that he might as well lay his hand of cards flat up on the table and show her every single mismatched deuce, three, and four he had in it.

  He was too nice? He might at last understand why men could commit hari-kari from shame. Because that disemboweling sword felt like a relief in comparison to the other feelings writhing inside. “I told you I would handle our work situation any way you preferred. And yes, it was – premeditated.”

  ***

  As they came out onto the Place de l’Opéra, the grand old Garnier dreamed wistfully of days when women descended from carriages in yards and yards of silk, the majestic building pulling the fog in close to it, stubbornly refusing to wake up from that dream just yet, even if dawn had come.

  Excited pleasure swirled through Sarah like one of those sweeping satin gowns, to think of herself on Patrick’s arm, all dressed up, going into this theater. She looked up at him – completely relaxed, eyes squinting a little at the fog, as if he was trying to penetrate through it to the approach of his next wave, ready to spring up lithely, grab his surfboard, and leav
e her as his little fangirl on the sand while he rode it in.

  Premeditated.

  She looked down at the phone again. Patrick had gone to effort here. He had caught at something she had told him the other night, while he stood there massaging her hands with such lazy friendliness – seducing her, premeditated, four condoms in his pocket – and then pulled strings and traded favors to give her something he knew she really wanted.

  “Premeditated since when?”

  He stopped holding her hand and shifted his own hands into his jacket pockets. Again, he squinted just faintly into the distance, as if he was hoping that wave would hurry up. His brown leather jacket was open, as usual, as if he didn’t feel the cold, which, of course, he wouldn’t.

  Or maybe he just wouldn’t seem to?

  She reached out and zipped his jacket up. Patrick actually gasped, a soft, hard sound, and looked down at her, stunned.

  She didn’t think it was that weird a gesture. He would have buttoned hers without a second’s hesitation, and probably knotted her scarf, loosened her hair from it, pulled on her gloves, and pretended to kiss her knuckles through them, all within the space of that second where she would have still been hesitating. “Premeditated since when?” she repeated.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then: “You’re so determined.” His voice was a soft stroke of respect. “Stubborn. Focused.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” she pointed out. Stubbornly.

  “And you’re not going to let me get away with ducking it, are you?” He took her hand again, but she had the oddest impression that this time he did it for his own sake, as she might want to grab his hand if they were going into a noisy room full of clashing noises and…actually, exactly as she would have loved to grab someone’s hand when she first had to step over the threshold into Luc Leroi’s kitchens. She remembered, still, Patrick appearing with a quick wink and a smile for her, holding out her new hotel-logo chef’s jacket with a friendly “Looking for this?”

  Breaking all the ice. Easing her in.