The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat)

by Florand, Laura

  She kind of thought he would have done it for anybody, but in her particular case, he was the only person in the kitchen she had met before, in that workshop at Culinaire. That workshop when he had suggested she should apply at the Leucé.

  Her eyebrows drew together. “Premeditated since when?”

  Another silence. “I guess since you said you hated me, Sarah.” A flick of his grin, amused, not as if they were talking about anything that mattered. “It’s such a strong word.”

  “Being hated turns you on?”

  “Enfin…let’s call it motivation.”

  “So you just couldn’t stand not to have every single person worship you?” she asked bitterly. “You had to flip it?”

  Another little silence. They had reached the Champs-Elysées, broad and brooding. Traffic rushed harshly through its foggy width, ignoring the boulevard’s sullen glamour like a worn-out hook-up, exciting enough the night before but it was high time she slipped her high heels back on and did the walk of shame home. “I did have to flip it,” he agreed. “You’re right. I had to.”

  “Well, congratulations.” Her bitterness grew. “You’ve proven you can seduce an intern. Now leave me the hell alone.” I hate you.

  He cut her a glance that was not like him at all, so vivid and burning and painful to her skin. “Don’t do that, Sarah.” Strange, she realized suddenly: his chest was shifting too quickly, as if he was breathing shallow and fast. She wasn’t out of breath from the walk, Patrick could hardly be. “Don’t withhold yourself from me to punish me. Don’t do that. I – don’t.”

  “It’s not to punish you!” she said, suddenly furious. The vision of herself on his arm, going up the stairs into the Opéra Garnier, swirled its satin around her like Cinderella’s dress at 11:59. Give me one more minute. Don’t, don’t rip me to rags. “What, do you think whether I sleep with you or not is all about you? How self-absorbed are you? It’s about me, too! Things matter to me!”

  He turned so suddenly she ran into him, and he caught her, pulling her in tight. They were at the narrow median on the grand boulevard, such as that median was: a pedestrian pause made of two lines of white and a minuscule bumper against traffic. Ten lanes of cars swept by on either side, leaving them horribly exposed. Oh, God, any of the hotel staff who drove to work might be driving by them right now.

  “Sarah. How much do you need to matter?”

  “What?” She blinked up at him. She hated being at that little point in the middle of the Champs-Elysées, a human defenseless against all those racing tons of metal. She wanted to tuck herself up against Patrick. Except he was just as exposed and vulnerable as she was.

  “Months of flirting, months of feeding you, months of trying to let you stand on your own two feet and not intervene too much, not save you when you can save yourself, months of only slipping in when you are about to crack or I just can’t stand it if Luc cuts you to pieces with a look, never when you’re carrying a damn thirty-kilo mixing bowl. Month after masochistic month of seizing every opportunity to stand too close to you, to try to get you to react, when only an absolute bastard would do something like that to a woman working under him. How much do you need to matter to me? Is that enough? Can I shut up now?”

  She gaped up at him. The light changed to red, and he turned, guiding her with as much speed and grace as if they were in the kitchens, or waltzing, and ushered her across all those lanes to the broad sidewalk on the other side.

  They were almost at the hotel, and people might see them, and suddenly there were too many things she felt they still needed to say. That she needed to dig out of him. “I thought that you were just being…French.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Everyone you work with is French, Sarah. Isn’t that why you came to Paris?”

  “Yes, but – you’re good at it.” Halfway down its avenue between the Champs and the Seine, the Leucé came into view, its palatial seventeenth-century façade neatly adorned at every balcony with fir branches.

  “I’m good at being French?” Stress eased out of him, and his lips curved. He looked as if he wanted to kiss her again.

  But she was still feeling rather frantic to get this straight. “Just – gallant, and a little flirtatious, and a little protective. Wouldn’t you treat any woman who worked under you that way? I thought you would.”

  That was what he did: the pressure valve of that kitchen, the one who could needle Luc on their behalf and let the response slide off his shoulders like water off a duck’s back. The one who could intervene, just when someone needed intervention. She wasn’t the only one he helped just at the perfect moment; she had seen him do it even for the experienced sous-chefs like Noë. For God’s sake, she was pretty sure she caught him sometimes doing it for Chef Leroi. At whom he also blew kisses and winked, when he wanted to be particularly provoking.

  True, she had never seen him blow on anyone else’s wrists. Maybe not that. But she had always thought he was a little more…tender with her, somehow, because she was a woman, and that was just the way he was.

  “We don’t have a lot of women who ever even reach our kitchens, Sarah. It’s a very brutal career path, and most top kitchens are very sexist places. But I haven’t flirted with any of them, no. That would be” – his mouth twisted – “quite execrable behavior on the part of the second-in-command, don’t you think?”

  “You’ve been sexually harassing me!” she realized, startled. Like – really. All those times she had imagined he was flirting with her, only to have him go on his merry way and pretend to flirt with Luc next, and…she hadn’t been imagining it. He had been making her think she had imagined it.

  “But very discreetly,” he pointed out, dark but wry. “Since you thought I was just being French.”

  She stared up at him, her eyebrows pinching.

  He turned her suddenly into the nearest doorway, an expensive jewelry store, not yet open. “There’s only so much I can do, Sarah, without ruining your chances at earning the respect you want. But as long as my protection doesn’t hurt you more than the injury I want to shield you from, I would be happy to protect you from every single person except one. Me. I have a little trouble protecting you from me, Sarah. But I’m glad you think I’m gallant.” He bent close, as if he was going to kiss her. Her lips parted – and he slipped her gloved hand up between them and kissed her knuckles instead.

  Pursing his lips, he blew a kiss over her mouth without touching, winked at her – and pressed one hand firmly against her shoulder to force her back against the doorway as he straightened and strolled calmly down the sidewalk away from her, heading into the hotel ahead of her so no one would see them together.

  Chapter 15

  Sarah didn’t make the mistake of a frantic shopping trip to change her style that afternoon, after she got off. She knew what she looked best in, and she had owned it for years: a simple midnight-blue sheath, silky and quiet. She played with her hair – up elegantly? Down and brushed silky smooth? But she finally went with up. He could…sensation washed through her, the feeling of hair tumbling down over her nape, as big, callused hands buried gently into it. He could…probably get it down again. If he liked it better that way.

  She regretted not shoe shopping, though, because her favorite black boots were scuffed from all the cobblestones. But she polished them as best she could and pulled them on over her silly extravagance, that detail that might change a common dessert into a special one: fine black net stockings, sparkling here and there with crystals like stars in the night, spotted in a shop window on the way home. To her look, she added subtle, shimmery makeup and an even more subtle shimmer of super-fine body glitter down her bare arms, so fine it made them luminous without anyone ever being able to pick out quite what was doing it.

  Then she sat and waited, done far too early. Then she pulled her stockings back off and redid all twenty of her nails, first toes, then fingers, very, very carefully. They had just dried, and she was zipping up her boots again, when the buzzer sounded and
she let him in.

  Patrick cleaned up so well he was a shock to her system. He wore an elegant and edgy black tuxedo jacket over a fine knit silk blend of a black T-shirt, a confident choice, the choice of a man who had no doubts whatsoever that he needed to appease with a conservative white shirt. The black on black seemed a surprisingly dark pick for Patrick, but it set off that golden hair. The easy assurance of his body made the formal clothes seem as comfortable to him, both mentally and physically, as jeans and a T-shirt.

  She wanted so desperately to enter the theater with her hand tucked into the elbow of this man, so handsome and sure and unadulteratedly sexy, and yet the sight of him washed over her own self-confidence like a wave over a sandcastle. Oh, I don’t think – oh, I wish I could have afforded new shoes.

  But his body just seemed to jolt with electricity as he took her in. His gaze ran down and up her, and his face lit. “Sarah.” He reached out to frame her face, carefully, not messing up her hair. He just held her there, for a long moment, staring at her, his smile sinking deeper and deeper into him, until it seemed to spread through his whole body and reach out to embrace her, too.

  He picked up one of her hands, the kitchen all cleaned off it, right down to a soak with lemon juice, the short nails so very carefully rounded and polished, moisturized, soft, everything a perfectionist woman could do to her hands while waiting for the most incredible date she had ever had in her life.

  Patrick ran his thumb over her nails. And then he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed every single fingertip – one after the other after the other. Every single one. He was still smiling that deep, deep smile when he lowered her hand and locked it snugly in his.

  Sarah, on the other hand, felt completely decimated, incapable of smiling. With that kiss of fingertip after fingertip, he had ripped her heart right out of her body. The melty, oozing thing that had been left in its place didn’t feel so bad…yet. But surely, by the time he threw her heart away, its melty substitute would congeal into something unusable. She would lose something forever.

  Or was he like Paris itself? To come here, she had to risk everything and take what she could get? Risk her whole life? Risk her whole heart? Had she still not risked enough of herself when she left family and career and country for her dreams?

  He looked so hot. She felt so hot. She wanted to go out with him so badly, to be escorted by him somewhere wonderful, and yet she did truly feel she might not survive it.

  Exactly as she had felt when she gave up engineering to follow her pastry chef dream. Exactly as she felt every single damn morning, heading into that three-star kitchen.

  He had just kissed every fingertip, as if she was precious. Could she be precious to someone like him?

  He had kissed her foot.

  “Miss me?” he asked softly, using that snug grasp of her hand to hold her in close to his body.

  Yes. He had been so professional the whole day. As if – as if she was just a person who worked under him, not even female. It was the first time she had realized that he had never treated her as if she was “just” anything, not even that very first time he met her, amid so many fumbling students in that workshop.

  It had made this whole day seem like a wound. As if her sun had just disappeared and she was the unmoored planet drifting out into dark, empty space. And she was supposed to be stronger than that, she wasn’t supposed to be dependent on him. She was supposed to be dependent on herself.

  “Did I do what you wanted?” Patrick asked. Only a couple of low lamps fought the night in her little apartment. The shadows and warm, soft lamps had always been her refuge before. “Leave you alone? Did that feel better?”

  She bent her head, feeling an overwhelming urge to cry in defeat, even though she never cried.

  “Because it felt like shit to me.” The hand not holding hers lifted and ran over her shoulder, cradling it. “I think I’m supposed to take care of you. Merde, Sarah, I’ve been doing this since I was fifteen years old. Twelve years of my life. If I can’t give that to you, of all people, if I can’t help you when I know how much you ache and how hard you’re beating yourself up – I think I might have to quit.”

  Her, of all people? And then the rest of it sank in, and she gaped at him. “Quit?” Like – not leave for another job but just walk out? “You’re Luc’s second!” She, with all her stupid dreams of becoming some kind of fairy godmother of food, couldn’t even handle being the man’s intern, and Patrick was just going to shrug off one of the highest positions a man in his career could aspire to? As if it was nothing?

  He laughed, as if it didn’t matter. “Well, that way, it wouldn’t be harassment.”

  She slapped her hands flat on his chest. “Patrick. You can’t quit.” As the heat of his muscles came through the fine knit of the shirt, it washed through her that she had the right to touch him now. Touch a man this handsome, this confident, this physical, this warm, this…golden. If he had the right to curl his hand over her sex and make her come, she had the right to touch him however she wanted, too. Never in the kitchens, for all the times he had taken her wrist to guide her or touched a hand to her back to ease her out of the way, had she ever touched him. And now she could. One corner of his mouth curled a little, and his eyes flickered down to her hands against his chest, as if he liked it.

  “Why not?” he asked, eyes vivid, as if the original seriousness of the subject was completely slipping from his mind. She pressed her hands a little more deeply into those pecs, thinking about how hard and relentlessly self-demanding his body really was, and how relaxed and playful it always seemed.

  “Because Luc needs you,” she said sternly. And me. I need you. Don’t leave me.

  “How sweet of you to think of him,” he said, a little dryly.

  “Don’t you need him?” she asked, puzzled. The two had always seemed to have a symbiotic relationship. Twelve years. The same foster home.

  “I don’t know, Sarah.” He covered one of her hands with his and dragged it slowly against his knit-veiled chest, clearly wishing they could concentrate on something else. “I used to. How long do you think I owe him, if I don’t need him anymore?”

  The question reminded her, cruelly, of her own choice when she left engineering. Mommy, I’m a big girl, I don’t need you anymore, and so I am leaving even if it breaks your heart. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. “I don’t know,” she said slowly.

  “Well.” He winked at her. “Maybe I’ll get fired for sexual harassment, and the whole question will be moot.”

  And that was when she got it. Finally. At last. “Oh!” she said on a note of revelation. “I’m a cover. So that you have to quit. So that you can go set out on your own.” How…crushing, to finally figure him out.

  ***

  As if he would be that obvious, Patrick thought, as he slipped on her coat and brushed his fingers over the nape of her neck while he did so. You are mine to dress and undress. People could see through a transparent cover like that.

  What he was doing was letting her believe that he was going after her as an excuse.

  Because if she truly understood how much he wanted her, she could torture him on purpose.

  He was so convoluted, Patrick realized. Luc always said so, but there was nothing like a graphic illustration.

  Still, he let her believe that she was just his cover for some other goal the whole walk to the Opéra Garnier, through the dark, busy winter streets, with the glow spilling out of every storefront to try to tempt them in out of the cold. He let her believe it while they went up the white stone stairs outside the theater and under its arches into a building of such dazzling splendor that Sarah’s eyes widened with delight, and she craned her neck so that he had to rest his hand securely on her back to make sure she didn’t tumble down the marble stairs in her efforts to see everything: gold and paintings and chandeliers, and the beautifully dressed people climbing those great stairs, heading for their seats. And not a single woman there as beautiful as her, in her
simple blue dress, with that nape of hers so exposed by that upswept black hair, so elegant, so quiet, so perfect. So fascinated, her eyes occasionally glancing up at him, making him part of this splendor, part of her joy in it, in a way that made him glad to be him. Thrilled to be him. Glad he had shaved.

  He smiled a little. Yes, he had thought she might like this better than that nightclub. And he found he liked it, too. It was relaxing to lean back in his seat as someone else entertained him with brilliant flights of perfection and imaginative beauty, as other people used their bodies and their beings to their uttermost limits in order to create the sublime for him. To know that while he unwound, he was giving her so much pleasure. It was relaxing, tucking her hand into his elbow as he rested it on the arm between them or laying his arm behind her head, supporting her neck while she craned to look at the great chandelier and the Chagall-painted ceiling that never quite fit with the rest of the nineteenth-century décor. It was an easy, easy way to give pleasure, compared to all the other ways he worked so hard to give pleasure, and while he gave pleasure to her, his mind could play with all the feathered costumes and the gold scrollwork and the leaps of the dancers, turning them into golden leaps and flights of fancy that he could transform into desserts.

  He imagined Sarah whipping out her little notebook and the two of them comparing notes in the morning, bringing the different inspirations each had drawn from this evening to bear on creating something for their place, and he liked that even more. Liked it so much it made his stomach knot, because in her hands lay all the power over this dream; if he let her know he had it, she might yank it away. If he screwed up, if she got mad. It didn’t matter how perfect he thought he was being, if a woman knew what mattered to him, she could always get mad at something and take it away.

  Oh, for God’s sake, Patrick. That was your mother. Grow up. Well, and to a lesser extent, most of the girlfriends of most of the guys he knew, rough chefs who were always getting in trouble with their wives and girlfriends, but Patrick himself had always preferred not to experiment with letting a woman hold that much power over him.