The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat)

by Florand, Laura

  Patrick grinned, completely pleased with himself, and snuck a look at her.

  She looked away immediately, carrying her melted sugar over to her own space of heat lamps and cooling boxes, pulling on her gloves. Glad the heat was going to burn.

  It didn’t matter what happened. It didn’t matter how long or how hard this journey to become a pastry chef was, or how much the casual, cruel things people did to her might hurt.

  She couldn’t hang her head. She couldn’t sigh. She couldn’t quit.

  But God, sometimes she wished so badly that she knew how to do all of those things.

  And when Patrick slipped a fresh-made macaron in front of her to test a little while later, she did take thumb to middle finger and thump it straight across the counter into the nearest trash. Without looking up and without comment.

  Patrick only paused a half-second. Whether he even noticed, she didn’t know. And she didn’t – she didn’t – care.

  ***

  He couldn’t get through to her. The realization of it sank over Patrick across the day, like cold, clammy, wet clothes. It grew inside him, until his breath was too shallow, his stomach thick and sick.

  She had always had a shield around her, against him and everyone else, that had always been true. But it used to be this shimmery, alluring thing, this bubble of concentration that he just had to slip inside. Now it was harder, colder, thicker. He tried to tease it, to slip in like he used to, and bounced back bruised and chilled.

  She’d known that heart was for her, right? That Luc was just his cover? And even if she thought it really was for Luc – it had made Luc laugh out loud, when Luc almost never let himself laugh like that. And she hadn’t even smiled. Hadn’t even pretended to think it was a little funny.

  The about-face from the morning before, when he had lain there against her, so open and tender and relaxed in it, as if all her tiny apartment was just filled with this quiet trust. To this. When he didn’t even know what he had done.

  Sickness rose in him, shutting off his brain. Sarah. What are you doing? Don’t do this.

  Shit, he should never have knelt in front of her on those steps above Paris. She was just so damn pretty. And she had seemed so – fragile to him, vulnerable, like she really needed to know she mattered.

  That will teach you to show anyone what matters.

  What the fuck kind of idiot did that? Knelt at a woman’s feet? What kind of idiot left everything he cared about so fucking exposed?

  When she came out of the back entrance of the hotel at the afternoon break, in jeans and scuffed, comfortable black tennis shoes, he was leaning against the stone wall, looking through her little journal. Her handwriting looked like print.

  Really. Like actual print. Same size, same form, black ink. Only the press of the ink pen into paper showed the difference. He ran his finger over the impressions, her notes on how to know the whites for a meringue were whipped just right, and there, something he had told her, about the differences between working with Isomalt and working with sugar for the slippers.

  There, the next page, a drawing, a fantastical little cake, nothing they did at the Leucé. One of her ideas? He tilted his head, charmed and intrigued so much that it rose up from his middle through his throat and tried to strangle him from the inside out.

  A terrifying sensation. God, he could practically lick this paper just to taste more of her, and she could shut him out so easily. For who even knew what stupid reason. He didn’t.

  He stared at that little cake drawing as Sarah walked past him without even acknowledging him, head buried in her scarf. His heart had crawled up somehow to beat inside his head, this thump, thump, thump against the inside of his skull that kept disrupting every attempt of his synapses to connect.

  Sarah checked suddenly and spun back. “What is that?”

  He clicked the journal closed, pulled its little elastic over it, and handed it to her. “You left it on the counter.”

  “And you just looked through it?” She yanked it from him.

  His fingers curled into his palms, striving not to make fists. “I like the ball-gown effect on that last cake. I could show you a trick for getting that to turn out the way you want it.”

  “It’s not your business.” She clutched the journal. “This is mine.”

  His hands gave up the battle and fisted fully. What the fuck did I do, Sarah? Are you jerking me around for some stupid slip?

  “Your own little place?” He fell into step beside her, not giving a fuck-shit if someone saw them together. And in fact, on cue, Noë came out, spotted them, and gave Patrick a very cool look.

  “In California,” she told him flat as a slap. “Four more weeks.”

  Something reached straight inside his body, gripped his stomach, and twisted it. He had to breathe right. He couldn’t let her see how effectively she was jerking him around. He couldn’t. “You have very precise handwriting,” he told her unresponsive black head.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Meanwhile, I have an illegible scrawl.” He kept his voice amused, as if it didn’t matter, and flicked the journal back out of her hands, opened it, and signed his name right across from her little cake fantasy of her future. Big, sprawling, taking up the whole little page.

  She stared at it a second when he handed it back to her. Her hand lifted to the edge and hesitated, because probably she hated the idea of a ripped-out page marring her journal’s perfection, too. When she looked up at him, she was furious.

  Furious to have his name in her dreams? His own anger pushed at him, a dumb, blunt force that still didn’t know that you never showed when something mattered enough to make you angry. “How did you learn to write so carefully?” A little edge crept into his voice despite the lightness he tried to inject. “If everything wasn’t perfect all the time, you wouldn’t let it stay?”

  Her eyebrows scrunched together as if he made about as much sense as a big red heart with kissy lips. And that scrunch of her eyebrows drove him completely insane. Hunger beat at him. He wanted to flip that hunger, make her frantic for him.

  “My mother,” she said coldly. But talking at least. He felt a peculiar sense of accomplishment, that he could get Sarah to share something about herself even when she was trying to shut him out. “She didn’t know how to write in English herself, and she wanted us to be just as good as all the kids with an American mother, to fit in. So she had us copy from books over and over until we got it right.”

  She flexed her right hand as she spoke, looking down at it as if it cramped, and his anger tried to rush out of him like a receding wave, overcome by an urge to pick up her hand and rub that painstaking memory out of it. “Didn’t your teachers tell her you were doing fine?”

  “I was three.” She stared at her hand and closed her eyes a moment. “It was…important to her. It made her happy.”

  Wait. He hadn’t been around a lot of children, but three was tiny, wasn’t it? Didn’t they still have those little chubby fingers and chubby cheeks at that age? “You learned to write like that when you were three?”

  “She started teaching us,” Sarah said, and turned away from him again at the next corner. He just followed her, though. They were almost at the Seine now. “It took a couple of years of practice.”

  He would have to be mad at her later. He picked up her hand, stripped the glove off, and looked at it for a moment. It must have been such a small hand when she was three. She must have practiced those letters for hours a day, for forever, to learn that precision so young. It must have been the most hopeless task, that she bent to, failing over and over, trying to please her mother. He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the knuckles.

  She curled her hand into a tight ball and pulled it away from him.

  So he was mad again. But not – quite the same way.

  “Come sit with me on this bench,” he said, and for a second she tried to resist the command, but he had his hand at her back, and she yielded. Something eased in him, j
ust a little, that he could still get her to yield to him. Thanks to his five months as her boss, she couldn’t shut him out completely. Which was probably exactly why she had been wary of them developing a relationship. He set his jaw and kept his hand there, kept manipulating her every way he could, as he led her down the nearest stairs and to a bench on the lower quay, tucked between two winter-bare plane trees.

  Up until the moment they sat there, by the cold brown water, he had intended to manipulate his way back into what he wanted and not, God, lay himself out there for someone who could so arbitrarily jerk him around this way. And then, suddenly, it was the cold, or it was how small she was, or it was that line of her jaw as she refused to look at him – he just pulled her onto his lap, astride him, wrapping his arms snugly around her to hold her when she tried for one surprised second to resist. “Sarah,” he said quietly. “What’s wrong?”

  Everything in him relaxed to have made that choice. A great sense of power rushed back into him, in the place of that furious weakness, not power over her, just…power. He could be strong enough to make this right. And fuck any part of his past that wanted to tell him different.

  Her eyes widened, and her lips trembled softer, so that just for a second he thought, on a weird leap of hope, that she was going to cry. He didn’t want her to cry, of course he did not. But there was something about it – for Sarah to cry, while he held her – as if she trusted him. Trusted herself. Could just let herself go. She shut her eyes tightly and looked down.

  He rubbed her back through her coat. “Sarah.”

  “I told you that you would matter to me,” she said low and fiercely, in that tone like she had told him she hated him. “You shouldn’t – I’m not good at this.”

  “You don’t have to be good at anything.” He rubbed her back more deeply, trying to penetrate through the coat. “You just…” have to give me what I want. That was going to sound so bad to say out loud, though. You just have to let me have you, every way I want you.

  Lucky Sarah, to have ended up under the tutelage of someone as screwed up as he was.

  She was starting to breathe hard, in a struggle with emotion, and he wanted to unbutton her coat to watch her breathing, to stroke her breastbone and try to soothe it. One hand even slid from her back to her buttons. “I’m not your fuck buddy!” she hissed at him suddenly, in a blaze of fury.

  She switched to English for it, and he stared at her, caught by the rage while he tried to figure out what she had said. I’m not…okay, he had gotten that much in school. Fuck. Well, everybody knew that, he watched movies. Buddy…buddy…“What does buddy mean?”

  She folded her arms, blocking his work on her buttons, and looked down.

  “Sarah.” He firmed his voice.

  “Pote,” she said sullenly. God, he loved how much he could get her to do what he wanted, just by using a certain voice. The leap of arousal was so great, she could probably feel it through their jeans.

  He put all the words together. “My…you’re not my plan cul? Is that what you just said?”

  She dug her fingers into the sleeves of her coat and looked away, up the walls of the quay.

  “I don’t even know what to say to that.” That whole evening at the Opéra Garnier, the walk through Montmartre, the top of those stairs…had that not been romantic to her? “Sarah. What the hell standards do you have for a man?”

  Now she did look back, her eyebrows drawing together in that way that just killed him. “Standards…for you?” she asked blankly.

  “Sarabelle.” He pressed his thumb to the crease in her eyebrows, all the tension in him gentling. “I don’t have standards for you.”

  “Because I could never live up to them?” she said stiffly, pulling away from his thumb.

  He hated it when she pulled back from him. “Because I don’t even understand what that means, to have a standard for you. You’re not my work. You’re just you, Sarah. You’re for me.” Oops, he probably shouldn’t have said that last. His heart tightened at having let it slip out, that tense anguish that made it hard for him to breathe.

  But her frown at last softened a little. She looked at him this time as if she was really curious to see him and not just trying to shut him out.

  “You said, ‘Then why are you still here?’” Her voice went low, choked, reluctant, and he got his hands through her buttons at last to stroke her breastbone, right where that choked feeling would lodge. “When I said I wasn’t there for sex.”

  Fuck, he’d been so tired. Was this all because his clumsy brain had connected with his tongue in some way that made his thoughts sound all wrong? Merde, she was just like his mother.

  No. No, she’s not. It’s a misunderstanding and you can fix it. Shut the fuck up, you stupid fifteen-year-old brat.

  “Sarah.” He took a breath. He had to tell her this. It was important. He had to get it out, even if its very importance clogged his throat until it was like giving himself the damned Heimlich to say it. “Don’t do that. Don’t shut me out because I made a mistake. So easily, like that, just yank yourself away. Don’t. I told you this before.” Did she not understand?

  “You hurt me,” she said, stifled. Her hands flexed, some kind of reaction she had to imagined pain that he was starting to spot.

  “Well, why don’t you try telling me the next time I hurt you? Why don’t you try giving me a chance to make it better? Do you think I want to hurt you? Sarah.”

  She swallowed, very close to crying. It was crazy how he tried to soothe the tears into the open, rubbing her shoulders, covering those restless, anxious hands. It’s okay, Sarabelle. You can cry for me. If you can trust me, I might be able to trust you.

  “I thought you wouldn’t care,” she said, so muffled she could have been speaking through a gag.

  “No. Sarah, no.” Merde, he was running into a problem here. He couldn’t tell her how much he cared, he couldn’t. Not after she had nearly dumped him for nothing. But if he didn’t get up the courage, how could she believe in him enough not to doubt so easily? Shit. “I told you you mattered.” His voice sounded as muffled as hers. Speaking through some hideous gag of his past.

  Please don’t make me spell it out more, Sarah. I – right now? I can’t.

  You just nearly stole everything I wanted from me because for one half-second I didn’t get everything right.

  “You made me feel like a wh–”

  He put his hand over her mouth, to protect his gut from the blow of that word. “Sarah, stop. Not again. What the hell am I doing that makes you think that? Barring a screw-up when I hadn’t slept more than six hours in three days, how could I treat you better?” If I need to do something better, I’ll do it, I just – what do I need to do?

  Her breaths came raggedly. Her lashes lowered to her cheeks. His other hand urged its caresses through her coat. It’s all right, Sarah, let yourself cry. Trust me with it.

  She sagged suddenly, the weight of her swaying against his fingertips on her lips. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “I–” Wait, what? She was? His arms scrambled back around her before she could change her mind and get away. She was? As if she didn’t think she had the right to wave hoops around for him to jump through? “You are?”

  “I guess I just – maybe I’m too sensitive.”

  Yes, you are, you really are. His hands rubbed over her back, coaxing her in closer, yes, there we go, head on my shoulder, now we’re good. He took a deep breath, everything in him easing at the weight of her head, right there. And now he could almost say it, that thing he felt for her. He almost could.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered again, all her weight relaxing. The sweetest sensation in the world, those little strong muscles trusting all their tension to him. Letting him take it away from her. “I shouldn’t have – I should have talked to you.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, stroking her back. “You should have. As soon as it hurt. Sarah, I would never hurt you on purpose.”

  She buried her face i
n him, lifting her hands to grip his shirt between the panels of his jacket. He took a deep breath.

  It was quiet, and isolated, and the wintry brown Seine had heard men make fools out of themselves before.

  Cuddling her against him, he kissed her hair, so glossy and black and perfect – and didn’t risk it.

  Chapter 22

  Light caressed Sarah awake, bringing her back into her body, which felt not tense or nervous but delicious and full of life. Well used. Happy. It took her a while to realize that the gentle light came from a much greater expanse of windows than those in her little apartment, plus the filtering effect of the heavy winter clouds.

  Patrick had gotten today off for both of them. And she didn’t even want to think about what that made crystal clear to Chef Leroi. She’d argued with Patrick about it, on the night walk to his place, along the stunning beauty of the night-time Seine, lit by all its bridges and that millennium of glory, from Notre-Dame and the Conciergerie to the Louvre. It was hard to maintain an arguing tone with a handsome, gallant man on a walk like that, but she’d done her best. Sarah, it happens, he’d said impatiently. That people in a workplace get involved. He’s sleeping with the owner, for God’s sake. If you’re okay with what we’re doing, then no one else has the right to say a word. And I haven’t had a day off since you started your damn internship, Sarah. Trust me. We’re entitled.

  And then, when she’d kept protesting, he’d tightened his hand around hers and said lightly, Do you ever think much about marble, Sarah?

  Which had fractured her whole thought process, of course, and while she was still trying to regroup and figure out how marble had come into their argument: Because I think about it a lot. Like, I have this beautiful rose-gray marble in my apartment that I had installed, oh, a month or so after you started your internship, and I think about how you’ll look stretched out on top of it, with your legs a little spread, saying, Yes, Patrick, yes, that’s…just…perfect. And then you–

  He had talked that way the whole walk home.