The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat)

by Florand, Laura

It was all right. She wasn’t – like that. She didn’t play games to hurt other people; she was too focused on what was important to her, and games weren’t one of those things. If he got hurt, it might be because of something she did or failed to do, but hurting him wouldn’t be her goal.

  Sarah.

  The way her name, the images of her, worked through his mind like molten sugar as he kneaded it and stretched it into what he wanted. Reassuring him. Easing him.

  She mattered too much. She did matter too much. But he just had to – handle that. And when he thought about her, he could handle that, as if she was the panic and she was the eye of the storm, too. Or the light in the window of a home he used to dream he could make come true. He could get through the storm, in order to get to her.

  No ghost of his childhood was going to reach up through twelve years of his life and still manage to wrench that dream out of his hands.

  No.

  Fuck no.

  So he headed back at last, picking up that bouquet from the florist’s. She probably wouldn’t be in his apartment, but if he had to track her down at hers, he might as well have flowers in his hand. They couldn’t hurt, right?

  He did glance once towards the Ninth, because he had walked far enough into the Marais that it would be as close to walk to her apartment as back to his own, but he chose…oh, hope, merde. Yeah. That’s what it was. Hope.

  Funny how terrifying hope could be.

  He found he still had a sullen hostility toward it, an unwillingness to let it take him in.

  But he could choose to forgive it, couldn’t he? For all the times someone else had betrayed it. It hadn’t been hope’s fault. It had been his, for exposing it, for letting someone know what he hoped for. He could savor hope again, as long as he was smart about it, as long as he hid that hope somewhere nice and safe.

  Twelve years of work and accomplishments must have been good for something, in the end.

  Because as he headed back towards Sarah – step by ever longer, stronger step – he found he actually liked that hope.

  Chapter 24

  Fingers caressed her hair back from her face, and Sarah smiled into them sleepily. “Omoni,” she murmured, blinking her eyes open in a mingling of pleasure and alarm, and then blinking again at Patrick’s face. His eyes were intensely blue from so close. For a second, disorientation seized her, and she thought she had finally fallen asleep facedown on the cafeteria table at the hotel and he was waking her.

  “No, Patrick.” He kissed her, gentle and careful. “What’s omoni?”

  “It means mother.” A little wrench of homesickness twisted with relief that her mother was not actually here, bringing all that pressure into her struggling Paris dream.

  “Ah.” Patrick’s mouth twisted wryly. “Not very suitable to me, then.”

  “No,” she agreed. But she couldn’t remember anyone besides her mother ever touching her so tenderly. Their stepfather had been careful to express his gentle, steady affection in ways that were not too physical with his new stepdaughters, Danji already hitting puberty when he married their mother.

  “Thank you for waiting.” Patrick kissed her again, deeper, more thorough, but still careful. When he pulled back, his thumbs traced over her cheekbones. He drew a long breath. “You’re so pretty.”

  He said that a lot. A strange amount, really, since she was hardly luminously gorgeous, like Summer Corey. “It sounded as if my waiting was important to you.” Her own space, where she couldn’t get anything wrong, had been so tempting after he walked out like that. But – he had asked her to stay. As if it mattered.

  “You were telling me something important about you,” he said regretfully, that callused thumb so delicate on her cheek. “And I made it all about me and walked out.”

  “I didn’t take it that way, Patrick.” She shook her head, then caught his hand when the movement almost knocked it from her cheek. “The conversation shifted, that’s all. And seemed to” – she hesitated – “seemed to touch on something important about you.” She searched his face discreetly, trying not to probe. If he could stand to talk about it easily, he wouldn’t have walked out.

  He smiled – lazily, easily, of course – and turned to sit on the floor, leaning back against her and pulling one of her arms around him so he could hold her hand against his chest, playing idly with the tips of her fingers. At his touch, her own tension at being in his space and not alone in hers eased into a profound sense of happiness. He didn’t start talking, though.

  “So…you’re all right?” she asked cautiously. A vase of flowers sat on the coffee table, the same elaborate, artistic bouquet from the photo he had texted her.

  “Never better.” He kissed her palm, then held it to his mouth to hide the wry smile she felt curl against it. “Vraiment. I’ve never been better.”

  She curved her body on the couch, so that his back was nestled into that curve and she could see his profile. “I’m sorry I” – embarrassment strangled her – “said – I didn’t mean–”

  A sudden, sharp glare, totally out of character. “Don’t you dare tell me you didn’t mean it.”

  She blinked. But now she couldn’t pull her knees into her chest, because if she tried to curl into a ball, she would be curling around him. “A-all right.” She flexed her free hand open and closed, open and closed. “But then, why did you leave?”

  He shook his head, brushing his mouth against her palm with the motion, and kissed it again. He was smiling, all unconcerned.

  As if something hadn’t mattered so very much to him, just a little ago, that it had driven him out of the apartment into the cold to handle it.

  He was so funny. She picked up his hand and kissed it, right in the center of the palm, just the way he did her, and watched an almost anguished shiver flinch across his body and hide again. How interesting. She straightened out those strong, long, square-tipped fingers and kissed every callused tip, just what he did to her. His eyes closed, the expression on his face intense, as if he was praying. He flicked her that quick, wary glance again, that black dilation back. “Hey,” she said softly. “You’re safe with me. Remember?”

  He gave a rough laugh. “I do try to remember that, Sarah, yes.” His eyes held hers a second before he looked away. “If you keep this up, I’m going to have to hold you down and do something kinky to you, you understand that, don’t you?”

  Arousal stirred. “No. But I can try to understand it.” It sounded like a delicious cycle, in fact: she did something to show him how much he mattered, he requited with an erotic control that released everything in her. It worked for her.

  He leaned his head back against her ribs, closing his eyes and drawing a long breath, like a man schooling himself.

  So she didn’t say anything for a while, letting him be. She didn’t have to pry her way into him with a crowbar; she was an intensely private person herself. He hadn’t pried into her. He had just left her a comfortable place in which to talk.

  She watched his face, thinking of that smile of his when he was cracking jokes, that brilliant blue wink that had saved her so many times when she had thought her latest failure at perfection was going to break her heart, the way he was so loyal to Luc even while he twitted him constantly, the way he brought so much gold to that kitchen that would feel so dark without him. She kept his hand, playing with it the way he liked to do hers, and he kept hers, but pressed against his chest while his eyes stayed closed. His heartbeat thudded against her palm, too fast by far for his relaxed position, but slowly calming.

  “Why did you end up in a foster home?” she asked, after the quiet had stretched for such a long, comforting time that she thought he might answer.

  “Because my mother couldn’t control me,” he said lightly, and his heartbeat picked up again. She caressed it, through his chest, touched profoundly, because the only reason she could think of for him to be making an effort to talk about something difficult was for her sake. He kept his eyes closed. “And I proved it on a
daily basis. We didn’t live in that great a part of the banlieue, and even if we had lived in the Sixth, I promise I would have found a way to get into trouble. I got involved with a really bad crowd, and I did it just to be destructive.”

  Patrick, destructive? Patrick, who created ten marvels a minute that were so fragile you could barely breathe on them without them breaking, and yet he made them come true? Patrick, who nurtured an intern’s hopes and patiently taught her and took care of her day after day for months, no matter how many other demands he had on his energy and time? “I thought you wanted to be an astronautical engineer.”

  He turned his head away. And kept speaking, lightly, self-mockingly, almost as if – was he luring her off a trail again? Getting her to focus on the thing that seemed to matter, instead of the thing that really did? “I wasn’t that interested in drugs for myself–”

  Wait, what? Drugs? Patrick?

  “– I saw how that worked, how dealers pulled you in until the drug became the thing you craved the most and then withheld it to get you to jump through hoops – but I very well might have become a dealer myself, the road I was headed down.”

  Okay, now, this was total bullshit. “I doubt it.”

  “Do you?” A quick, sidelong glance.

  “You like to take care of people. You like to take care of strong people who are going for their dreams and to make sure they know how to reach them. Give me a break, Patrick. The only way you could get involved in drug dealing is if you actually thought that would help people, and you’re not that dumb.”

  He twisted to put one elbow on the couch and stare at her, then rose abruptly and went into the kitchen. “Sarah, you are very dangerous to my equilibrium,” he said over his shoulder, pulling out a glass.

  She slid off the couch and came after him. She would never have been able to imagine herself making this gesture even yesterday, and yet it seemed suddenly entirely natural and right to just slide her arms around his waist from behind and press her cheek against his back.

  He jumped so badly he jerked both their bodies, and then laughed soft and rough as he turned, slipping his arms around her, too. “You move very quietly,” he complained good-naturedly.

  Good nature. All that good nature in him. And he didn’t even seem aware of what an exceptional quality that was. Well…but…who would have told him? Something must have gone badly wrong with his mother for him to end up in fostering, and she didn’t think it had anything to do with drugs. Or maybe the bad crowd had been a reaction to something, not the initial problem but the response to another one.

  And from what she’d seen of his foster father when the man stopped by the kitchens to talk to Luc, he was hardly an emotional man. Luc was, but he put it all into his desserts, not into offering a young boy the praise for which he might be starving. Girlfriends…Patrick must have had quite a few girlfriends, he was just too damn charming, but would they have felt secure around him, his girlfriends? Or would they have felt convinced they needed to play hard to get, to never let him know how special he was, because he always kept that carefree shield up?

  Would they have felt – like her?

  “Ninja princess,” she told him dryly. Her fingers snuck dramatically up his chest, like a tiptoeing warrior, then slid firm and warm around his neck. “We’re notoriously sneaky.”

  He bent his head to her. “I’m probably supposed to know whether there were Korean ninja princesses, aren’t I? I’m entirely willing to be taught, if that’s any help.”

  “Ninjas were Japanese. Also, originally farmers. But when you’re a little girl, sometimes it’s nice to pretend at something dramatic and romantic besides a golden-haired Cinderella.”

  He hefted her up onto the counter easily, so that his hands could frame her face from closer to a level with his, sliding in her hair, which was still loose today. “You’re so pretty, it’s hard for me to imagine you feeling insecure because you weren’t a blonde.”

  She let her forehead tilt to rest on his, almost boneless under the wave of emotion that ran through her. “Patrick.” I think I’ve been in love with you from the very first moment you walked into that workshop. I might have been in love with you from those days as a beginning student, watching you become Meilleur Ouvrier de France. I can’t believe in this. I can’t believe that someone like you could fall for me. “You’re amazing.”

  His hands slid around her waist again and pulled her into him hard – too hard – much too hard – and slowly easing again. He withdrew enough to start to say something, caught himself and shook his head, and kissed her, long and deep. When he at last pulled back, it was to rest his face against her breasts, made possible by her raised position on the counter. She looked down at his golden head, stroking it curiously, fascinated by her growing understanding that, for all the times he had saved her, protected her, helped her, she also needed to keep him safe, to protect him. How strange when she still felt as if she was trying to balance on shoes made of spun sugar.

  When she couldn’t protect him, unless she could believe that sugar would hold.

  Chapter 25

  The day off was so easy. To make up for the earlier complicated conversation – or to distract from it – Patrick took her to the witchy chocolate shop he remembered her mentioning. Since that took them by Philippe Lyonnais’s place, he stopped in on the way back and introduced Sarah to the world-famous pastry chef, petrifying her with shyness and a sense of her own hubris. Patrick, of course, was completely at ease: teasing Philippe about his inferior macarons, asking if Philippe needed any tips while he was there, picking up a macaron shell and inspecting it dubiously until Philippe threatened to shoot him with a pastry bag full of ganache.

  But of course, Patrick would be at ease, wouldn’t he? The whole gastronomic world knew that the only thing standing between Patrick and being one of these world-famous star chefs himself was his choice. That choice no one could quite understand.

  Because what if it was just a choice of love and loyalty over fame?

  Sarah tucked her hand in his big, warm one as they left the Lyonnais shop, thinking about how much love and loyalty Patrick held in him, that love and loyalty he gave to Luc.

  “So do you think you could work with him?” Patrick asked.

  Sarah slanted him a shocked glance. “Philippe Lyonnais?”

  “Sarah. What did you think being interned in one of the top kitchens on the planet meant? You have job opportunities, Sarabelle. Did you like the kitchen atmosphere? It’s a lot calmer than a restaurant kitchen, isn’t it?”

  “Patrick.” Her stomach tightened into that old knot. “I – California.”

  His hand hardened on hers. “You need more training.”

  “Patrick. I’m never going to get good enough to do what you do.”

  He keyed in the code to his apartment building. “That would be up to you, obviously.” It was that kitchen tone he sometimes had to use on the team, the one that said Buck up without ever needing to actually state it. “You can make the choice to give up and not get that good, just like anyone else can.”

  “Patrick. I don’t even want that. I want my own little place.”

  “In California,” he said stiffly as they climbed the stairs.

  “Well, it’s not like I could succeed in Paris!” It could cost a million euros even to “buy the walls” of a place in Paris. She could never raise that kind of capital. She didn’t have that kind of gastronomic street cred. It would take her years and years to earn it, if ever.

  Patrick pushed open the door of his apartment and watched her as he held it for her. “I could,” he said with a little quirk of a smile.

  Oh. That hurt, all out of the blue. She hadn’t been expecting him to one-up her. Her talent was so far beneath his, why grind her under further? “I know you could.” Her fingers curled into her palms, away from his. She took a step back, seeking space.

  Space from him.

  Space for her.

  His face froze a tiny second, his eye
s searching hers. Then it relaxed again, lazy, easy, and he pushed the door closed. Shutting her in. “I take it you’re one of those people who think a couple running a restaurant together would kill each other,” he said lightly, as if he discussed nothing of any importance at all.

  Her brain did a little jerk. Wait, what? Had he just hinted at opening a shop with her? Lightly? As if it was half a joke? As if they were talking about nothing that mattered?

  Nothing that mattered, only to take over her dream.

  “Couples?” she said dumbly.

  His smile went entirely out. He just looked at her for a moment. “Or whatever you like to call them in America. What was that delightful term you used yesterday?” Anger lashed through him, so wicked his lips actually formed the sound F, before he pressed them hard together and looked away, his jaw set.

  She took a step back toward him, that space suddenly too much, too cold. “I’m sorry for that,” she said quietly. “I just don’t understand any of this.”

  “Don’t you?” His anger seemed to subside, but the memory of it remained, that rare red glimpse into a volcano she hadn’t realized was active. His hands stroked up her forearms. “Funny, I think I understand myself in this far too well.” The easy, soothing stroke of callused palms, stirring the fine hairs on her arms. “What don’t you understand, Sarah?”

  “You make me feel exactly right,” she said low, her throat closing. It confused her no end. She had never, never once in her life, felt exactly right.

  His mouth softened first. And then a glow grew in his eyes, brighter and brighter, until she felt silhouetted in the light from him. “Sarah.” She could have sworn his own throat was closing. He pulled her into him, holding her.

  “I should go,” she sighed into his chest, and his hold tightened. All her weight just wanted to sink into him. It always did. “I can’t keep this up.”

  His hands eased, stroking. “Can’t keep what up, Sarah?”

  “This.” She touched his chest and then her own. “You make it seem so easy, but I always know I’m going to screw something up.” Shatter those sugar slippers.