The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat)

by Florand, Laura

  When they finally surfaced, it was to the realization that a tourist with a big camera was taking photos of them with a reflex lens.

  Oh, for God’s sake. Patrick cut the man a glance, and his eyes narrowed just a tiny bit, as if he might insist on the erasure of the photos, but then instead, he grinned and rolled his eyes as he turned away, heading down the Seine with Sarah again, taking her hand. “If he’s any good, maybe we’ll end up in a museum,” he said cheerfully.

  It was a little surreal to realize that they actually might and never even know. “We might need to start visiting more museums.”

  Laughing, he laid his arm across her shoulders. “I was thinking we might try a soccer match next, but whatever makes you happy, Sarabelle.”

  She smiled and leaned into him as they walked. I love you, too, Patrick. We don’t have to talk about it, if it scares you. But just so you know, I love you, too.

  And I’ve got only four weeks left here. Now what am I going to do about that?

  Chapter 32

  “I can’t believe that salaud dumped me at Valentine’s.” Patrick searched in the drawer at the end of the couch in his apartment, pen in hand. “Isn’t that typical? He knows how much I hate that heart shit. What was your idea for a menu item, Sarabelle? The dozen transparent hearts that lure people off the real one?” He shut the drawer, empty-handed, turned, and finally opened a notebook on the table, pen flying.

  Sarah watched him over her book, one eyebrow lifting very slightly. That restless energy in him was profoundly erotic. As if someone had just plugged him into a socket, and all his ambitions were surging with the freedom and attention. “Luc didn’t already plan out the Valentine’s menu?” Because she had seen him talking out sketches with Patrick and Noë any number of times this January, seen them rolling metal into new forms, printing new molds, testing things out. She had tasted the things they were testing out, shoved absently in front of her by Patrick.

  “Oh, you know Luc,” Patrick said vaguely. “He’s so imprecise.”

  Right. She pressed a little smile out of her mouth, looking down at her book again. Patrick wasn’t even putting proper effort into tricking her off his trail anymore. Sometimes she loved him so much.

  “If you want something done right, you really have to do it yourself, don’t you think, Sarah?”

  He was asking her? “Maybe after three more years apprenticing,” she said reluctantly. “Right now, I think if I wanted it done right, I would ask you.”

  He beamed at her, picked up her hand, and kissed it, then folded it securely in his left hand as his pencil flew. “Like that?” He flipped the notebook around to show her a sketch of hearts shifting over each other. His drawing style was a bold, firm line combined with a surprisingly graceful curve, the detail simple and accurate. It, too, was erotic. It was quite possible she might find nearly everything about him erotic.

  Even his tendency to take over.

  “Hey.” She sat up. “That’s my journal.”

  His fingers firmed a tiny bit on it. “Sarah, focus on the drawing,” he said impatiently, as if who held that journal wasn’t important at all.

  “Will you give that back?” She bent from her end of the couch to try to grab it.

  He shifted it to the other end of the coffee table and flipped to the next page, sketching quickly. His body, meanwhile, shifted just enough to trap her legs and make it difficult for her to wiggle free and grab the notebook. “What about this?” He held it up again, well out of her reach.

  She glared at him. He turned the notebook back to inspect his own drawing. “You’re right, if I see another heart thrown out there like that, I might be sick, too. Maybe we could turn Valentine’s into some other kind of message. Something like: Take proper care of your heart, you idiot.”

  She had to fight so hard not to smile at that, wanting fairly desperately to kiss him. Focusing on his theft of her journal helped keep the urge under control. “Patrick, if you don’t give that back to me, I’m going to tie you up again.”

  He dropped it instantly. “Merde, Sarah, don’t just spring a threat like that on a man out of the blue. Don’t you believe in foreplay?” He shifted their positions on the couch, pulling her on top of him as he stretched out beneath her. Under her – but not tied, knowing his physical strength left him in complete control of the situation – he smiled up at her and freed her hair, playing with it as it fell to either side of her face. “You’re so pretty.”

  She was so entirely normal looking. But she supposed she could get used to being beautiful to him. She rested her forearms on his chest to bring their faces closer and smiled down at him. I love you, she mouthed.

  He jerked a little under her and then cupped her head in his hands and pulled her down for a kiss, deep and thorough. “Ninja princess,” he said softly. “Quiet, but you strike deep.”

  “Do you know farmers actually developed ninja skills to fight the princes? So the very antithesis of princess. Also, Japanese.”

  “Oh, aren’t all Asians the same?” he asked, extra vaguely.

  Her eyes crinkled with amusement. He was so cute when his efforts to distract a conversation away from what mattered got so transparent like that.

  “What am I talking about, what would you know?” he asked. “You’re an American, aren’t you?” And just when she was starting to give him a surprised, approving look: “You guys don’t know anything about geography and other cultures.”

  She thumped him very gently on the head with her knuckles, and he laughed out loud and kissed her again, this kiss swooping and delighted. “Maybe your mom will teach me about Korean culture.”

  “I doubt it,” Sarah said dryly. Her mother’s culture marked her – in the food she made, or in her obsessive need not to compliment a baby, for example. But consciously, her mom shut everything of her past in Korea away from her as hard as she could.

  “Well, at least Korean food. If she likes to feed people, I know she’ll love me.”

  Her heart jerked. Did he know that? Did he know that, as in know that he would meet her mother and eat at her table? “Oh, I’m sure. You probably won’t be able to leave the table without gaining two kilos.”

  Her mom liked to make sure people she cared about had reserves. Her stepfather complained lightly sometimes about the love handles she had put on him. But then he had also said once, in a quiet aside to Sarah, that, in fact, an awful lot of love had gone into putting those little handles on him.

  “That sounds so nice,” Patrick said wistfully. “Having your mom hover over me stuffing me with food. I bet I’ll love her.”

  It softened her immeasurably that he was so willing to give her mother love. But, again, was this just a given, in his brain, that he would be getting to know her mom so well? Sometimes it would be helpful if Patrick was able to ask for what he wanted from another person’s life directly. She stretched to recover her journal and gazed at his sketches blazoning themselves across her personal, intimate space and dreams, scowling a little despite the cherished feeling in her insides.

  “Does it bother you that much?” Patrick asked, and she met his eyes. His were very serious. “To have my dreams mixed up with yours?”

  She closed her journal and held it tightly. Her journal. Hers. “I don’t want you to take it over,” she said slowly. “And turn it into yours.”

  “Ah.” He watched her. “That might get complicated.”

  Yes, wouldn’t it, though? It was already so complicated. And yet sometimes, when she looked into his eyes, so blue, so tender, so laughing, just for her, it all seemed so beautifully simple. As if the power of that look should wash everything else away.

  “What if we turned it into ours?” he asked quietly. “It’s a somewhat trickier negotiation, I grant you, but I thought I’d proven over the past twelve years that I’m good at negotiating other people’s needs with mine.”

  “Good at negotiating them to get what you want,” she said wryly.

  His face shuttered.
She had hurt him, she realized, before he even said, lightly, idly: “Oh, is that the only person who gets what he wants when I’m around?”

  “I’m sorry.” She laid a hand on his chest. What a stupid thing to say. “No.” All the things he made sure happened right in those impossible kitchens, all the people he kept working together. “No, you make everyone’s dreams come true.”

  “Sarah.” He pulled her into one of those sudden embraces of his, too hard, as if he was squeezing her with all the words he couldn’t say.

  “It’s true.” She stroked his lips. “Mine, Luc’s, all those people at the tables.” His eyes were starting to grow heavy-lidded under her caress of his lips, as he sank into the pleasure of it. “Everyone’s…except yours.”

  He closed his eyes immediately, all the way.

  “Patrick.” His lips were so soft. All that aristocrat’s supple sensuality veiled with silk. “Why don’t you go after your dreams?”

  A tiny flicker of a wry smile, while his eyes stayed firmly closed. “I am, Sarah. You just can’t seem to tell.”

  Was he really? Or was that claim, too, just another distraction, another way of keeping even himself from knowing what mattered most?

  Why don’t we turn it into ours?

  She looked down at him, her heart beginning to beat so hard. As if looking down at him was like looking down at that mile of sky below her as she jumped out of a plane.

  Why was she so scared of his power? Could it be because it had taken all her strength and courage to develop a sense of self strong enough to come to Paris for her own dream – and then a cute guy with just the right blend of gentleness, firmness, and humor had winked at her after a workshop, and she’d twisted all that dream into something he wanted? It was a beautiful twist, it was a leaping, striving, glorious twist, like one of his sculptures of sugar reaching for the stars. But all that time had she known, deep down, that in stepping into those brutal, demanding Leucé kitchens instead of the little shop she had imagined, she was changing that dream for him?

  And yet she didn’t feel she had come out poorly in the change. Her dream didn’t feel small or shattered. It felt ambitious. It felt beautiful. It felt as if it was reaching for the stars.

  It was hard to breathe this far up in the stratosphere, air grown shallow and insubstantial, failing to fill her lungs no matter how much she tried. “You know, in the U.S.–” She cleared her throat, and looked down at his face, and all her internal resistance to this offer just dissolved away. She could do this. She could do this for him. “It’s, ah – not as hard to go back to college as an adult as it is here.”

  His eyes flew open.

  She held his eyes with difficulty, cheeks heating. “There are two of the top engineering schools in the world in California. Caltech, for example. And some…some smaller ones, you know, if you had to take courses first before you could get into those.”

  His hand flew up to hers at his face and closed around her wrist, too hard.

  Her face was burning. Her voice felt strangled. “I could – I could–” She took a deep breath, thinking it through one last time, and firmed her decision out. “I could go back to work as an engineer for another couple of years, so we would have a steady income, if you wanted to go back to school. Or, or – you could take classes part-time at first, to see if you really like that dream as much as you used to think you would when you were twelve. You might not, you know, not anymore. I have a hard time seeing you sitting in front of a computer.”

  Patrick was staring at her, his face oddly pale.

  “But, but – it might be something you really need to at least try,” she managed, wishing he would let go so she could go hide now. “So that you know.”

  “Sarah, that’s not your dream.” His voice sounded very severe, strange. His mouth was compressed like someone facing his worse nightmare.

  “I know, Patrick!” she exclaimed, exasperated. “But I can manage a few more years, all right? If it’s what you really want. I’m not convinced it’s what will suit you, but if that old dream is what is keeping you from going all out for your dreams now, if you just have to try it – you can go to school during the day, and I’ll go to work, and at night you can teach me how to get better at all the techniques I’ll need for my shop in a few years.” A few years wasn’t any time at all, in a span of life. An incredible sense of strength, of rightness, filled her. I think I know how to do this: give to him, help him, and still be me. Maybe, in this past year, that’s the strength I gained. “I do need to get better, before I open my own place. And, and – I can help you with math. Because it’s going to be hard, you know, catching up on the math.”

  He was just staring at her, turned to stone.

  “It’s going to be at least as hard as catching up on all these apprenticeship skills has been on me. You might go ballistic, Patrick. I can’t imagine you sitting still for that long.”

  “This is a serious offer,” he said abruptly. “You’ve thought it through. You really mean it.”

  Her eyebrows drew slowly together. “Patrick – why would I do that to you? Toss your dream into the conversation like some toy, without having thought about it? Without meaning it? I’m not you.” Oh, wait, that wasn’t fair. What a nasty thing to say. Sometimes she still fell for that self-protective trick of his, of thinking he was being careless when in fact he never was.

  “Oh, no, you so very much aren’t,” he whispered, and sat up abruptly, so that she was astride his lap and they were face to face. “Sarah. Sarah. I think you’ve ripped me right in half. I honest to God can’t take this. I love you so much. Merde.” He took a harsh, shaky breath and then lifted her off his lap suddenly, turning to brace his arms against his knees and hang his head.

  “Do you need a paper bag?” Sarah asked with a kind of tender wryness, stroking his back very gently.

  He shot her a desperate glance. Like she was pushing him off a cliff. “I might. Merde, but I’m glad I got that out.”

  “That you’re being ripped in half?” she asked cautiously.

  “It’s the same thing.” He took her hand and pressed it against his chest, where his heart was thumping like mad. “This part, Sarah,” he said very softly. “That I got that part out. But you knew, didn’t you? Have you always known?”

  “I still don’t know, Patrick. Because, I mean – how could you? I’m not perfect, like you. I have to think to know, but once I think it through, that L word you’re so afraid of is the only thing that makes sense of everything you do.”

  “Oh, God, you’re so much better than perfect.” He lifted her hand to his mouth, kissing the palm and then just burying his face in their joined hands. “Sarah.” His voice sounded muffled. He took a breath, started to say something else, and then just subsided into their palms again. “Sarah.” The one word seemed to encompass everything he had started to say.

  She watched his golden head a moment. He didn’t seem inclined to move any time soon. “It might be helpful if you could articulate once in a while,” she ventured. “Because instead of my brain coming to logical conclusions as if it’s some structural problem to solve, all the time, it might be nice once in a while to just hear it.”

  He said nothing. But after a second, he kissed her palm again.

  That tiny, hidden gesture just dissolved her. “Or maybe I’m just fine with this,” she whispered, petting his hair. “Maybe you make it more than clear.”

  “I can’t believe you just…said that.” He spoke into their hands. “About the engineering. Even Luc never–”

  “He probably didn’t know how.” She stroked his head. “He was making his way up from the streets, wasn’t he? And not much older than you. Pastry chef was probably the only way he knew to become all he could be, and therefore all he could show you. But I know how. I know how you can become an engineer still, if that’s what you really want. I can’t promise you Mars, but you can try for it.”

  He still hadn’t lifted his head from their palms. She could
feel the contraction of his facial muscles against her hand, the struggle of his expression. “Sarah. It’s as if, when you say you love me, you mean you want all my dreams to come true.”

  Yeah. That was kind of what it felt like to her, too, loving him. Her own dream felt so fragile, now that she had put it in his hands. But he knew how to handle things delicately. He had always handled her dream with care, hadn’t he? Teaching her strength, never taking it. “I would love to see your face,” she said softly, “when one of your dreams came true.”

  He finally lifted his head. His face was very flushed, and if she hadn’t had the proof from her palm that his eyes had stayed dry, she would almost have thought he had been crying. “See, Sarah, when I say I love you, I just mean I want you in my life, I want to keep you, you’re mine. When you say all this shit about being perfect, I don’t even understand how to tell you how much better than me you are.”

  “Patrick.” She curled one hand around his wrist, stroking his pulse. “You try to make everyone’s dreams come true. It’s not a great gesture of love on your part, because you love most people that much; you do that for everyone, as automatically as breathing. So it’s okay for you to feel love for me as something more selfish, more greedy.” Her mouth curved a little. “I kind of like it. You feeling greedy and selfish about me.”

  “Sarah,” he said reluctantly. “I’m greedy and selfish all the time. I’m the most selfish person I know.”

  The half-shamed sincerity in his face floored her. “You actually think that.”

  His eyebrows drew together in clear bafflement. “I am, Sarah. Can’t you tell? That’s why you’re here right now. I always make sure to get what I want.”

  “Patrick.” He was kind of hopeless, wasn’t he? She leaned in and kissed him. “No, I can’t tell. And if you can usually manage to get what you want, despite all those other imperatives driving you – helping people to their own dreams, trying not to admit yours – then more power to you. Because that is quite a tricky negotiation.”