The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (24 page)

“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 in 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.

And then he’d done it.

Done all kinds of things. The next time he came up close behind her in the kitchens to help her get something right, while she was working at one of their marble counters, and his breath drifted over the top of her head, she was going to shatter everything she touched.

It had been nice to sleep late, after that. Sleep as if she’d never known a restless, tension-plagued night in her life.

Outside, clouds glowered over Notre-Dame, the real reason for how soft the light was through those great windows. She smiled at them for making it so clear how very glad she was to be exactly where she was and rolled over, pulling a white sheet over her shoulder. She was sprawled across the bed, she who never sprawled, her face tucked against the corner of the pillow on the opposite side, as if even in her sleep Patrick’s charisma had pulled her out of her space into his.

The bathroom door opened, and Patrick came out, hair wet and, from the tousled look, combed just by a run of his fingers. It looked really good on him, that wet hair – fresh and relaxed and intimate. So much more naked than the strands that could cling, sweat-damp, to his temples and nape after a mad two hours at lunch or dinner. He wore only a towel and the daylight that filtered over him. She hadn’t actually gotten to see him naked that much yet, had
been touched
but barely gotten a chance to touch him.

He looked as good in just a towel as he did in black-on-black elegance laying a woman out to be his feast. Strong shoulders and narrow hips, with the definition of a man whose work kept him in constant, gymnast motion and who relaxed from the tension of that work by going to the gym or skiing.

She smiled a little. “Do you ever even lie around watching TV or reading a book?”

“Sarabelle, we can stretch out on that couch and watch TV the whole damn day.” He crouched by the bed to put his face on level with hers and reached into the nightstand drawer at the same time. A slim black tablet appeared on the mattress. “Or download whatever you want, if you’d rather read. If you’re nice to me, I might even brave the cold to get us some potato chips and popcorn. Or didn’t you say there was that chocolate witch place you like, just over on the Île Saint-Louis? If we get sick of wallowing, you can show me it. It’s a good day for hot chocolate. Then, if you’re extra, extra nice to me – let’s say you smile at me a couple of times – I might even make you dinner.”

Wait. His plan for their day off was
cuddling
? Relaxing together?

He made it sound so…easy to get right.

She looked up from the tablet to meet his eyes tentatively. His were narrowed, watching, but as soon as their gazes met, he threw up his arms to shield himself. “Oh,
merde
. You’re about to tell me something horrible, aren’t you? Don’t, don’t, don’t, Sarah,
please
don’t tell me you’re a vegetarian.”

He made her laugh, every time, this surprise right in the middle of seriousness, as if a little firecracker of happiness had gone off in the darkness. He used to do it in the kitchens, until she had gotten to the point where she could hate him so adamantly it didn’t work any more.

“Well, I don’t eat a
lot
of meat,” she said cautiously.

He groaned and flopped forward so that his face smashed into the mattress, his arms flung out dramatically. Then he turned his head enough to give her one blue wink. “We’ll take turns with dinners,” he promised, as if they might be feeding each other indefinitely, and her heart just…it was as if it jumped out of a plane, and instead of dropping, just found itself floating there. Checking above it – no, no parachute – how long could a heart float like that with no means of flight?

My internship ends in a few weeks. By “indefinitely,” he doesn’t really mean “until the end of time.”

He grinned at her. “You can cook me something – Korean? Do you know how to cook Korean? Did your
maman
teach you?”

She nodded, relaxing into a smile. Her mom loved to cook.
Loved
it. She had stuffed and stuffed her daughters and every other child she saw in a kind of manic obsession to give them enough. It might be why Sarah had turned out so thin – revolt. Or more likely a complex shame at eating, when she knew that others had starved. It was so much easier to make beautiful fairytales of food for others than to take food for herself. Her older sister, Danji, Dan Ji at birth or Danni as people outside their family called her, had a little bit more trouble with her weight, still struggling to find a balance between her need to grab food every chance she saw, their mother’s need to feed her, and the fact that there were an infinite supply of chances in America.

The first cake Sarah had ever made had been for Danji’s birthday. Sarah had been five, her efforts at cake-making inspired by something on television – probably
Sleeping Beauty
– and her results comical. But edible. And with lots of frosting and sprinkles. Danji’s face had lit up like the Eiffel Tower.

Their mother, Ji-Na – or Jenny, the American name she had insisted on until she met their stepfather, who had gently refused – had taught the girls how to cook very young, kind of a desperate inculcation of life’s most vital skill. But Ji-Na Lin’s culinary culture was not one that included many sweets. Desserts had been Sarah’s discovery – through TV, and books, and other children’s birthday parties, becoming determined to make her
own
beautiful cakes, assimilating it all into her life, watching Danji’s face light up over and over, watching her mother pet the counter near the latest cake as if she had to almost-not-quite touch it, Ji-Na’s eyes filling with unshed tears.

But she thought she might actually like to cook regular food for Patrick. She thought he might like it. She thought that while she was cooking it, and while he was eating it, his appreciation might make her feel really, really good.

Their eyes held too long, and she started to blush at the warmth that filled the moment. “
Tu es si jolie
,” he said softly, and straightened from the bed. “So – if we watch James Bond movies, am I going to have to compete for your attention with the blond guy?”

She laughed, filled with more happiness than she could remember feeling in a very long time. “I think you’ve blown that competition out of the water, Patrick.”

His eyebrows went up. And then he grinned a little. His smug expression lasted the whole time he was messing around in the kitchen. He was so funny. He always looked as if he was just messing around – and then he would produce the sublime with a yawn. Just so no one thought he had been really trying.

He really, really hated for people to know he was trying, didn’t he?

“You know what I like about America?” Patrick called from the kitchen space. “Breakfast. They’ve got some ideas about breakfast.” He was cracking eggs into a pan as he spoke.

“France has all those croissants and pastries,” Sarah protested. “Fresh baked, with that
scent
when you’re walking by the
boulangerie
…”

“You’re not getting pastries, Sarah,” Patrick said firmly. “You’re getting protein. Also” –he double-checked his refrigerator – “you can have some fruit. I’ll make it look pretty if you want me to, but that’s as far as I’m going in the dessert direction.”

She had to catch three little words in a tight grip inside her not to just spill them out. She loved everything about him, the fact that he was bossing her around to make sure she ate better, the fact that he probably really would make that fruit look all pretty for her, because he wouldn’t be able to help it. The fact that he was standing there naked, pretending to be clothed.

She wanted to tell him something to make him realize how special he was, but if she started, it might all flood out. Leave her heart splatted on the great rocks below, while he stood on the cliff above with his eyebrows raised.
Wait, were you taking me
seriously
?
And then dove agilely into the waves beyond, untouched in any permanent way by his enjoyable romantic interval.