The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (25 page)

But what if she should be taking him seriously? What if she could?

She rolled to sit, clutching the sheet to her. “Shirts are in the bag by the bed,” Patrick said. “But you have to wear them without a bra. It’s a requirement. They said so at the store. You know how fussy those designers are. Or if you don’t want those, mine are in the top drawer there.”

She looked warily down at the bag near the nightstand, silver tissue paper covering what was clearly clothing. Damn it, he was
not
going to bring this into their moment again, was he? That horrible, sick feeling when he bought her things as if she was his, his–

She reached into the sack as if it was a nest of snakes and drew out the top shirt, a tee in the softest, finest, most perfectly cut sea green. The designer label made her drop it as if that snake had sunk its fangs straight into her wrist. “Patrick.
You take these back.
”

“I ripped yours!” he snapped instantly, as if he had known exactly what was coming. “I’ll replace it. I haven’t had a chance to find the exact same tights yet. Oh, but…there’s another pair I really liked under the shirts.” His voice changed, a little undercurrent of hunger and masculine hope that made her wonder if that other pair of tights included feathers in some way. Or a garter belt.

“I can buy my own clothes,” she said between her teeth.

“Sarah, you don’t make shit right now! I do. Don’t start a fight for no reason, it’s a beautiful morning.”

She looked at the lowering winter clouds. She looked at him mostly naked in the kitchen, cooking. It
was
a beautiful morning, but he – but she – “Patrick, my little tees cost like ten euros. These must be at least a hundred each.”

By the tiny flicker in his eyes and the way his face stayed neutral, she could tell that she had radically underestimated the price.

“Patrick!”

“Sarah, I didn’t have time to go hunt down any cheap stores. And I don’t buy myself cheap things, so I’m not sure why I would buy you cheap things.” He slid the eggs onto plates, his mouth positively sulky.

That was kind of a hot look on him.

Oh, for God’s sake. She needed to bang her head against something.

“Patrick, you are out of your mind,” she said severely, now torn between her own personal issues and the realization that he was an insane person, financially speaking. “Aren’t you supposed to be saving to start your own restaurant some day? And you spend hundreds on a stupid T-shirt?”

His jaw set. “I like getting what I want, when I want it.”

“I noticed!” she snapped, wounded.

“No, you did not!” he retorted, outraged. “Five damn months.
Merde
. And I
was
trying to wait one more, until you told me you hated me.”

“Five whole months was hard on you?” she sneered, shocking herself. She didn’t sneer at people.

His hand tightened on the handle of the pan. “You have no idea, Sarah,” he said, his voice gone low and tight and dangerous all of a sudden. “None. That’s the difference between you and me. No matter how much I might try to draw it out when we have sex, no matter how much I try to make you crave it
,
I’ll
never
be able to make you feel a tenth of what I–” A clawing motion with one hand, and he turned suddenly to bury himself in the refrigerator.

When he finally straightened, she was right beside him, and he jumped so badly the flat of raspberries in his hand smashed into the corner of the refrigerator door, sending raspberries up into the air and down over them in a rain of red fruit.

“
Merde
.” He caught several mid-fall, casually, as a boy might catch a baseball he’d been tossing, and proffered them to her on his palm. “I’m, ah, not used to having anyone but me in this
kitchen.”

That little revelation made her just light from the inside with happiness again. She lowered her lashes, in case he could see that light glowing too brilliantly vulnerable out of her eyes, and looked down at the four beautiful red berries held out for her in that broad, work-hardened palm.
That’s the most beautiful way he could possibly have presented them. More beautiful than any fancy plate in our kitchens.
She wanted to bend her head and eat them straight out of his palm.

But that seemed kind of…humble, for someone who was already humbled by everything about him, and so instead she took one in her fingers and – changed suddenly and offered it to his lips.

He softened, so visibly that she finally realized how tense he had been. His lips closed around the raspberry, those aristocratic lips of his that revealed the truth behind his laid-back surfer’s demeanor, and he kissed her fingertips gently as he took it, a soft touch that sank sweetness all through her. Bumping the refrigerator door closed with his shoulder, he slouched against it, still holding the caught raspberries in one hand and the half-empty flat in the other, his gaze running over her in one of his T-shirts. “You would rather wear my clothes than some I bought for you?”

“It feels different,” she said stubbornly. It did. The scent of him in the fabric as she pulled it over her head had felt – cherishing. But then, that was what he meant to do when he bought her things, too, wasn’t it? To take care of her.

“I like it.” His voice deepened, a hungry possessiveness in it that caressed over her. His gaze lingered at the hem against her thighs and then trailed slowly back up. “Once again, I don’t think you can have any idea how much.” His eyes flicked over her earlobes, but for what was probably the thousandth time since she had shown up with them bare, he chose not to say anything. He straightened. “Eat your eggs, Sarah, before I have to throw them in the trash and start over. And don’t step on any raspberries, or I’m going to suck them off your feet.”

And that was, that was…what in the world did a woman
do
with that? She sat on the stool behind the counter and ate her eggs, curling her toes toward the soles of her feet the whole time.

Patrick rinsed the raspberries, patted them dry in a towel, placed them on her plate in a giant heart around the rim, and cracked five more eggs into the pan for himself.

***

It was an absurdly beautiful day. Like…how could anything that
effortless
be so wonderful? It undermined her whole existence. Shouldn’t she be working hard if she wanted something to turn out so perfect? Or
somebody
should be working hard? Making it look effortless?

She peered at Patrick suspiciously, but he seemed truly to find this as enticingly easy as she did. Of course, he always made everything look enticingly easy, but his relaxation and peace felt so complete.

Her hair still lay damp on her neck from her shower after breakfast, because he didn’t have a hair dryer. When the movie failed to hold her interest, she shifted to the other end of the couch so that the tablet didn’t block his view and downloaded a book her librarian sister had recommended ages ago. A chef’s memoir Danji had thought she would like, since Danji still assumed Sarah had energy to do anything once she hit a bed but sleep these days. It was sweet, though, how many chef’s memoirs Danji had been reading ever since Sarah had shocked her family with her career change.

Just this silent gesture of
I will try to understand.
Kind of like when Sarah had started making all those cakes for her mom and sister:
I will try, too. I will try to make up for it. But – my way, okay?
Engineering had been so removed from her family history, as if all her accomplishments at Caltech were just…self-absorbed. All about her.

She blinked, as if her brain was a kaleidoscope and a tiny shift had just made her whole image of what she was doing change. But then it shifted again, a blur of her mother’s horrified panic at her leaving her engineering career, and that other image was gone.

Patrick shifted his long legs to make room for hers to stretch out the other way and pulled one of her feet onto his chest, caressing it absently as he might have played with her hand – running his thumb over the tips of her nails, down her instep, deep and firm up her sole, exploring the undersides of her toes, all while absorbed in the French comedy he had picked out, which she hadn’t quite gotten but which he seemed to not only find hilarious but to have halfway memorized.

Her tablet drifted to rest on her chest as she watched the expressions chase across his face, while pleasure ran all through her from his petting of her foot. He grinned at something said on screen and lifted her foot absently to his mouth to kiss the tip of her big toe.

Sweetness sighed through her. “Shouldn’t I be doing
something
?” she asked finally.

He yawned and paused the film, looking at her over the foot he kept playing with – squeezing all her toes and the ball of her foot in the grip of a man who could casually juice an orange in one flex of his fingers, then relaxing them. It was an unbelievable degree of bliss, just that one squeeze. How did a woman recuperate from this kind of attention, after it was gone? “Are you getting restless?”

She shook her head. “Just – what did I do to deserve this?”

“To deserve what?” he asked blankly.

She gestured awkwardly.

“Me?” He gave a crack of astonished, oddly harsh laughter. “What did
you
do to deserve
me
? God only knows, Sarabelle. You seem so sweet, but you must have done something.”

“I do not either seem sweet,” she said, a little revolted. Because she wasn’t. Sweet women – smiled at everyone, and mothered, and always put others first, and she didn’t do any of those things. She had put herself first before her own
mother
, even after all her mother’s suffering, when she came here.

Hadn’t she?

“To me,” he corrected. “To me you’re sweet, because you let me in. I think to everyone else you’re sweet like a closed garden – one of those Japanese monk ones – or maybe a glorious, gorgeous steel katana.”

She crinkled her nose, uneasy. “That sounds…painful. Cutting.”

“Yeah, that’s not right.” He tilted his head a moment, considering her. “
Enfin.
Maybe not the cutting edge, maybe that doesn’t fit, but I like the steel image, that beautiful, supple strength.”

Beautiful, supple strength? “Are we talking about the same person?” she asked, dumbfounded.

“Maybe you look different from different perspectives,” he said wryly.

“Evidently.”
You must, too. To think I would have to do something bad to deserve you.
“Korean and Japanese aren’t the same, you know.”

He shrugged, half smiling. “I don’t know much, in fact, Sarabelle. Teenage boy fantasies about being a ninja and studying Asian forms for inspiration for desserts are about all I’ve got. Do you ever go back there with your mom to visit family?”

Sarah gave a tiny shudder. “No.” No, her mother would never go back there. Never.

Patrick frowned a little, thumb moving gently up and down the base of her foot. “It was bad for her?”

Sarah nodded, all her insides tightening. This thing no one could discuss, that hurt so much that it hurt
her
, who had been born after.

Patrick stretched over the length of the couch, picked her up, and settled back with her snuggled against him. “Do you want to come tell me about it?” he asked, only after he had already gotten her tucked firmly in place.

“Not really,” Sarah said, strained, into his chest. That supple hardness of his body in repose did too many things to her: aroused her, intrigued her, calmed her.

He nodded and didn’t say anything else. A long time passed while Patrick just held her, the warmth of his body seeping through her, while he seemed in no hurry to return to his film.

“They were starving,” Sarah said, low. “Her and my older sister and our…brother. She got rice on the black market, but the police found out, and they…they…held her hands down on the floor and stamped on them.” Her fists clenched and hid in his body. You got used to it, in a way. Her mother’s hands had always been askew, awkward, settling beside her daughter’s perfect, pretty little hands as Sarah tried to write those damn letters of the alphabet, no excuse at all for why
Sarah’s
unbroken hands couldn’t do better. Not that her mother ever said that, it was just – Sarah always knew it. “In their military boots.”

“Oh my God,” Patrick said, and his own hands flinched. Their hands were their careers. Their lives. She had given up all the brilliant promise and security of her engineering degree to choose a career where the grace of her hands was essential. Where
feeding
people was essential. Where the delight of food became the greatest gift you could give someone. He forced one hand out of its flinch and covered both of hers.

Oh. Oh, was he
protecting
her hands? From boots? With his own?

Her heart broke in a way it never had before, as if it had been cracked wide open to reveal this glowing richness inside, all hers. Her treasure. A gift from him.

She took a breath and closed her eyes, concentrating on the feel of his hand, on the sound of his heartbeat under hers. Maybe just here, in darkness, wrapped in him, she could finish this story.

Her own heart beat so hard, her voice a whisper. “So then – so then – she had to get them out. They snuck their way to the border with South Korea, but – my brother was three, and – she had to choose, you know. She was too weak to carry him, and he was too weak to walk, and my sister was only five and weakening fast from hunger. And she asked some farmers to watch out for him – they promised – until she could come back for him. And – she did come back for him, but they didn’t keep their promise. He – he died. Wandering the fields, calling for his mother until he was too weak to keep calling.”

Patrick made a low sound and tightened his arms too hard around her, squeezing her whole body like he had squeezed her foot.

“And – and – when she got to America with my sister, she had me right away, so no one could send them back. And – I think because she had to have another baby, she had to. I don’t know – she had to replace him, you know, she–” Sarah buried her head in his chest. This was why she couldn’t cry. Because there was this. A grief so great in her mother’s heart that nothing else could be permitted tears. To be so weak as to cry
over stupid things like failing to get a sugar shoe right shamed all those tears her mother still cried on the dark nights, those nights when Sarah as a child would sneak out of her bed in flight from a nightmare and find her mother curled in a ball in her own bed, weeping, prey to her own far worse dream.