The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (33 page)

Luc had been the hero that he needed. And in return, Patrick was his champion. Still to this day.

And yet, champion or not…no one became a Meilleur Ouvrier de France without being passionate about his field. No one. “What parts did you learn to like?”

“The people,” he said promptly. “All the personalities, and all the striving to be the best, and the way
no one stopped that striving.
Not in Luc’s kitchens, not as chef, not as sous-chef, that’s what he believes in, that everyone should strive to be their very best. I mean, shit, Sarah, the last thing in the world he wants is for me to leave, but if I tell him tomorrow I need to go start my own place – if I
dump him
like that, like a bastard, right after Summer dumped him – he’d loan me the capital to do it. He wouldn’t say a word to try to stop me from reaching for whatever I want. He’d help
me.”

And that,
that
was the answer to all those debates in the bar. Sarah tightened her hand around Patrick’s. That was why Patrick stayed.

“And I like the energy, every day,” Patrick said. “The chaos that isn’t really chaos, it’s all controlled, until something goes wrong and there’s an explosion, and you can see right away just the way to defuse it, to make the whole thing keep running smoothly.”

Oh, “you” can see that right away, can you?
Sarah thought, finding him so endearing it was all she could do not to turn this walk into one long mobile hug.
As if anyone can do it? As if it’s easy?

“And the flavors.” Patrick’s voice deepened to a tone so close to the ones he used in the throes of sex that arousal prickled all through her, right there on the Seine. “And the textures. And the way they respond to your hands. The way they can do
anything
, become anything. There’s nothing too beautiful, nothing you can dream that you can’t figure out a way to do.”

The Meilleur Ouvrier de France finals theme his year had been “reaching for the stars” she remembered suddenly. Patrick’s sugar sculpture had marked her, had been photographed by the press over and over. She’d pressed her nose against glass and held stubbornly to her spot against all the elbows of the other students to watch him make it. But suddenly it took on a whole new meaning: the curls and twists of sugar-glass twining with chocolate to reach so impossibly high, the sparkle of stars gold-caught, the chocolate planets that everyone swore were too big for the impossibly reaching fine base, that their weight would crack the whole thing. But they held. He had calculated every detail of his structure and materials perfectly – a true feat of engineering.

And of course he’d made it look as if he was just, say, spending a day surfing on the beach. She looked down at his hand around hers, the golden hairs, the strength, the calluses against her palm, the sureness with which it held hers, and the delicacy of which it was capable.

His phone burped.

He checked it absently and smiled. “That
salaud
,” he said affectionately. He showed her the screen:
Luc: C’est toi qui gères.
“He always used to tell me things like that when I was a teenager, too.
You’re in charge.
He would remind me of that all the time:
‘You’re in control of yourself and your life, and you’re the only one who is. So take control.’ Which was so profoundly annoying, Sarah, you have no idea – I mean, I was fifteen, had had my career choices ripped away from me because I had made a rude comment to a jerk, the school system utterly fucking ignored me when I insisted I wanted to continue toward my
bac en sciences
, and when I fought back against
that
, I just found myself in the damn foster care system, being yanked around. And there was Luc, who
had been dragged through the streets until the age of ten and then been shoved into foster care, and he still went around saying shit like that.
Putain.
What if he had been talking to some idiot who might have been desperate enough to look up to
him
as a role model in life? Thank God, I was never quite in those
straits, but I try to keep an eye out for his more vulnerable staff. You never know what insane thing they’ll fall for just because he says it with conviction.”

She smiled just a little. “You love him very much, don’t you?”

He flinched. “Sarah, for
God’s sake.
”

Her smile deepened, and she tucked her hand more securely into his. “You don’t really want to leave him, do you?” So she had four more weeks before she had to choose between his path or her own.

He shrugged, and his thumb rubbed over her hand. “I do and I don’t, Sarah. I don’t, and every time I get close to doing it, I think how much I
really
don’t, but–” He grimaced and looked over the water a moment.

His phone burped again. This time he took longer to look at it, as if he didn’t particularly want it fracturing his thoughts. But as soon as he did, he stopped dead. “Wait, what?”

She peered across his body at the screen.
Pas sûr de mon date de retour. Not sure when I’ll be back.

She blinked. “He went after her?”

“Evidently.” A grin started to grow on Patrick’s face. “I sure as hell hope that’s where he’s gone.
Pu-tain
!” He was beaming now, so much joy in him just for the sake of someone he couldn’t even admit he loved. “That man might actually end up
happy
.
Merde.
He went after her
.
” He turned suddenly, picked Sarah up by the waist, and spun her around in the air, one great whirl of delight on someone else’s behalf. Sometimes she
loved him so much, it was as if her whole heart was an out-of-control carousel, spinning and spinning. “He did it! He put himself out there.”

And he checked suddenly, holding her eyes, as he still kept her raised high above him.
He put himself out there.
She reached down and stroked his golden hair, down to the jaw he had once again forgotten to shave, too reluctant to roll out of that bed he shared with her. Tenderness and amusement filled her. Because he thought he didn’t put himself out there? All you had to do was learn how to see straight through him, this man who had so much heart and drive in him that he wanted to hide.

He was out there. He was always out there. He just didn’t want anyone to know it.

She arched down, still held above his head, and kissed him. And he made a little sound and slowly lowered her body in a drag down his, until his arms were wrapped around her, and her toes were resting on his shoes, and he was kissing her back, kissing her and kissing her.

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.