The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (6 page)

She gave him that straight, dark, incomprehensible look of hers and wiped a hand under one tilted eye, leaving a streak of pomegranate warrior paint across a delicate cheekbone.
Don’t wipe it off, you bastard. That’s crossing the line. She can wipe off her own damn cheeks without you showing her how to do it.

Still without speaking to him, she finally set down her pomegranate, picked up the little silver spoon he had angled for her, and dug into it. He leaned back against the next counter over and curled his hands around the edge of it as she slipped that spoon into her mouth, and his own tongue touched the back of his teeth, and he just rode it out, rode it, rode it, while she swallowed, while her head tilted as she thought about the flavors, while her mouth softened as if she liked them. Just
rode it
, his fingers pressing into the underside of the marble, until finally the tide of arousal relented and he could breathe again.

“I like it,” she said…reluctantly. The reluctance made him a little frantic. Why was she growing more and more reluctant with him over time? She didn’t
resist
him – she always did what he told her, and God, but did he have fantasies about that. But she shut him out. More and more and more.

Her eyes didn’t follow him after he slipped a yogurt onto her tray in the cafeteria, and her face didn’t relax when he teased her, and when he joked with the waiters or the other chefs and got every single one of them laughing uproariously, he didn’t catch her eyes sparkling as she tried to stay concentrated on her work. Ever since that damn fight with Luc, it had gotten so bad that he was starting to doubt he even existed. Maybe he was some kind of ghost, trying to get the attention of the living.

Maybe he’d killed himself in her eyes when he got in a fight with her superhero, Luc. It had done Luc a world of good, and he himself had enjoyed the hell out of it, but he was starting to wonder if he had made a very big mistake.

She hadn’t even
touched
his beer last night, damn it. It was absurd how sick to his stomach that had made him. It was part of the reason he’d had too much to drink after she left. When he’d gotten back, that beer had just sat there coldly, and he’d had to drink it to warm it up.

“But not orgasmic?” he said lightly. Luc lifted his head and gave Patrick a narrow look.

So I
like
getting her to say “orgasm,” all right? I like the way it crawls all over my skin for the rest of the day and drives me out of my freaking mind.
Fuck you, Luc. It’s not like you’re sane.

And I’m not harassing her, really. If she told me to stop, I’d…change my technique.

“It’s…sweeter and more solid than an orgasm,” she said slowly and with a perfect seriousness that just laid its calm, firm hand over his sexual teasing and crushed it out of the moment. If he showed her how to adjust her technique, if he fed her, if he took her wrist and guided her, she yielded to everything.

And yet somehow, she never let him get away with anything. It was an extremely poor reflection on him, given their relative positions of power, that he kept trying to get away with things anyway.
Patrick, you fucking bastard. Putain d’enculé, va.

“I like it,” she repeated.

“Hmm.” He looked at the little breakfast, not sure what he thought about that. Probably you
shouldn’t
always try to fit an orgasm into every breakfast. Be kind of like drinking champagne every single morning. Still…

“Is it something you guys are experimenting with?”

He shrugged, not about to tell her he had made it for her.

He wouldn’t want her to get the wrong idea.

Like that he was hitting on the intern whose dream in life depended on working here or anything.

She might have mentioned earlier that as soon as he got the foundations of that dream set up for her, she was planning to run off half-assed with it to California. Before it was even properly
built.

“Because I would make the soft cheese much thinner and lighter, if so,” she said, and then flushed abruptly – as she hadn’t for the mention of an orgasm – and looked down.

Because, well…she was the lowly intern. And he was the second-in-command of one of the most famous pastry kitchens on the planet. And she was supposed to seed pomegranates and learn as much as she could and
not
dare to suggest she might have an idea better than his.

“Eat it up, Sarah,” he said, and reached out to flick a thumb over the crease between her eyebrows.

Her gaze flew up.

“
Pardon
.” He showed her the red drop on his thumb. “It was about to get in your eye.”

“Patrick,” Luc said from where he was stationed, and Patrick set his teeth as he met Luc’s eyes – black, just a little too steady for open warning, more a cool expectation that he behave better than this.

It
was
about to get in her eye. I was just being helpful, damn it.

Luc kept holding his eyes.
Le salaud
. It was the irony of Patrick’s life that he had spent the first fifteen years having everything he aspired to crushed on purpose, whenever he showed it was his aspiration, and then he had latched on to a foster brother who went around setting
standards
for him. Who not only thought he should aspire to the highest he could possibly be, but who just
expected
it. Latched on to Luc so tightly, in fact, that Patrick had always had to work pretty hard not to seem like a hungry infant grabbing the nearest adult finger.

Patrick’s hand flew to the spoon, slipping another bite between Sarah’s lips and closing her hand around it, even as he turned to move onto another task. “Eat it, Sarah,” he said calmly over his shoulder, a command, and, of course, she always obeyed those. “And then come here.”

Chapter 7

The scent of sugar filled Sarah, helium to a balloon, so joyous and light it could rise above the whole world, and yet so much pressure, so close to popping.

Sarah had loved sugar work at Culinaire and been the star of their class on it, but at the Leucé she’d mostly been relegated to making the delicate curls and arcs they needed by the thousands. A job not to be sneezed at – it required precision and perfectionism, and she loved it, making those curls and graces. She loved it, even while she watched Patrick build one of those incredible sculptures of chocolate and far more elaborate sugar work, his face occasionally slipping into pure concentration, aristocrat’s mouth stern, cleft chin strong, no crinkle at the corner of his eyes.

Unless he looked up and spotted her watching him, in which case, of course, he winked and did something silly and excruciatingly cruel, like offer her one of the glass hearts he was making on the palm of his hand.

But this new task – okay, it wasn’t on the scale of Patrick’s special one-off sculptures for big events, but still. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth, trying to control that helium pressure of excitement. Patrick glanced down at her face and looked, just for a second, extremely pleased with himself.

“Here we go.” He winked at her. “This is the part where we ignore how much it hurts.” His gloved fingers began flicking at the edges of the pool of glistening, clear melted sugar and Isomalt on the marble in front of him. Fast, fast, fast, pulling up just a half-centimeter all around the edge of that molten pool as that edge got cool enough to start setting. It never got cool enough to touch. But they touched it anyway.

His fingers flew around again, fast as a hummingbird’s wing against the burning heat, folding in a little bit more of the cooling edge. The sugar work was one of the rare things for which they would use gloves in the kitchen, and that was only to protect the sugar as they were working on it. Human oils would make the sugar crystallize and fingerprints ruined the beautiful sheen of the final product. But those gloves didn’t protect human hands against the heat at all.

At Culinaire, of course, they had taught students to work with gloves in all circumstances, not just with sugar. Hygiene, they said. But in the actual three-star kitchens, she had discovered her very first day that, outside sugar work, gloves were utterly disdained. You couldn’t get such exquisite, minute detail right if you had a shield between your hands and it.

Plus the sensations, the textures, were part of the chefs’ joy in what they did, that joy that made them so great, and they couldn’t stand letting anything blunt that passion. This from guys who probably put on condoms matter-of-factly, without even thinking about doing anything else, she thought, biting her lip at the little snort of laughter that wanted to rise up. Just as long as no one messed with the sensations in their
hands.

Then a vision flashed through her head of Patrick putting on a condom matter-of-factly, and her stomach did a slow slide – and then the woman he was doing it for slipped into the vision, some gorgeous blonde who looked a lot like Summer Corey, and her vision shattered into painful shards. She focused on her sugar, folding, folding, conscious of the heat of his body even through both their thick white chef’s jackets that were supposed to protect them from anything hot.

Each flick of her fingers flicked pain through her, burning through the gloves and relaxing her. It made sense, that pain in her fingers. The blisters she would have on her fingertips and palms after this sugar work. The way she wanted to flinch and couldn’t. She had to make herself bear it.

And the sugar rewarded her. It responded to her hands, a beautiful dream that enough care could turn true. As she formed the sugar into a ball that burned her palms, the sugar started insisting on her strength, demanding all the muscles in her hands and arms. Patrick dealt with his resistant sugar deftly, strong hands stretching and folding as if the stiff, resistant mass was nothing. She was surprised to realize how much easier it was for her, too, than it had been a few months ago. She could
do
this.

“Then we’re going to blow it,” Patrick said. “Heat your reed a little.”

She knew this process, knew how to slip a ball of sugar onto the reed at the end of the pump’s tubing, knew how to squeeze air into the ball, like a particularly tough balloon. Knew how to cool the side that started to bulge too fast, how to heat the side that was too slow, back and forth, as she pumped air in. Patrick was stretching his own ball with one hand as he pumped air into it with the other, hands flicking with automatic grace back and forth as needed to control it. The form elongated in his hand and curved.

Hers did, too. She started to smile, feeling as if her anxious heart was not a balloon but in fact that very same sugar, and she was finally, finally, with enough strength and persistence, managing to stretch it out. Fill it. Make it glow.

“Now for a tricky part.” Patrick heated the sugar by the reed enough to cut cleanly through it, then remove the sugar on the reed before it set. “We have to cut the top off. Cleanly and smoothly, and in just the right shape. So it has to be hot enough that we can do that, and yet we don’t want to mar the shape. Very delicate.” But even though he called it delicate, his hands were doing it as easily as petting a puppy: a stroke here, a pressure there, holding it over the flame, and – “
Voilà.
” He proffered the elongated shoe form to her on the palm of his hand.

Oh, he made that look so easy. Sarah took a deep breath and concentrated with all her might. She
loved
these sugar-glass slippers: so slim and graceful and elegant, gleaming like diamonds, sent forth filled with champagne for romantic gentlemen to impress their dates. She always wanted to sneak up to the restaurant door and peek through it to see the women’s faces as the slipper reached them.

To make them herself made everything inside her feel beautiful. Hey, she’d done it. She’d gotten the cut right, hadn’t she? It looked smooth to her. She snuck a wary glance at Patrick, but he only nodded approval, working with his own sugar again now to form the long stiletto heel and attach it to the base.

“
Et voilà!
” Laughing, he presented the finished slipper on the flat of his big, gloved palm, magical and feminine, clear as glass and gleaming. He pretended to gauge her clumsy black kitchen shoes. “Do you think it will fit?”

No. No, the ugly kitchen shoes were what fit her feet. And they were a lot more practical for sixteen-hour work days filled with falling knives, spilled caramel, and accidents with liquid nitrogen. Sarah set the main part of her slipper carefully on the marble and again copied Patrick’s movements, stretching more sugar into that impossibly elegant heel, using heat again to attach it to the base. There, that was perfect, wasn’t it? Perfect.

Her heart beat so hard she could barely stand it, as she lifted her own slipper in her fingers. That
she
had made. It was right, wasn’t it? She looked up at Patrick, her heart tightening.

“
Parfait
,” he said, smiling. “Why don’t you make us about a hundred more of those, Sarah, so we’ll be ready for tonight? Let me know if your hands start hurting too much, and we’ll switch someone out with you.”

Really?
Really?
She
was going to be the one making the glass slippers? She was? Over here in her corner, surrounded by a heat lamp and hair dryer to keep everyone at bay, making these beautiful shoes?

As Patrick cleaned and stored his own equipment in quick, graceful moves, preparing to shift to another station, she drew a breath of all that sugar scent and let it out, feeling for just one second as if maybe, maybe all the months of her internship had been worth it.

The door opened, and Summer Corey walked in. Patrick straightened from storing his pump as if he’d been touched with a live wire. He shot a wicked glance at Luc and wolf-whistled.

Summer’s beautiful face softened in relieved amusement, her eyes meeting Patrick’s with quick warmth.

The sugar-glass slipper cooled in Sarah’s palm.

“Why, it’s
Sunshine
.” Patrick’s voice was everything provocative, as he strolled across to the lovely blonde and bent his golden head toward hers. “I was just
looking
for someone who could kiss this and make it better.” He touched a finger to the faint hint of bruising still on his cheek from that fight and cocked his eyebrows at Summer hopefully.