The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (21 page)

Chapter 18

In the early hours before dawn, Patrick lay on his side, facing the window, his body warming her whole back, and Sarah kept drifting toward sleep, except that his hand would stir in a soft stroke of her belly, and that would wake her again a little, this alien presence that made no sense in her dreams.

Strange instincts swirled in her when that happened, tangled with the almost-dream – the desire to curl into him and tell him she loved him, but of course she could not do that. They were not equals. She didn’t have the right to fall in love with him. This wasn’t in her hands.

If they had worked down the hall from each other in some big engineering firm, the handsome man who managed to keep them all functioning as a team and the brainy, serious colleague determined to get everything right – and even succeeding – would she have had the confidence to tell him? Would she ever have been sure enough of herself for him, even with the solid strength of a successful and respected position behind her?

She liked him taking over, to be honest, but it left her in a very strange place.

Patrick slid his hand from her belly to her forearm and down it to one of her hands. He seemed completely incapable of sleeping, even though it was nearly dawn again and he had to go into work. Her day off, not his. “Where’s the Asian from?” he asked quietly. His thumb touched the base of her index finger and traced slowly to its tip. Then shifted to her middle finger, repeating the gesture one finger by one. “You were born in America, right?”

Her hand curled up suddenly and hid inside his, catching his hand by surprise for a second before it obligingly curved around hers to help it hide. “My mother immigrated from Korea. My older – sister was born there.” Her voice faltered, but –
no, I can’t talk about that.
“North Korea,” she added after a moment, though, because maybe, maybe – he might see. Without her needing to tell him.

But he didn’t seem to peg to that. A lot of people, she had realized growing up, had no real idea of the difference between South Korea and North Korea. Some vague impressions of a nuclear threat and a mad leader were the most she could expect, even from the people who read the news.

“I thought Lin was a Chinese name,” he said, and she blinked, surprised he knew that. She hadn’t even known it herself until a genealogy project in fourth grade.

“It probably came from China at some point, generations back. I don’t really know.” Her mom didn’t like to talk about Korea or her family.

Patrick made a soft sound to indicate he was listening, his fingers entirely fascinated with their stroking of her arm. “And after she got to America she had you? Did she marry an American?”

“Eventually. Not my biological father, that didn’t work out, but I’m not sure if she ever really had any expectation that it would. I think she was grabbing on to anyone she could with him. I was the anchor child. You know – once I was born and a U.S. citizen, I could eventually sponsor them for U.S. citizenship, too.” Her mother had settled in for the long haul, to keep her head down until Sarah reached twenty-one so that she and Danji wouldn’t be deported, training her kids to keep their mouths shut, not to draw the wrong attention to their status. Fortunately, the marriage to Matt, Sarah’s stepfather, had eventually taken that burden off her seven-year-old shoulders. It hadn’t saved her three-year-old or four-year-old shoulders, though. She had always known that if she wasn’t careful, her mother and sister could be taken away, sent back into something terrible, but she could not. She would be sent into a foster home.

She shifted her hand to curve over Patrick’s suddenly. What had his foster home been like? Luc seemed to respect his foster father, when the man came by their kitchens, but it had shocked her to learn that the same man was also
Patrick’s
foster father. Patrick treated him with a needling hostility that always bothered her, when she witnessed it; it wasn’t like Patrick to be mean.

“So did your mother speak English well when you were a baby?” Patrick asked. “Was it easy to handle school, or did you have to learn English there?”

“We did fine,” she said stiffly. Very well, even. Her mother hadn’t known how to read and write in Korean much beyond her own name and had struggled terribly with English. To this day her accent was so strong that very few store cashiers could understand her. But she had drilled herself and her girls with endless English language tapes, and taken them to all the library story times, and pushed them into any program she could find. So Sarah had never had much of an issue at school. Danji had struggled more: malnourished for the first five years of her life and with no exposure to English until she was in the U.S. and already, therefore, in kindergarten. Sarah had never known what malnourishment was. Their mother
loved
to cook. Once she arrived in the land of plenty, she stuffed her daughters as full as she could.

“I’m sure you did fine, Sarah.” Patrick traced over her shoulder, exploring the muscles and bones of her upper back. It was a funny, precious feeling, his absorption in her body, there at dawn. “I was asking if it was hard to do fine.”

“Oh, yes,” Sarah said, low, remembering. It felt so easy to talk to him here in the gray end of night, with her back to him, with his hand tracing over her as if it could not quite stop. “Well…I don’t know. Our mother was really anxious that we do well, so we were anxious, too. Even though we always did well, really.” Even Danji, stubborn and persistent, studying hard and utterly enamored of books.

“So you’ve always been that way,” he said thoughtfully. His fingers found the strongest curve of her shoulder muscle and walked it slowly on down her arm. She wanted to go to sleep now and dream forever of this feeling of being so special, never to wake out of it again. “Not realizing how well you’re doing.”

She blinked a moment, not sure what to make of that. How well she was doing at what? At making love? She was hardly doing anything. He was the one – her body flushed all through with the memory again, of the way he took her over, of the way she yielded – it was all him.

His fingers finished their walk over her elbow, down to her hand, and out over it to the very tip of her middle finger, which he rubbed gently before his fingers drew back up her arm in a slow stroke en route to somewhere else.

A great sigh moved through his body. She felt it gather in the shift of muscles so near her, then drift in a cascade of warm air over her back. “I’ve got to go.”

That was probably better, really. She didn’t know what to do with him. She only knew what to let him do with her. She needed to have her own space back, because that was the only way she could control it as her own. Exhaustion settled heavily over her, holding her down with as much imperative as Patrick did. She might sleep half the day.

Her eyes widened suddenly. “You haven’t slept at all.”

“Mmm.” He trailed a finger down the nape of her neck, and she still shivered at it, a tired, contented shiver.

“Patrick. How late are you working?”

He yawned heavily, as if even thinking of it was contagious to his energy. “Until midnight or so, I assume. Unless I can get Luc to fire me, there’s always that.” He bent and pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder, pulled the comforter carefully over her, and slid out of bed. “I’ve got to get home and change.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw absently, the fresh growth just starting after yesterday’s shave…for her.

How many times had she tortured herself with the thought that when he showed up in the hotel kitchens with that faint growth on his jaw, it was because he had just rolled out of bed from a hot date the night before? Tortured herself by wondering if some of his women preferred prickles. She hadn’t realized that even fresh-shaved at the start of the date, by the time they got home after midnight, he would have that little prickle to rub against her skin still, the finest-grained sandpaper compared to the rougher, more sudden prickle of that first night.

He dressed so quickly, once he put his mind to it. Gathering all his energy for this day.

God, he was going to have a shitty day. That brutal, physical, unrelenting, perfectionist work far into the night again, on no sleep. And after a long, intense day yesterday, with only the theater for a break.

She rolled completely over suddenly and sat up, clutching the comforter to her nakedness. “Patrick.”

He was already at the door, picking his coat up off the floor and hanging hers up at the same time, but he turned and came back to her.

Her bed was a low one, and she looked a long way up at him, still so handsome today, even tired and tousled and unwashed. A wave of shyness washed over her. What could she possibly say to him? To call in sick? He couldn’t do that any more than he could let her do it the other morning. To be careful? They both knew exhausted people were ten times as likely to burn themselves, what good did it do to remind him? To rest? He couldn’t. There was nothing. He had to get through this day. She had a wild urge to come in herself to share it with him, give herself an equally horrible day for his sake, but God knew, her being ten times as clumsy and in need of assistance all day in those kitchens while he himself was exhausted would
not
be a help to him.

She didn’t really know what to say, or to give him against this day, and so she reached out and took his hand, curved it to her face, and kissed it.

Patrick drew in a sharp breath. And then he knelt between her legs, putting their faces on a level. His hands framed her face, his thumbs tracing over her eyebrows, grazing past her temples, then coming to stroke over her cheekbones, back and forth, softly. He kissed her, firm and long and warm. Drawing back, he took a breath as if to say something – and then caught it and gave his head a tiny shake. “You’re so pretty,” he said softly.
Tu es si jolie.
Then, rising from his knees with that lazy, animal grace of his, he was gone.

Like a dream at first light.

Chapter 19

What a shitty day. Patrick got through it on adrenaline, as they always had to do, but by the end of it he had burned himself three times, and the last time he didn’t even notice right away. Noë, who was supposed to be
under
him, had to tell him. “Go put some Burn Ease on that thing before you get it in somebody’s food. You need to go home, Patrick.”

“Can’t. Luc’s off mating.” Thank God. Maybe Patrick had managed to knock some sense into that man’s head after all. “Somebody’s got to be here.”

“Somebody is,” Noë said very dryly. Patrick glanced at the other man, who was his age but still in his shadow, because Patrick hadn’t left yet, as a lot of
seconds
might do by the age of twenty-seven. Put on that MOF collar and head out full throttle in pursuit of that dream.

Patrick offered a wry grin. “You would be too short-staffed if I left.”

Noë turned away in acknowledgement, because it was true, and Patrick kept working for some time, on nothing but adrenaline, before he remembered the burn.

He did let Noë handle the last of the service and cleanup, when orders started slowing. As soon as he peeled the chef’s jacket off him, the adrenaline came with it, fatigue slumping through him so hard he wanted to just curl up on the floor. If he could have trusted the others not to kick him back awake, he might have done it. Pillowing his head on his jacket sounded much easier than getting home.

Or getting to Sarah’s…? Exhaustion crushed the thought like a granite boulder. He couldn’t handle Sarah tonight. He couldn’t manipulate his way out of a cardboard box right now. That dark gaze would look straight at him as he fell in a heap on her bed, and that bright brain of hers would think,
Wait. I thought
he
was special? Maybe I should take another look at some of those guys at Caltech.

He hoped to God he could find a taxi without trouble. The thought of dragging himself through the cold streets, getting ignored by taxi after occupied taxi, washed through him, and that floor looked so tempting. No, he couldn’t let the
commis
see him like that.

Maybe lock himself in Luc’s office?

No, no, no. Get home.

He dragged himself out of the kitchens through the back service entrance and stopped dead when he saw Sarah: bundled up everywhere until only her eyes peeked out, shivering in the dark street. “Sarah, what the–” He glanced around, but no one was there to see him. He knew still, in a dull way, his brain getting lost more and more in a morass of fatigue, that he was supposed to keep them a secret, that she was ashamed. That was why she wasn’t waiting for him inside, where it was warm. But he couldn’t quite figure out how to accomplish keeping that a secret right this moment, with her coming up to him, her gloved hands shoved up her own sleeves, shivering. “Sarah, what the fuck are you doing out here? It’s after midnight. You shouldn’t be just standing around on a street, waiting for someone to come harass you.”

She pulled in on herself even more tightly, which had to be a trick for someone already as tight against the cold as she was. He wanted to put his arm around her to help with the cold, and he remembered people might see, and his brain felt so
sluggish.
“I was worried about you,” she said, low and…embarrassed. He had made her feel bad.

She was
worried
about him,
she
was trying to take care of
him
, and he wouldn’t even know how to deal with that when his brain was awake and working properly. She shouldn’t see him like this, anyway. He didn’t want her to see him weaker and not in charge. He was going to handle this badly, he knew it, and he wished to hell she had caught him before he slid his chef’s jacket off, because now that the adrenaline had sludged off him, he couldn’t seem to scrape even an iota of it back up to help him deal with this.

His lack of sleep had already put an edge on him all day, so that tempers had flared in the kitchens far more than they usually did and usually in his wake. “I’m all right,” he said, which was a lie, but he didn’t see why he should start telling her the truth at this hour of the night. Talk about a recipe for disaster.