The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (23 page)

I don’t care about him.

I am me.

God damn it, I can
be
me without anybody else’s help. I can reach my own dreams!

She built a bubble around herself, in her head, and inside it, there was cool and quiet, the noise and the bumping bodies bouncing off its force field. She could focus. Just her. All that mattered.

Then why are you still here?

Because it’s my dream. Mine. I didn’t come all this way, and betray all my parents’ hopes for me, to give up.

The cold from the marble wanted to seep into her bones and turn her into one of those marble counters herself.

Outside the force field, Patrick was in a particularly merry mood today, as if he just couldn’t be satisfied until
everyone
thought he was special. His handwriting on the whiteboard had her working on the sugar slippers again. Good. She could focus on that. Something important.

Something that mattered more than he did.

As she used the stove near the pass to melt sugar and Isomalt, Patrick leaned across into Chef Leroi’s station right in the middle of her line of view and squeezed out a giant heart in red raspberry sauce over the marble, complete with exaggeratedly kissy lips. Grinning, he finished the heart tip with a flourish and shifted back into his own space, catching her gaze with a wink.

Chef Leroi reappeared, checked just a second at the sight of the heart Patrick had drawn, and – to the utter wonder of everyone in the kitchens – tilted his head back and laughed out loud. Wow. Maybe he and Summer Corey were working things out.

Patrick grinned, completely pleased with himself, and snuck a look at her.

She looked away immediately, carrying her melted sugar over to her own space of heat lamps and cooling boxes, pulling on her gloves. Glad the heat was going to burn.

It didn’t matter what happened. It didn’t matter how long or how hard this journey to become a pastry chef was, or how much the casual, cruel things people did to her might hurt.

She couldn’t hang her head. She couldn’t sigh. She couldn’t quit.

But God, sometimes she wished so badly that she knew how to do all of those things.

And when Patrick slipped a fresh-made
macaron
in front of her to test a little while later, she did take thumb to middle finger and thump it straight across the counter into the nearest trash. Without looking up and without comment.

Patrick only paused a half-second. Whether he even noticed, she didn’t know. And she didn’t –
she didn’t
– care.

***

He couldn’t get through to her. The realization of it sank over Patrick across the day, like cold, clammy, wet clothes. It grew inside him, until his breath was too shallow, his stomach thick and sick.

She had always had a shield around her, against him and everyone else, that had always been true. But it used to be this shimmery, alluring thing, this bubble of concentration that he just had to slip inside. Now it was harder, colder, thicker. He tried to tease it, to slip in like he used to, and bounced back bruised and chilled.

She’d known that heart was for her, right? That Luc was just his cover? And even if she thought it really was for Luc – it had made
Luc
laugh out loud, when Luc almost never let himself laugh like that. And she hadn’t even smiled. Hadn’t even pretended to think it was a little funny.

The about-face from the morning before, when he had lain there against her, so open and tender and
relaxed
in it, as if all her tiny apartment was just filled with this quiet trust. To this. When he didn’t even know what he had done.

Sickness rose in him, shutting off his brain.
Sarah. What are you doing? Don’t do this.

Shit, he should never have knelt in front of her on those steps above Paris. She was just so damn pretty. And she had seemed so – fragile to him, vulnerable, like she really needed to know she mattered.

That will teach you to show anyone what matters.

What the fuck kind of idiot did that? Knelt at a woman’s feet? What kind of idiot left everything he cared about so fucking exposed?

When she came out of the back entrance of the hotel at the afternoon break, in jeans and scuffed, comfortable black tennis shoes, he was leaning against the stone wall, looking through her little journal. Her handwriting looked like print.

Really. Like actual print. Same size, same form, black ink. Only the press of the ink pen into paper showed the difference. He ran his finger over the impressions, her notes on how to know the whites for a meringue were whipped just right, and there, something he had told her, about the differences between working with Isomalt and working with sugar for the slippers.

There, the next page, a drawing, a fantastical little cake, nothing they did at the Leucé. One of her ideas? He tilted his head, charmed and intrigued so much that it rose up from his middle through his throat and tried to strangle him from the inside out.

A terrifying sensation. God, he could practically lick this paper just to taste more of her, and she could shut him out so easily. For who even knew what stupid reason. He didn’t.

He stared at that little cake drawing as Sarah walked past him without even acknowledging him, head buried in her scarf. His heart had crawled up somehow to beat inside his head, this thump, thump, thump against the inside of his skull that kept disrupting every attempt of his synapses to connect.

Sarah checked suddenly and spun back. “What is that?”

He clicked the journal closed, pulled its little elastic over it, and handed it to her. “You left it on the counter.”

“And you just looked through it?” She yanked it from him.

His fingers curled into his palms, striving not to make fists. “I like the ball-gown effect on that last cake. I could show you a trick for getting that to turn out the way you want it.”

“It’s not your business.” She clutched the journal. “This is mine.”

His hands gave up the battle and fisted fully.
What the fuck did I do, Sarah? Are you jerking me around for some stupid slip?

“Your own little place?” He fell into step beside her, not giving a fuck-shit if someone saw them together. And in fact, on cue, Noë came out, spotted them, and gave Patrick a very cool look.

“In California,” she told him flat as a slap. “Four more weeks.”

Something reached straight inside his body, gripped his stomach, and
twisted
it. He had to breathe right. He couldn’t let her see how effectively she was jerking him around. He couldn’t. “You have very precise handwriting,” he told her unresponsive black head.

She didn’t answer.

“Meanwhile, I have an illegible scrawl.” He kept his voice amused,
as if it didn’t matter,
and flicked the journal back out of her hands, opened it, and signed his name right across from her little cake fantasy of her future. Big, sprawling, taking up the whole little page.

She stared at it a second when he handed it back to her. Her hand lifted to the edge and hesitated, because probably she hated the idea of a ripped-out page marring her journal’s perfection, too. When she looked up at him, she was furious.

Furious to have his name in her dreams? His own anger pushed at him, a dumb, blunt force that still didn’t know that you
never
showed when something mattered enough to make you angry. “How did you learn to write so carefully?” A little edge crept into his voice despite the lightness he tried to inject. “If everything wasn’t perfect all the time, you wouldn’t let it stay?”

Her eyebrows scrunched together as if he made about as much sense as a big red heart with kissy lips.
And that scrunch of her eyebrows drove him completely insane
. Hunger beat at him. He wanted to flip that hunger, make her frantic for
him.

“My mother,” she said coldly. But talking at least. He felt a peculiar sense of accomplishment, that he could get Sarah to share something about herself even when she was trying to shut him out. “She didn’t know how to write in English herself, and she wanted us to be just as good as all the kids with an American mother, to fit in. So she had us copy from books over and over until we got it right.”

She flexed her right hand as she spoke, looking down at it as if it cramped, and his anger tried to rush out of him like a receding wave, overcome by an urge to pick up her hand and rub that painstaking memory out of it. “Didn’t your teachers tell her you were doing fine?”

“I was three.” She stared at her hand and closed her eyes a moment. “It was…important to her. It made her happy.”

Wait. He hadn’t been around a lot of children, but three was tiny, wasn’t it? Didn’t they still have those little chubby fingers and chubby cheeks at that age? “You learned to write like that when you were
three
?”

“She started teaching us,” Sarah said, and turned away from him again at the next corner. He just followed her, though. They were almost at the Seine now. “It took a couple of years of practice.”

He would have to be mad at her later. He picked up her hand, stripped the glove off, and looked at it for a moment. It must have been
such
a small hand when she was three. She must have practiced those letters for hours a day, for forever, to learn that precision so young. It must have been the most hopeless task, that she bent to, failing over and over, trying to please her mother. He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the knuckles.

She curled her hand into a tight ball and pulled it away from him.

So he was mad again. But not – quite the same way.

“Come sit with me on this bench,” he said, and for a second she tried to resist the command, but he had his hand at her back, and she yielded. Something eased in him, just a little, that he could still get her to yield to him. Thanks to his five months as her boss, she couldn’t shut him out completely. Which was probably exactly why she had been wary of them developing a relationship. He set his jaw and kept his hand there, kept manipulating her every way he could, as he led her down the nearest stairs and to a bench on the lower quay, tucked between two winter-bare plane trees.

Up until the moment they sat there, by the cold brown water, he had intended to manipulate his way back into what he wanted and not, God, lay himself out there for someone who could so arbitrarily jerk him around this way. And then, suddenly, it was the cold, or it was how small she was, or it was that line of her jaw as she refused to look at him – he just pulled her onto his lap, astride him, wrapping his arms snugly around her to hold her when she tried for one surprised second to resist. “Sarah,” he said quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Everything in him relaxed to have made that choice. A great sense of power rushed back into him, in the place of that furious weakness, not power over her, just…power. He could be strong enough to make this right. And fuck any part of his past that wanted to tell him different.

Her eyes widened, and her lips trembled softer, so that just for a second he thought, on a weird leap of hope, that she was going to cry. He didn’t want her to cry, of course he did not. But there was something about it – for
Sarah
to cry, while he held her – as if she trusted him. Trusted herself. Could just let herself go. She shut her eyes tightly and looked down.

He rubbed her back through her coat. “Sarah.”

“I told you that you would matter to me,” she said low and fiercely, in that tone like she had told him she hated him. “You shouldn’t –
I’m not good at this.
”

“You don’t have to be good at anything.” He rubbed her back more deeply, trying to penetrate through the coat. “You just…”
have to give me what I want.
That was going to sound so bad to say out loud, though.
You just have to let me have you, every way I want you.

Lucky Sarah, to have ended up under the tutelage of someone as screwed up as he was.

She was starting to breathe hard, in a struggle with emotion, and he wanted to unbutton her coat to watch her breathing, to stroke her breastbone and try to soothe it. One hand even slid from her back to her buttons. “I’m not your fuck buddy!” she hissed at him suddenly, in a blaze of fury.

She switched to English for it, and he stared at her, caught by the rage while he tried to figure out what she had said.
I’m not
…okay, he had gotten that much in school.
Fuck.
Well, everybody knew that, he watched movies.
Buddy…buddy…
“What does
buddy
mean?”

She folded her arms, blocking his work on her buttons, and looked down.

“Sarah.” He firmed his voice.

“
Pote
,” she said sullenly.
God,
he loved how much he could get her to do what he wanted, just by using a certain voice. The leap of arousal was so great, she could probably feel it through their jeans.

He put all the words together. “My…you’re not my
plan cul
? Is that what you just said?”

She dug her fingers into the sleeves of her coat and looked away, up the walls of the quay.

“I don’t even know what to say to that.” That whole evening at the Opéra Garnier, the walk through Montmartre, the top of those stairs…had that not been
romantic
to her? “Sarah. What the hell standards do you have for a man?”

Now she did look back, her eyebrows drawing together in that way that just killed him. “Standards…for you?” she asked blankly.

“Sarabelle.” He pressed his thumb to the crease in her eyebrows, all the tension in him gentling. “I don’t have standards for you.”

“Because I could never live up to them?” she said stiffly, pulling away from his thumb.

He
hated
it when she pulled back from him. “Because I don’t even understand what that
means
, to have a standard for you. You’re not my work. You’re just you, Sarah. You’re for me.” Oops, he probably shouldn’t have said that last. His heart tightened at having let it slip out, that tense anguish that made it hard for him to breathe.

But her frown at last softened a little. She looked at him this time as if she was really curious to see him and not just trying to shut him out.