The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (3 page)

“Summer Corey is just bored,” Luc said. But restless tension coiled under his control at even opening the topic of discussion. “And she’s hardly shy. She’s dated half the billionaires in the world.”

“They probably went after her,” Patrick said very, very dryly. “Given that she’s, you know, gorgeous and filthy rich, and by an astonishing coincidence, most self-made billionaires seem to be capable of going after what they want. What the hell’s wrong with
you
?”

Luc’s black eyes locked with his. Ooh, impressive amount of fury bottled up there.

But Luc refused to respond, until finally Patrick shook his head in disgust. “You know, I’ve never seen a man so fascinated by a woman and so afraid to go after her in my life.” He tucked the heart onto the top floor of the Eiffel Tower, and the mirror base chose that moment to reflect his own face back to him.

Damn mirror.

“Here.” He thrust the pump and tubing into Luc’s hands. “Your turn to work on hearts for a while. I like mine the way it is.”

Chapter 4

“
Service!
” Noë, the second sous
,
called. Lean, serious, and cerebral, Noë made a steady counterpoint to some of the other outsized personalities in the kitchen, but his edge was starting to show as the pastry kitchen’s peak hit. “
Service, service, service!
”

Covered in ashes of gold again, Sarah focused on her plates with everything in her, the cries raking across her nerves even after nearly five months of this. The crowded kitchens never offered an instant’s space or peace, unless you came in extra early or were lucky enough to be working sugar, surrounded by heat lamps and hair dryers to keep everyone at bay.

On top of the dinner dessert hour, the hotel was hosting a major gala. Hands flew, bodies flew, plates flew, and tempers soared, as mortal humans raged against the unrelenting demand for divine perfection even as they lived only to fulfill it.

“
Service!
” bristle-headed Hervé shouted at the pass. Their plates, where something molten often nestled inside something frozen or vice versa, depended on seconds in timing.

“We’re doing it as fast as we can,
merde
!” Thomas, the newest and youngest of the waiters, yelled, grabbing plates.

Hervé shifted as if he was about to lunge across the pass. Only twenty-one, but with six years more experience than Sarah,
chef de partie
Hervé shaved his head to make himself look tough, but then forgot to keep it shaved, so that he looked more like a hedgehog in a white jacket.

“Is that what you guys told your girlfriend last night, too, Thomas?” Patrick asked as he dipped passionfruit mousse into liquid nitrogen, the vapor haloing him as if he was some golden, firstborn hero reaching into the heart of creation. Hervé’s urge to strangle the waiter evaporated in a crack of laughter. Even Thomas had to roll his eyes and laugh, since he had no girlfriend in the picture about whom to get protective, the kind of thing Patrick always knew.

Sarah sighed. Kitchen teams liked their crude humor. And all they ever seemed to think about was sex.

None of them faltered in their miraculous pace, so many beautiful desserts flying from their fingers that it was as if those fingers were fairy wands on speed. Patrick had placed himself at the pass, where he could both assemble dishes himself and verify the perfection of every dessert that passed through. He had tucked Sarah to his left, from where she fed him his prepped plates.

His body brushed hers with almost every move, something he remained oblivious to, having grown up in top kitchens where people worked at insane speeds in a tight space. But she noticed. Every single faint brush of his arm reaching across her, his body passing behind hers, his biceps grazing her shoulder as he shifted.

She tried to sink into her task: marking plate after plate with the golden ashes from which the hotel’s famous
Phénix
would be reborn when Patrick plated the rest. He did all the other components of this insanely beautiful and complex dessert in less than half the time that it took her just to get the ashes right.

And every time she bent just as he had shown her, every time she blew over her finger, she felt his body again, felt his breath tickling in her palm, impossible to capture.

She was getting more and more
dans le jus
, or into the weeds, as chefs called falling behind in the States, and more and more frantic with it. Every once in a while, amid all the other things he had to do, Patrick’s arms stretched over hers, catching her up, quick and easy and without comment, as if it was nothing.

“
Chaud!
” someone called, passing down the line with a big pot, the scent of caramel wafting around them. “Hot!
Chaud derrière!
Hot behind!”

Patrick pressed her against the counter with a hand against the small of her back, squeezing himself out of the way, too. A wave of helpless longing ran through her at that touch, but she kept her face serious and unaffected while he grinned down at her. “They always say that about me. Do
you
think I’m hot behind, Sarabelle?”

Even the world’s worst geek should have been able to manage a flip
I always thought they were talking about me.
Even in a second language. Even in the pressure of the moment.
Instead she thought, inevitably, of what a tight, beautiful behind he had under that white chef’s jacket. Of the way it looked in jeans when he left the hotel late at night, heading home, away from her. And of how good it felt to have that firm hand just take her over and press her against the counter.

A hand that was already gone again, handling all the other tasks he had in the kitchen.
He
didn’t need any recovery time from his contact with
her.

Sarah turned, brooding, to get more gold dust from a cupboard and pivoted straight into the pot Patrick had just moved her away from, hot metal right at the level of her face, the scent of passionfruit and caramel filling her nose–

An arm swept her into a hard body. The pot passed. Instead of the excruciating singe of metal or a destructive wave of molten caramel, her face met a tough chef’s jacket and a firm chest.

The whole incident and its avoidance took less than a second. Patrick released her and caught her chin in strong, callused fingers. “Sarah.” He bent to look her firmly in the eye. “Pay the fuck attention to
other people
, too. How many times do I have to tell you?
Fuck.
”
He grabbed the gold dust and set it in her station, pushing her back to it without giving her time to react.

There was never time to react in the kitchens at this hour, with a banquet of five hundred and the full restaurant service. The intern wasn’t even supposed to
be
here at this hour, but Sarah had no other way to prove her worth than working doubles just like the real chefs.

Patrick’s voice rose, dominating the seeming chaos. “And if I catch anyone, ever again, carrying hot caramel at someone else’s face level, you are fucking fired.”

All the white-clad men in the kitchen glanced from him to Sarah, without ever breaking the rhythm of their work.

“Sarah hits here.” Patrick chopped his hand into his own chest, and Sarah’s face flamed. Yes, her presence and her presence alone required them to change the habits acquired in years of intense work. She was the only woman on the team, the small, incompetent intern who didn’t know how to keep out of the way of a hot pot of caramel, even after being warned, even after being physically moved out of its way. “Your pots need to go no higher than here.” Patrick’s hand at his waist.
Damn you, Patrick, I’m not
that
small.
“Is that clear?”

He touched her shoulder briefly – quick, automatic reassurance, so the intern wouldn’t have hysterics. And then he was back at work.

Well, he had never stopped working, had he? Making sure the puppy survived was part of his job. Sarah focused as hard as she could on her gold dust ashes, struggling between humiliation and a crawling bone-deep awareness of her own skin. Because that was how deep it would have burned, that caramel pouring over her face. Oh, God.

He just saved me. Again.

Night after night, day after day, hour after hour, he saves me.

From myself.

He could pick up her whole self, pat it absently on the shoulder, tuck it up in his pocket warm and safe, and never even notice.

I hate you.
I hate you.

I hate you.

It was hours before Sarah could escape into the corridor that connected the kitchens to other parts of the hotel’s innards. The instant service ended, she sank against the wall outside the kitchens, breathing in and out, grateful to still have a face. Such a stupid second of inattention. And there were seconds like that all the time in the kitchens: three thousand six hundred an hour.

Jesus. What had she been
thinking
to leave her engineering career for this? What kind of fairytale had she imagined herself in? Not this one. How could she have been so
stupid
as to follow Patrick here, sun-dazed, instead of finding an internship in some small, mid-level shop, the kind of thing she might be able to actually
handle
?

He was probably regretting the offer now, wasn’t he? The whole kitchen probably was. Damn him.

“Are you all right, Sarah?” A shift of movement in the corridor, and Patrick rested a hand on the wall above her, leaning in. She wanted to bury herself in that shelter. He wouldn’t mind. He’d probably handled teary interns with calm patience a hundred times before. Joked them out of it. Nudged a chin or squeezed a shoulder, with a little
buck up you’ll be all right now
wink.

“Yes.” She turned her face away.
Thirty-six more days. I can’t give up on it because it’s hard. It was what I
wanted
. What I thought would make me feel right.

Patrick’s sigh ran over her hair, and she opened her eyes to see him gazing down at her. “Sarah. I made such a terrible mistake when I recommended you for this job.”

He might as well have dashed a whole bucket of liquid nitrogen straight into her face. She twisted away from him and into the door of the women’s bathroom faster than even he could react, frozen right down to the crackling, rigid roots of her hair. If she brushed herself wrong, they would all break.

She went into a stall and sat on the toilet as the only place in this whole damn hotel where she could sit. Just sit. Alone. Forearms braced on her knees, staring at her hands.

They were such slim, pretty hands, or they had been. Burns here and there would now leave scars forever. The palms had grown callused as a farmer’s. Her eyes closed, but she couldn’t shut out the sight of broken, jagged hands, closing so gently over hers. Her mother’s hands.
That’s not right, Sarah. Like this.
At three, as Sarah tried to copy the letters of the alphabet exactly the way they were printed in her books. Her Korean mother, struggling to correct her own illiteracy, had had such faith that with enough discipline and effort, her daughters could get those American letters perfect. Be perfect.

However hungry Sarah grew now, as she worked so hard in these kitchens and failed to eat, however exhausted she grew, months of exhaustion, however much it hurt when she burned herself or cut herself, her mother had fought through far worse.

She stretched her slender, pretty, never-broken hands.
I’ll get this right for you, Mama. I’ll make everything so pretty. Turn even hunger into this gossamer breath of beauty, an excuse to sink into a fairytale.

You’ll see.

Her mother’s broken hands covering her mouth in panic as Sarah told her she had quit engineering to go back to Paris and become a pastry chef. She could still hear Ji-Na Lin’s whisper of a wail:
But you had turned out
right
!

Mama, don’t worry. It will be so pretty. You’ll see.

I promise you I’m not going to fail.

She couldn’t even look herself in the mirror when she made that promise anymore. She was so tired of breaking that promise every damn day.

How had Patrick Chevalier managed to waltz into her life and catch her, just with a wink and a glint of light on his hair, in a dream that was so much too big for her?

Chapter 5

Tucked just far enough off the Champs that the kitchen team could afford to buy more than one beer there, the Australian-themed bar featured heavy, dark wood and pseudo-Aboriginal art. Sarah always felt as if she could get lost in it – slight and dark and quiet, so that if she made the mistake of passing out in exhaustion on the table, her colleagues would stroll out and never even realize they had left her behind. Sometimes she wanted that – just to curl up in a booth, let a beer relax her tension and let the day slide off her and never wake until morning.

Stepping into the Leucé kitchens that first day of her internship and realizing she was the only woman there had been a shock to her. Her engineering studies had certainly gotten her used to being surrounded by a majority of men, but – to
this
extent? What had happened to all the starry-eyed women in her Culinaire program, women who came from all over the world, just like her, because they dreamed of
Paris
and
pastry
and being the best? Where had the women from the previous years in those programs
gone
? Nowhere? Back home?

So she’d started joining the team in the bar at one in the morning because she wasn’t an idiot: no way did she want these rough, intense, adrenaline-charged guys with their tastes for crude sex jokes hanging out drinking beer and talking about her behind her back.

At first it had been ghastly to force herself to go with them instead of collapse in exhaustion on the Métro and let it carry her home. But then she had gotten used to it, to the way they all unwound, the way the tension slid off all of them and the day got processed. Insults got traded over something that had gone wrong, dissolving it into a joke, another kitchen disaster survived, that bound them together instead of drove them apart.

“Fuck, Sarah, can’t you grow taller?” Hervé said now. “Way to get me fired.”