The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) Read online

  She slipped her hand in between the panels of his jacket, which had been left open so she could always slip in, and rested her hand over his heart. Thud, thud, thudding, too hard. She spread her fingers as best she could and pressed them firmly.

  He took a deep breath and managed half a shaky laugh. “You know those cultures where you can’t compliment a baby, because they think it will attract demons and bring harm?”

  It was a common Korean belief, to which her mother subscribed with intense paranoia. Sarah didn’t interrupt him to tell him.

  “If someone in one of those cultures can’t say – certain things, it’s not…it’s not because they don’t care enough about the baby. It’s the opposite. You know?”

  Her eyes stung, shocking her. That was twice in one day now, and she never cried.

  “It’s just – Sarah, I know I should say it. I know I’m being ridiculous. But it feels like I’m tying you to a funeral pyre and setting it on fire when I even try.”

  And under her hand, his heartbeat was, indeed, going crazy. She rubbed his chest with the heel of her palm, trying to soothe it.

  “It’s all right, you know,” she said softly. “I just don’t understand how you can, ah…think I’m so pretty…when I could be so much better, if only I worked harder. When I should be perfect for you. So sometimes…sometimes…it means a lot to me when you try to show it.”

  His lips curved, wry and tender. He lowered his head to rest it against hers.

  “It helps me believe in you,” she whispered, her hand still caressing over his chest where his heartbeat thudded so hard.

  He said nothing for a long time, just holding her.

  “You didn’t just change your mind about becoming an engineer, did you?” she asked, low. “It wasn’t like a kid who sometimes wanted to be an actor, sometimes a firefighter, sometimes the garbage collector. Something happened.”

  His body stiffened. “What did Luc tell you?”

  “Nothing. Essentially he said I was being a coward, and I should put myself out there and ask.”

  “He said that?” Patrick muttered. “That bastard.” But there was no heat in the word. “He has nerve.”

  Evidently. But then, that was one thing these top chefs didn’t lack, wasn’t it? Nerve.

  Which made it all the more important to pay attention to where and why their nerve failed them.

  “So I’m asking,” Sarah said.

  Patrick’s fingers rubbed over her knee as she sat on his thigh, rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. “She was just like that,” he muttered finally.

  “A girlfriend?”

  “My mother,” he said and winced, deeply embarrassed. “I know. I know. I’m twenty-seven. It’s high time I got over my mother.”

  What an odd thought. She curved her hand over his rubbing one. “I’m pretty sure I’m never going to get over mine.” But that was okay. Her mother didn’t deserve to be “gotten over.”

  A funny movement of his shoulders, like it wanted to be a shrug but just couldn’t make it. “Your mother sounds incredible. I wish I could be half as strong as she is.”

  Oh, you sweetheart. Sarah pressed a kiss into his temple, on an upsurge of feeling. To honor her before you even meet her.

  When your own mother…?

  “She was just like what?” Sarah asked carefully. It felt invasive to be pushing into him this way. Like she was, well…stepping out of herself. Into him.

  A huff of a breath. Patrick’s index finger pressed into her kneecap. “First it was the favorite toy that she took away. If she wasn’t happy about something, you know, if I did something wrong. The favorite, of course.”

  Sarah’s worst punishments had been when she was asked to go to her room and think about ways to improve her behavior. Sarah and, most particularly, Danji had been spoiled in every way their mother had been capable of spoiling them. It wasn’t fear of punishment that had kept Sarah kicking her heels against the chair, sobbing over those letters she couldn’t get right. It was just that, in the same way her mother couldn’t deny them anything, it had never occurred to Sarah that she could deny her mother anything either. She was in college before she ever started to wonder about who she could be. She’d been looking at her engineering school’s brochures on its program in Paris, in fact.

  “Then it was your best friend, that you lost the right to see. Or the right to play on the soccer team, when you’d just made captain.”

  Her lips parted. Something sick coalesced suddenly in the pit of her stomach.

  “So you learned to hide which friend you liked the best – you talked about him as if he was a jerk. You learned to act like sports were a pain, that she dragged you to when you would rather watch TV.” You, he kept saying, as if he had to distance himself. “You learned to talk really passionately about certain TV shows, so that would be the first thing to go.”

  Sarah’s teeth sank into her lower lip. Her hands wrapped around his arm, holding it tightly.

  He looked up at her suddenly: “I got good at that, Sarah. But I never thought, I never thought–”

  She petted that strong arm, kneading it through the leather, up and down. The switch to I went too deep suddenly, grief already seizing her for how painful she knew the thing he was going to pull out would be.

  “Do you know how hard I worked to be ready for the engineering track?” he said suddenly, viciously. “I figured out when I was twelve that there weren’t many astronauts, that engineering was the way to get to the stars. And that you had to be the best to work on a Mars rover or some equivalent. That since Americans were the ones doing the Mars missions, I would probably need to get into our best school, Polytéchnique, and then get another degree in the U.S., to make the right contacts.” His mouth twisted. “The Polytéchnique has that great exchange with Caltech, for example. My grades were so damn good. I was the head of all my classes. All on my own – no one helping me with homework at night, because my mother was too busy smoking something or with a boyfriend. For three fucking years, I worked five hours after school every damn night, or more if I needed to. Then she got mad at me because I was rude to one of her boyfriends when I was fifteen, and she yanked me out of the damn sciences program and put me into the pastry apprenticeship track. To punish me. Because she knew how much I wanted it. My life, Sarah. She took away my damn life. Whenever I see news about the Mars rovers, with their names like Opportunity and Spirit, I still – I still hate her so bad.”

  Her hand fisted slowly over his heartbeat. Her mother must know hate – a powerful, utter hatred of some people, although all she poured out onto her own daughters and her husband was an intensity of love. Sarah knew some people deserved every drop of hatred you could give them, but you still – gave it to them. Gave them that part of yourself and stained it black for them. And they sure as hell didn’t deserve that, the right to turn any piece of someone’s soul black. She wished she could wash the stain out, the way she had always wished her love would wash her mother clean. How sad for Patrick, one giant embrace of affection and warmth for all around him, to have that hate in him. That twisting of his ability to dream.

  “And you know what pisses me off even worse?” Patrick said into her hair. “That she still might manage to screw me out of what I want, when she’s not even here. Like, now I’ll let her.”

  “You’re not letting her,” Sarah said quietly and firmly. “Patrick – she doesn’t have that much power over me.”

  He lifted his head as she spoke, and then, at the last word, laughed, quick and involuntary. “I was hoping you were going to say she didn’t have that much power over me.”

  “When someone you loved when you were tiny fits you to their mold, it can be hard to break out of it,” Sarah said softly. Her hands flexed.

  Patrick rubbed her knuckles again. “You did.” And then he amended, “Well…okay, maybe you didn’t. But you’re still going after your own dream with everything in you. I love that, the way you just lock your fist around it and won’t let
anyone or anything wrest it away from you.”

  Sometimes she thought that her own dream was really, at heart, just to be her. That everything else was just a symbol of it.

  But, of course, to be her perfectly.

  “You just need to figure out what yours is,” she said.

  “I kind of think I have,” he said ruefully. That warmth that she always thought of as his special gift was back in his eyes, for her, heating her all the way through. That warmth and laughter he had developed to deal with the world, when he could have chosen so many other things. Bitterness. Hatred.

  “Really? What is it?” she asked curiously, despite herself. She knew he wanted to keep his dream hidden, but – “To open up your own restaurant? To go to Mars still?”

  His eyes widened. He stared dumbfounded a moment, and then dropped his forehead back on top of her head with slightly too much of a thunk. “You know, for someone who seems to see right through me, you’re not as perceptive as you could be. You must be your own blind spot.”

  What did that mean? “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.” Maybe one day he would be able to.

  And she thought again of how soon her internship was ending. How much longer did one day have?

  What was she going to do? What risk was she going to take?

  Or was she not going to take any risks? Just stay inside herself and hope the risks would be taken for her?

  “I might,” he said. “That’s the thing, Sarah. I just might. It might be one of those dreams you can’t get, unless you lay it all out there.”

  Chapter 31

  They had reached the Pont Neuf, as they followed the Seine’s lower quay toward Patrick’s apartment, when Sarah’s brain pointed out that he still didn’t make sense. Jesus. He was worse than being on a misdirected research project, trying to process unwieldy data around the wrong question, realizing it still didn’t add up, she was still missing something. Or maybe so was he. Willfully.

  Because – Meilleur Ouvrier de France. Maybe a man could tell himself he was doing it for his chef and maybe in many ways he really was – after all, their whole career choice was focused on pleasing others. But the Meilleur Ouvrier de France was the ultimate achievement of their career. It took everything out of a person, and most people failed. You didn’t get that good unless it really, really mattered. But she could see now why Patrick would have to pretend to himself that it didn’t.

  Now how to approach this? For all the times he had nurtured her in the kitchen, could she help him reach his dreams, while keeping them safe, too?

  “How did you adjust?” she asked finally. “From engineering to doing so well in pâtisserie?”

  “Oh, I didn’t.” A light voice, amused. Right. “When she forced me from the sciences track into the apprenticeship track, I went completely wild. I essentially broke any chance of the state allowing her power over me again – and ended up in the foster care system. And I had been at Bernard Durand’s for less than two months and was about to break that, too, when Luc stopped by to visit, because Bernard is always after him to go be a role model to his foster kids. I don’t really know what Luc saw in me. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like anybody right then. But I still remember him saying to Bernard, ‘He’s too old to fit in here. Let me take him up to Paris with me. We’ve got a spot for an apprentice I can get him, and he can stay with me.’ I didn’t trust him at all, but – well, he grew up in the streets, right? He understood things, like why I would be wary. So he just got me that apartment the size of a bed down the hall from him, so I’d have my own space and sense of control, and then he took me into the kitchens where he was sous-chef and said, ‘Here, see how much you can make of this opportunity. That’s what I did.’ And so…I did.”

  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.