The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) Read online

  “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.

  The sugar slipper shattered in Sarah’s hand. She looked down at the ruined fragments, not even understanding when she’d tightened her hand.

  “Sarah,” came Luc’s cool voice. “Maybe you should work on the grapefruit for a while.”

  Only the lowest job in the kitchen short of mopping floors. Not that anyone cared how badly an intern’s heat-blistered hands might sting with all that acid. No one should. No chef worth anything let a little pain in his hands stop him.

  Sarah stripped her gloves off, her throat clogging. There, the tip of one had melted through and she hadn’t even noticed. She had probably left a stupid fingerprint on the stupid slipper, which would have made Luc kick her off the task even if she hadn’t shattered hers. Her throat clogged, but she would not cry over something so unimportant.

  “Patrick,” Luc said. “Why don’t you show her how?”

  Show her how to cut grapefruit? After nearly five months? Sarah’s jaw tightened, but Patrick’s eyes danced with delight, dimples sneaking into appearance as he tried to keep his lips straight. “I guess you’ll have to survive him without me,” he told Summer woefully, and then was joining Sarah completely on the opposite side of the kitchens, where the commis and lowly intern worked on these basic tasks.

  “How are your hands?” He grabbed them and flipped them over, touching the faint hint of a blister. A tiny grimace of that mobile aristocrat’s mouth of his, a little squeeze of her hands to buck her up. “You’ll be okay,” he told her firmly.

  She would. Yes, she would. These stupid, minor pains would not stop her.

  “Hey.” Patrick gave her hands a little shake. “He didn’t think about what a bastard he was being to stop your work on the slippers. It was just the first excuse he could think of to get me away from Summer.” His eyes danced again at that.

  Yes, Sarah was aware of that, of how she’d just been shattered by men who were using her as a cardboard prop. It took everything in her to fight that clogging in her throat.

  “I’ll get you back on the slippers after she’s gone,” Patrick said. “Right now, I don’t want to make him lose face in front of her by arguing with him, okay?” He dropped her hands and turned to catch the commis next to her before the boy ruined a whole batch of financier batter.

  Yes, of course. Summer mattered. What she thought about people mattered. Sarah gouged her knife into the grapefruit peel, and the fruit, too big really for her hands, slipped so that the knife stabbed right into the base of her thumb.

  The blood spattered everywhere, red drops all over the counter and her coat, and even in the financier batter, caught in passing. Oh, damn. And it hurt. Hurt hands always made the whole body respond to the agony.

  “Timothée, get some new financier batter going,” Luc said crisply, not pausing in his own work, even while beautiful Summer Corey drifted his direction. “And Sarah, bind that up, and get a glove on it. I need those grapefruit. Now.”

  A warm hand closed over hers and pulled her to the nearest sink, cold water washing out the acid. "There you go, sweetheart.” Patrick gave her one of those quick, lazy grins that yanked her heart out of her chest every time. As if he cared about her. Probably exactly what every dog in the park thought whenever he scratched it behind its floppy ears. “And don't you feel guilty. Women stab themselves all the time when I'm around. I shouldn't have smiled at you like that, I know. I just don't know my own strength.”

  Yeah. He really didn't. She clenched her hand around her knife. “I hate you.”

  He blinked. Those golden-brown eyebrows went up over gorgeous, suddenly intrigued blue eyes. “You do?” He shifted in on her, his whole body changing from the involuntary, constant brushing of each other to something focused on her, intent. The cleft in his chin was so close she could bite it. A warm hand moved on her right wrist and hand. "How much?" he asked softly.

  "Utterly.” She yanked her hands away, not caring about the blood on her chef's jacket, or the fact that she was alienating the second most important person in their kitchen.

  “Really.” Patrick's pupils dilated. For a second, the thought gasped through her body that he was going to press her back into the edge of the sink and kiss her.

  “Patrick," a cool, controlled voice said, and they both blinked. Patrick pulled away from her, glancing back at Luc, whose black eyes touched both of them briefly before he focused on what was really important – the desserts he was finishing and in whose service they all were. Or maybe what was really important to him was Summer, for whom he seemed to be performing.

  “Sorry,” Patrick murmured to Sarah, and set something in the sink. Then he was gone, lazy, casual, catching waves, and somehow six miracles of impossible perfection and beauty bloomed from under his hands in the next six seconds, slid through the pass to feed their avid guests.

  The knife she had been holding when she told him how much she hated him lay in the sink. He had removed it from her, so easily she hadn't even realized it. She had been stupid enough to think he was going to kiss her.

  Trust him to handle the risk of being stabbed with as much lazy aplomb as anything else.

  Trust him to never even realize how much someone else might get hurt in the process.

  He didn’t let anything get to him, did he? Or anyone.

  She hated him, because she couldn’t manage to do the same.

  Chapter 8

  Patrick lounged against the wall by the door leading out of the kitchens, his heart beating so hard he thought it was going to beat right out of his skin. Butterflies swarmed his stoma
ch until he wanted to rip their damn wings off. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, sinking into the nervousness, going for the calm in the center of the storm.

  The door opened, and he lifted his lashes and grinned. Immediately, adrenaline slammed him, his skin tightening until he felt he would burst out of it. All the energy from the nerves honed, focused on the kill.

  Don't show you want it. Never show how much you want it.

  Sarah. All bundled up in her winter coat and scarf, eyes hostile and then immediately cool and blank, shutting him out.

  But not for long. All his lethal, competitive hunting instinct homed in on that target.

  He shouldn’t do this. He knew he shouldn't. All her life and dreams were forced into her ambition to be a pastry chef, packed into it that same way Luc did with his work, as if it was the only way she knew to be her self, until her whole freaking world hung on it. And Patrick was one of the most powerful people in the kitchens. He shouldn't be harassing her. Putting her into a position. Nor should he be favoring her. Putting other people into a position of resentment at the injustice of seeing sexual attraction win over their hard work.

  Yet here he was.

  Shifting away from the wall, moving into her personal space, watching her eyes widen, her head tilt back, as they changed from co-workers to predator and prey.

  And all that predator that filled his just-sunning-here-on-the-rocks surface woke up and stretched and prepared itself to send out a long, lazy roar that would fix this particular zebra’s gaze on him with desperate attention.

  “So,” he murmured, and without seeming to move let himself fill her space still more, made her turn that intense focus of hers entirely on him. His whole body skittered with something tense and electric when she did. “Hate. That's such a strong word.”

  It made him hot all over, how strong it was. His skin felt itchy and tight.

  He had had no idea that he had gotten through that intense focus of hers enough to inspire hatred.