The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) Read online

  “Sarabelle.” His voice went so sandy and low. He reached out as if her body was his to control, curled his hand around her ankle, and pulled her foot out from under her to his face.

  She toppled backward and sideways, not being that flexible, and he scooped the tea out of her hand before it spilled, just as easily as he had scooped so many things out of her hands just before she ruined them in the kitchens…and kissed her foot. Right under her instep, holding it against his mouth as if it was the palm of her hand. The prickle of his jaw shivered from the sole of her foot up her whole body, everywhere, it wouldn’t stop shivering through her, until her toes curled so hard and her nipples pricked so desperately that she thought she would go mad.

  “Sarabelle,” he said, his voice so sandy. “Sarabelle, your toes.” His thumb traced over the little rounded tips of perfectly manicured red toenails that she fixed again every few evenings, as one thing she could always get exactly right. “I love them.” That roughened voice leapt exultantly, as if he really did love them. “Can I have them?”

  “I don’t – I don’t–” She didn’t know what she didn’t. Her hands scrambled at the comforter as if it could give her some ballast, while Patrick Chevalier kissed her foot, held it to him as if it was precious, oh, God, oh, God. His thumb slipped under her toes now and ran along where they joined the ball of her foot, and she made a little gasping whimper, her body dissolving.

  “Sarah, they’re adorable,” he said, as if he was helpless, and he took her big toe between his teeth and bit it very gently.

  “Oh my God.” Her body arched. Her sex bloomed desperately. She scrambled for anything, any purchase.

  His gaze ran over her body, that one quick flicker of blue that saw everything, always, and he brushed the prickles of his jaw back over the sole of her foot, while ripples of pleasure ran back through her entire body from the sensation, like inexorable waves that would wash down her entire citadel of defenses. And then – oh, God, oh, God, that was his tongue, twirling hotly against that most sensitive skin at her instep.

  She had never, in all the fantasies she had fought not to have, imagined Patrick Chevalier kissing her foot. She had never imagined anyone kissing her foot. She had never even imagined anyone touching her foot. It was her foot. It wasn’t – it wasn’t–

  She was dizzy from the pleasure of it. From the arousal and the bliss and the complete confusion.

  “Sarah.” His teeth grazed over the inside of her ankle, and she twisted at the merciless, overwhelming pleasure of an erogenous zone she hadn’t even known existed. “Sarah.” The hand not holding her foot rubbed up her calf, strong and sure, heating through her jeans, releasing muscles, all kinds of muscles that didn’t know what to do with themselves when they weren’t tense.

  His hand paused to caress under her knee, making her flinch because it tickled, and he rubbed his jaw so very delicately against her foot as he smiled and let his hand ride up to her inner thigh. Where it didn’t tickle at all.

  She was spilled back on the bed, hands clenching in the comforter in the vainest effort to find purchase, as if that would help her against a tsunami that had swept up on her right here in the middle of landlocked Paris. He had sat up at some point during his sweeping takeover of her foot and leg, and he looked down at her sprawled body, for a moment that blue of his eyes all she could see in the room. Their color was so vivid, the hungry triumph so bright.

  “Sarah,” he breathed into her foot, and she shivered everywhere. “I’ve had so many fantasies about the first time, my brain is clogged. I can’t decide which one to actually do.”

  That just split her own brain into little parts of atoms, as if she’d been pulled straight into the sun’s core. She couldn’t process the thought of him running through so many fantasies about her that his mind got over-packed with them.

  “Which one would you like best?” That sand-in-the-sun voice of his went so low, running its warm texture all over her body. “This one?” She found herself on her stomach, not flipped there, somehow it just…happened. Gentle and controlled. A second’s pause, when her back and bottom just seemed to burn up from an imagined gaze alone, and then his hand curved over her bottom, caressing it thoroughly, one luxuriating claim of possession, before his fingers slid under the hem of her shirt and stroked up her spine.

  Oh, that felt so good, so good, the callused hand on her spine, her tense, tense back. She arched out of the bed into it.

  “Mmm.” The rough grain of his approval, all over her skin. His hand curved over her bottom again, thoroughly, and he turned her back over, cradling her to his hips as he brought himself against her. “Or this one?” he murmured, so low, rising over her.

  She stared up at him, her eyes enormous, her mouth so hungry.

  “Or this one?” Now he had them on their sides, his hand running over her ribs, the intimacy of his eyes, only inches from hers, unbearable.

  “Patrick–” She had to tell him that this wasn’t something she could handle, that she would get hurt. Oh, but then he might stop. He was a nice guy. So many times he had swooped in to save her, so easily, without even paying attention. The casual, gallant Galahad to her clumsy peasant.

  “Merde, qu’est-ce que tu es jolie,” he said, and kissed her. How pretty you are. “So-so-so-so pretty,” he breathed hotly into her mouth, and a hand rubbed hard up her back to the clasp in her hair, releasing it to spill over their faces. “Oh, God.” He stroked it away from their mouths and held her with it, his hand fisting locks of it as he kissed her some more.

  She was completely overwhelmed. She couldn’t do anything but open her mouth and let it beg for him, her body one rushing collapse. Her hips pressed hard against his, involuntarily, and good God, but he was aroused. He was really aroused, his own hips driving back into hers in response, and one of his hands sliding down to grip her butt and press her harder against him.

  Sometimes, back before she knew she had to hate him, she used to imagine kissing Patrick. For all the shy, carefully guarded dreams of it, in her bed at night, she had always thought that if she ever got a chance in real life, it would be like her dreams of beautiful desserts: so perfect in her head and so awkwardly mangled by her when she tried to make them come true.

  And instead it was so stunningly, starvingly beautiful, his mouth so hungry and so hot, and it didn’t even matter if her mouth didn’t know the perfect thing to do, it all just melded into something so fine. His mouth was still bruised from that fight over another woman. It must hurt. And yet he moved it on hers, in hers, with hers, as if he couldn’t feel a thing but pleasure.

  “Or there’s this one.” He rolled onto his back, lifting her above him, and she jerked a little as her weight settled down onto his arousal. And bit her lip, purely panicked by the position. Oh, no, she couldn’t take charge of this. She couldn’t. It was like asking her to take charge of a sun storm. Or the kitchens in full swing for a banquet of a thousand. He could do it. She was lost.

  His eyes fixed on her pleated eyebrows, and he shivered voluptuously and threw an arm over his face. “Maybe – maybe not the first time,” he said, his voice strained.

  “I need a shower,” she said, distressed. “I can’t, I–” Not Patrick. Not her sweaty, kitchen-stinking body. She wanted to be pretty.

  Si, si, si, si jolie. Do you know you’re one of the prettiest women I’ve ever seen?

  “A shower.” He brought them to his feet suddenly, with that strength and agility he wielded so deceptively easily, his hands scooping under her butt to keep her thighs around his waist. “Of course you would want a shower. I bet you just love the hot water running over your body, don’t you?” He found the one door in her tiny apartment with no trouble, carrying her to the shower and reaching in to turn on the water. “After a long day? Before a long day? Both. Relaxing all your muscles.”

  How did he know she needed her muscles relaxed? How could he know her? He never even paid any attention to her…and yet he knew when she was hungry, when she
needed help, when her hands hurt, when all she wanted was to be the type of person who could break down and cry.

  “Sweetheart, I promise you.” His mouth swept hot and urgent from her lips down over the lobe of her ear to bury in her throat, and she bowed her head back to him, helpless, helpless. She had never, in all her fantasies, been able to imagine exactly what that prickle of his jaw against her throat would actually feel like. It reduced her to nothing but sensation. It turned her into everything his. “By the time I’m done with you, you’re not going to feel a bone left in your body.” Pushing her T-shirt out of the way, he licked the jut of her collarbone, down to the hollow of her throat, where his tongue curled up like a cat to play.

  She gave a starving little whimper. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t see. A tearing sound, and air flowed against her skin.

  “I’ll buy you another,” he promised against her throat, following her collarbone to the other shoulder. Good God, he had just ripped her shirt in half.

  Her brain tumbled in a tumult, between nonchalant, always-smiling surfer Patrick and – this, those torn panels being slid off her shoulders, his fast, clever hands at the catch of her bra. Oh, the release of her breasts after the long day, his hands following the line left by her bra on her skin from her spine around to cup her breasts. They disappeared completely under his palms.

  “Sarah.” He pulled her up higher between the wall and him, lifting his head to study her breasts. “Sarah.” His gaze swept up to her face, his eyes so hot she flushed everywhere from them. “Sarabelle.” He thrust a hand under the shower, indifferent to how it soaked his sleeve, and adjusted the temperature. “Does that feel good on you, bébé?” He drew her arm off his body and held it under the water.

  She shivered all over at the warm water on her skin.

  “Ah, oui, you like the feel of that, don’t you?” he breathed hotly, his hands at her jeans, pushing them off her. “God, Sarah.” One callused hand rubbed over the narrow pink lace and cupped her, and she whimpered again and tried to climb up the wall. “I’ll never be able to work again.”

  She wore bits of string and lace for panties because…it was the only sexy thing she could put on her body, around him. Because when she got dressed in the morning, she thought of him, she thought how much she hated him and how much she would hate for him to ever see some glimpse of a panty that was plain and boring. She thought of him, and she couldn’t stand for that secret garment not to be sexy.

  His hand cupped her so surely. It felt like coming home. As if she could relax herself completely into his hold. You can’t, Sarah, you can’t. You’ve fallen for that belief so many times before with him. You’ll regret this. You’ll really, really regret this.

  But his hand rubbed with a kind of gentle authority against her sex through her panties, and she flowered to him with such a desperate hunger it was almost comforting.

  “Help me out just a little?” he murmured, catching one of her hands and bringing it to the buttons at his throat. “My hands are busy.”

  She drew a quick breath. Somehow, that was suddenly enormous, the act of undoing his buttons. But he couldn’t possibly know how enormous it was to her. Could he? It would be like she was saying yes. Asking for him. Not just…overwhelmed.

  He brushed her fingers back and forth over his top button, his other hand rubbing slow and lazy against her panties. His eyes glittered, and she had a sudden flashing conviction of incredible tension in him, a conviction that could not possibly be true. It was Patrick, after all.

  Patrick, whom she always wanted to impress. All those times he had intervened to guide her, to make sure she got something exactly right. She knew how to undo a button. She knew how to do that much at least.

  She slipped the button free.

  A hard breath moved through his chest. But he wasn’t looking into her face. His lashes were lowered over his eyes, focused on his hand so thoroughly, reassuringly, maddeningly covering her sex.

  She slipped the next button free.

  “You sweetheart,” he breathed, and ripped his shirt and the T-shirt under it over his head in one gesture, dropping them on the floor.

  Oh.

  Oh.

  Oh.

  He was so beautiful. The broad shoulders and the lean waist, and all that relentlessly defined muscle from his shoulders until his jeans stopped the view, the definition of a man who worked too hard, who didn’t know how to stop moving. How many days had he winked at her as they finished up an insanely demanding lunch service that left Sarah dripping and exhausted – and then gone off to work out in the hotel gym?

  He used all those beautiful muscles to pick her up and step with her under the shower, still wearing his jeans.

  Oh. The hot water hitting the nape of her neck took all the tension out of it, and her head sank forward against his chest. Oh. That was…she had never felt anything so sweet in her life as that moment, the water running down her neck and back, while she was held against a warm, hard body.

  “Sarah,” he whispered, one hand rising to rub the water over her nape. “Why don’t you let me show you a little trick, for just how easy this can be?”

  Easy. That was hilariously cruel. This wasn’t easy for her. But of course she was easy for him. “You’ve always got a trick,” she said despairingly. Something to make it look easy, while she strove and strove and strove and failed.

  “You’ll like this one,” he murmured. “It’s so, so easy, Sarah.” He angled her body until her shoulders were back against the wall of the shower but her pelvis was still held to his by one hard hand, the water spilling now over her breasts, her belly, sliding down to pool at their joined hips. “Close your eyes.”

  The shower drove her lashes down, enforcing his command. His free hand blurred so lightly with the water that almost at first she didn’t realize he was following drops over her breasts, her nipples, down her belly. Almost she couldn’t tell…and yet she could. The graze of texture and warmth that was not water. The way his fingers left burning trails. The way she arched to it, while his hand slipped down into the tiny pool collecting between his jeans and her hips and found her wet panties.

  “There you go, chérie,” he murmured, as his fingers played subtle and quiet against her panties, their wet cotton and lace texture oddly in keeping with that sand-roughened voice of his. “There you go. It’s as easy as this.”

  She wasn’t a person who could relax like that, who could let go like that. And yet…something had shattered with that kiss of her foot. Maybe earlier than that, something had melted with that massage of her hands. She was so used to him being in authority over her. She was so used to him showing her the best way with a flash of casual gallantry. So used to letting her muscles relax so that he could guide her arm in the gesture she needed to make.

  And the water – the warm water she always used to try to wind down. To console herself for a hard day.

  And his hand. His hand rubbing the subtly raw feel of the wet cotton against her sex. Against the nub of her sex. Against something deeper in her that should be out of reach of touch, something that seemed to expand and expand until it was this great, golden bubble that had to burst because she could not bear it.

  “You have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?” Patrick said. “How many times I could make you come like this, just so I could watch you.”

  Her lashes rose, and the water caught in them, stinging her eyes as she tried to stare at him through the drops. He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t look as if he was waiting to catch his next wave. His face was severe, stark, his concentration so intense it almost hurt, as if she might be wrenched away from him if he didn’t look at her hard enough. And as if that mattered.

  “Close your eyes, Sarah.” His hand insisted, coaxing and thorough. She tried not to close them, even with the stinging of the shower, because she had never seen that expression on Patrick’s face before. But his thumb moved, and her lashes shivered downward as everything in her focused on that one spot, as th
e golden bubble grew and grew. “Trust me. You’ll want to have your eyes closed for this.”

  “Patrick.” Her head arched back, and her hips lifted. Her voice was so breathy, so foreign. “You can’t–”

  “That’s my least favorite word.” He walked his fingers up and down her sex, through the panties, as if he was taking them for a little stroll, only to have his thumb come back and circle three times, finding its spot again. Curling up. There to stay. “Especially in conjunction with you.”

  She drew a shuddering breath as his thumb settled into the steadiest, sweetest rhythm, still gently, courteously veiled by the panties and that gossamer shield they provided against complete invasion.

  “You know, Sarah,” Patrick mentioned softly, “I know how quiet you are. I know how you like to focus and not say a word. You can do that right now. You can be as quiet as you feel. You can…focus.”

  “Patrick,” she whispered, her hips twisting against his hand. It felt so good. It felt much too good. The gold was unbearable. She could not stand it if this bubble did not burst. Oh, but don’t let it burst – too soon…

  “Yeess.” His thumb deepened the pressure the barest delicate fraction. “You can focus on that, if you want. My name.”

  “Pa–” Her voice broke off as that gold bubble started to shimmer.

  “Yes, I like it.” His hand rubbed the whole length of her sex while his thumb never stopped moving. “Go with that, bébé. Go with it.”

  The bubble was coming apart.

  “Go with it. Go…go…go, Sarah, go–”

  She broke in a gentle, incredible cascade of pleasure, as if that bubble had been filled with golden liquid that washed all over her, while she rose and rose with it until she sobbed and tried to clutch at his chest, her nails pressing too hard. It was so gentle. It was so utterly complete. She wanted to stay in it forever, and already it was almost over.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Sarah. Let go.”

  Her hands slid off him, falling limply, and then the orgasm that she had thought was already finished broke again, growing bigger still, the waves of it coming over and over as he held her in his hand, as he rocked her with the heel of his palm.