The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (15 page)

Patrick fought so hard not to fold his arms over his chest defensively that his fingers hurt from the pressure as they dug into the edge of the desk behind him. “How many years have we been working together, Luc? And you still can’t trust me?”

Luc looked frazzled, not surprisingly. After all, he
should
be able to trust his
second
after twelve years working together plus half raising Patrick from a screwed-up teenager to an adult who was…still kind of screwed up, apparently. “You’re saying I can?” Luc searched Patrick’s face.

Be helpful if Luc was a little less smart. Still, Patrick hadn’t been manipulating him for twelve years for nothing. “Make up your own mind. You either trust me or you don’t.” He turned his head away, giving it a subtly proud, wounded angle. Not so hard, really. It
did
wound him, damn it. That Luc didn’t trust him. That
Sarah
didn’t trust him. That she was over there wanting to be
professional
.

Luc’s eyes narrowed. “Patrick–”

Shit. Of course, the trouble with having manipulated a man since both of you were teenagers was that, sometimes, he started getting wise to you. Patrick checked his watch. “
Merde
, I’m going to be late for that workshop at LeNôtre. If you see Summer, give her a kiss from me, okay?”

He blew Luc one and breezed out. Walking right by Sarah without touching her. Without winking at her. Without even grazing one finger over the back of her hand to say,
Hey, see you later?

His whole body itched until he felt ready to claw through layers of skin to the heart underneath.
Bordel de merde.
Sleeping with her was supposed to
fix
that.

***

Sarah drew a breath of relief when Patrick left to give a workshop over at LeNôtre. And then it occurred to her how many star-struck women would be in that workshop, hanging on every word he said, thinking he looked so
cute.
Her time as an intern was coming to an end soon. Maybe it was time for him to pick up his next one.

In her hand, another sugar slipper shattered. Damn it.

Chef Leroi stopped right beside her, and she froze, caught with the glittering, sweet fragments of her failure on her palm. “Sarah. Would you mind seeing me in my office?”

Oh, God, Patrick had told him. Had she thought he would choose
her
over Luc? The two men were tight as only a chef and his
second
could be
.
When they had been in the glass-walled office earlier, all those glances Chef Leroi kept throwing her way had probably been in reaction to Patrick’s amused comments about how she was just as hopeless in the sack as in the kitchen.

Oh,
God.

Her head chef turned inside his office, leaned back against his desk, and was silent for a moment, studying her. She felt crushed already. Too much perfection, too intensely focused on her. And, despite everything, all she could think about was how much she wanted Patrick. Just a wink of humor to save her, to tell her it was all okay. How was she going to get through the rest of this internship without him now?

“How are you handling Patrick?” Chef Leroi asked.

She nearly jumped out of her skin.

“You’re not letting him get to you, are you?”

She stared at him, feeling as if he had just walked in on her naked in the shower and doing something kinky to herself.
Luc Leroi
, the impervious, the imperturbable, the ever-perfect, and her boss
.
It made everything inside her squirm.

“He’s like that with everyone,” Chef Leroi said ruefully. “Even me.”

Her hands curled slowly into fists at her thighs as everything squirmy inside her congealed into ickiness and sank. “I don’t take him seriously,” she said coolly. “Who would?”

One of Chef Leroi’s black eyebrows went up, and she had to hide a flinch. She hated it when he looked at her like that, her head chef’s eyes cooling a little, her value visibly reducing. “I would,” he said, in the even tones that made it clear that what
he
did should set the standard for the whole rest of the world. “When he should be taken seriously. But that way he pretends to flirt with everyone…I don’t know how that might feel, if you are working under him.”

Miserable. Her old hatred of Patrick stirred. “He doesn’t mean any harm.” She shrugged. “It’s just the way he is. He would stop if I asked him to.”

Now both Luc’s eyebrows went up. “No, he would not,” he said, a little amused, but not in a way she liked; amused as if she had just said something stupid.

Sarah’s brow creased. She rather thought he might, actually. So why hadn’t she asked him to? “He’s just amusing himself. He doesn’t go after things that seriously.”

Luc gazed at her a moment. “He’s got an amazingly refined skill for getting people to believe that, at least. And yet, if I recall, you watched his MOF trials at Culinaire?”

Yes. His glorious, golden MOF trials, the way he had made them look so enticingly easy.

“The trials for which people train their whole careers, with more intensity than if they were training for the Olympics? And at which most chefs kill themselves trying to succeed, and still fail?”

Her eyebrows drew together. She stared at him for a moment.

He allowed those perfect black eyebrows to wait for some gleam of intelligence in her brain, faintly raised, not much hope. “You thought he was just amusing himself at those trials, is that it?”

Well…it had
looked
that way.

Chef Leroi gave a slight shake to his head, his eyebrows settling back down as that brief hope in any other human being’s intelligence went out.

Sarah narrowed her eyes just a little. She had gone to
Caltech
, damn it. What was she not figuring out?

“So you don’t have any trouble working with him?” Luc Leroi asked finally.

God, yes. “Of course not.”

“You’re sure? You want me to ask around, find some other chef who can take over your internship?”

Her heart began to beat sick and thick in her chest. “Are you trying to get rid of me? I know I’m not doing–” She stopped, wanting to beg
I’m trying my best
, but no one here cared about trying. Only about doing.

“You’re doing well,” Luc said unexpectedly.

Her gaze jerked to his, the statement so completely out of character her whole world must be going insane. He gave his shoulders a minute movement, his lips twisting wryly. “Tell Patrick I said so.”

What?

“But if you need to get away from here, well, you won’t be the first person.”

Sickness rose up until it was all she could do to hold it in. Not the first, not the last. How many interns had done exactly the same stupid thing she had done, last night?

“The restaurant business is hard on people,” Chef Leroi said, and her sickness sloshed, confused. Hadn’t he meant she wouldn’t be the first intern to fall for Patrick? The first intern they had to shift gently on after Patrick had carelessly hooked up with her? “A lot of would-be chefs end up preferring shops, something smaller.”

She checked Chef Leroi’s face for that disdain the guys had shown in the bar, toward those who chose shops instead of restaurants, but of course that forged-in-chaos face of his stayed perfectly neutral.

“Where are you going next?” he asked. “You’ve only got a little over a month left. Are you staying in Paris or going back to California?”

For some reason, her stomach gripped her again at that decision, as if two paths still lay before her and one of them headed toward a drastic plunge. “My family is in California.”

Chef Leroi grimaced oddly and stared down at his right hand for a long moment. But he finally said, “I know some people in California. Let me know if you want me to call anyone.”

“What would you tell them, about why you sent me?” she mumbled, shamed. “That I wasn’t up to your kitchens so you’re sending me on?”

Again that black eyebrow rose, just a tad. “I would tell them that you were one of the best interns I had had in some time, but that my
second
had a desperate crush on you, and I thought the situation could get awkward.”

Sarah stared at him. She couldn’t even figure out how to wrap her mind around what he had just said.

“If I had to say anything.” Luc shrugged. “As I said, most people find restaurant pastry kitchens too intense and prefer to shift to shops. It’s an easier life. Interns from my kitchens quite commonly seek work elsewhere afterward. And get it. Everyone knows what it means to come out of my kitchens.”

She was one of the best?

A desperate crush?

Which one of those was he inventing to make her life easier?

But – she could very well credit Patrick with inventing things to make her life easier. He did it all the time, pretended she was cute, winked at her, poured that humor and charm out around him so generously to get everyone through the day.

But Luc Leroi didn’t make people’s lives easier. Ever. Every single insanely intricate, gorgeous idea that popped into his head could have been conceived in the pure purpose of challenging people still further beyond what anyone could possibly be capable of.

This entire conversation he was having with her, about whether she should work here because of a crush one of her supervisors had on her, left him wide open for a sexual harassment suit, even in France.

So what was going on that she was missing?

***

Patrick’s workshop kept him out through the end of her official shift. She wanted to stay on to help with the night’s big event and prove that
nothing had changed
, but Chef Leroi was adamant about sending her home.

She caught the Métro for once, hoping its rush-hour bustle would crowd everything out of her brain. But her brain kept wanting to come back to things, pick them apart.

A crush.

You’re so-so-so-so pretty.

Professional. With you.

You thought he was just amusing himself, is that it?

In her apartment, she went through her evening rituals – peppermint tea, shower, fixing her nails, all those little things that built this space back up around her, making this time and this place her refuge. But when she climbed into bed, at only six in the evening, the first thing she saw was his T-shirt, forgotten half under her pillow. She picked it up and stared at it. Had he worked all day naked under his chef’s gear? Or, knowing Patrick, he probably kept a stack of fresh T-shirts in his locker, for all the mornings he rolled straight out of some woman’s bed to come in to work, leaving stray items of clothing behind.

Her fingers curled tight into the knit. And then, instead of throwing it away from her, she lifted it to her face despite herself and breathed in his scent. And then she flopped onto her bed, T-shirt in one hand, and went to sleep, at six in the evening.

She slept straight through until six in the morning. Twelve hours. No stress. No tension. Her hands didn’t even hurt. In fact, when she woke, she felt incredibly good.

Except about the fact that her face was snuggled into Patrick’s T-shirt.

That, admittedly, was crappy.

She buried her face in her pillow, shoving his shirt under it, and encountered a little foil packet. Oh, God.

She jumped up to throw it in the trash can under her tiny kitchenette stove and checked at the sight of the three other ripped-open foil packets lying on top of the trash.

One of the packets had been wasted, she reminded her flushing self. He had actually only used two of them, because…well, you didn’t need a fresh condom for every
female
orgasm. Why couldn’t she have been at least half as good at him as he had been at her?

Still, even through a writhing need to hide her face – and
not
in his T-shirt – a tiny thing ticked in her brain, an awareness of an oddity. Patrick had just been taking advantage of a convenient confluence of events to get thoroughly laid, right? And doing an extra-good job of it because Patrick didn’t really do a
bad
job at anything. It had probably seemed a pretty average job of it, to him.

But…she supposed it might be Basic Optimism 101 for Guys to always stuff a condom in your pocket when you got dressed every morning. It was possible. God knew, with Patrick, it was probably insane pessimism
not
to. But…several? He always stuffed
four
condoms in his back pocket just in case? Didn’t that get…bulky?

It didn’t make sense. It made her feel as if she had strayed into the labyrinth of somebody else’s mind.

As a pathetic self-defense against this second, brutal day after, she put on her sexiest underwear and made her eyes and lips up carefully, and fixed her hair and even put on her dangly pearl earrings, the ones she had given herself as a prize when she got her first engineering job. All those things the chef’s jacket would overwhelm with its giant whiteness as soon as she got into the kitchens, so that she just became a marshmallow again.

Then she headed out into the foggy morning, a pinch already tightening between her eyebrows, still wondering about those condoms. And that
desperate crush.
And the expression on Patrick’s face when she said she wanted him to act like they were colleagues.

Chapter 14

Patrick lounged outside Sarah’s apartment building, so early in the morning it was still dark, his stomach knotted. The fog came down and settled cold fingers around his hair, wrapping its heaviness around the streetlamps that shone stubbornly through it. He hadn’t seen her since lunch the day before, when she hadn’t eaten a thing he put on her tray.

When he got back after his workshop, he had found her gone, and by the time Patrick himself got off, it was well after midnight, and what kind of man sent a text at one in the morning checking to see if
the intern who worked under him
might be awake and willing to let him in?

She didn’t want anyone to know. He should respect that. He hadn’t respected much of anything else.

The door opened and he turned, his face lighting before he could stop it. She had twisted that jet-black hair of hers up on the back of her head, in a beautifully perfect chignon that made her look so small and elegant, exposing the graceful line of her throat, drawing attention to the tilt of her dark brown eyes, the serious, full mouth. She had lipstick on, something glossy that added a shimmer of red. And there was some pale gleaming stuff over her eyelids.