The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (38 page)

She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed very hard. “I love you so much,” she whispered. “I can’t tell you how much. It hurts how much.”

He took a breath as if to speak, got caught, and lifted her up so he could rest his head on hers. “I can’t believe how hard those words still are for me to say out loud,” he groaned. “After all that. But you know, don’t you, Sarah? You know I–” He kissed her forehead. “You know.”

“Patrick.” She hid her face in his throat. “I think it’s pretty obvious at this point.”

He settled her weight onto his thigh, curving his body around hers – turning the crowded observation deck and the whole sparkling vista of Paris into a space just for the two of them. “So what do you want to do, Sarah?”

She thought about it until she finally started to smile. “I don’t know. I used to know – I used to have only one idea of how to be me. It was the only way I’d ever tried, and it was important to me to stick to it. But now – I’m starting to feel that there are so many ways. And they could all be…right. Me. Whole.” She gave him a still-shy smile. “Maybe you’re my oyster. You make me – that
me
of me” – she thumped her chest, trying to explain – “feel safe enough to grow all shiny and glowing and…perfect.” Her eyes stung, and she dipped her head. “Without even trying. Just me.”

“I don’t know about trying,” he said. “I’ve always suspected you must try very hard to be you, no matter how easy you make it seem. I mean, how else can you do it so well?”

I love you.
So much that sometimes she could only say it with the tightening of her arms. Just like him.
Thank you.
“I guess I don’t really want to go back to engineering, but I can manage that for a couple of years if it helps you out–”

“I actually have enough saved up to put myself through school,” Patrick interrupted. “But Sarah, I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you offered that.”

So he’d been squirreling away money for a restaurant or college or whatever his dream was, all the time he was pretending to the world he didn’t have one.

“I do still want to open my own shop. But maybe – maybe before I do that, I’d like to actually get good at it. Train under, oh, I don’t know, somebody fantastic for a while longer.” She gave him a quick glance.

A flash of a delighted grin. “You’re already good, for the amount of experience you have. I keep telling you, Sarah. But yes, you do need more. If you want to be the best.”

He said that in the tones of a man who had never been anything less than the best in his entire working life, a man to whom being the best was just an integral part of who he was. If he ever ran off to Nepal, how long would it take him before he was climbing all the highest peaks in the Himalayas? Brushing snow off his shoulders as if it was nothing, laughing his way out of avalanches.

“And can you imagine living in the south of France?” she asked. Because, well, she came from California. Gentle winters and summers full of lavender sounded a lot more enticing than being buried in snow. And – Luc would be there. So Patrick’s heart would be whole, even if Sarah’s wasn’t entirely.

She was astonished when a tiny grimace flickered over his face. “I can,” he said, carefully. “But I think, as big a wrench as it will be, it’s really past time Luc and I quit being each other’s crutches.”

Again that surge of emotion, at what he had just revealed of both his love and his strength. She wrapped her arms around his waist more snugly. “And I don’t mean to harp on Hawaii, but you really were made to be a surfer, you know. And it’s a lot more accessible to my family. They probably need some incredible French pastry shop on Maui, don’t you think?”

“I have no idea what kind of pastry shops or restaurants Maui could support, and if we’re going to invest both our futures at once in that kind of dream, we’re going to do some proper research on our potential client base,” said the man who had just promised to run off to Nepal with her. “But that can be arranged.”

She smiled up at him. “Making sure that if I reach for my dream, my base won’t shatter under me?”

He stroked a thumb over one of her eyebrows without comment.

But of course she was right. He liked stretching her dreams as high and far as they could go, and then making them come true. It made her want to give him his own dreams with everything in her.

She drew a breath. “I guess I have lots of possibilities, too. I want to be me, I want space for my dreams. And I’m really not sure which of these options would be best for us. But I thought – well, for one thing, I’m only twenty-four. You’re only twenty-seven. We can
change
our choices, if they don’t work. And I do think I’ve grasped what the most important thing in all this is. No matter what, I can be me with you.”

Patrick’s eyes glowed such a vivid blue his entire insides might have turned luminescent. “Well,
merde
,” he said softly. “How long did you say it would take me to work out all those sexual fantasies on your body, Sarah? Over fifty years?” He took her arm. “I guess we have plenty of time to figure it out.”

And he led her back into the restaurant. Without –
aargh.
Again. Setting up all her romantic expectations
again.
How did he
do
that to her?

Chapter 35

At the table, he pressed a quick kiss onto her lips as he pulled out her chair. “I should go say
bon soir
to the chefs. Do you mind?”

She shook her head, of course, although it made her feel just a little wounded. She wasn’t good enough to meet the chefs? Not even as his girlfriend? But she reminded herself not to be an insecure idiot and waited politely, watching the other guests and the city below. That blue-velveted midnight view was incredible. She could curl up in it, fall asleep dreaming of it, let it float her gently down to earth and eventual morning like a drifting magic carpet.

“Miss me?” Patrick said, and she turned her head for another kiss. He’d been gone quite a while, probably resisting offers of employment. He had chocolate on his fingers, too.

“Sneaking a taste?”

He just shrugged and sat down. “I hope you don’t mind that I picked your dessert out for you, Sarah. This one made me think of you.” That surfer-aristocrat smile, his fingers playing idly with his fork as the dessert arrived.

It had a gleaming chocolate base, a
gâteau
coated with the perfect blend of chocolate and cocoa butter so that it arrived at the table gleaming and glossy. And rising from that were – hearts. A fantastical tower of hearts, some in chocolate, completely opaque, some of sugar reflecting her own face back like a mirror. They rose in Seussian madness, this crazy overload of hearts, so that no one could
ever
tell which was the real one. The waiter set the concoction very carefully in front of her, and then turned it, just a little. And there, inside the shield formed by two of the chocolate hearts, in a tiny gap which had opened just for her, lay an exquisite heart of blown sugar. A rose-streaked jewel of a heart, utterly transparent and fragile, and just the size to fit into her hand. Across the rose sugar-glass two words had been hand-painted in gold.

Je t’aime.

The impact was too much. She was never going to be able to breathe again. Her heart might not even be able to beat in her own body again, only in the palm of his hand.

“It, ah, turns out that Luc’s right, sometimes for a chef, what you make
is
the best way to put your heart out there,” Patrick said awkwardly.

He was flushing. Had he kicked her out of the kitchens so often this past week so he could perfect this? The man who “couldn’t stand that heart shit.” How many favors had he swapped with the pastry team here? Yesterday, when he chased her out to shop for shoes, he must have come here to prep the components. She’d gotten a garter belt as his present. He’d done
this.

He cleared his throat. “I thought the proposal kneeling on top of the Eiffel Tower seemed a little clichéd. I almost couldn’t resist a few minutes ago, but–” Those broad shoulders
shrugged
. Of course. As if what he was offering instead was just another lighthearted choice, six of one, half a dozen of another.

Tears welled up in her eyes.

Patrick rubbed the back of his neck. “I looked through a lot of poems I could have put on it, but in the end, I thought maybe just those two words would mean more to you than anything else.”

“Patrick.” The tears spilled over. “Patrick.” She dashed her hand across her eyes.

He caught her hands. “It’s all right, Sarah,” he said gently. “I don’t even know her, and yet I think your mother would be thrilled to have her daughter cry from joy.” He lifted his free hand and wiped some of her tears away himself. “It’s not the same. You were fortunate to be born to a different world, and your hurts still count, and your joys still count, and you can cry sometimes, with me.”

She shook her head, trying to smile at him, and her gaze fell on the words
Je t’aime
painted in his strong, graceful handwriting across that transparent, fragile heart, and she burst into tears again.

I love you
, he mouthed to her, cupping her hands to his face to hide the form his lips took from the rest of the world. From those demons who could steal it from him. He kissed the inside of her palm and lowered her hands to the table, keeping hold of them so she couldn’t fight her tears, and rubbing his thumb gently over one of her fingers as he occasionally stroked the tears off her face himself with his other hand.

He must have worked on the idea for this incredible heart between rushes for weeks, late at night, turning it over in his head while he walked beside her down the Seine without ever mentioning it, perfecting it for her. It made her breath stop at the wonder of it. To be so cherished. To have him. “You know, the cliché would have worked just fine,” she hiccupped.

Three freaking times he had set her up with a romantic moment and Paris sprawled below her. As if it was nothing. As if anyone could be that charming. And then he had chosen something hard. Something that ripped his soul right out of his body and gave it to her, as carefully sheltered from everyone else as he could.

“Would it have?” He stroked another tear away. Suddenly, his head cocked, his eyes arrested on her face. “Oh, you would like that, wouldn’t you? You would
love
it. To have both.”

Those crazy tears strengthened their flow again, just at the thought, and her breath got so short and tight in her chest.

His face lit for her, so tender. “Well, then, come here.” He rose, his hand around her wrist, pulling her with him through the tight-packed diners back out onto the observation deck.

In the most private corner of the deck he could find, with the whole city spread sparkling out below them, he slipped to his knees with that same easy grace he had had when he teased her as he checked her shoe. His arms circled her loosely, his head turned up to her, as if there wasn’t another soul on the deck with them. As if it was only them and Paris.

He took a deep breath – and then expelled it, turning his head to look out at the city. “Oh, this is hard.”

Because she was the dream he wanted most of all. And if he asked, she could say no. She could take it away from him. Her heart broke open, like it could never be a small, firm, determinedly selfish organ again, like it would always be this uncontrolled, messy,
huge
thing that would make room for him, that would hold her dreams and his.

He touched his cheek, catching one of her fallen tears. As he looked up, all the lights of the tower glowing over his face, another tear fell and caught in his lashes. He blinked, but it stayed caught, shimmering as he grabbed one of her hands and held it to his cheek. “I love you,” he said, as if it didn’t hurt him to say it at all. As if all he was thinking about was her. “Sarah. Will you marry me?”

She had to pull her hand back and cover her face, she was crying so hard. She nodded blindly, unable to speak.

He caught her hand again and brought it back down to cup his cheek. “Well, that’s all right then,” he said, and his breath puffed hard against her wrist, a release of extreme tension.
All through that, even when he looked easy, he was terrified I would say no. It took everything in him to risk me for me.

He kissed the base of her ring finger, and the Eiffel Tower started to sparkle, the lights dancing over his face, gleaming with her tears. “Do you think you would like a pearl? Although I kind of like the idea of a sapphire, too.” His thumb rubbed over that spot where a ring would go, and he rose, pulling her securely into his arms to look down at her there, high above the lights of the city, the lights of its tower sparkling all around them. “What do you think,
chérie
? Do you have any preference or should we go look for what we want – together?”

FIN

Coming Next...

First of all, thank you so much for giving one of the Amour et Chocolat books a try. If you enjoyed this one and are new come to the series, just turn the page to see a list of the other Amour et Chocolat books, as well as those from other series. If you’ve read all my books and are wanting to know what is coming next, well, first,
thank you
, again. It makes me really happy that these books might make you happy, too.

The best way to know about new releases is to sign up for my newsletter here:
www.lauraflorand.com
. (You can also find behind-the-scenes glimpses of the chocolate research while you’re at my website, if you’re curious.) If you’re interested in more day-to-day chatting with readers about everything from books to chocolate to perhaps even some cute guys, please join us on
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, another good way to be alerted to a new release.

As of this writing (January 2014), I can tell you that I am working on a couple of novellas connected to the Amour et Chocolat series, a historical, and, of course, the Vie en Roses series about the Rosier family. But I’m not sure yet which will be out next (so again – newsletter! really, it’s the best way). For a glimpse of the world of the Vie en Roses series, keep reading for an excerpt from
The Chocolate Rose
.