“So?” Patrick pulled three, four, five of her plates out.
Five?
She only had twenty done so far. What was the difference between those that weren’t good enough and those he left? Why couldn’t she
see it
? “Orgasmic? Or does it leave you wanting more?” A wicked little smile. “Don’t hesitate to tell me if I don’t bring you all the way, Sarabelle.”
She pressed her lips together, but of course they
did
want every bite of everything they produced to be orgasmic. Despite his teasing tone, Patrick was pushing her to analyze every nuance of flavor and texture, training her to the height of his ability, even if that was far beyond hers.
“It’s elusive,” she said slowly. “There’s this edginess hiding under all the warmth. Like that hidden heart is going to wake up and grab you when you least expect it.”
Patrick’s eyebrows shot up, and he gave the pre-dessert a slightly disgruntled look, as if it had betrayed him somehow. She licked her lips to get the last bit of that edgy, rich combination of burnt sugar and chocolate. That pseudo-lazy gaze of his drifted for just a second to her mouth, and then he turned, catching a
commis
going past him with a tray full of prepped glasses and tapping a couple of them, indicating a need to redo those. All the kind of thing that happened in a second here.
“I like it,” she finally decided, and hesitated. She knew she wasn’t really supposed to question her chefs. But Patrick had always encouraged questions, always made it clear she could ask him anything, and no matter how stupid she might eventually realize her beginner’s question had been, his response was always affectionate and easy, approving of her just for asking it. “But…chocolate for a pre-dessert? I thought the idea was to have something completely different from the rest of the menu, and surely we’ll have chocolate on the dessert menu? Plus it’s so…sweet. Shouldn’t it be a cleaner, lighter flavor so we’ll be ready for something more? The, ah, real orgasm.”
A flash of humor or something else in his eyes at getting her to say the word orgasm. She looked back at him with firm seriousness, refusing to let their conversation have any sexual meaning at all. She had no doubt that he could make an easy lay out of her, if he got that bored with his other options or she was that convenient, but she had to work under him. And he wouldn’t be easy for her.
That wicked grin. “Sarabelle, you know you don’t have to have only one orgasm with me. Haven’t I mentioned it? We can start with a little one, and then go on to one that’s bigger. One after the other, if you like. Especially if you’re willing to let me give you several…” He took her spoon into his mouth with no hesitation, his eyes both vivid and sleepy. Lazily, thoroughly immersed in the taste in his mouth. “…different things to taste,” he finally remembered to add, his eyes all limpid innocence.
She just looked at him. Straight and serious, unyieldingly so.
He winked at her, stacking her rejected plates out of the way. “Now let me show you a trick, Sarabelle. For just how easy these plates can be.”
Oh, no. Oh, but yes. She craved it every time.
He came around the counter, always such a casual grace to him that one
forgot
how fast and precisely he moved. Maybe he forgot it, too. He had grown up in this environment; maybe everything felt in slow, relaxed motion to him.
Warmth wrapped around her body from behind. “Like this, Sarabelle.” His voice just seemed to rub over the top of her head. A long arm fitted itself to her much shorter one, and through two layers of thick chef’s jackets, she felt its strength. Like a fencer’s, but a fencer who fenced non-stop every day for sixteen hours. His cheek nestled in next to hers, the gold-streaked bronze of his hair tickling her temple, a strand catching against the far edge of her eyelashes. Just for a second, that close, his scent, warm and male, snuck through all the scents of lemon and butter and vanilla and cinnamon and chocolate and strawberry and fresh-crushed almonds, the layering of aromas so thick even human sweat rarely managed to assert a presence.
“Relax.” He squeezed her wrist just a little.
And, of course, she did. It was terrible how little she could help it, and how wonderful it felt, when all her muscles yielded themselves up to him.
He laughed and guided her hand closer to his mouth as he bent to it, bent her body with him, his hand cupping hers. Pleasure washed through her. This felt so right. She could get nothing wrong. For one second, with him controlling her, she could only get everything right. His chest pressed into her back, in that graceful dip over the plate she had seen him make a hundred thousand times. His breath ran, so faintly it could have been the touch of sunlight, over her bared wrist, swirling in her palm. He adjusted the angle. Air glided over her finger, and gold dust swirled from it as his other arm, circling around her, deftly guided the plate under the fall, turning it to get the sweeping look of the “ashes” perfect.
“There.” He gave her that quirky smile that made her feel as if she was standing at the very edge of a cliff above a turquoise sea, ready to drop into his arms naked, roll over and over with him on a sun-washed beach. “Got it?” With a wink, he was gone.
She tried to catch herself back, but her toe caught on the edge of that imagined cliff just as the waves pulled back, and she fell splat on the jagged rocks below.
Her toes curled so tightly in her shoes they hurt. She couldn’t tell the difference between his plate and hers. Not at all. Six months of brutal, expensive courses at Culinaire, nearly five months as an intern, huge debts she was trying to juggle on her
stagiaire
stipend of four hundred euros a month, and she couldn’t see it. Almost, almost, but not really, she could almost feel the difference, tickling in her palm where his breath had been.
She curled her fingers over that palm, trying to hold that brush of breath to it. And she hated him for that breath. She hated him as hard as she could.
Chapter 3
“She’s good.”
Patrick folded molten sugar – a mix of sugar and Isomalt, really – as Luc spoke, not looking around to follow the other man’s gaze. There was only one
she
in the pastry kitchen, their little black-haired intern, eyebrows almost certainly pleated right now in stubborn concentration as she struggled to get something right.
“It’s lucky you spotted her at that workshop,” Luc said. “I wouldn’t have thought someone her age, with her background, could step up to this kind of work.”
American Sarah Lin had gotten a degree in engineering from Caltech according to her CV, and at twenty-four was nine years older than the typical French apprentice starting out. Luc wouldn’t have been the only chef to dismiss her as a pastry student tourist.
Patrick focused on folding his colors into the sugar –
bleu, blanc, rouge
– concentrating on the resistance of the material so that he wouldn’t look around and see her carrying the full industrial-size mixing bowl whose contents probably weighed over twenty kilos. She could handle the mixing bowl. It was Patrick’s job to make her stronger, not weaker.
Thirty-six days of her internship left to go. He stretched the sugar out thin, thin, thin. Not breaking it. Playing it constantly between hot and cold, heat lamp on one side, cool-blowing hair dryer on the other, so that it wouldn’t break.
“You could mention that to her once in a while,” he told his foster brother and chef. “That she’s doing well.”
Black eyebrows went up, Luc as always cool, controlled, despite the bruises still visible from their fight, proof that at least once Patrick had cracked him. Damn hypocrite. As if Patrick didn’t know that inside the man was exploding with a passion he compressed the hell out of.
“I haven’t fired her,” Luc said. “What else does she need to show her she’s doing well?”
Patrick rolled his eyes to heaven. The man was a trial to him. “Let’s see –
Good job.
” He trimmed and curled the
bleu, blanc, rouge
ribbon of sugar, creating a burst of fireworks that would play behind the two-meter chocolate Eiffel Tower he had made, complete with flecks of gold leaf for the sparkles. The Eiffel Tower rested on a base covered with an edible layer that was almost perfectly reflective and one of Patrick’s personal triumphs in the field. He’d come up with a method for it after seeing research several MIT engineers in materials science had been doing on dielectric mirrors. The other chefs in Paris were jealous as hell of those reflective surfaces, but none of them had figured out the secret yet. “Two words. Or
Well done.
You’d barely have to move your mouth.”
Luc gave him that cool
I beg your pardon
look that had tempted Patrick to commit homicide some five million times in the past twelve years. “She needs to learn to judge whether her job is well done on her own. If she’s dependent on an outside critic for approval, she won’t get far.”
Said the man who lived for his three-star reviews. Who was the reason
Patrick
lived for three-star reviews, when he thought reviewers could go stuff it up their asses. “She’s too hard on herself, Luc.”
Luc shrugged. “Good.”
Sometimes it was a challenge not to just grab Luc’s head and bang his own against it. But since he didn’t like to show when Luc got to him, he plotted instead to let Luc catch him flirting with Summer Corey again. That last fistfight had been such a nice distraction.
“I’m right about this.” Luc’s voice was mild, but since Luc had essentially been self-forged in the fires of the universe for the sole purpose of bringing perfection to chaos, even his mildest voice cut through the daydream. “No one gets any good by being pampered.” His voice took on an extra layer of firmness, of meaning. “You know that, Patrick.”
Damn it, did Luc see right through him? Because there was something about that tone. Did he
know
? Was Patrick’s façade starting to crack that damn obviously, that even through Luc’s blur of Summer obsession the other man still noticed it? More and more, Patrick went through the day feeling as if all his gleaming, perfect surface was just riddled with hairline cracks, like a failed sugar sculpture about to make an ugly mess.
And if Luc did realize what was happening, how long before he started making sure Patrick was kept separate from their intern? Rage leaped inside Patrick at the thought of Luc –
Luc
– trying to hold what Patrick wanted out of his reach. His fingertips dug too hard into hot sugar, his hands burning.
Don’t show you want it. Never show how much you want it. If Luc can turn on you, anybody can.
And mixed in with that, his frustrated voice of reason:
Damn it, grow
up
.
“Making sure a poor intern doesn’t spend every night crying into her pillow isn’t pampering her, Luc.”
Luc gave Sarah a thoughtful look past Patrick’s shoulder. “I’ve never seen any sign of tears.”
Well, neither had Patrick, but – damn, she was strong, wasn’t she? He folded and pulled, folded and pulled his hot mass of sugar, to keep from turning around and looking at that strength. Supple as sugar, stubborn as sugar, so small and wannabe perfect and determined to get there. He knew all the sides of her concentration – the little crease between her eyebrows if a man saw her from the front, the tilted dark brown eyes focused so intently they shut him out, the stretch of her nape if a man was behind her, with her hair twisted up on the back of her head and only the vulnerable V of dark, fine hairs showing, the strain on her shoulders and hands and spirit that she felt on the inside, and the exhaustion at the end of the day.
He adopted a woeful look. “You never see me cry either. Not even when you try to make me add a heart to the Eiffel Tower in what would otherwise be a beautiful sculpture. But every night–”
Luc didn’t allow himself to openly laugh, of course, but Patrick caught the glimmer of amusement in his eyes. He grinned in self-satisfaction. Luc had saved him from their foster home, and Patrick liked to keep returning the favor. Every single laugh he got out of his repressed chef was like scoring a point against – well, the world, really. Definitely against their pasts. “It’s the president’s daughter’s wedding,” Luc said. “And the guy proposed on top of the Eiffel Tower.”
Merde
, what a cliché. Patrick rolled his eyes.
“What was I supposed to do?” Luc asked, amused. “Say no?”
“
I
didn’t vote for him.” Patrick eyed the mass of pink Isomalt-sugar on the food warmer next to him. He supposed he couldn’t put off doing the heart forever. He sighed extra heavily to make sure Luc didn’t miss it, and pulled a chunk free, attaching it to the tube of an air pump. “You could throw Sarah a bone, Luc.”
A fine, compressed curve to Luc’s mouth – maybe another glimpse of amusement, maybe something else. Twelve years of working together in impossibly intimate conditions, and Patrick still rarely knew entirely what Luc was thinking. Of course, Luc rarely knew what Patrick was thinking either, but it was aggravating to have that be mutual. “She’s got you in charge of her, Patrick. I think I gave her a little bit better than a bone.”
Damn. Patrick’s heart started swelling with pleasure and pride before he even quite digested the hugeness of the compliment. He hated it when Luc did this to him. It was so rare and it left him so mushy inside, all shit-happy to have Luc think well of him, like he was fifteen years old still. “You didn’t give her me,” he pointed out. In his hands, as he squeezed the pump, the little pink mass of molten sugar swelled and swelled, which irritated the hell out of him somehow. “
I
gave her me.”
“Ah,” Luc said, and just held Patrick’s gaze with that straight, steady black one of his that made Patrick think back over what he had just revealed.
Bordel de merde
, he was going to kill Luc one day.
“Have you grasped that she’s shy yet?” he asked between his teeth, pressing with a dull blade against the swelling pink sugar to form the heart shape.
“Sarah Lin?” Luc asked blankly. As in:
What business are an intern’s emotions to me?
“No.”
You idiot.
Although Sarah was shy, too. So deliciously, thoughtfully shy. Patrick cut the heart from the tube and gently massaged away the hole left, coaxing the little heart into just the right shape. “Our hotel owner. You know, that gorgeous blonde who keeps coming down here to moon over you while you ignore her?”