Stuck at three stars. Patrick’s stratospheric view of the world was oddly addictive. He was so damn adorable in that unconscious arrogance. Maybe because it was unconscious. He didn’t mean to be arrogant; he was just so used to being that good.
“Luc’s good at maintaining them, but to me – it gets kind of boring. Catching the third one was fun – merde, that was fun – but ever since, it’s just convincing critics over and over that we haven’t fallen off our game.” He managed not to yawn. “And see, I don’t even care what the fuck the critics think, you know? That’s one of the reasons I’m not entirely sure I would be a good head chef. But Luc does, and…” An indolent wave of his hand.
“And you care about him,” she said softly. “And that’s how it works out.”
“So far.” Another supple shift of those broad shoulders. “Sometimes I think if I met the right chef de cuisine – if he hit me just right, even one with no stars but with a lot of conviction – it would be fun to go start a completely new place with him, somewhere out in some village in the provinces, and make it into such a legend that we had people helicoptering in to see us. I mean” – he grinned – “that could be fun. I can see the helicopter pad right now. And once I’ve got that going solidly, maybe going and working on another place. I’m really good at consulting, actually. You know, revamping a whole pastry kitchen, getting everything and everyone working right and the menu perfect? I’ve only done it a couple of times because it’s so hard for Luc to spare me long enough, but – I’m really good at it. I don’t mean to brag.”
She shook her head slightly, smiling. Go ahead and assess yourself honestly, Patrick. It’s good for you. I know you’re not bragging, and I’m not going to try to take the things that make you feel the most alive away from you. And I can completely see how you would be really good at that.
“They almost always try to hire me to take over when it’s time for me to leave. But then, Luc – I always felt as if I would be sealing him into his tomb to walk out on him. And he did half raise me, you know, or the me I’m proud to be.”
Her hand closed around his fingers. “I love you so much,” she whispered. That heart in him.
“Sarah.” His fingers linked too tightly with hers. “What did I do to deserve you?”
That caught her so off guard, she started to laugh a little. “What did you do? Patrick, are you kidding me? Your whole damn life! That’s what you did.”
“Sarah.” Struggling visibly with emotion, Patrick drew her hand up to kiss it and incidentally hide his face from the rest of the restaurant, behind their joined hands.
“I hope you’re proud to be all of you. And I’m pretty sure you deserve a lot better than this.”
His hand tightened on hers. “No. There isn’t better, Sarah. If I deserve you, then I’ve gotten my third star.” He stretched his free hand across the table to pet one of her earrings, that starry gift he had given her that night in Montmartre.
Was that what those earrings meant to him, that she was like a star? Only the highest prize a chef could aspire to?
Or, wait – the highest thing an astronautical engineer could aspire to? Dreaming as a young boy, probably pasting pictures of the planets to his walls. Or hiding them under his bed, where his mom wouldn’t spot them.
Oh.
She drew his hand across the table and kissed it, hiding her face now, too shaky for this public place.
The waiter came back with their menus, and she opened hers like a wall against the room, grateful for the respite. They were on their second course before Patrick brought up something serious again, and of course, he did it casually. “Luc called when you were in the shower, by the way.”
Her mind flashed over all his opportunities to mention that between the shower and now. A lot. So it was probably important. “Is he back? He can’t have been calling from Tahiti or wherever he is, can he? It would have been three in the morning there.”
“Maybe they made him drink kava or something and he had to agree to it to survive the wild island rituals.”
She gave him a look of great patience.
Patrick smiled. “Or maybe he made up with Summer and they’ve been – well, it’s kind of like imagining your brother making love all night, Sarah, so I try not to get a picture. But what he said was that he was going to open his own restaurant in the south of France, and did I want to either take over this one or join him.”
The impact was flat and hard, like walking into a glass wall. Not unexpectedly – she had seen the reflections off that glass long before she reached it. But she had hit it just the same.
There went the last chance for her own dreams to have a say in their lives, didn’t it? What better choice could Patrick have, than to go with his hero, the man he had loved all his teen and adult life, and help him catch three new stars? She couldn’t ask him to choose her dreams instead, not over that.
That wall of glass into which she had slammed felt so cold and hard. Merciless. Impenetrable.
So was she going to stand there with her hands pressed against the glass, staring after him longingly while he walked away? Or was she going to walk around it?
She took a breath that didn’t cut her lungs nearly as much as she had thought it would. It felt almost…easy. “You know, Patrick, you’ve managed to put yourself in a position where you are surrounded by people begging you to fulfill whatever greatest dream you might have. And they mean it. The world is your oyster. I’m so proud of you.” Did she have the right to be proud of him, as if he was hers? Maybe that was still up in the air. “It makes me so proud just to be seen with you.”
His face lit. Waves of emotion struggled across his expression, fighting his need to hide them. “Merde, Sarah, I’m never going to take you somewhere public again. You’re dangerous. Come for a walk for a minute between courses.”
So they walked out onto the second-floor deck, gazing down at the city.
The south of France. She supposed it could be a crazy, wonderful adventure. She could learn more pastry skills and what lavender smelled like in late June. She could do this.
Hey, she’d graduated from Caltech, survived nearly six months in one of the top pastry kitchens in the world, and worn a garter belt. It might be that she could do just about anything.
Did he want her to?
She glanced up into eyes almost as deep and velvet blue right now as the deepening night over Paris. “What do you want to do, Sarah?”
I want to have you. But I want to have me, too. “Patrick. You can’t decide your life based on my dream. You have to go for your own.” Yes. Certainty grew in her as she said it: at least once in his life, he deserved to go all out for his dream. She could do that for him. Whether it was to the south of France or to Caltech, she could be the one who helped make all his dreams come true.
I love you. And I love to see you dream. As if you can go all out for it again.
A little silence. “I am.”
Her eyebrows knitted.
“Sarah.” He heaved a frustrated breath. “That is about like you, to see through everything else I do and make me spell the hardest thing out. Didn’t you pay attention when I was up there kneeling at your feet? Do I have to hire a plane to write it in big letters across the sky for the whole world to see, so I don’t have a chance in hell of protecting it from anyone who would want to destroy it? You’re my dream. All right? That’s why this is so hard on me, to say it. You’re the most important. All those other possibilities – they all sound fun. I could do any of them and end up with a beautiful life. As long as you’re in it. But, merde, Sarah, I could run off to Nepal with you, and we could open some little bed and breakfast for tourists and lead climbers up the mountains, and I could end up happy with that, too. If you’re in it. You’re what makes all those other dreams seem so easy to grab these days; as long as I have you, going for anything else seems like just a fun game. How badly could it hurt to lose a dream if I’ve still got the one where we’re together?”
The wave of h
im just washed over her. She couldn’t think or breathe, just be tossed and tossed in its incredible power. “I always saw you more in Hawaii,” she said, struggling for air. Oh, for God’s sake, she was using his technique – a little humor to try to give herself enough emotional space from that power of him to breathe.
He beamed at her, as grateful for that little release of humor as she was. “See, Sarah, you are always the smart one. I would love to learn how to surf. I feel like I’m made for it.”
“But Patrick–”
“There’s not a but, Sarah, shut up about the buts. The world is my oyster – fine. I can do a dozen things, and it’s thanks to my own ability to reach them – d’accord, très bien, oui. Well, and in one case, thanks to a certain person’s willingness to help put me through school.” He kissed her fiercely. “But you’re the pearl. I don’t see what’s so complicated about this. Now what do you want to do? Because I think that’s still a harder thing for you to negotiate, around the people you love and particularly around me, and I want you to have space for it.”
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.
The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) Page 29