Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(10)
His eyes closed a second.
Now Lina’s smile felt like a secret, tucked up behind her lips, as she busied herself with the next plate, trying to figure out the best technique for doing dozens of these a night quickly and efficiently and without shattering the globes over and over in her team's hands. Pretending that, well…that was who she was. A top pastry chef.
Delighted when someone took pleasure from slipping a spoonful of her work into his mouth.
Jake ate silently, absorbed, all his focus on the dish. He ate until the tiniest sliver of sugar was gone. He dabbed one finger into the last bits of lime zest and sucked those off the tip.
Now those were the kind of bad table manners a pastry chef could really warm up to. Lina smiled at him despite everything, the pleasure warming her, as if it could thaw out the old her and bring it back to life.
Oh, the old Lina wasn’t dead? She was just Han Soloed?
She pulled one of her earlier preparations out of the lowboy and started to finish it off. Pretty, fancy sweetness, as if the doors to this restaurant kitchen had never burst open. As if she could control the raw world and make it beautiful.
Offer it to someone else who had seen raw, ugly things.
She slid the new dessert across to the mountain lion. Jake gazed down at it warily. A bar shape of chocolate, which she had just that instant coated with melted chocolate that gleamed, covering the multiple layers of chocolate mousse and croustillant underneath the chocolate coating. One line of a gold sugar baton across it and absolutely nothing else but the deep brown-black chocolate gloss. She loved the purity of this dessert. Nothing to distract. If that gleaming chocolate wasn’t the most beautiful thing a diner could see, then he should quit ordering the chocolate dessert every time and experiment a bit.
Live a little, people, she used to say, in complete oblivion to what the antonym of live really was. There’s more to life than chocolate.
“Thank you,” Jake said stiffly.
She turned away and watched sidelong under her lashes as he gazed at the dessert as if he and the bar of chocolate were having a battle. Then he slowly brought his spoon down and sliced through the gloss.
Maybe he was in power when he was prowling around, but eating her desserts made him vulnerable? Maybe that was why he braced like that?
Well, and so he should. She gave her dessert a firm nod. That dessert was powerful. Men could burst through these doors and spray bullets, and when a woman picked herself back up off the floor and made sure her friends were alive, she could square her shoulders and make more fragile sugar.
She could hang her life on it. Keep going forward.
Yeah, you’d better run, evil, you *. I’m Lina Farah. And every single beautiful dessert I make says FUCK YOU. I WIN.
“It’s really good,” Jake remembered to say. He looked up at her. “I mean really.”
Right, like that was convincing.
As convincing as her I’m still Lina Farah, top pastry chef act.
But, “Thank you.” Because sometimes manners were like a recipe, too. They helped guide you through the dark moments so that you didn’t hurt anyone while you were in them. “I’m glad you like it.”
His mouth softened, and he looked back at his chocolate, focusing on it.
He had a very intense focus. As if he wanted to absorb every sensation. And once again, as he finished he ran a finger over a tiny splotch of chocolate on the plate to scoop it up and suck his finger clean. Her mind zoomed immediately in on those lips sucking his finger.
Will you quit? she thought, exasperated. Can’t you prove you’re still alive without jumping on the first hot man you see?
Still, if you wanted to get down to basics, the one time-honored way for life to keep forging forward and producing new life was…
Merde, Lina! Pull yourself together.
She cleared her throat. “Don’t scrape the plate, Red. There’s more in the kitchen.”
Hazel eyes lifted to hers. “Is there?”
Of course there was. Did he even know who Lina Farah was? (Lina Farah. Yeah. I’m Lina Farah.) “Sure. Want something else?”
Come on, want something else. Let me show you who I am.
Let me show me who I am.
He pivoted on the stool to face her more fully, resting sinewy forearms on the counter. “Would that be too desperate?”
If they were going to talk about desperate, she was pretty sure she shouldn’t throw stones. She gestured to herself. “It’s okay if you’re desperate for me.” Hell, that was like bathing in sunbeams to a pastry chef.
A tiny lift of red-brown eyebrows. “Is it. Good to know.”
Ridiculously, Lina started flushing a little. Hopefully not enough to show on the warm tones of her skin. She should be able to beat him in a hide-the-blush contest any day. Right? She eyed the thick gold-dust of his skin again. Maybe not. Maybe the sun had baked the visibility of a blush out of him. Whereas she spent much of her day indoors.
She turned her back and bent to look in a lowboy, just to be on the safe side.
But it felt good to flush. Alive.
“This one might take a while longer,” she warned. Since the restaurant was still closed, she had very little prepped—just her experiments, produced from a need to get back in here and make these kitchens a place where life was lived and fed and made beautiful again, rather than a place of fear and death. She’d made far too much, but she couldn’t stop.