B00CACT6TM EBOK (19 page)

Gabriel might be the hottest thing since molten sugar, but he wasn’t exactly without his issues.

“
Salut, Papa
,” Jolie said cheerfully, bending down to kiss her father’s cheek.

“How was he?” he asked. “Daniel Laurier?”

“He just promoted his
second
to executive chef, if you can believe it. He’s taking a step back. Trying to find more family time.” She snuck a sideways glance at her father’s face, not quite sure what she was looking for or why she didn’t want him to know she was looking for it. Some regret, for the fact that he had put his own restaurant before his family? Some reflection on it?

“Daniel Laurier?” her father said incredulously. “What happened, did he hear a rumor that the restaurant was going to lose a star? He wants to make sure that gets blamed on someone else?”

“I don’t think so, Papa.” Jolie turned away, oddly saddened. Whatever she had been looking for, she hadn’t found it. “Have you thought any more about that invitation from Luc Leroi?” she asked carefully, not looking at him.

Her father stood from the couch and walked over to the window, a little slower and heavier on the left side than the right, but not too bad. Jolie liked his physical therapist. The woman didn’t put up with much.

“Remember, when I was interviewing him last week, he said the Leucé would be delighted to host us for an event in honor of the cookbook,” she said. “He offered to have himself and his chefs make a selection of the recipes to serve.”

The Hôtel de Leucé was
only
one of the most famous restaurants in the world. But, of course, the Leucé had climbed up in the world while Pierre Manon’s restaurant at the hotel’s rival, the Luxe, had fallen. Back when her father had three stars, the Leucé only had two. Now their situations were reversed—or rather, her father had no stars, really, since he had quit, but everyone knew that under his leadership the Luxe had both gained its third star and lost it.

“Why?” Pierre Manon asked harshly. “Pity?”

Jolie bit her lip. The energy and cheerfulness she had absorbed in Sainte-Mère wavered, struggling to hold up against the heaviness in this apartment. “I think it was for my sake,” she said cautiously.

Her father clenched his fist—his left fist—slowly and carefully and hard.

“Because I’m working with him, Papa. I think he’s offering it as a friendly gesture.” Even when she was working on other books, did her father still see her as only that tiny font name?

“Five years ago, when those idiots were taking away one of my stars, they were
giving
one to that kid. And
he’s
going to make my recipes to help me? You may not think it’s pity, but I know pity when I see it.”

Jolie was silent a long moment. “I think it was to help me,” she said again. “He’s actually a very nice guy, under that intense self-control of his. I think he likes to help people live their dreams.”

Her father snorted. “The amount of people who have interviewed Luc Leroi can’t even be counted. It doesn’t make you important enough for him to organize an event in your honor.”

Jo’s jaw set. Tears stung, sudden and bright, but she blinked them back. “All right, Papa. Come for a walk with me in the gardens? We’ll stop and eat in the bistrot at the corner.” Her father never felt threatened by the homey bistrot.

Settling into the seat on the TGV south to Nice three days later was like exfoliating the soul. First the guilt and then the worry, slowly washed away by the inexorable swift roll of the train, to reveal the bright hopefulness, clean again.

It wasn’t so bad, really, having a five and a half hour commute. She typed up notes from her kitchen testing of recipes and from the work with Philippe Lyonnais that Friday. How to process his macarons into a recipe a home cook could approximate was a challenge. She watched Youtube clips of Gabriel demonstrating a dessert for this or that TV station—big, fun, pulling everyone into his energy. She drafted some behind-the-scenes stories to post over the next week on her blog. She scrolled through the weekend’s texts from Gabriel. There were a lot, photo after photo of different savory and sweet plates being produced or tested in his restaurant, with which he wanted to tempt her. Once in a while a word thrown in:
Hungry yet?

Oh, yeah. He made her hungry. And he made her smile.

She grew happier, with each mile closer. Except when guilt tried to sneak back for the fact that she had slipped out Sunday afternoon after all, after having spent the day with her father. She wasn’t entirely sure that her father knew what to do with her around the whole weekend, anymore than she knew what to do with him, but she still cringed at the thought of leaving him alone.

And yet here she was, leaving him alone. Trying to convince herself she was doing it to protect him, when she knew perfectly well that Gabriel would never really do anything to hurt her father. Her soul got lighter and lighter, more and more eager, at the rate of over five kilometers a minute. And yet guilt twisted through it uneasily, unsettling everything, making some part of her long for freedom that no human with a heart could ever truly have.

She got into Sainte-Mère at eleven at night, while Gabriel was still working, and slipped a message to Raphaël. He came out as soon as he could, diners turning to eye him as he passed through the white-arched
salle
, murmuring to each other,
Which one is that?

“This is going to make Gabe’s night,” Raphaël said with something of his brother’s grin. Raphaël looked as if he should have been a seafarer, a pirate, or in this day and age just someone who busked his way around the world. Despite a clear resemblance in facial structure and height to his brother, his shaggy hair was a little darker, his eyes gray-green, and he looked more—windblown and exposed to the elements, as if he got his non-cooking exercise windsurfing. “What can I help you with?”

Jolie felt herself grow a thousand pounds lighter just at his confidence that Gabriel would be thrilled. “Can I have your key again?”

He grinned, fishing in his pocket. “Why don’t you just ask him for a copy? You know he would give you one.”

Did
she know that? Jolie thought, on a hiccup and a sudden, whooshing slide. Whoa.

Did she
want
to know that?

Well, yeah. In a way, it made her heart all fuzzy with delight. And that fuzziness terrified her.
Never, never, never get involved with a chef
, her mother said.
They’ll suck everything out of you and never give anything back.

Don’t you dare fall for one of my chefs.
Her father.
Or any chef. Find someone you can make a life with.

Careful
, some part of her said, slinking away, wanting to protect itself.
Don’t let a man suck the life out of you. Don’t let a man claim your happiness and then crush it out like a weight.

And yet, big as he was, greedy as he was, Gabriel never felt like a weight. Or a vacuum.

“We’ve got some late tables, so he probably won’t be home until after midnight, just so you know,” Raphaël told her.

“Yes,” she said. “I know how it goes.”

Raphaël wiggled a key off his ring and looked at her a long moment as he handed it to her, and for an instant his grin faded. “Be careful of my brother, Jolie.”

Uh-oh. She wasn’t sure she knew how to be careful of Gabriel.

“Don’t . . .
merde.
Don’t—make him fall even harder for you, if you’re going to drop him when you get bored.”

Bored?
Of Gabriel?

And—happiness lodged in her like a purring cat in a lap it was not about to get pushed off of—
make him fall even harder for me?

“He’s not very boring,” she said.

“I need to meet a cookbook writer,” Raphaël informed the heavens very firmly. “Let’s say, when you get frustrated, then.”

Jolie burst out laughing. “I’ve been frustrated with him since before I even met him.”

Raphaël sighed. “This intervening in someone else’s love affairs doesn’t really work, does it? Just—don’t do anything mean, all right?”

Like
don’t break up with him.
Because he
needed
her, right. Just like her father needed her. Jolie waited for that uneasy sensation of someone else’s weight on her life to descend, that familiar sense of a man sucking more out of her than he was willing to give back.

She was still prodding curiously, trying to figure out where that feeling was hiding, when she let herself into Gabriel’s apartment.

Then she forgot all about it, laughing in anticipation as she rinsed the day off her in his shower and slipped into her little white cami pajamas. His favorite.

She was reading a book when she heard his feet on the stairs, and her body immediately thrummed with adrenalin. She ran across to open the door and grin up at him. “Surprise!”

Gabriel’s face just
lit
. Tiredness vanished in a burst of delight, and the next instant, she had disappeared in a bear hug.

“
Pardon
,” he said, when he finally released her. “I know I need to take a shower.” But instead, he framed her face and kissed her, deeply. “Jolie. That just beat Christmas. I’m never going to walk home to my apartment with quite the same attitude again. I’ll always be hoping.”

He was so big. With how much he felt, with how little he hid it. She bounced on her toes, face still framed in his hands, beaming up at him.

His fingers flexed into her hair before he dragged them reluctantly away. “Let me go take a shower. It was a crazy day.”

“I made you some more dal,” Jolie said, following behind him.

He stopped in the hallway so suddenly she ran into his broad back. Then he turned, cupped her head, and kissed her very hard again.

“It’s simple,” she said, a little embarrassed, since what
he
fed
her
received international awards. And he had yet to repeat himself, in anything he offered her. “And the ingredients were leftover from last time.”

“Are you apologizing?” Gabriel asked incredulously. “Jolie.” He kissed her again, fierce and hard. She was backed up against the wall now. “Let me go take a shower before I crack, okay?”

He pushed off the wall and strode away, fast, stripping off his T-shirt as he went. A smooth, muscled back was revealed for half a second before the bathroom door shut behind him.

Mmm.

She gave him a couple of minutes while she stood where he had left her, pressed against the hall wall, listening to that shower run over that beautiful, indefatigable, irrepressible body.

Then she walked into the bathroom and right up to the edge of the spray. He had no bathtub but a tiled shower walled with glass, so that she could just step between the panes of it.

He froze with one arm stretched up, one hand full of soap lather sliding over his ribs.

“I couldn’t wait,” she said and stepped in under the water with him.

Her little white cami and boy shorts turned instantly transparent, clinging to her skin. He made a sound as if he had taken a battering ram to the stomach, and the soap slid out of his hand and hit the floor.

“Oh,
merde
,” he muttered, in a frantic, drowning voice. “Jolie—you’re going to
kill
me.”

She stiffened, flushing all over her wet body. It was the first time in her life she had ever stepped in on a man in a shower, and she had been expecting a hot and happy reception. “Sorry.” She tried to step back, and his hand lanced out and grabbed her in a grip of steel. “If you’re tired,” she said stiffly, pulling at that grip, not in any hope she could break it, but just to show him her resistance.

“I’m not tired, I’m terrified. Jolie.” Still holding her by one arm so that she couldn’t get away, he brought the other, soapy hand to cup her breast through the transparent wet cotton. “You’re incredible.” His voice thickened. “Jolie. I
promised
to treat you right, and then you do this to me. I’m so happy I don’t even know what to do with myself, and then you layer sex on top of it. I can’t even remember my name.” His hand flexed helplessly on her breast, and she made a sound in her throat, as pleasure ran through her. “You turn me into an animal.” The hand holding her arm slipped from it and cupped her other breast. He squeezed them up and toward each other, lost in the view. “And then the next day you’re not sure you want me,” he muttered, so low and far back in his throat she almost couldn’t hear it.

Before she could figure out what to say to that—who
did
know what to do with someone this big in her life in the morning?—he slipped his hands down the clinging wet fabric and gripped her butt, lifting her to ride against his nakedness, and she lost coherent speech. There might as well have been nothing between his hard sex and hers. Nothing but that annoying, frantically arousing slip of transparent wet fabric.

He twisted her against him, sliding her back and forth over his sex. The shower rained down over her face. He stared down at that, fascinated, his own head well above the spray, sliding her harder, watching her pure helplessness to the elements in which she was caught: him, the water, her own desire.

His own face flushed, his arousal turning him into something—animal. Feral. Dangerous. He twisted suddenly to protect her face with his body, pushing her back against the wall of the shower, and she blinked wet lashes up at him, feeling absurdly grateful for being rescued from what he had submitted her to. “I’m going to last thirty seconds.” His voice was guttural. “I might come right here. You have
no
idea what you look like, or what you’re doing to me.”

“I like it,” she admitted again in a whisper. “I really like driving you wild.” She twisted her hips, the wet fabric dragging against her clitoris, the lips of her sex struggling to cling to him through the cloth. “Make me come in thirty seconds, too.”

“Oh, no.” He dragged her up the wall, closing his mouth around one of her breasts through the cloth and suckling so hard she whimpered. “
You
I’m going to torture for at least an hour. But I think that’s going to have to come second.”

It didn’t, though. In a sudden change of resolution, he dropped to his knees and pulled her thighs over his shoulders, so that she was riding on them. Tilting his head back for one long look up at her, while the water streamed into his face, he waited for her to realize what was coming and to twist and writhe in a sudden panicked conflict of embarrassment and desire. His hands gripped her thighs hard, so that she couldn’t get away.