B00CACT6TM EBOK (26 page)

Meaning maybe Gabriel
did
know her father better than she did, but Jolie didn’t go ahead and admit it. It probably hurt to admit something like that. He damn well wanted his own kids to know him.

“Gabriel, I’m going to beat you over the head. You’re not even guilty or apologetic!”

He tried to figure out what a guilty or apologetic look would feel like on his face. They weren’t emotions he was familiar with much. If you were going to do it, there was no point feeling guilty about it. “I’m sorry you’re upset,” he finally offered. He was, too. It had been like raking claws through his own organs, forcing himself to handle her father, when he knew how angry she would be when she found out.

Jolie thunked her head against his chest in despair. “That’s not the same as understanding that you were in the wrong to do it in the first place.”

How could he possibly be in the wrong, when it had turned out to be the right thing to do? Sometimes she didn’t make any sense at all.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, peering into his face. “I’m not getting
anywhere
with you, am I? Are we going to be fighting about your inability to contain yourself for the rest of our lives?”

His heart brightened right back up. “Oh, I hope so.”

She stared at him a moment, caught between indignation and surprise, and then her mouth softened. “You are hopeless,” she said affectionately.

He really thought
hopeless
was the exact opposite of what he was, but he didn’t think he wanted to talk about it too much. It was the kind of hope she might accidentally stomp on, in her current precarious temper, even if she might regret it later.

“Even if you did mean well,” she muttered, reluctantly.

“Oh, so you’ve stopped believing I
wanted
to stress him into another stroke for revenge?” he asked, a dry bitterness leaking back into his voice, because that one might hurt for a long time to come.

“It did sound terrible, Gabriel.” Jolie petted his shoulder, a healing gesture he liked much, much better than her fussing at him. He still wanted a lot of healing, after being told he was
screwing
her. “I didn’t really think you wanted him to
die
, but—”

“I know it sounded terrible, but why did it sound
plausible
?”

“You know part of you was always happy to be stealing me away from your worst enemy. Admit it, Gabriel.”

“Part of me was always
worried
that he had the strongest claim on you. He always gets the most beautiful things in my life for himself. Even when he doesn’t start with the advantage of being that most beautiful thing’s
father
.”

“You didn’t really want to gloat over him?”

And that was when he realized what really scared him. He stared down at her for a long time, quite still. She felt so good in his arms. His heart thudded hard and slow and shamed, telling him to shut up. Not to let her know this. And he thought about spending the rest of his life waiting for her to realize that he was no damn prince. A hard, reluctant breath struggled through his lungs. “No, I think I can see why you believed it. Because every single word was true.”

She stiffened and jerked back against his hold.

But he didn’t let her go yet. “That I think he’s being pathetic, that I think he needs to get off his butt, that I gloat over being the one to have you. I do, Jolie.”

She stopped straining against his hold, her eyebrows drawing together. She was studying him very intently.

“I love you, though. And I’ll do all kinds of beautiful things for you. I thought I had already tried.” It hurt him still that all his best, what had seemed so beautiful to him, still didn’t outshine his darkness. “But I can’t manage to never be a bad person for you, because part of me—just really is a beast.”

She gazed at him. He wanted to hide his ugly soul from that gaze, but it was too damn late. And then, to his utter surprise, she started to smile a little. “You’re amazing,” she said.

He—what? His heart hiccuped and then just stopped, and he couldn’t figure out how to get it started again.

“I love the combination of roaring and”—she brought his hands up and kissed the palm sides of his fingers—“sweet. I love you.”

Really? Even knowing that? He curled the fingers she had kissed around her face, tracing the shape of her with his thumbs.
Really?
She really loved him?

“You did it for him, didn’t you?” she said softly, and he stared at her incredulously. “All this time I thought you hated him, but really inside . . . marshmallow.”

“Jolie.” His hands, the hands that had never been going to risk getting burned by her again, tightened and pulled her in. “For one . . . you’re a damned food writer. Find a better comparison than a marshmallow. And for another—I’m sorry to continue to be the beast in your fairytale, but did you listen to what I just said? I would
never
do
anything
for Pierre Manon.”

She raised her eyebrows, challenging. “You mean you really did do all that just to gloat?”

“It was a nice secondary benefit.” One that had made him feel sick to his stomach. “Jolie. I did it for
you. Putain.
How could you possibly imagine anything else? I’m not subtle!”

“For me?” she said blankly. “I thought this was all about you chefs.”

Now
he
wanted to beat his head against something. “He made you sad,” Gabriel said finally, simply. “He drained all your happiness, as if going back to Paris was some sea monster that kept dragging one side of your ship under. He made you think you had to be by yourself if you didn’t want to be weighed down. He made you feel like you were selfish, because he was sucking so much out of you that you didn’t have any other way to protect your own self. And I was getting fucking tired of it, and I wanted you all for me, so—”

“So it was really just all about you, is that right?” Jolie said, one corner of her mouth turning up wryly as her eyes held his.

She could think what she fucking liked. Gabriel scowled and wrenched his hands away from her head to fold his arms.

She reached up and curved her hand around his cheek, the way she did sometimes that made him want to rub his face against it like a puppy.
Merde
, he hadn’t shaved for days. He would probably sandpaper her skin off.

“You saved me,” she said very softly. “You made yourself be the bad guy so you could save me.”

His breath shortened until his chest hurt so much. Did she finally understand him just a little? Would she ever understand what it had cost him to risk that way she looked at him, to risk
her with him
, to save his worst enemy . . . for her?

“I love you,” she said, and his heart just went pitter-pat with helpless delight.
Son putain de coeur.
Life would be so much easier if he didn’t have that heart. But it wouldn’t be nearly as
happy.
She pressed a kiss against his jaw. “You’re impossible, but there’s something beautiful about how impossible you are.”

That one hit him like a lightning bolt straight to the heart. There
was
? She really thought that?

“I love you that way. And I think you wanted to help Pierre Manon more than you admit to.”

“No,” Gabriel said forcefully, kissing her hard. “I did not. And when we do our cookbook, I want your name in the same damn size font as mine. So you’ll get used to thinking of yourself as front and center in the picture. And not the tiny secondary reason for anybody’s actions.”

“The publisher will never agree to that,” Jolie said so ruefully that he kissed her smile, just to remember what it felt like against his lips. “They’ll want yours to sell the books, and mine will end up getting squeezed small.”

“They’ll agree to whatever I ask them to or we’ll go somewhere else. We can share the last name so it won’t take up that much more space.”

She gasped, then wrenched her mouth away from his and buried her face in his chest, laughing helplessly—or was she crying again? He frowned, twisting his head to try to see. “Gabriel, you are hopeless. You will
never
learn to slow down.”

“What? Jolie, you know I’m not going to let the name
Manon
be on
my
cookbook. You’ve been asking for this ever since I first brought up the idea and you kept repeating, ‘I’m Jolie
Manon,
’ over and over like you were begging someone to change that. I just wanted to make sure the sex was good first, that’s all.”

Now she was laughing out loud, the sound rippling into the dark, relaxing everything in him as if he had been brushed with a night breeze. “I love you,” she said again, and that night breeze ran all through his hair like slim, caressing fingers. “But there is no way you could handle Pierre Manon as a father-in-law.”

“I already
am
handling Pierre Manon as a father-in-law,” Gabriel said between his teeth. “You just don’t like the way I do it.”

“In fact, I don’t know how you’re even going to handle him spending half his time down here on the Côte d’Azur trying to train all your rivals to beat you. Did you think that challenge through?”

“Yes,” he said very evenly. “I did. I thought about your twelve hours of commute a week, I thought about your face every time you had to get back on that train and go deal with him, all alone, and I thought about how much I didn’t want to spend half of every week without you for the next year, even to avoid dealing with a
putain de salaud de beau-père
in close proximity.”

That got him a hard, sudden squeeze and a kiss against his neck. But it didn’t get him a yes. “Look, let’s just see if you two can avoid killing each other for a while and—”

“No,” he interrupted. “You and me does not have anything to do with whether your father and I kill each other. Quit thinking of yourself as the tiny font in the picture. Besides, if I can handle it, you can.”

“You think?” Jolie said very dryly.

“
Putain
, Jolie, you can’t tell me trying to buck your father out of depression for years by yourself was
easier
than dealing with a couple of men yelling and throwing things at each other. My way is a lot more entertaining.”

She began to laugh again and put her head down on his chest, which he liked quite a bit. “Gabriel. I am not going to be rushed into saying
yes.
We’ve only known each other for a few weeks. Unless you count me watching you make that Rose from my father’s office when I was barely in my teens. I appreciate the—assumption of marriage—but you are
not
going to get me to say yes, for, I don’t know, at least a year.”

“You think not?” Gabriel tilted his head back and regarded the sliver of stars thoughtfully. Then he hauled himself up off those uncomfortable cobblestones and carried her through the streets toward his apartment, just as he had always wanted to. “Well, we’ll see.”

Since she kept saying he didn’t know how to slow down, he was determined to prove her wrong by waiting at least a week.

Jolie hugged herself excitedly as the first demonstration for the cookbook got underway. At last! It was like her father had lost ten years of age. Or rather, returned to being fifty-five again, instead of the old man with nothing left for him that he had been acting for years, ever since he lost that star.

She wished Gabriel were here to grin at her, in smug
I-told-you-so
, but of course that would make his head blow off. Plus, she didn’t really want him and her father to start throwing pans at each other in the middle of the demonstration, no matter how much publicity that might bring.

She had been in Paris for over a week now, something Gabriel sulked about every night on the phone, while she worked with her father in increasing delight as he grew more and more invested in the demo preparation in the Leucé kitchens, training the
sous
who would demonstrate his recipes until they had them exactly the way he wanted them. Pierre had wanted to get Luc’s
second,
Patrick Chevalier, to do the Rose, a challenge pseudo-surfer-boy Patrick had seemed quite intrigued by, but Jolie had put her foot down. “No,” she said, flatly but with a secret sense of deep loss. “We’re not going to do the Rose.”

“Jolie, you’re the one who insisted on having it on the cover!” her father argued. “Now we have to do it. Everyone loves that dessert. It’s one of my best ones.”

One of
his
best ones. Some things never changed. But it was worth the frustration, just to see her father re-asserting his right to dominate whatever came out of his kitchens.

Still—“No!” Jolie snapped. “I mean it, Papa!”

Her father growled, but he either had some degree of guilty conscience or didn’t want to give Gabriel’s desserts the honor of being in his demo, because he yielded.

The idea for the event was two parts: a cooking demonstration for the number of guests who could fit into the kitchens to watch, followed by a tasting event in one of the hotel reception rooms, for a larger crowd.

The guests were excited to be behind-the-scenes, and her father was playing the top chef to the hilt, letting Leucé sous-chefs do the actual demonstrating while he talked to the guests and just added the final fillips to a plate before turning them toward the gathering.

Jolie demonstrated some of them herself, in her role as the amateur who could prove how effective the recipes in the book were at teaching an expert’s techniques. And she talked to people, lighting up. She hadn’t known if she would be good at this, but it turned out it was easy, smiling at people, engaging them, answering questions.

Luc Leroi appeared beside her, in the stylized white shirt he favored when working for the cameras. Black-haired, with a face that was exceptionally perfect, every detail of bearing and expression so extremely controlled as to seem inhuman, he made the ideal foil for his sous-chef Patrick Chevalier on the other side of her, all golden and dishevelled, with a boneless air about him as if he’d just been making love under a palm tree. Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe Patrick was the foil for Luc.

Either way, not too many women would object to standing between the two of them with a smile on her face for a few minutes, while cameras flashed. Patrick grinned for those cameras, a long, lazy grin, like a lion about to stretch himself out on a rock for the afternoon. Which, to be honest, if you didn’t have that adrenalin response to being on camera that some chefs did, a demo really was a relaxed way to pass the time for these guys—lazy and easy, compared to the brutal intensity of making a hundred of the same dessert in five minutes, and five different others, too, during dinner service.