A hard body nudged hers very gently from behind.
“Bonjour,” a low voice rumbled in her ear.
She whirled to find him standing on the staircase, immediately behind her and face almost on level with hers. Her center flew right out of her body and got lost somewhere, her serene assurance swamped under a wild urge to grab him and kiss him and see just how direct and ill-mannered he could be.
His face zoomed in even closer, and her heart lurched in twenty different directions as if tumbled in a dryer, and . . . he pressed a proper bise against each of her cheeks. Her whole being pulled toward the press of his freshly-shaved jaw, until it was all she could do not to rise up after him as he lifted his head. Barely lifted his head. His eyes glinted very blue as he studied hers from only centimeters away.
She swallowed.
He drew a breath.
She bit her lip.
His gaze tracked that, darkening.
She backed up.
One of his fists clenched briefly by his side.
“Good morning,” she said stiffly. “You don’t sleep very much.”
“You either.” He looked quite pleased about it. “And here you thought the only thing we had in common was a lawsuit and mutual sex appeal.”
She turned on her heel and headed across the place, determined to ignore him, and he struggled to fall into step beside her. He kept having to shorten his long, fast stride and bring himself back even. He wore another soft, fitted T-shirt, gray-green today, and jeans. His hair was wet, his scent fresh, clean, some light apple-scented soap, and was it just her, or did his arm muscles have even more fantastic definition than they had the night before?
“Are you going into work already?”
“Actually, I’m free for a couple of hours.” He cut a hopeful glance sideways at her, his eyebrows rising in question.
She gritted her teeth. Just in case she wanted to invite him up to her room?
His eyes flicked over her expression, and for a second, he looked almost glum, rubbing one hand over the back of his neck. Then he shook the glumness off him. “Did your yoga teacher let your class out early? I thought I had another five minutes.”
“Are you stalking me?”
He scowled briefly. “In my bestial way? I was working out.” He showed her the gym bag slung over his shoulder. “You mean, you didn’t see me? You didn’t know I was watching you while you went through some of those poses?”
Yep, all peace, all tranquility, completely gone. In their place, a burning sparked small and then grew until it burned in every part of her body that she had flexed and worked and stretched. And it had been a pretty comprehensive yoga class. So thoughts of him burned through pretty much all of her.
“I can imagine what you were thinking while you watched, thanks.” She headed up the streets of the old part of town. Probably better to explore their empty morning quiet than to head toward her hotel room with him following as if that was exactly where he expected her to take him.
Okay, maybe not better, but certainly smarter.
Pff. That’s what you think, her body protested sulkily. It’s about time some psychologist did some Body Q studies to balance out all these dumb E.Q. and I.Q. things.
“Can you?” His grin came back. “Imagine what I was thinking? We should compare notes. Just to see if our imaginations are compatible.”
Compatible. With the imagination of the man who had invented that exquisite fragile Rose guarding a melting heart of gold? Her own heart melted out of her at the thought.
Anyone would have supposed that man would be—elegant. Courtly. Careful and refined. Poetic. Ready to lay his cloak at a woman’s feet.
Not openly stating that she would love to have him take her doggy-style and they both knew it.
She glared at him as a curve and descent of the street led them into another little place. In this one, the fountain was much older, a worn marble face of a beast spouting water from his mouth into a tiny basin. Benches curved in a half-moon around it, near walls completely covered with the thick glossy green vines and delicate white flowers of jasmine. In the early morning, the place was still in shadow and utterly silent, except for the water and their footsteps.
She stopped in front of it, and when he stopped beside her, she twisted so that she was on the other side of it and facing him. “You’re lucky you’re so hot,” she said bitterly.
“I know,” he said despairingly, shoving his hands into his pockets as he leaned a shoulder against the jasmine. “It doesn’t bear thinking of, what my social life would be like if I was ugly on top of everything else. Now what have I said?”
“You are so—incredibly—arrogant.”
“I know.” He sounded exasperated. “But I don’t see how I’ve been arrogant with you. It seems as if ignoring your signals indifferently would have been a lot more arrogant, but apparently I have no idea.”
Her signals. She ground her teeth over the urge to take two great fistfuls of his hair, yank his head down hard, so that it hurt, and bite that sensual, arrogant mouth of his. And that would teach him for finding her signals so obvious.
“You treat me like I’m your . . . your . . .” She searched her brain for the kind of French vocabulary she had never heard as a girl visiting her father and his family in the summer. “Pute.”
Gabriel looked as if he had been walking along, whistling cheerfully, and out of nowhere found his face slammed with a skillet. Cartoonish. It took him a full minute to get any sound out at all. “I what?”
She pressed her lips together and glared at him, refusing to repeat the nasty word for a hooker.
He shook his head as if it was still ringing and sat down abruptly on the stone bench beside that worn marble face, the jasmine tangling wildly behind him over the stone walls. “I really do have bestial manners, then,” he said, smashed.
She started to wish she had bitten her tongue. He looked—distressed. He looked as if he wasn’t going to go around calling it as he saw it with her anymore, with that blunt accuracy that was so infuriating and so arousing.
“That’s not how I’m thinking about you,” he said after a moment. She hadn’t known he could sound so subdued. She didn’t like it nearly as much as she had thought she would. “Like a—pute. I mean, I don’t”—his hands squeezed the stone of the bench—“what qualifies as treating you like a pute, exactly? The fact that I want to have sex with you?”
Would her body quit melting when he said things like that? “The fact that you act like all you have to do is snap your fingers.”
He gaped at her. Indignation started to grow in his face. “Snapping my fingers is what I do with my staff. If they are really slow and I have to get pointed about it. I’ve never snapped my fingers at you. I talk to you like you’re an equal. Because you are.”
She folded her arms over her chest. Just in case her shirt wasn’t thick enough and he was reading her attraction to him like a three-step recipe again. “This is how you talk to all your equals?” she challenged dryly.
“No,” he said, as if she was dense. “But the others don’t look at me as if they wanted me to haul them off somewhere dark and dangerous.”
She was really going to have to kill him.
“It’s incredibly arousing,” he confessed.
Her eyes flickered involuntarily down his body—the way the T-shirt clung to the flat abs, and his arm muscles stood out from the tension in his hands, and the long legs stretched there, on that bench in that intensely peaceful space of jasmine and running water and ancient stone. The realization that he was telling the truth jolted through her: he was aroused. It was just the two of them, hidden here in the early morning, and he wanted her. If she walked up to him, if she leaned down into him, he would—
“I could probably behave better if you would quit looking at me like that. Maybe. It might be too late,” he admitted. “I’ve kind of gotten the idea in my head at this point.”
“So you’re behaving like this because I look
easy,” she said bitterly.
His eyebrows drew together. “What? I never said that at all.” He hesitated. “Enfin—you can be. Easy. If you want to be. I won’t think less of you.” He snuck a hopeful glance at her. “I don’t disrespect you because you want to have sex with me, you know. If that’s where the pute thing came from.”
She gritted her teeth, torn between the overwhelming desire to hit him and the one to completely give in, to be just—easy. Just go with it. Just get hauled off to somewhere dark and dangerous and growled at some more. Working with chefs does not mean you have to get sexually involved with them. You idiot. You don’t have to perpetuate any cycles.
“But I’m behaving—what is so wrong with the way I’m behaving?—anyway, whatever I’m doing, I’m doing it because you look like something delicious.”
Her lips parted.
So did his. “Just this sweet, buttery, golden-brown, pistachio-kissed deliciousness, like I could just bite my teeth into you so gently—” His hands were shaping the air as he talked. His tongue touched his teeth, and his teeth came slowly together as if they were sinking into something. “And you’re right there, just—right there, as if you want me to. And then I hit some electrified forcefield every time I try. It makes me feel like one of those dogs with the collar and the invisible fence.” He gave his wet, shaggy head a shake. “And it makes me starving.”
Starving. Her soul seemed to run right out of her body like the rippling flow of the fountain, into the palm of his hands. To think of this man starving for her.
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, putain, you’re doing it again.”
Damn it. She took a hard step back and ran into the jasmine-cushioned wall, the vines grabbing at her hair.
He opened his eyes. And stared at her pressed back among the dark green vines and stars of white. She felt—caught. Held still for him by vines of jasmine. If he cornered her against that wall and kissed her, she would not manage one word to fight him off.
“Good God.” He sprang to his feet, shoving his hands in his pockets and striding away to the edge of the curving walls.
The light slowly grew in the place, and a door opened from an old building with sea-blue shutters, a bent woman with white hair coming out with a little dog. Gabriel took another hard breath, focusing on the old woman like a lifeline.
“Bonjour, Gabriel.” Her eyes flicked with bright curiosity over Jolie.
He dipped his head. “Bonjour, madame.”
The old woman kept walking, slow and careful but leaving them to their peace. Some of the tension eased out of his body.
“I’ve got another idea. About how you can make up for stealing my Rose,” he said over his shoulder, without turning to look at her. “But maybe we should talk about it later. This afternoon? What are you doing for lunch?”
She rubbed her arms, knowing she should move out from the shelter of the jasmine. But it smelled so good around her, and the effect on him was so enticing. She kept imagining him turning, prowling back toward her, sinking his hands through the vines on either side of her head, lowering his mouth . . . maybe she could slip her hands into the vines, hold herself prisoner to him. . . . “I thought you never took anyone out to lunch or dinner,” she said with as much stiffness as she could manage.
“Oh, I wasn’t asking you to lunch.”
Her mouth set. She straightened out of the jasmine.
“I’m working,” he growled defensively. “You of all people should know what a three-star restaurant takes.”
Yes, she remembered her father’s hours. Before he lost that third star, without Gabriel there to keep it for him, sank into a depression, and quit, which was at least better than literally falling on his big butcher’s knife, as some chefs did.
“But what are you going to eat?” Gabriel asked.
A vague wave of her hands. “I don’t know. There must be some good restaurant around here.”
He turned back enough to give her an incredulous look.
“Where I don’t need reservations six months in advance and an inexhaustible fortune.” Jolie rolled her eyes. Didn’t he know she would be lapping up everything that fertile brain and those supple hands could produce, if she could?
Straight, strong eyebrows drew together. “You’re not paying in my restaurant. I may not be able to take you out, but, putain,” his eyes glowed with a strange, vicarious hunger, “I can feed you.”
Gabriel Delange. Feeding her.
If she threw herself across that little fountain and kissed him, would she be sending mixed signals?
Or sending consistent signals for the first time?
“I don’t want you to turn away someone who has a reservation,” she said reluctantly.
His expression changed. “You mean you want to sit at a table?” Was that wistfulness that crossed that strong, dangerous face?
“Where were you thinking I would sit?” she asked, confused. “Is there a bar or something?”
“I was thinking you could come into the kitchens.” He hesitated. “It wouldn’t be very comfortable, though,” he admitted. “And you would have to eat standing up.” That buoyant, animal energy faded. His hands flexed in his jeans pockets. He looked increasingly glum, resigned.
“In your kitchens?” Jolie lit like the morning sun, slipping over the centuries-old buildings at last to shine straight into their little alcove.
Gabriel’s gaze caught on her face.
“Can I take notes? And pictures? Can I write about it?” Plunged into the heart of how he worked, of what he made. And not peeling grapefruit until her fingers screamed, but able to watch.
“You can do anything you want,” he said slowly. He wasn’t moving, except for his eyes, tracking over and over her face. “I told you. Anything at all.”
Chapter 8
“So are you enjoying your vacation?” her father asked, sullen and slurred, when she called, and Jo stiffened with shock.
“My—”
“Your sisters told me.” His voice dragged painfully.
“But I’m n—” Jo stopped. Of course, what were her sisters supposed to tell him about her absence from his side in his moment of need? Her perfectionist, narcissist father, so desperately short of the attention he craved. “It’s for the book, Papa. Publicity.”
“You’ve been doing all the signings without me?” he asked resentfully.
She rubbed between her eyebrows. “No, I—promised to do a little talk on food writing for a writers’ group down here. How to make contact with chefs, how to work with them . . . I couldn’t let the group or the publisher down. I knew Estelle and Fleur were going to be with you.”
“No one complained about not having the real chef there?” he asked roughly.
“Of course they wanted you, Papa.” An easy one. “But this particular talk was focused on the food writing itself, so we managed. I’m rescheduling the demonstrations until you feel up to it.”
“Until I feel—” Her father made a harsh sound, like he used to when some underling’s spot of sauce on a plate was a millimeter off. “I told you I can’t do demonstrations like this!”
But it’s my first cookbook! It’s our cookbook. It deserves a launch! She bit her tongue. She couldn’t stress her father right now. What if it drove him into another stroke? “Don’t worry about it.” She stared out at the white parasols on the upper terrace of the ancient mill.
Great chefs. Fascinating. Extraordinary. Impossible.
Maybe no one rose to greatness of any kind without being a narcissist. And no one rose to become a great chef without knowing how to make other people hungry. For more of them.
“When are you coming back to Paris?” her father asked morosely. “Or are you coming back to Paris? Too busy with the book, I suppose?”
“Papa!” His narcissistic life had peaked once. And then he had lost his wife and daughters, to a trans-Atlantic divorce. Then one of his stars. And two months ago, he had lost his skill, with the stroke. Her heart tore at her,
at the utter devastation of his faith in himself, that arrogance he needed most of all. “Of course I’m coming back to Paris! I’m only here a couple more days.”
She hoped she could talk Gabriel out of a lawsuit in two more days. Maybe instead he could take his vengeance out on her naked bod—she smacked herself on the forehead. Hard.
“I hate being so far away from you, Papa,” she told him and hated herself for the fact that it was only partly true. She had spent most of her life far away from him. He had never been there for her. But that had been her mother’s choice, of course, to move back to the States after the divorce. Her father’s famous three-star restaurant in Paris was hardly transportable in pursuit, especially since her mother, with full guardianship, could have waited until he started up a successful restaurant in New York and then moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, if she wanted. Jo didn’t think her mother would have done that; Brenda Manon had moved herself and her daughters back home to the U.S. because that was where her support network was, and her home country, rather than in an effort to get them as far away from her husband as possible. But then, Jolie’s parents had probably sheltered their daughters from their most acrimonious battles, so maybe her father couldn’t be so sure.
For Jo to choose to live her own life to her own benefit right now, when her father, who had never had any of them, so desperately needed her, would have been horrible.
“I love you, Papa,” she said firmly, and he gave a little sigh of relief. He needed people to love him so much.
“Thank you, pucette,” he said roughly. “You’ve always stood by me.”
It was two when Jolie stepped into the alley. A matte-skinned, burly dark-haired man stepped back to let her pass before him, and she hesitated because he was the one carrying a big case of bottles and thus from her point of view should have right of way. And also, no woman really liked having a stranger his size behind her in an alley, even if the broad daylight and the proximity of so many helpful people with knife skills made that a little ridiculous. But he just raised his eyebrows and waited politely, in that very French way that conveyed he was physically incapable of pushing in front of her to go first, no matter what kind of load he was carrying, so she went on. The scent of roses wafted over her as she went past him, and she glanced around, trying and failing to find some sign of a climbing rose.
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