B00CACT6TM EBOK

by Florand, Laura

  The first person she saw when she peeked through the kitchen door was Gabriel. Dipping his finger into some orange powder, he bent over a plate until he almost touched it and blew carefully, so that that the powder fell over the spiral of chocolate on the plate in a scattering of flame, and her body clenched. All around him, his team worked like speed demons—sous-chefs flying to finish plates, petits commis and interns prepping the components, all engaged in making the lunch menu’s dozen desserts, requested via slips of paper waving from the metal shelf beyond him.

  He slid the dessert down the counter to the pass, his lips relaxing from the pursed shape to reveal a grim cast to his face. Then he looked up suddenly and met her eyes.

  He grinned, all the grim lines relaxing away. “You’re late. Don’t tell me you had car trouble again.”

  “I thought things would be slowing down a little bit if I waited until now. I don’t want to be in the way.”

  His eyebrows flexed together. “You’re not in the way. If I say you can be here, you can be here. You must be hungry.” A stern look. “You haven’t been snacking, have you?”

  “No.” She hadn’t even eaten breakfast, in anticipation. “I’m starving.”

  His face suffused with so much delight that her mouth dropped open and she stood stunned. Why, he wasn’t just dramatic, difficult, and compelling. He was beautiful. “Perfect.” He grabbed her by both arms and pulled her inside. His eyes flickered to her mouth when the move brought her body so close to his. She took a breath.

  But he dropped her arms and reached out to take the case of bottles from the man behind her, whom she had entirely forgotten. “Matt, bonjour.” He shook the other man’s hand, once freed. “My cousin, Matthieu Rosier,” he told Jolie, with absent politeness. “Matt, Jolie Manon.”

  “Manon,” Matt mused, his brown eyes squinting curiously. “Didn’t we burn someone named Manon in effigy once?”

  “All my copies of his menus,” Gabriel corrected, slanting a quick glance at Jo. “Not an actual straw figure. Drinking with my cousins has a very bad effect on my maturity level. It was ten years ago, Matt, merde.”

  “Pardon,” Matt said with complete lack of sincere apology, grinning as he bent down and kissed Jo’s cheeks. The scent of roses wafted around her more strongly, coming from his skin or clothes, and the gesture itself startled her; he must think she and Gabriel were personal, not professional acquaintances.

  How right was he?

  “Thanks for these.” Gabriel touched the dark blue glass bottles Matt had been carrying, and Jolie saw that they were labeled eau de rose, stamped with a dramatic R inside a flowering rose and the words Rosier SA. “The rose harvest is all in, then?”

  “We picked the last of them three days ago. Finally. We had such a damn cold winter, it made everything late.” A kind of grumpy patience to Matt’s voice, as if he was someone who really liked forcing everything into the shape he wanted it, and yet, as a man who dealt with nature, knew he had one opponent he just could not control.

  “I wish I could have gotten out more than once to help pick,” Gabriel said. “We all had to work in the rose and jasmine harvests when we were kids,” he explained to Jolie. “These days, they have big crews come in, but I guess most of us still like to pitch in a little bit, on a Saturday morning or in my case a Monday one. There’s something about spending a morning picking roses and ending up covered in the oils. The day after Matt’s birthday, I think the whole damn clan is out there, hangovers and all. It’s turned into a tradition.”

  “Speaking of which, if you hit on a new good wine nobody has discovered yet, pick me up twenty cases or so. No man’s cellar should look as bare as mine does this week.”

  “Sure. In fact, why don’t you go talk with Raphaël about it? He usually deals with the local wine-makers,” Gabriel said, with perfect friendliness, but his cousin flicked a glance down at Jolie and laughed suddenly, for no reason.

  “Raphaël. In the other part of the kitchens. Right.” Matt mouthed something at Gabriel that looked suspiciously like Bonne chance, Good luck, as he headed off toward Raphaël’s side of things.

  Gabriel opened one of the bottles of rosewater and breathed in the scent of it, then profferred it to Jolie so she could do the same. As the scent of roses filled her again, she thought about the way he took pleasure in every scent and texture that entered his world and, at least as important, how his first instinct was to share that pleasure with her. He disappeared again for a second and came back with a white chef’s jacket. “Here. You had better wear this again.”

  He slipped her arms in it for her, and little tremors spread through her body from where his hands touched. His movements so quick he could have had a woman’s clothes off in the time it took her to take one heady gasp of his scent—would she quit coming up with these ideas?—he buttoned the jacket and tied her apron, tucking the apron strings under the roll he had made at the top of it, in the style every chef wore everywhere. His fingers brushed against her pelvis when he did so, through the thick layers of apron and capri pants.

  “I must look like a big marshmallow in this outfit,” she said ruefully, fighting the desire for more of those fingers.

  “You look cute.” His eyes flickered to her mouth again. Her heart jumped, but he only grabbed her and spun her to a spot at the counter right next to where he had been working. “Wait here. Enfin, feel free to move around if there’s something you want to see. You can take all the notes and pictures you want.” He started to move away, in that blur of speed at which he seemed to function, then paused, a superhuman stopping to exchange a word with a slow-motion mortal. His gaze ran over her one more time, and he smiled a slow, deep smile. “Thank you for coming,” he said, and was gone.

  She heard him calling to Raphaël, his brother and chef cuisinier, as he moved away into the savory side of the kitchens.

  He had thanked her for coming? To be personally fed behind the scenes by the chef himself in one of the finest restaurants in the world?

  But—wasn’t he arrogant? Of course he was. And wasn’t he most arrogant about his most famous accomplishments, his food?

  A young woman reached past her with a murmured Excusez-moi, opening a steel cabinet above her head to reveal all kinds of plastic boxes and bottles labeled with everything from cure-dents to colorant rouge. A young man pulled open a drawer blocked by her knee. She tried to shrink, pulled out her notebook and camera, and let her pen start flying.

  Gabriel reappeared in only a minute, smiling at her again. He really did look—very happy to have her here.

  “I’m really in the way,” she told him ruefully.

  “You’re not in the way.” A little growl slipped into his tone, rubbing all over her skin. “I told you. If I say you can be here, you can be here.”

  A petit commis, reaching at just that moment for the cabinet above her, hesitated, eyeing his chef warily.

  Gabriel closed his hands around her hips and shifted her a few inches to the left, allowing the commis to get what he needed. “You might have to move around a lot, though,” he admitted. He sounded—wary. Anxious? Surely not. “There’s not really anywhere you can stand that someone won’t need to get through you once in a while.” One of his thumbs flexed into her hip. “Unless you would rather sit in my office?” he asked reluctantly.

  Her heart tightened. Not the office exile again. Not standing on the other side of that glass, watching perfection rise out of chaos. Not all safe and protected from his heat and growls and the scents and sounds around him. “Would that be easier for you?”

  “No.” His hand flexed hard on her hips. “No, and I don’t do easy. I do things the way I want them.”

  Yes. Just that Rose on the cover of her cookbook proved that. And every other thing he had ever done with his life.

  And he had not been talking about doing her the way he wanted, so her mind could just quit going off on those kinky tracks. For crying out loud. Once a woman’s body started down the dark side in
its fantasies she could never get it back, could she?

  He said something rough to one of his team, glanced back down at her, and got caught by her expression. A little smile kicked across his face and right in her belly at the same time. He bent his head. “I could probably do things the way you want them, too,” he whispered and grinned. “At least, you seem to think so.”

  Jo glared helplessly. To absolutely no avail. He took a plate from a black-tuxedoed waiter and set it in front of her, and then it was all over but the sighing.

  He fed her. The arrogant, rude, you-know-you-want-me chef. Sweeping in beside her. Sliding a plate in front of her. Excitedly telling her how he did it. Checking for her reaction. Leaving her to enjoy it while he kept working at the speed of a Tasmanian devil.

  He never took one single bite himself. He was just too busy—constructing plates with intense speed, magical things that disappeared, swept away by the black-clad waiters moving through with their elegant grace. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the work, as if he was of no higher rank than his gifted sous-chefs, or as if he just could not help it; he had to make sure it was done exactly right.

  It was like watching a superhero cartoon: a blur of motion and all the sudden a city had been built, a world saved—only instead of skyscrapers, his city was a fairytale wonderland. The only pauses ever in his motion were beside her. To offer her . . .

  Caramel melting inside a shell . . . a glistening dome of chocolate, flecked with gold . . . the sweet touch of peach. She couldn’t figure out why he seemed so—eager, careful, wary, almost shy—every time he slid something in front of her.

  Silk slid over her lips. Tender, fragile textures melted on her tongue. Gossamer beauty broke under her fork. Sometimes he had to force her to break it, grabbing the utensil from her and dashing it into some fantastical treasure: “All at once, you have to eat it all at once, all the flavors together, before the hot cools and the cold melts.”

  Until she started to wonder . . . if she wasn’t eating his heart.

  An exquisite, complex, vulnerable heart.

  A roar broke out, as she gazed down at the dessert he had set before her, its pale green shell shattered by her fork, the fresh, sweet red center of cherries spilling out like a wound. The roar wasn’t directed at her, but she looked toward it, breathing it in.

  The roaring beast shrugged his big shoulders, turning back toward her, and took his own deep breath when he saw her looking at him. “Do you like it?”

  “You’re beautiful,” she said involuntarily.

  His smile grew wider, a boyish delight. “You mean, this.” He gestured to the marble counter, indicating her dessert and everything that had come before or been served to others.

  “I said what I meant.”

  His hand froze in the middle of the sweeping gesture. It turned, pressing flat against the marble, and his head bent. She couldn’t read his expression, as he stared down at his hand, so still. It was almost as if he was badly shaken, as if something was rising out of the shaking, warring inside him. At last he turned his head enough to give her a troubled, anxious look.

  Her own expression grew troubled in response. What was she doing? Where was she going with this?

  “I’m done for a couple of hours.” He straightened and rolled his shoulders. His hands went to the white buttons on his jacket, and her erogenous zones all skittered like uncontrollable brats. “Shall we go talk about that Rose you stole from me?”

  Chapter 9

  His path through town led them up a wide stairway lined with an ancient vine, thicker than his wrist, and along a pedestrian street so narrow he could stretch out his hands to touch both walls. Old arched doorways, painted in blues, greens, yellows, and burnt oranges, matched the beautiful sea-shades of the shutters above them. Wrought iron tables or old, distressed wooden ones with peeling paint stood outside doorways beside little chairs and potted flowers, creating inviting spots. Laundry hung above them from lines strung between balconies, like festival flags.

  They came out onto a flat cobblestoned terrace area with a wide gravel space for boules over to one edge, old men playing against a backdrop of distant sea. Jolie itched to frame them in her camera, the blue of the famously azure coast, the plane trees, the silver ball flying through the air, caught suspended against a far-off dream. Instead, she let the image soak into her brain, joining Gabriel at a café table with a view over the sweeping skirt of civilization draped below the hilltown, all its crowded, heavily populated way to the sea.

  Gabriel ordered coffee, and she asked for a Perrier. For all the opulent food she had been eating, she felt oddly light, fresh. He formed delight out of flavors, textures, beauty, never relying on an easy use of too much sugar or fat.

  As they sat, the tension in Gabriel’s muscles drained away from him slowly, his body growing heavy in the chair, as if he would never leave it again. But he would. Seven more intense hours at least tonight before he could sleep.

  “Do you ever make your Rose?” she asked. “I didn’t see it on the menu.” Or in his kitchens. She didn’t want to admit to him how heavily disappointment had squeezed her not to taste that Rose from his hands.

  He shook his head. “I stopped making it after your father stole it from me the first time. It—hurt too much.” He looked out toward the yacht-jeweled sea.

  She rolled her napkin-wrapped utensils, remembering him a little more clearly from when he was twenty-three, so skinny his bones stood out and burning with passion. I lost thirty pounds. And his girlfriend. And won a star. And got the very lousiest reward possible.

  Of course, so had her father gotten a crappy reward, years earlier, when his wife had divorced him and taken Jolie and her sisters to the other side of the sea. It took all of you, being a top chef. And all of everybody who loved you, too. As fascinated as she was by these starred creatures, she wouldn’t want to be one in a million years. Nor trust her life and happiness to one.

  Which made it increasingly terrifying that happiness seemed to spring out of her just being near Gabriel, great curling vines of it trying to tie her to him in an exasperated tangle.

  “So I had another idea,” Gabriel said.

  She bit her lower lip and waited. His eyes flickered to her mouth and stayed there a long, frustrated moment. But then the waiter arrived with his coffee, and he curled his hand around the tiny white cup like a life preserver.

  “You could write my cookbook for me. It’s something I need to do, I just hate trying to sit down and put it into words. If I had words for these things, I would be writing about them instead of having to physically produce them. And I wouldn’t be so exhausted.”

  Jolie smiled ruefully.

  “No offense.” He took a long sip of coffee. “I know you work hard.”

  “None taken.” She wished she didn’t have an absurd urge to tell him he could put his head in her lap and take a nap, if he wanted. She might work a full day, between research and writing, but she didn’t work anything like as hard as he did. Besides, the research—going into chefs’ kitchens, getting them to talk about their passion, tasting their delights and learning how to make them—that was all play. They indulged her, the way they wouldn’t indulge their employees. In a way her own father hadn’t indulged her. Food writing, she had discovered, put her on different terms—terms that pulled down that glass wall, that let her step into this world, live it, and, for the time she was working on a recipe with a chef, get an exceptional amount of his attention.

  “I’m thinking of one that is just focused on desserts, but who knows, there might be interest in a second book that Raphaël and I could do together. But that would be for another time.” Gabriel waved a hand, putting that second book into the future. The coffee was kicking in, the energy coming back to his body.

  Energy in that body. That would be hovering over hers, teaching her. . . .

  It hit her like the plunge down a roller coaster, giddy, screaming, arms flung waving in the air: My third cookbook would be Gab
riel Delange!! Omigod, omigod, omigod.

  And a jerk, on that roller coaster ride. One cookbook would put them in close working contact for at least a year. He had even thrown out the idea of a second one, two years.

  And she found him so hot. So rudely, undeniably, arrogantly hot.

  There was a road she could start down, and it wasn’t a straight one. It curved neatly and smoothly right back around to a household of women with no father or husband there, to a broken family, to crying and tears.

  She took a long swallow of Perrier to try to clear her head and instead got bubbles up her nose.

  “You would be the author,” he said. “I would be the title. We’ll figure out the royalties.” He dismissed those impatiently with a flick of his fingers.

  “I’m in the middle of another project,” she said slowly.

  He frowned. “How long until that one is done?”

  “My deadline is next January, but I could probably start working on yours at the same time. Actually, if you would feel comfortable working with me, I would love to interview you for this French Taste project, too, and maybe gather some stories and a contribution. It’s kind of a wander through France, via its top chefs.” She could probably survive that much contact with him, right? Without doing what her mother had always warned her against?

  “Sure.” A decisive move of his hand. “I would like that.”

  She sat blinking a moment, trying to figure him out. He had thrown her, here. From the exquisite Rose which was her first knowledge of him, to the rough, direct come-ons, as if she was stripping naked and doing a pole-dance for him, to the lunch in his kitchen, to this. “You do remember I’m Jolie Manon.”