“Yes, and I’m not supposed to rend your sick father with my lawsuit,” he said dryly. “I’ve grasped that. Since you’re willing to sacrifice yourself for him, this is what I want from you. I suppose you have some reason you can’t give that to me either? Some way I would be a bad guy, a beast, if I insisted on it?”
“A bad guy to let me work with you on a cookbook?” she asked incredulously. “With you?” She might end up doing something that would be bad for her, but she could hardly blame him for that. It wasn’t his job to save her from her own emotions; it was hers. “I can’t even believe it. It’s like a dream come true.”
The cup stilled in front of his face. When it lowered, that grim dry look was gone, as was the fatigue, the blue eyes lit as if he had just been suffused with energy again. “A dream come true? Vraiment?”
“Really.” She drew a breath, the next year stretching before her like her own personal fairyland. He could have dedicated his entire life to the search and not found a more perfect gift for her. Wait. He had dedicated his life to the search, from the time he was fifteen years old. He just hadn’t known she would be the recipient of the gift, back then. Her eyes widened. “Really.”
He sat forward, resting his chin on his hands, bringing his body much more intimately into her space. His eyes almost exactly matched that distant sea. “Good. I’m glad my manners are improving.”
A dream come true. Gabriel didn’t know how to talk to her after she said that. A cookbook. To take everything that was finest about him and ask her to put it into words, as she had done so beautifully for her father. Making his ephemeral life permanent, giving it that seal of immortality. Of—worth, somehow.
To ask her to make him immortal, too, and to have her react to that request as if he had given her the finest gift a man could give her. As if, to hand her everything that was most beautiful about his life, everything for which he had driven himself so hard, was, in fact, the most beautiful thing she could possibly ask for.
It—what was he supposed to do with that? He had wanted her from the first instant he had turned to see her small pistachio-and-gold self gazing at him with such fascination from his doorway. It wasn’t that he had only wanted her for sex, because he wasn’t an idiot. He had thought she was cute, and arousing, and putain but he would love to have a cute little girlfriend who looked at him like that. Not just for sex, but to have her—there. To smile at. And receive a smile back. To have her roll over in her sleep and put her arm over him, murmuring something befuddled but welcoming when he slipped into bed at one in the morning, instead of the bleak emptiness that currently greeted him. Sex sounded great—especially with her butt taunting him all the time. But it became, even in the fantasizing, a claiming process. A way of taking her and maybe managing to keep her.
He had known from the first that keeping her might be a hopeless case, because women stopped being nearly as fascinated and grew a lot more hostile and frustrated when they realized his working hours. But he couldn’t stop himself from trying. He never could stop himself from trying for the impossible things that could be beautiful.
Still, it had started out mostly as fun. Arousing. Tantalizing.
And now—she had reached one of those slim hands of hers into him and closed it around his heart.
And she just held it there. How was he supposed to move around, continue to live calmly and strongly, while someone was squeezing his heart like that? He was afraid if he got up too fast from the café table or walked too quickly and outpaced her, it would get ripped right out of his body.
And it was hard to walk as slowly as she did. He supposed she had a nice long stride for someone her size. But he was used to consuming his day in a blur of speed.
Now he was getting ridiculous. She couldn’t literally rip his heart right out of his body if he made the wrong move.
“Not that I can accept the offer,” she said suddenly, her shoulders slumping.
Why the fuck did women always act so fastidious about his heart? What was wrong with it?
“My father’s not doing so well after the stroke. Emotionally, I mean. I can’t just leave him in Paris all alone.”
Gabriel felt that wrench of appalled compassion for Pierre again—all alone, without even his hands to build dreams anymore—and fought it with a furious growl. “Look, he had a wife and three daughters.” Which was more than Gabriel had ever managed to get in his life. If he hadn’t poured so much of himself out for Pierre that his girlfriend of six years dumped him, he could—probably have his own ex-wife and daughters living on the other side of the world by now. “If no one is left who cares about him enough to stay with him besides you, it’s his own fault.”
Like it will be your own fault, that dark, wrenching compassion told him. When you’re all alone, and people don’t even want to eat you up with a fork anymore.
Merde, will you shut the fuck up? he growled at that inner voice.
Jolie’s pistachio eyes had gone bleak. She looked down at her hands.
“You can visit,” Gabriel snapped. “I’m not holding you prisoner. You’ll probably only need to be here about half of each week.” See? See how nice and princely I can be? Not that she probably appreciated it. She probably had no idea how begrudging and greedy he felt, forcing himself to let her see her father. Salaud. The last thing Gabriel wanted was to share something beautiful with him. He didn’t even know if he was brave enough. If he was afraid she would rip his heart out of his body just by standing up too fast, what would a six-hour high-speed train trip do? Especially to see Pierre Manon, a man who knew how to steal everything beautiful out of another man’s life for himself, and had the advantage of being her father, to boot. “It’s not like I would have time for you Friday, Saturday, or Sunday anyway,” he said roughly, and then kicked himself. As if she didn’t already know, Pierre Manon’s daughter, what lousy lonely weekends she would spend with a boyfriend like him. Let’s just rub it in, you bad-tempered idiot. You are so pathetic at being the prince.
But Jolie’s hands had curled on the table, as if she was closing them around something tantalizing. She looked back up at him, and her eyes were . . . hungry. Alive. The bleakness flushing away with energy. “Do you mean that?” she said. “You would really let me write a cookbook with you? I’m Jolie Manon, remember.”
Yes, and it gave him a vicious, pure surge of victory to think of taking her away from her father, too. Ha, you bastard, you can lose the most beautiful part of yourself to me, this time. He had to squelch it. Remind himself that he wasn’t that much of a beast, to let the old battle with Pierre soil the instinctive, delighted reaction he had had to her, long before he knew her name. She sure as hell deserved better from him than that.
But then, he always thought people deserved better of him than what he could do without trying.
“Pierre’s daughter,” he said. “I know. I saw what you did for him.” I would be delighted to have you worship me in words instead of him.
She leaned forward, close enough to kiss. “And would you make your Rose for me?” she asked, hushed. “We could use it again. I could tell the story, of how you first created it working for Papa, and—”
He sat back hard in his chair, putting three feet between him and that kissable mouth. “No. Not the Rose.” And don’t call him ‘Papa’. That makes me feel—like strangling somebody. Myself, maybe.
Her face fell, which was bad enough. But then she looked almost—relieved, which made his eyes narrow. Relieved, how? What was she escaping, when he didn’t make that Rose for her? It had broken his heart. What power would it have over hers?
He so liked the thought of having power over her. It made his insides all greedy and grumbly and itching to pounce.
To roll her under him in a dark bed and no one can save you from me, not even you.
“So is it a deal? I drop the lawsuit, and you write the cookbook with me. I’ll get one of my cousins to cough up an apartment you can stay in somewhere around here. Somebody must have
something.” In fact, wasn’t one of his cousins heading off to the Rosier Fragrance Paris division for a year? Maybe they could trade.
Jolie narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you planning on holding a potential lawsuit over my head the whole time we’re working together?”
“No. You need to call your agent, because I’m really looking forward to when I can hold a legal contract over your head instead.”
Jolie tipped her Perrier to her lips and took a long swallow straight from the bottle that made him want to reach out and lay his hand against her throat, feel the muscles work as that coolness slid into her. “It does sound nice,” she said dreamily.
Chapter 10
Gabriel paid, his eyebrows flicking together when Jo started to pull out her wallet, his hand closing over the bill so that she had no hope whatsoever of seeing what was owed.
“You just fed me a three-star meal people fly around the world and book six months in advance to eat,” she said dryly as they stood. “The least I could do is buy you coffee.”
He grabbed her hand like he was afraid she would do something with it if he didn’t. His fingers laced with hers and locked there tightly. She caught her breath as his slightly rough palm spread a rash of heat all over her skin. All he did was hold her hand, and she wanted to take all the lithe strength of her body and bow it around his. “You don’t get to pay me back in kind,” he said benevolently, strolling across the cobblestoned place to its edge, where they could see the town falling away below the old medieval walls, gradually growing more modern, from Renaissance buildings there at the base of the walls, to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century a little farther out, on through to the present, the farther it got from the six-hundred-year-old fortifications. “You’re a woman. You have to pay me back with sexual favors.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. He grinned, gazing out at the coast sloping into the sea. “Everyone knows that about dating.”
She yanked at her hand.
He tightened his hold. “Sorry. Otherwise, I’m afraid you won’t recognize this as a date.”
It wasn’t even humanly possible to free her hand just by yanking. His fingers were supple, warm, and strong as steel.
A shock of hunger and fear ran through her. His come-ons, she could ignore, refuse, dismiss as infuriatingly arrogant. This was something more serious. She liked it too much, but it could lead somewhere. “I thought this was a business meeting. Or maybe a blackmail session.”
“Yes, I figured that out,” he said, grimly dry. “That’s why I’m making it more clear.”
She pulled at her hand again. Could she admit, only to herself and to no one else, that the reason she kept pulling was that it aroused her so much when that didn’t work? When she couldn’t get it free?
His hand tightened again. “Will you stop? You make me nervous when you do that.”
Nervous? His profile was still toward her, but it had, indeed, shifted to an expression more serious, not necessarily happy.
“Why nervous? Do you think I’m going to hit you or something if I get my hand free?”
He shook his head and didn’t answer. His thumb rubbed coaxingly over the knuckle of hers.
She swallowed as that one tiny gesture turned every bone in her body to some soft, elastic thing with which he could do what he wanted. This was making her nervous. It had been easier, funner, and far less dangerous to just fight with a beast over sexual attraction. They were talking about working together now. They were holding hands. That made everything more loaded, brought implications in everywhere. “Shouldn’t you be resting before tonight?”
It squeezed at her, his moment of utter fatigue at the café table, before he drank his coffee and got his second wind. Plus, he was probably safer when he was sleeping.
He slid a glance down at her. “Is this your way of asking for us to shift to my apartment or your hotel, or is this one of those invisible-fence-dog-collar things?”
Okay, so maybe somewhere down under her question, she would have liked for them to shift out of the dry heat of this afternoon into the intimate, shadowed coolness of a room with a bed, but did he have to be so damn blunt about it? And did she have to love that bluntness quite so much? She gritted her teeth and yanked again. “I want my hand back now. Really.”
His bigger hand hardened to something immutable. “No. Really.”
On the terrain de boules, steel thumped into the dirt and then clocked gently against steel. Somebody gave an approving grunt, somebody a rueful curse. The scent of pine tingled around around them, oils from the trees that shaded the boules match baking into the air with the heat.
She thought about that trapped hand for a moment. And then she turned straight into him, stepped up onto the low stone wall that shielded them from the drop off the ramparts, and kissed him. Which, as far as establishing a working relationship went, was maybe not the best move, but damn was it satisfying.
He made a startled sound into her mouth, and his hand dropped hers so that both his arms could close around her, one hand pressing into her lower back, flexing her closer.
Delight swept through her, and she forgot her purpose. That strength holding her in, protecting her from the drop, the instant response of his mouth and his body. After the first second of surprise, he took her in as unquestioningly as if he had been expecting her to jump on him for some time. Her temper flicked at the idea and then got lost in the way his mouth shaped hers, his hold tightening as he deepened the kiss.
She could have kissed him forever, with that spice of temper and that long, luxurious pleasure. She hadn’t known anything could feel so warm and so good. She hadn’t known she should choose a private spot for this so that she never, ever had to stop.
But they had to break apart because they were standing in full view of half a dozen old men, two café terraces, and anyone who chanced to look up from the lower part of town. A lot of whom probably recognized Gabriel. It cost her, to tilt her head away, to try to catch her breath.
The blue of his eyes was burning. She couldn’t hold his gaze. That blaze in it made her feel as if he was holding her out there over that drop off the ramparts.
She lifted her freed hand and waggled it, without nearly as much energy or flippancy as she had planned.
He stiffened, his hands hardening on her hips. His face went grim. Bleak even. What? “That was a horrible thing to do to me,” he said flatly and released her. He turned, took one step, and stopped with a jerk to turn back to her. “Give me your damned hand back.”
She stared at him, wishing she understood what in the world was going on in his head. She looked down at her hand and flexed it. It seemed small, suddenly, but capable for all that. A happy hand. She liked it. She had a lot of fun with it. It was hers, and not something she had ever understood how to trust to others. She looked at his hand, big, open, demanding, stretched toward hers, little calluses on the pads at the base of his fingers and on his fingertips.
Slowly, because the acquiescence seemed to deconstruct every part of her, fill the pieces with light, and put them back together in a shape she couldn’t even recognize, she slipped her hand into his.
His closed snugly back around it, immediately. He, too, gazed down at their hands a moment.
The tension in his body eased, and a faint curve relaxed his mouth.
A strange, profound contentment filled her, all caught up with nerves and jittering sexual awareness though it was. She liked having her hand right there. She wished she hadn’t just manipulated him with a kiss, because now she would have liked to lean back into him again and kiss him some more.
But . . . “Gabriel.”
He smiled, with a sudden quick pleasure. Did his name on her lips make him that happy? That melted her again, and she almost forgot what she wanted to say. Oh, yeah. Damn.
“I really, really, really want to do this cookbook with you.”
His hand flexed. His smile grew surer, deeper. “Thank you.”
“I don’t know if I can r
isk our working relationship for sex.”
He stopped dead, his mouth opening and closing a few times. His hand tightened so hard on hers for a second, she made a little sound to remind him it wasn’t a stress ball. He dropped it. That hand he had insisted so adamantly on holding. “Tu te fous de moi?” he said incredulously. Or in other words, You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
“I really want to do this cookbook,” she said pleadingly. And how am I supposed to work with you for a year, and hold hands with you, and maybe do lots of other stuff, and not fall for you? An arrogant chef who never stopped working and never stopped thinking he was the most important person in the room.
“Jolie. It’s not mutually exclusive. The intention was quite the contrary, je t’assure.”
“But it might not work out. It probably won’t work out. And then the cookbook would be ruined.” Working on a cookbook with Gabriel Delange. Shattered. Because she couldn’t resist that combination of roaring bluntness and exquisite, wordless poetry, not even for the incredible chance of being able to concentrate on his food for a year. Not even for the chance to learn everything he was dreaming when he made it, to spend her nights thinking up the words to describe it.
“You need to look at the bigger picture, with your ambitions,” he said urgently. “Never choose half of anything just to be safe, when you have a chance to have something whole and perfect.”
She bit her lip.
His fist clenched at his side as he focused on her mouth. “Why wouldn’t it work out?” he asked hostilely, braced for attack.
She wrinkled her nose apologetically and touched her fingertips to her chest.
“You?” Gabriel looked startled.
“I’m not good at relationships.” Wait—was he talking about her when he said whole and perfect or him? Or his vision of them both together? Whole and perfect? Her insides softened squooshily.
“You’re not good at them?”
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